In favor of Bradley Manning

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I do want my country's foreign policy to go well. And we might actually be in a pretty good place. If state department officials, for example, know they can discuss things privately for a while but then things might become public in three to five years, that might actually turn out to be the best of all worlds. Just the possibility that, yes, there's a reasonable chance that what you do today might become public in the relative near future.

With Bradley, my best hope would be that the military judges would take a good long look and, as much as they don't like a private deciding what to release, decide he was in fact largely correct. And in their statement they might say, he took a terrible risk, both for his country and himself, but by heart, the idealism of youth, and luck, he is largely correct. And they can give him a five year sentence, reduced to time served. (which afterall is about three years!)

And I hope President Obama would pardon Bradley Manning with the same rationale. But Democrats have less reputation for being 'strong' on defense than Republicans, and so a Democratic President has less room for taking action likely to be misunderstood by a significant segment of the public. Plus, President Obama tends to be a follow-the-rules, try-harder type of individual, and I wish he wasn't.

How do I know that nothing Bradley released endangered U.S. soldiers?  That's a very important question.  And I only have a partial answer.  And that answer is that it's okay to talk about military conduct, but that a person should not reveal strategy.

And we do apologize for things.  For example, we mistakenly use a drone to bomb a wedding in Pakistan, we issue an official apology.  Make it real, make it straightforward, without putting a precondition on the other party to accept.  It is better than nothing.

Okay, we still have these two cases . . .

This is unbelievable.  And I hope it would be an exaggeration.  Maybe DynCorp only passively went along, that kind of thing.  But seeing the film The Whistleblower at UH-Clear Lake and hearing peacekeeper Kathryn Bolkovac speak afterwards, I'm not so sure.

This is conduct during a military occupation and definitely should be discussed.



This is conduct during a war.  It's not giving away strategy.  I think it should be discussed.

Back during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, we bombed electrical generating plants in Iraq.  Well, that's part of the whole industrial infrastructure that keeps the whole Iraqi military machine going, right?  Partially.  But it's also a mixed bag, partially military and partially civilian.  I think it should be at least 80% military before we feel really good about bombing it, and yes, I will acknowledge that there might be exceptions, but they should remain exceptions.

With both Iraq in 1991 and the Balkans all through the 1990s and I can remember '99, we seemed to get into a trap where we said we're going to keep bombing things until someone whom we label as a moral monster says he gives up.  The monster in Iraq was Saddam Hussein, and in Serbia was Slobodan Milosevic.  And both of these were bad dudes, and to their victims, quite a bit worse.  Why are we then giving them decision power on how the war continues?

It may be old-fashioned, but I think there's a lot to the civilian-combatant distinct.  And it's something we drift away from at our own peril.

You completely missed the point...

Thank you!
Bradley Manning did nothing wrong and should not be punished. The people that are actually responsible for the real crimes commited should be the ones to be punished. Including the Military and Government for locking a good man that only told the truth. The ONLY reason Bradley was made out to be the bad guy is because they wanted to cover their own ass. It really is as simple as that.

Please elaborate.

2 down, 251,285 to go...

Of course, since a large portion of these documents were unclassified, I'll settle with a rationale for the release of each of the remaining 100,000+ documents classified as CONFIDENTIAL or higher.

Oh, and the DynCorp case:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 02358.html

Note the date: July 2009.

Manning wasn't deployed to Iraq until October 2009.

Actually, both the Dyncorp and the "Collateral Murder" cases are of somewhat marginal interest from a national security perspective. Both incidents had already taken place before Manning released information about them, and they received attention by the mainstream media.

The *real* problem with Cablegate is when a document like *this* gets released:
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/ ... -libi.html

This is an interrogation report (SECRET, NOFORN) of senior Al Qaeda member Abu Faraj al-Libbi, which reveals that the US knew of Al Qaeda activity around the Pakistani city of Abbottabad where Bin Laden was eventually located and killed.

We will probably never know the full details of the Bin Laden operation or its intelligence basis, as much of the information concerning the operation is likely still TOP SECRET - and will remain so. Nonetheless, one need not read The Art of War by Sun Tzu to realise that it is best to keep your enemy in the dark about what you know about the enemy.

In other words:


No, it is not.

He did release a lot of information. But then, so did Daniel Ellsberg, who released pretty much the entire history of the Vietnam War and the official decision making surrounding it.

Okay, the part about the documents which we reveals that we knew about Al Qaeda activity around the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. That's not good. On first, second, and third look, that is not good. But here's where we play poker. What other areas did it reveal that we knew about Al Qaeda activity? I mean, if we panic like it's a disaster, then it is a disaster. If we stay calm, then it may or may not be.

And I'm not crazy that the information was gotten through interrogation, can be unreliable. And interrogation can mean torture. Which I would hope we'd learn from the Romans, through the Middle Ages, to 20th century dictators, if we allow it for limited exceptions, it tneds to become institutionalized. I remember reading part of an Amnesty International publication back from the late 1980s that estimated one third of world governments used torture.

With Bin Laden I've wondered, what if we isolated him? What if we intercepted his email and issued responses where the original messages never got to their intended destinations. What if we arrested and detained, but did not torture, the people leaving his compound. Maybe even released some of them with perception that they have given intelligence information and had thus been compromised.

In general, I want us to pursue terrorism as a criminal matter. I remember in the days after September 11th, seemingly the entire world was standing with the United States. I remember a guy on the radio asking, How can someone call himself a muslim and then fly a plane into a building? And from his voice, he certainly seemed entirely sincere. And I would guess what Islam means to him is about caring for others and trying your best. And of course it has versions of the golden rule just like almost every major religion does.

Now, even with most of the world standing with the United States, pretty much as soon as we did a direct, concrete, specific anything, some of that support would erode. But . . . the bread and butter things like CSI (Container Security Initiative, must be the most boring thing imaginable) and some countries really don't have control of their central banking systems to effectively address money laundering.

If we can build a middle, to me that's very helpful. I think terrorists and suicide bombers often think of themselves as the rock stars. If we can get people speaking out, no, we don't admire this kind of reckless, destructive behavior, that can be a very positive thing. Often, it's young men who are excluded, isolated, not much positive hope for the future. Or, older guys who remain stuck in the fervent ideology of a young guy in his twenties.

And so, to me, this kind of stuff is not idealism, it's very practical.

Frankly, I don't care about the tens of thousands of other documents. I don't think releasing them should be considered a criminal offence. Even if he has done damage, that should be weighed against the good he has done by whistleblowing.

Ellsberg released about 7,000 specific pages on the Vietnam War. Manning is accused of indiscriminately releasing +250,000 documents.

Notice the difference?


You seem to forget a very important point. The information about Bin Laden's whereabouts was reliable.


One word: Why?

And exactly what good has Bradley Manning done (assuming he is guilty, as no verdict has been passed yet)? Stirred up a bit of more controversy over a few already controversial events?

Your indifferent attitude towards the disclosure of classified information is an obvious demonstration of your immaturity.

Is there a specific part you'd like me to elaborate on?
Though I honestly don't understand why anyone, apart from those that should have gotten in trouble, would not sign with Bradley Manning. People were committing crimes, he exposed them. He did the right thing and got punished for it. That's it.
But alright, technically, he wasn't allowed to do that. But does that mean that he should just do nothing while innocent people are murdered? Even though that happens in war all the time, this was a bit different because those people weren't in the line of fire or anything like that. And anyone that reveals any secrets that any Government should NOT have (obviously all Government are entitled to certain secrets, although I don't think they should be, but with the way the world is at the moment it's necessary) but the Government and the Military do plenty of bad s**t that they absolutely shouldn't. So when it gets revealed, they do whatever they can to cover their asses.

Does the state have to prove that it's necessary to classify information before doing so? No?

I believe some might call that a conflict of interest, where the party making the judgment is also the party most effected. "Hmm, should we release this embarrassing information that won't actually harm anything but will make us look bad, stupid, incompetent, etc?" How many times do you think the answer is going to be "nah, just slap a classified label on it and bury it in the files, no one needs to know"? There is, after all, no penalty for over-classifying anything, quite the opposite in fact.

Of course they're not going to just come out and tell everyone when they've done something wrong. But the point is that they should NOT do the wrong thing. Obviously people are going to do the wrong thing sometimes but when an innocent man is punished for outing the guilty party, that's when things get really bad. I'm not allowed to kill innocent people (and I don't want to) but when the Government does it... they'll send an innocent person to jail to protect themselves. If I saw a murder and called the cops, that would be fine. If someone sees a murder by the military, you better keep your mouth shut.
That's basically what this means.

You still haven't provided a single point of justification for the 100,000+ classified documents released which had absolutely nothing to do with the "Collateral Murder" case, the Dyncorp case or any other isolated incident. If Manning "did the right thing", then why didn't he just release documents from those specific incidents?

Exactly what crime was Manning exposing, when he released *this*, for instance?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_F ... Initiative


And as such, a likely response to the Cablegate incident will be even more over-classification. If government agencies can't prevent information at the level of SECRET from being compromised, then an obvious response would be to (1) classify it as TOP SECRET instead (as the rules for handling this kind of information are much stricter) and (2) stop sharing this kind of information with other government agencies.

Recall that Manning was able to retrieve the documents from SIPRNet, an electronic system for sharing classified information between US government agencies. Access to SIPRNet was expanded following the critique of the US intelligence community failing to share information in the 9/11 Commission Report.

Now, with just about everything being laid out in the open because of Cablegate, it is only natural to assume that embassies, intelligence analysts, diplomats etc. will be become more tight-lipped about the information they send back to Washington.

I'd have been impressed if he had released information about the incidents before they happened. That's the sort of whistleblower we need.

I believe this is what you wanted to quote me for, right?