It's not the Army's job to affect public opinion. It's our job to enforce the orders we're giving. Yeah, they're two cluster fucks of wars, one justified, one probably not. And I'll even agree to you. Men in uniforms should have fallen on their swords and resigned before we went there, but, at the end of the day, we're not responsible for those orders. Look at a government that's trying to nation build.
I'll damn straight complain about Manning. He certainly risked or cost lives with his actions. You want to whistle blow? Fuck, I wouldn't have a problem with the so-called Collateral Murder video. But, there's a difference between whistleblowing and releasing a metric-fuck ton of whatever you can get your hands on. Moreover, what he did right there (and what Snowden did for the non-uniformed agencies) is shoot every intelligence analyst in the foot. Open share of information because we can trust a very professional workforce? Nopes. We've got a world where second guessing things that people don't understand is a religion.
Now, in your hypothetical, I would duly move that information up to my seniors, unless I had reason to believe they were breaking the law. In that case, I would use my rights as a soldier to bring the issue up to the next level in the chain of command that I trust. If I believed that the whole system was utterly corrupt, I'd consider bringing evidence or that corruption to relevant media. I damn sure wouldn't spend my days in Iraq harvesting files for Assange.
Here's the thing that, quite frankly, you probably can't understand. Once the chain of command that orders everything in the military breaks down, everything goes to hell. You don't *get* to do your own thing in the military.
50 dead marines or 500 dead Iraqis?
Idealy, neither group would have to die as we should have never gone there in the first place. But to be blunt, I cant think of a reason why a marines life should have a greater value then 10 Iraqis (or one Iraqi)...
Okay, do you pick 50 dead marines, currently pinned down or dropping the airstrike that'd rescue them at the fifty percent risk of 50 dead Iraqis?
Except, replace every 50 with a black box, because there's no way to know, and even if you manage to get everyone out alive, you'll still be crucified for "collateral damage" because one of the MRAP's took down a telephone pole trying to get away.
Except if there were more people like Manning, we wouldn't be in the fucking mess in Iraq.
100% exactly this. You are in those fucked up situations because leaders are corrupt or incompetent and the public is kept in the dark. People like Manning are exactly what it takes to change that.
I also have little sympathy for you. Is it not what you expected? Has there ever been any point in history where military service was a simple matter of being handed destructive power and told where to point it?
And U.S. intelligence's very own reports have concluded that Manning's leaks posed no threat to anybody, plus he did not just randomly dump that content on the internet like people always try to say he did. He handed it over to a journalist organization specifically designed to facilitate whistleblowing, and that organization then collaborated with several other reputable journalists on filtering & redacting the data to be released responsibly. Someone else then broke the encryption on the archive, which resulted in the mass dumping of information, and that was not Manning's fault whatsoever.
What? Giving out classified information to third parties *damn* sure makes it his fault.
Edit: cleaned up the formatting, left everything else the same.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1247184 times)