He released evidence of scores of crimes and warcrimes. His actions were a major catalyst for the Arab Spring, yet something for which he has literally been tortured.
If I blow up a bomb in the middle of a populated area and just so happen to take out a bunch of bad guys that doesn't make my actions right. This is true even if the bomb only kills a bunch of bad guys, because the action was completely reckless, without regard to collateral damage, and only by luck gets the job done.
Likewise we wouldn't condone getting the GMail password of a child kidnapper by releasing the GMail passwords of all adult males. Whistleblowers report specific crimes, they don't just mysqldump a database and netcat that shit to foreign-entity.co.au and hope they treat the data properly.
But let's talk about his actions catalyzed the Arab Spring. How many Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian and Syrian lives does Pfc. Manning have on his hands then? We blame the U.S. for all of the fatalities related to Iraq, for example, even though the U.S. didn't directly undertake all of those killings. So why would Manning get a pass for this?
As far as torture, Prevention of Suicide Watch is an actual prisoner status one can be in, especially if one makes jokes about killing themselves (as Manning's own lawyer admitted he did). The military judge presiding over Manning's hearing agrees that he was held under suicide watch without enough justification and has reduced his eventual sentence (it's unclear by how much though).
But either way, I would humbly submit that someone with military training should be intelligent enough to not joke about committing suicide, especially when part of a case with extreme media interest where actually committing suicide would bring the "Eye of Sauron" of negative attention on the detention facility. You don't even have to take my word for that; just look at the reaction to Aaron Swartz's suicide.
Blowing up a crowded population to kill a few "bad guys" is exactly one of the crimes he is accused of releasing. Aside from that, it has nothing to do with him.
He is often compared to famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who released thousands of documents indiscriminately that had a lower security designation than anything Manning released. Plus even Robert Gates called the negative impact of Manning's leaks "fairly modest."
It wasn't just a SQL dump. Manning found evidence of crimes, and he took what looked suspicious. Read his chatlogs with Lamo if you must.
Daniel Ellsberg had a hand in writing the very same "thousands of documents" that he leaked. So he was able to vouch for their contents. (And P.S., he leaked it to the New York Times, not Pravda).
Pfc. Manning, on the other hand, downloads hundreds of thousands of different documents, and instead of simply releasing the specific ones he looked at which he felt documented war crimes, simply passed it all along. Not to the Inspector General, not to the Office of Special Counsel, not to the NYT, or WaPo, or any U.S. entity. No, he passed it (these hundreds of thousands of documents he never so much as looked at) directly to WikiLeaks, an organization that is not exactly impartial (and either way, is foreign-run).
So I'll reiterate. He took whole CD-R's full of stuff, which he didn't fully review, and offloaded it all to a foreign third-party to filter through and do with as they will. If the impact ended up "fairly modest" it was due only to luck or incompetence on Manning's part (I'll let you pick whichever you like).
If Manning were whistleblowing, he would have taken the "evidence of crimes", and leaked that, just as has been done by other soldiers before him (e.g. Justin Watt, serving in Iraq).
I've read the chat logs as it turns out, but it reminded me of something: Manning himself noted that he had been demoted by the Army for physically assaulting another soldier, that he was dissatisfied with being 'an abused work horse', etc. etc. However he managed to convince himself of his 'ethics', the fact is that he had a ton of ulterior motive.
For all the talk we hear of proportional response for Aaron Swartz, you would think that Manning would have thought more before making the logical leap from "I have to deal with shitty officers" to "I have to exfiltrate as much as I can".
I mean, Manning himself realized that it's not as if all military servicemembers are horrific murderers:
(02:09:58 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: most people in the Army aren’t in specialties
that involve directly servicing targets.
(02:10:14 PM) bradass87: im glad you realize that
Another cool snippet from those chat logs:
(12:12:46 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: Want to go to the press? :)
(12:12:51 PM) bradass87: no
Looks reeeeeeaaal concerned with getting those crimes reported, doesn't he?
The logs also state:
(12:21:24 PM) bradass87: say… a database of half a million events
during the iraq war… from 2004 to 2009… with reports, date time
groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures… ? or 260,000 state
department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world,
explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail,
from an internal perspective?
Which of those 500,000 events were war crimes? How about the 260,000 cables? Don't forget the cables describing such heinous crimes as what U.S. diplomats thought of the buddy-buddy relationship between Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin, my knees shake at the thought!
(1:34:45 PM) bradass87: all while witnessing the world freak out as
its most intimate secrets are revealed
Looks like it's still spinning the same to me, Brad-O, except of course for all those dead in the Arab Spring uprisings. I just hope we end up with stable secular democracies out it. Maybe some good will come of all this (not that it will help Pfc. Manning in the end... good intentions don't excuse bad behavior).
He released evidence of scores of crimes and warcrimes. His actions were a major catalyst for the Arab Spring, yet something for which he has literally been tortured.