If a soldier thinks something is wrong, he might talk to a reporter and even provide classified examples if necessary to prove his point.
That is not what Bradley Manning did. He did a full dump of information regardless of whether or not the information was related to his cause. That's not a courageous protest: that is playing God with other's lives on the line. In his delusion of Godhood, he literally committed treason.
Sorry for the harshness of this, but it genuinely outrages me that people see heroism in this guy. His behavior is outside even the most liberal interpretations of the concept of non-violent protest or civil disobedience.
> If a soldier thinks something is wrong, he might talk to a reporter and even provide classified examples if necessary to prove his point.
> That is not what Bradley Manning did.
Did you even read the article linked?
" Manning said he first tried to take his information to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico, before contacting WikiLeaks."
"Manning said he tried to talk to an unnamed Washington Post reporter to interest her in the Iraq and Afghanistan documents, but “I did not believe she took me seriously.” He left voicemails with the public editor and the news-tips lines for the New York Times and heard nothing. A blizzard, he said, kept him from driving to Politico’s office to discuss the documents. According to Manning’s account, only after his attempts to give the documents to mainstream media organizations fail did he consider giving them to WikiLeaks."
Why did Manning need to speak to anyone? Why couldn't he just send data discs to all the papers mentioned with the classified data? If his true motivation was whistle blowing you'd expect him to leak the data to as many media outlets as possible.
I've heard this claim before (he put other's lives in danger), but I haven't seen it backed. As far as I know, even the military operations documents leaked were old (relatively). I haven't come across any sort of news relating to people dying because of these leaks. Or any sort of military or government personnel being put in danger.
I'm genuinely curious about this as well. I do recall seeing reference to wikileaks documents (in general) potentially endangering US allies / sources / informants / partners. However, I can't recall specifically whether or not the information was sourced from the documents Manning leaked.
"that is playing God with other's lives on the line."
That's the same pseudo-argument that keeps coming up again and again. Whose lives did he play with? Please don't answer with some hypothetical "aiding the enemy" crap.
Wasn't it the U.S. military that originally played with lives aka "collateral damage"?
Manning had Gigabytes of secret documents and cables. He didn't know what was in them. Even if no one died, he sure as heck didn't know that when he gambled on releasing them. Therefore he was playing God.
Second, if you search through this entire comment thread you will find links to NYTimes articles about them actual damage caused.
That is not what Bradley Manning did. He did a full dump of information regardless of whether or not the information was related to his cause. That's not a courageous protest: that is playing God with other's lives on the line. In his delusion of Godhood, he literally committed treason.
Sorry for the harshness of this, but it genuinely outrages me that people see heroism in this guy. His behavior is outside even the most liberal interpretations of the concept of non-violent protest or civil disobedience.