Just a reminder: Desmond Tutu salutes Manning (and thank Hank, I am on the right side of history.)

[struggle4progress]

4. I admire them all but regard their support for Manning as a surrogate for other issues

War stinks; militarism stinks; the history of the Iraq war stinks; the thoughtless use of the US military to bully other countries stinks; the size of the US military stinks

Many of us will agree with all that, and more -- but we didn't learn it from Bradley Manning

Manning released about 750K documents, a handful of which might have produced important stories. In trying to assess the damage, one team spent about 850 hours examining 2K of these documents, which works out to about 25 minutes per document. If Manning had spent a tiny fraction of that time -- say, a minute per document -- reading what he was releasing, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, it would have taken him about three years to read them all. But he was in Iraq only about 7 months before being arrested. The only conclusion is he dumped most of the documents indiscriminately without knowing what was in them -- which explains why he's never said much about the thousands and thousands of important narratives he's alleged to have exposed. And it's unlikely that any of of his supporters have read many of the documents, either. Moreover, unfortunately, Manning released the documents to Assange, a person who has repeatedly in various contexts shown substantial callousness about the potential effects of his releases on other people and indifference to possible resulting loss of life

There are many reasons various people might understandably enjoy seeing American get a good smeck in the schnozz, but the effects of this don't seem particularly salutary to me, with regard to domestic politics. Manning's releases are probably the reason a 2010 whistle-blower bill suddenly died in Congress, when everyone had expected it to pass; and the next time something like that looked like it might move, Snowden popped up. By greatly complicating President Obama's efforts at diplomacy, for example, the long-term effects of Manning (and later Snowden) will simply be to strengthen the rightwing's hand in American politics -- and they're the bastards who gave us all this crap in the first place