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A hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq already, and I've yet to hear of anyone who's died as a direct result of the leaks.

tptacek 16y ago
So, because a hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq, your logic is that a few more would be a rounding error and thus an acceptable cost for getting the documents out? I don't agree with that logic.
- anthonyb 16y ago
  Thanks for putting words in my mouth. No, my logic is that the current status quo in Iraq is secrecy, and it makes it much easier for human rights abuses or slack rules of engagement to be swept under the rug. At least some proportion of those deaths would have been prevented if there was greater oversight from the general public, both American and overseas.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    None of that is responsive to the original comment you tried to rebut. I don't support the Iraq war either, but that doesn't mean I share your opinion about Manning.
    - anthonyb 16y ago
      Ok, I'll spell it out for you. The pretext for going to war in Iraq was that Saddam had WMDs - a pretext that was later found to be extremely flimsy. If we (ie. the public) had had access to unfiltered information, not just what the US/UK goverments wanted us to have, would we have gone to war? I doubt it. Hence you need to balance the cost of releasing the information (maybe a few hundred deaths, but that's yet to be demonstrated) vs. the cost of being led around by whoever's in power (currently >100,000 civilian deaths, and a borderline civil war in Iraq).
tzs 16y ago
The leaks include names, addresses, and even GPS coordinates for the homes of people who have cooperated with the Afghan government or the US. They also contains names and addresses of people who the US thought might be in danger and so needed to keep an eye on, because those people did such heinous crimes as teaching girls. In the past, when the Taliban has found out the identities of such people they have often killed them, and their families. Do you have some reason to believe that Taliban policy is only to kill such people when they find out about them themselves, and so if the unedited documents became public the Taliban would NOT go after the people named in them? There's a reason (besides trying to milk this for all the publicity they can get) that Wikileaks doesn't just make all the documents available as is. They know that without redaction, they will get innocent people killed. That's why they are redacting them (with the help of the several newspapers they gave copies to).
- anthonyb 16y ago
  Good points, but what makes you think the Taliban aren't going after these people already? Or that the information isn't already accessible to them - the Afghan government is incredibly corrupt, and I find it hard to believe that anything that they know would be kept secret. Ditto for Iraq - the US went in woefully underprepared, and even today you have roving militants gunning each other down. If there were more transparency and more information about what was happening at the time, you'd have avoided (or at least mitigated) situations like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and had less violence.

tptacek 16y ago

So, because a hundred thousand civilians have died in Iraq, your logic is that a few more would be a rounding error and thus an acceptable cost for getting the documents out? I don't agree with that logic.

anthonyb 16y ago
Thanks for putting words in my mouth. No, my logic is that the current status quo in Iraq is secrecy, and it makes it much easier for human rights abuses or slack rules of engagement to be swept under the rug. At least some proportion of those deaths would have been prevented if there was greater oversight from the general public, both American and overseas.
- tptacek 16y ago
  None of that is responsive to the original comment you tried to rebut. I don't support the Iraq war either, but that doesn't mean I share your opinion about Manning.
  - anthonyb 16y ago
    Ok, I'll spell it out for you. The pretext for going to war in Iraq was that Saddam had WMDs - a pretext that was later found to be extremely flimsy. If we (ie. the public) had had access to unfiltered information, not just what the US/UK goverments wanted us to have, would we have gone to war? I doubt it. Hence you need to balance the cost of releasing the information (maybe a few hundred deaths, but that's yet to be demonstrated) vs. the cost of being led around by whoever's in power (currently >100,000 civilian deaths, and a borderline civil war in Iraq).

tzs 16y ago

The leaks include names, addresses, and even GPS coordinates for the homes of people who have cooperated with the Afghan government or the US. They also contains names and addresses of people who the US thought might be in danger and so needed to keep an eye on, because those people did such heinous crimes as teaching girls. In the past, when the Taliban has found out the identities of such people they have often killed them, and their families. Do you have some reason to believe that Taliban policy is only to kill such people when they find out about them themselves, and so if the unedited documents became public the Taliban would NOT go after the people named in them? There's a reason (besides trying to milk this for all the publicity they can get) that Wikileaks doesn't just make all the documents available as is. They know that without redaction, they will get innocent people killed. That's why they are redacting them (with the help of the several newspapers they gave copies to).

anthonyb 16y ago
Good points, but what makes you think the Taliban aren't going after these people already? Or that the information isn't already accessible to them - the Afghan government is incredibly corrupt, and I find it hard to believe that anything that they know would be kept secret. Ditto for Iraq - the US went in woefully underprepared, and even today you have roving militants gunning each other down. If there were more transparency and more information about what was happening at the time, you'd have avoided (or at least mitigated) situations like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and had less violence.