I see no substantial difference.
>To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
I really don't understand what you being in Afghanistan is supposed to prove. If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
Is that not the case?
>If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.
Oh, we absolutely would. The case was built specifically around the leak of collateral murder.
American espionage law criminalizes leaking evidence of war crimes. Snowden has offered to come home if its scope was tightened to only include actual espionage. Congress demurred.
This is what you were fighting for in Afghanistan like it or not - for a group of elites who would toss you in prison for exposing their war crimes without a second's thought.
> If anything it suggests that you place a higher value on loyalty to the institution you belonged to that committed these war crimes and covered them up than you do on human rights.
You realize you were the invader right?
However, I am glad you are able to with criticize and judge a person with 20/20 hindsight, while simultaneously offering nothing of value to the conversation.
Thank you for taking the time to offer your opinion and I wish you nothing but the best.
Yet your comment history on this subject ("activist" vs "journalist") indicates that's how you see the world. My contribution is to expose the cognitive dissonance surrounding your comments.
I've yet to see anything that makes your time in Afghanistan relevant to this conversation. In fact another person already posted a source debunking the claims that anyone's life was in danger due to the Wikileaks releases.
Aside from that, I did not ask about, nor do I care, what you think of my time in Afghanistan. I am more than capable of evaluating my own life choices through a critical and charitable lens.
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to the discussion and wish you the best.
> Brigadier general Robert Carr, a senior counter-intelligence officer who headed the Information Review Task Force that investigated the impact of WikiLeaks disclosures on behalf of the Defense Department, told a court at Fort Meade, Maryland, that they had uncovered no specific examples of anyone who had lost his or her life in reprisals that followed the publication of the disclosures on the internet.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/bradley-mannin...
That is, unless there were somebody they could point to who was dead as a result. Then they would describe what happened.
Or stay silent - if there were no examples.
Hopefully that's not what you mean to convey.
Some clarification would go a long way.
What was indiscriminate about it? Wikileaks reached out to other journalists to sort through and publish the information. The full release of the diplomatic cables happened only after some of those journalists (David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian) failed to keep that content secure.
To reiterate, "Further, I am of the opinion, being someone who was quite literally in Afghanistan when he leaked the information he did, that any probative value of the information Manning leaked was overshadowed by the indiscriminate way in which it was done."
You cannot look at just one small part of what was leaked and ignore the rest. If all that was leaked was the war crimes, then we would not be having this discussion.