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> How much time do you think someone on active duty in Iraq has to sort through data? You've clearly never been deployed. You have more free time than you kno

> How much time do you think someone on active duty in Iraq has to sort through data? You've clearly never been deployed. You have more free time than you know what to do with. Think about what you do when you get off shift at your job. Now remember that you have no family or friends that aren't also co-workers to hang out with. No alcohol, limited access to new movies and video games. You are also stuck within the confines of whatever base you're assigned to. If you're lucky there might be a one-screen movie theater or an internet café. You might even be able to get severely bandwidth-capped satellite internet in your tent/third-of-a-trailer-shared-with-a-roommate that you call your room. Despite what you want to believe about Manning, lack of time was no excuse for indiscriminate leaking of sensitive information that honestly and truly put lives at risk.

boomboomsubban 10y ago
And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing? Time isn't the only relevant resource. Maybe I'm an asshole, but the "put lives at risk" line seems like nationalistic swill. Even if it risked American combatants, why should that justify hiding the deaths of possibly fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians?
- golergka 10y ago
  How does it not justify it? Deaths that already happen vs quite real damage that you cause in the future?
  - boomboomsubban 10y ago
    It isn't "quite real damage," it's potential damage. Without revealing and adressing the past deaths, you can expect there to be future deaths. The point of revealing isn't to say "hey we did awful shit," it's to say "we're doing awful shit and it needs to stop."
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    I'd call the cops on bank robbers even knowing they may get "damaged" during capture because I think the benefits to society outweighs the harm. Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.
    - golergka 10y ago
      Repeating a discussion that is being mad in a neoghbour thread, I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.
      - fornever 10y ago
        > I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war. So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay". First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.
        golergka 10y ago
        How exactly could've you made out these figures as civilians and not enemy combatants? From POV of the camera, you already have seen one of them with an RPG, and the opposing force doesn't really use uniforms either. Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.
- the_trapper 10y ago
  > And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing? Most of the military intelligence Soldiers I deployed with brought their own personal laptops. You really underestimate how much free alone time is available to you when you are deployed. Remember that Manning was also kind of a black sheep at the time. Spending hours alone on a laptop would not have been seen as out of the ordinary at all.
  - boomboomsubban 10y ago
    I don't question the free time, I doubt the ability for someone already under a fair amount of emotional distress to be able to hide reading thousands of pages of classified data. Even with the route she took, it was only a matter of months for her to make a mistake that got her arrested. Giving it to wikileaks reduced her anxiety, going through it likely would have ramped it up. Additionally, needing to keep a local copy of the data is a huge risk.
- angry_octet 10y ago
  This is exactly the sort of thing intellos do all day if they are good. The only covert part was the exfil. I don't think the war diary stuff made much of an impact, or the apache video. The diplomatic traffic OTOH was the spark into the tinder of the middle east autocracies that set off the so-called Arab Spring.

boomboomsubban 10y ago

And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing? Time isn't the only relevant resource. Maybe I'm an asshole, but the "put lives at risk" line seems like nationalistic swill. Even if it risked American combatants, why should that justify hiding the deaths of possibly fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians?

golergka 10y ago
How does it not justify it? Deaths that already happen vs quite real damage that you cause in the future?
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
  It isn't "quite real damage," it's potential damage. Without revealing and adressing the past deaths, you can expect there to be future deaths. The point of revealing isn't to say "hey we did awful shit," it's to say "we're doing awful shit and it needs to stop."
- EdHominem 10y ago
  I'd call the cops on bank robbers even knowing they may get "damaged" during capture because I think the benefits to society outweighs the harm. Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.
  - golergka 10y ago
    Repeating a discussion that is being mad in a neoghbour thread, I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.
    - fornever 10y ago
      > I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war. So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay". First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.
      - golergka 10y ago
        How exactly could've you made out these figures as civilians and not enemy combatants? From POV of the camera, you already have seen one of them with an RPG, and the opposing force doesn't really use uniforms either. Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.
the_trapper 10y ago
> And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing? Most of the military intelligence Soldiers I deployed with brought their own personal laptops. You really underestimate how much free alone time is available to you when you are deployed. Remember that Manning was also kind of a black sheep at the time. Spending hours alone on a laptop would not have been seen as out of the ordinary at all.
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
  I don't question the free time, I doubt the ability for someone already under a fair amount of emotional distress to be able to hide reading thousands of pages of classified data. Even with the route she took, it was only a matter of months for her to make a mistake that got her arrested. Giving it to wikileaks reduced her anxiety, going through it likely would have ramped it up. Additionally, needing to keep a local copy of the data is a huge risk.
angry_octet 10y ago
This is exactly the sort of thing intellos do all day if they are good. The only covert part was the exfil. I don't think the war diary stuff made much of an impact, or the apache video. The diplomatic traffic OTOH was the spark into the tinder of the middle east autocracies that set off the so-called Arab Spring.