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For the life of me, whenever I hear someone call Manning a whistleblower, I cannot ever get the person to articulate exactly what he was blowing the whistle aga

by d23 12y ago

For the life of me, whenever I hear someone call Manning a whistleblower, I cannot ever get the person to articulate exactly what he was blowing the whistle against. It's my understanding that most of what was released was nothing more than embarrassing personal cables that harmed diplomatic relations. Snowden revealed legitimate privacy concerns that the American people had not yet been privy to.

thetrb 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
- d23 12y ago
  Which doesn't really justify 99.9% of the other things that were released.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    But that 99.9% (assuming your figure is accurate - I have no idea the proportion of damning vs. embarrassing vs. irrelevant information that was leaked) doesn't make Manning not a whistle-blower.
morsch 12y ago
I couldn't off-hand recall anything, either. But a cursory search reveals: "There were hundreds of classified reports of torture, that continued even after the Abu Ghraib scandal."[0] The diplomatic embarrassment is what made the news, but whose fault is it that -- and who stands to gain from it? People like a good embarrassing story. And I'm sure governments prefer you think of them as having their diary exposed to the public as opposed to the guys paying thugs to torture people. [0] http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2013/08/2013817912749650.html http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2013/08/2013...
ck2 12y ago
You seriously never heard of the "Collateral Murder" video? Manning specifically released that among other information. It was incredibly important.