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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 sl

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).