The Scariest Quote You'll Read From the Trial Nobody Is Talking About (Manning trial)

[struggle4progress]

25. Do the arithmetic. Divide the number of documents Manning released by the total time he was in Iraq.

It comes out to about two documents per minute

That is, if Manning read documents 24/7, without any time allotted for eating or sleeping or showering or actually doing his job or anything else, maybe he could have read all 700K+ documents in that time, if he read a document every 30 seconds

It's not physically possible for him even to have known what exactly he was releasing, let alone for him to have had an informed opinion about his releases, and even less possible for him to have gone through more documents than he released and carefully chosen the ones he actually released because he was convinced that those documents really showed some criminality that needed to be exposed

The only possible conclusion is that he simply dumped data, without any clear idea what he was dumping, possibly for purely ideological reasons, possibly because he was confused or depressed or angry, possibly because he wanted to impress somebody: I don't know what

Claiming this has something to do with journalism is risible. It's like a guy backing a truck up to a newspaper office and unloading 1400 reams of paper documents with the comment that maybe there's a story somewhere in there: if you set crack reporters reading the paper stack, at 2 minutes a page, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, it's going to take several years to get through it all. Nobody does journalism that way, on the off-chance maybe you'll find something in the stack