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What If Manning Had Leaked To the New York Times?
New submitter minstrelmike points outs a two-page editorial in the NYTimes "about what would have been different legally, morally, and security-wise," had the military information released through WikiLeaks been published by the Times instead.
"'If Manning had delivered his material to The Times, WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein. In fact, you might not have heard of WikiLeaks. The group has had other middling scoops, but Manning put it on the map.' The writers also discusses what the Times would and would not have done, admitting they probably wouldn't have shared with other news outlets, but also admitting they would definitely have not shared everything."
He wanted it to get out.
Spin:
"heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein"
Reality:
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
"A full audio recording of the whistleblower is released today despite a court prohibition on such recordings"
I thought Manning shopped it around to all the big existing media and they didn't want to know, it was only after Wikileaks picked it up that THEN they came back. And as to unedited, Wikileaks was working with the newspapers to get the redactions done until.. The Guardian in the UK started dropping unedited stuff? Don't know for sure, a lot of finger pointing, but 99% of it always appears to be at Wikileaks and from what appeared to be going on at the time, they were doing the best they could to release slowly and carefully to avoid putting people into danger (though as pointed out, anyone who wanted this data probably already had it).
Waiting for an amusing sig.
There is absolutely no way NYT would have touched Manning's cable archives. They would have feigned interest and then shopped him. Bill Keller knows this.
The OP is the biggest piece of self-serving balderdash I've read in weeks. It's nauseating, and teeming with distortions and outright lies about Manning and Wikileaks.
I wonder if they would have simply sat on them for a year, like they did with the NSA wiretapping matter just because the feds asked them to?
At this point, "Why didn't he leak to the Times?" is only slightly less risible than "Why didn't he just register his concerns with the chain of command?"
NYT to whistle blowers: "Give your leaks to us instead of lame ol' Wikileaks! *WE* will make money on.. err... I mean *WE* will keep your data safer!"
WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates
That's one whopper of a half truth.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein
The unredacted cables were published by accident, with Wikileaks and The Guardian being about equally neglectful. The op-eds claim of "[publishing] heedless of the risk" here is a lie.
I know that it is an op-ed, and therefore not the New York Times' opinion, but the New York Times still have a responsibility to do a basic fact check before posting it.
What If The New York Times Still Mattered?
Unfortunately there's no, "you're an idiot" mod, so I'll leave you unmoderated and tell you directly. If Manning really did leak this information then yes, he's a hero. But he's not a traitor, and he deserves no punishment. He deserves what any hero does, but unfortunately he's getting what heroes too often get. Instead of praise and thanks for highlighting evil, and exposing dark secrets, he's getting punished for it. But that's to be expected, what evil organization actually likes being exposed as evil when they try and pretend otherwise?
People like to say, "oh, you broke the law, accept the consequences", but fuck that shit. If the law is wrong (and any law that forbids a person to revel wrong doing on the scale reveled by Manning, is wrong), then it is your duty to break it. And then to evade injustice. E.g. the mafia come and say, "we'll protect your shop from someone firebombing it", but if you reject their offer, you still have the right to defend your shop yourself from firebombing (which will come from the mafia). The mafia are the government, demanding you accept their laws or face the consequences they decided on.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Be careful what you wish for.
We could always move the tax rates back to where they were when Reagan was in office.
It might actually pay for all of our military traipsing around the world.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The law is not an absolute concept. It is a convention full of flaws. When someone breaks an unfair laws he does not "deserve" punishment, even if he does it knowing he will get it, and if in the end he does not get the punishment much for the better, although it seldom happens.
However, he's also a fucking traitor and deserves the punishment which is coming to him
- I suppose he is a 'traitor' in the same way that an SS soldier would have been in Nazi units designed to burn people alive in concentration camps, for releasing the real information about the atrocities for all the public to find out.
USA government kills civilian children on daily basis with bombs, that's part of the information released by Manning. I don't give a shit what the literal legality is of what he did, he is not a traitor, the US government is the traitor of the principles that the country was founded upon.
USA government, every single fucker in it that knew and authorised that knows and authorises murder of people on daily basis should be rotting in jail, Manning is a normal person that became part of a completely corrupt, oppressive, ridiculously blood thirsty system and he did not stand for it. By releasing this information he notifies the public what atrocities are done in their name under the pretence of 'protecting the Constitution', while in reality completely abandoning the Constitution and destroying every principle that the USA Republic was founded upon.
You can't handle the truth.
I feel the same way, except I believe the cables should have been edited for names of the innocent and so on.
They were. Wikileaks didn't release the unedited cables, and I doubt Manning would have been willing to leak them without assurance that they would redact dangerous information. The problem was that "respectable newspapers" (The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel) were involved in the redaction process, and The Guardian used the opportunity for a scoop. Maybe NYT is more trustworthy than The Guardian - I don't know - but it is deeply ironic that they are using this of all things as an example of being better "legally, morally, and security-wise" than Wikileaks when Wikileaks's only shortcoming was involving the likes of NYT in the first place.
Also wealth redistribution can be good for an economy. It is what made the USA the powerhouse it was. WW2 and the programs of the great depression moved lots of money into the hand of the new middle class, they spent that money thus driving the economy. A single rich person has only so many needs they will spend money on, taking that money and giving it to people who will spend it will improve the economy. Today we see the reverse with a shrinking middle class and a slowing economy as wealth accumulates in the hands of a small few.
These are just facts, they have nothing to do with the morality of such action.
We just think it's funny that you keep calling Obama a socialist. All it shows is that you have no clue what the word means. Obama is not a socialist. The American Socialist Party doesn't even think he's a socialist.
I don't like or support Obama, but not because of his economic stance. The fact is that he'd be able to get a lot more done to help the country on the economic front if the Republicans weren't bound and determined to block everything he attempts to do.
Technoli
Comeback without the strawman and total misunderstanding of systemic poverty and we can talk. Until then, fuck off.
you stupid elitist pricks all have a big laugh about the EVIL CONSERVATIVE and you pat each other on the back to cheer on yet more and more government, more regulations, more taxation, theft and erosion of the civil society.
You know, it takes a truly exception level of delusion to think that it's the elite in this country who want more taxes on themselves, and the average working people who want to cut all benefit programs and social safety nets for the average working people.
Yes, I'm sure all the billionaire power-brokers in this country are all Democrats who just hate it when Republicans pass tax breaks and pro-corporate laws that benefit themselves greatly. "Oh no, please make me pay more taxes and take away these laws that allow me to lord over the poor like a God!" I can hear Donald Trump and the Koch brothers saying.
Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
Sure you can tax into prosperity... Tax pays for services needed for prosperity, like security (police, defense), libraries, transport and communication infrastructure,
education, a legal system etc at a minimum. This obviously doesn't mean that "more tax is always better", but some level of tax is needed. Providing care for the elderly and children increases the workforce and thus prosperity, but also requires funding.
One of the clearest indications that political thought is an oxymoron is the idea that everything must come in only 2 flavors and nothing between, and that all lines must be straight lines.
Reality isn't that tidy. There is a point where too little taxes fail society and a point where too much tax crushes. There's also a spot in between. Or actually, more of a blob, since there are a lot of variables in the equation. The blob can be larger or smaller or even inside-out depending on whether your demands exceed supply.
We are the most spoiled generation in all human history. We have all - even the eldest - spent all, or nearly all of our lives expecting things to become cheaper every day. Sure, we howl about inflation, but the truth is, anything electronic has been chasing Moore's law for decades, and almost everything we do any more ties into something electronic, even if it's just just sitting down at the PC and figuring out when to plant the South 40.
Matters only got worse when offshoring became economically viable. We've come to expect that Lower Prices Every Day is a right, and not simply being in the right place at the right time. No 16th-century farmer expected next year to require less effort or money to survive than last year.
So we do foolish things like lower taxes right before a recession is due when we should have been saving the money for when the rains came and lowering taxes afterwards. And compound it, by fighting to keep the taxes low even as we embark on expensive campaigns.
There's almost always something that isn't really necessary in any budget, whether it's personal, corporate, or government. And tough times help provide incentive for getting rid of it. Still, historically, we are used to being able to prosper while paying far more tax than we have for the last 10 years. And, frankly, the last 10 years have mostly been pretty miserable, so I don't buy the whole "lower taxes = more prosperity" line. If it can't work in a period that long, I'll likely die before it works at all - if it ever does. Ergo, it's useless for my purposes.
The one thing that more government money can do that no one else can, is spend money when no one else dares to. Governments don't have to show a profit (and shouldn't!), nor do they have to be concerned over-much about daily expenses. They can keep on cranking regardless, and if it isn't very efficient, nonetheless, it keeps money in circulation instead of being hoarded. Hoarded money doesn't really do anyone any good. Not even the hoarders. Until you spend it, money is just potential.
He violated his contract with the US government.
- OMG and the US government has violated its contract with the entire USA, with all the people and all the States.
USA government was supposed to protect and defend the Constitution and the principles of individual rights, instead it's killing off individuals and is taking a long, stinking dump on the Constitution. It doesn't matter that somebody who signed up TO PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION is not following the orders of the system, that is clearly is violating its own oath to do the same.
He did not sign up to protect the government, he signed up to protect the Constitution.
Manning is doing his job, the rest of the government is not.
You can't handle the truth.
Wikileaks was being actively supported by several media outlets at the time (which IIRC included the Associated Press). As such, they were acting agents of the press doing work that the papers themselves hadn't dared for decades.
However it was the Guardian's blunder that caused the real breech, IMO. There is no denying they bungled it.
Republicans are on the record as vowing to block anything the Obama attempts to do.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/26/democrats-gop-plot-obstruct-obama
And yes, Obamacare is so socialist that it is virtually identical to a health care plan the the Republicans came up with several years back.
Obama is not trying to take away your guns or your Second Amendment rights. If you had been paying attention, you would have realized that he's trying to take away your Fourth Amendment rights.
Technoli
This is what this is about. The Times really didn't like Jullian Assage.
I think its because they are titled, old newspaper snobs who think its not only their duty, but their right to decide what the people get and do not get to hear. They are pissed that things like wikileaks exist in the first place and the old order of newsmedia is being shaken up.
The NYT thinks the people OWE the Times news stories, and they should just for them over, as if they are a perennial authority figure on everything news related.
Again with the leaks, they think it was their sole right to censor the government cables of what and what should not be shown to the public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/opinion/keller-wikileaks-a-postscript.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/28/julian-assange-press-wikileaks-documentary_n_1116599.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/26/new-york-times-assange-wikileaks_n_814434.html
So althought it was not wikileaks who outed Manning, but a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who Bradley Manning bragged to about leaking the docs.
So what got Bradley Manning caught was ultimately his own big mouth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/03/adrian-lamo-bradley-manning-q-and-a
This article is nothing more than some weasel words to get potential informats to go back to the news media instead of new media, for all the wrong reasons. I wreaks of typical news trickery, and self-promotion.