I know what you mean but i am not sure how much he knew about the things manning leaked. Considering what he did before i want to believe that he had a good reason why he did it. Maybe he really thought people were in danger
People really were put in danger. The Taliban targeted Afgan nationals revealed in the documents to be associating with the US. From a Taliban spokesperson: "We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the U.S. If they are U.S. spies, then we know how to punish them." [1]
I like freedom of information, but what Manning did was simply irresponsible. There was no filter on the documents released. Release all the reports of us torturing and murdering, sure. But don't go around telling the Taliban exactly which families risked their lives to help the counterinsurgency.
Fucking hell, will you stop linking that 8-year-old article? The only information contained in it is one goat enthusiast no one ever heard of, quoted as saying "yes if we learn of a betrayal against goat enthusiasm we will be upset about it." That proves absolutely nothing. If any brave Afghan national USA collaborator had died as a result, we would have heard about him enough to be sick of it. Unlike, for instance, the thousands of Afghan nationals murdered directly by USA military, whom the war media never mentions.
This comment crosses into ideological flamewar and personal attacks, which are destructive on HN regardless of how correct your underlying views may be. Please don't do those things here.
It isn't a question of criticism but of grandiose rhetoric—e.g. equating people who disagree with you with child-haters, and whatnot.
One can argue that atrocities demand intense responses and I agree with that. But I also know that on internet forums this has long degraded into garden-variety flamebait, that the discussions it produces are tedious, predictable, and worthless, and that the end state they lead to is heat death. It's for those reasons we moderate discussion this way, not because we're secret atrocity sympathizers.
Edit: I think it can be helpful to understand how this is really a question of the medium you're posting to. Heated rhetoric that might make sense in a different medium doesn't work the same way in an online forum. No awareness is raised. All it does is provoke opposite flames, and then people try to destroy each other verbally and wreck the container in the process.
If your concern is to make points about reality in the hope that someone else will shift their view a bit, the only way to do that here is neutrally, because if you can't be neutral, the state machine simply advances to state Flamewar. If your concern is to vent rage about evil, that may well be justified, but it doesn't make sense here because the destruction it causes outweighs the limited relief it brings and the zero other good it does. This isn't personal or specific to your views. It's a way of tending to the container for everybody.
Troll somewhere else. If you read even the first line of my comment you’d know I’m talking about protecting Afghan nationals. If you continued reading, you’d see that I agree with leaks exposing the evils committed.
According to him he did it as a matter of conscience given the broad and indiscriminate nature of what Manning was releasing, potentially putting the lives of US servicemen and those that work with them at risk.
His stated reason was that Manning was putting lives in danger due to not filtering the documents released whatsoever. This included revealing the identities of Afghan nationals which had been friendly with the counterinsurgency. These nationals were then targeted by Taliban. See my sibling comment for more.
