Bradley Manning charged in WikiLeaks case

[TheWraith]

21. Because these are US embassy cables.

Is every single gram of it a live attack plan for Normandy? Obviously not. That doesn't mean it's not confidential, or that it doesn't have intelligence value. Often what facts or information a government is curious about, even when it's freely available information, can give a lot of insight into what that government is thinking or what they already know. Which is not to say that the documents didn't contain really, really classified information. A non-theoretical example: the US conspiring with the Pakistani government to help secure their nuclear material and weapons, a fact that doesn't sit very well in Pakistan.

A slightly more abstract example: during World War II, the Germans announced to the world that they'd discovered the remains of thousands of Polish military officers executed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when the Soviets controlled half of Poland, and therefore according to them this proved both the barbarism of the communists and that the Allies were subservient to the vicious Slavs, and that all decent Poles should support Germany in the war. The Soviets retorted that it was obviously another German war crime--not a hard sell given the use of "Action Groups" led by the SS on the eastern front to execute entire villages.

That was all information available to the public, no big deal if cables were published about it, right? Little problem: Although many people treated the German claims as propaganda (for which it was certainly used), the US and UK both knew that the Germans were being 100% completely accurate about the discovery of dead Polish officers and who killed them, because the UK had intercepted and broken the encrypted signals from the German motorized signals regiment which found the first mass grave.

If your argument is that these cables should be unclassified because they're all publicly available information (which they're not), that loses something based on the fact that publicly available information is, you know, publicly available, and you don't need to tap in to classified communications to get it. Also, Manning's defenders can't have it both ways; either he revealed the most important cache of information since the Dead Sea Scrolls, or it's all unclassified gossip. It can't be both.