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

[dreamnightwind]

213. The Arab Spring was certainly inspired

in no small part, by people learning more about the activities of their governments and ours from the Manning-supplied documents. You can believe what you want about whether or not that is a good thing. In my mind the people should be able to make decisions based on what their governments are actually doing, not what their governments say they are doing, so I think that was an enormous accomplishment.

And about the second "accomplishment" you mentioned, that this kind of leak caused our government to stovepipe its information and intelligence communications, that is precisely the method to the madness that is Assange. His expectation was exactly that, and he has spoken at length about it. He is attempting to disable our run-away security establishment by leaking, and therefore choking it on its own reactively strengthened secrecy requirements, so that it becomes ineffective. Basically he is attempting to monkey-wrench the whole machine. It's a very radical idea Assange has. It's probably a little bold for my taste, but then I'm a coward behind a keyboard and he's putting his life on the line.

The people you want protected by not revealing our secrets, what are they up to? There were a lot of insights from the leaked documents that showed how we propped up oppressors for corporate interest, rather than supported freedom and democracy like we claim to do. Labor activists and labor interests? Are you serious? Our government vigorously works AGAINST those interests. If we have such assets, we're only using them as convenient ways to disrupt regimes we oppose, in places such as Iran. The much larger reality is that our government and the tentacles of its security apparatus install and maintain oppressive regimes in every corner of this planet, actively working with the oppressors against the interests of the citizens of those countries, and of ours, most especially when it comes to labor issues. If you've read so many of the documents like you claim, you already know this, or your mind is just not tuned to perceive it.

You are way way off base in your claims that nothing was accomplished. It is possible to make a valid argument that the methods were reckless and too broad. It is not, in my opinion, possible to claim that little was accomplished by the leaks.