Officers of the United States Government should be on trial -- not PFC Bradley Manning.

[Proud Public Servant]

45. Coping with Manning's crime was my job for a while

Last edited Tue Jun 4, 2013, 02:13 PM - Edit history (1)

As many have said here, what Manning did was an indiscriminate data dump. Why was that so bad? Let me tell you about my job...

After Wikileaks began releasing items, I became part of a task force assembled to cope with the fallout. We worked literally around-the-clock, since we never knew when new cables would be made public. We were concerned with one thing and one thing only: the safety of people who would be in danger in their own countries if their names were revealed.

See, this is what diplomats actually do: they build and maintain foreign contacts. And in repressive countries, many of those contacts are people like human rights activists, labor agitators, and others who get under the government's skin. They then report on their conversations with such people to Washington, using classified cables to do so. They classify the cables because news that, say, a country's leading opposition figure was meeting regularly with the U.S. counselor for political affairs is not something you want that country's government to know.

I don't participate here all that often, and most folks here don't know me. So you may have to take my word for it: I'm not a DLC-er, I'm not a hawk, I'm not a Third Way type; I'm very much just the opposite. But I will tell you right now, from the inside, that all Bradley Manning accomplished was (1) putting a lot of good people, and the diplomatic efforts they were a part of, in peril, and (2) making sure that the government would heretofore be even more secretive than it had been, and that information would be even more stoivepiped (for more on the problems of stovepiped government information, please read up on 9/11). Hero? He was at best a misguided idiot.