Walter Pincus re: AP-The reality is that this is not a whistleblowing case-There are no heroes here

[JDPriestly]

23. You make a good point about this complex issue.

Think of the Benghazi case. Imagine (God forbid!) that Obama had lost the 2012 election and that a Republican president had classified the e-mails that revealed the lies the Republicans and the press told and then refused to release them. What if a true whistleblower in the interest of fairness and full disclosure leaked the accurate wording of the e-mails -- the originals -- to a news reporter?

Now, Benghazi could be described as a continuing investigation because of the ongoing fight against Al Qaeda and because of its links, the terrorist links, to Benghazi. Would the Al Qaeda links justify punishing the whistleblower? What if the whistleblower instead of disseminating lies to create a scandal had simply leaked the true e-mails to correct a dishonest, libelous news story?

What if the whistleblower is revealing something that he or she firmly believes will SAVE lives? Wouldn't it have been great if, prior to the Iraq War, someone in the government had leaked the truth about Curveball? Maybe we would not have gone to war? Maybe thousands of lives would have been saved? So whistleblowing even of secrets can be a nobel act. It isn't always, but it can be. Where it is good or bad depends on the situation and is a subjective judgment that is probably limited to the information of the person making the judgment at the time of the judgment.

(Nov. 1999 Chalabi-connected Iraqi defector "Curveball"—a convicted sex offender and low-level engineer who became the sole source for much of the case that Saddam had WMD, particularly mobile weapons labs—enters Munich seeking a German visa. German intel officers describe his information as highly suspect. US agents never debrief Curveball or perform background check. Nonetheless, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA will pass raw intel on to senior policymakers. [Date the public knew: 11/20/05]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/leadup-iraq-war-timeline

I have wrestled with this problem a long time, especially concerning Wikileaks, Assange and Manning. I did some reading about double agents and spying in WWII so I could understand it better. (Remember the "Loose lips sink ships." The decoding of the Enigma was kept secret although many, many people knew about it. That was amazing and a key to winning the war.)

I still vacillate on these issues. I think that it may be impossible to draw a line and make rules.

And without a line, without rules, a person like Manning who is, on the one hand, was told not to follow illegal orders and on the other to be silent about war crimes faces a very difficult choice. Appealing to a superior of his superior could have gotten Manning killed, and yet, what if Manning had revealed secrets that caused others to be killed? That probably was not his goal, but then, who has the overview to decide what is correctly classified and kept secret and what not?

This is just such a difficult issue. It is baffling. Our government should, in the first place, be very discerning about what it classifies and labels as secrets. That is the first step. But it does not decide the issue to say "Do no harm," because sometimes the wrong of our government is in putting people in harm's way so that whistleblowers put human life in danger when they expose the government's wrongdoing.

There just is no easy answer.