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Comment by the_trapper | Hacker News Reader

> How much time do you think someone on active duty in Iraq has to sort through data?

You've clearly never been deployed. You have more free time than you know what to do with.

Think about what you do when you get off shift at your job. Now remember that you have no family or friends that aren't also co-workers to hang out with. No alcohol, limited access to new movies and video games. You are also stuck within the confines of whatever base you're assigned to. If you're lucky there might be a one-screen movie theater or an internet café. You might even be able to get severely bandwidth-capped satellite internet in your tent/third-of-a-trailer-shared-with-a-roommate that you call your room.

Despite what you want to believe about Manning, lack of time was no excuse for indiscriminate leaking of sensitive information that honestly and truly put lives at risk.

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And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing? Time isn't the only relevant resource.

Maybe I'm an asshole, but the "put lives at risk" line seems like nationalistic swill. Even if it risked American combatants, why should that justify hiding the deaths of possibly fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians?

> And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing?

Most of the military intelligence Soldiers I deployed with brought their own personal laptops.

You really underestimate how much free alone time is available to you when you are deployed. Remember that Manning was also kind of a black sheep at the time. Spending hours alone on a laptop would not have been seen as out of the ordinary at all.

I don't question the free time, I doubt the ability for someone already under a fair amount of emotional distress to be able to hide reading thousands of pages of classified data.

Even with the route she took, it was only a matter of months for her to make a mistake that got her arrested. Giving it to wikileaks reduced her anxiety, going through it likely would have ramped it up. Additionally, needing to keep a local copy of the data is a huge risk.

This is exactly the sort of thing intellos do all day if they are good. The only covert part was the exfil.

I don't think the war diary stuff made much of an impact, or the apache video. The diplomatic traffic OTOH was the spark into the tinder of the middle east autocracies that set off the so-called Arab Spring.

How does it not justify it? Deaths that already happen vs quite real damage that you cause in the future?

It isn't "quite real damage," it's potential damage. Without revealing and adressing the past deaths, you can expect there to be future deaths. The point of revealing isn't to say "hey we did awful shit," it's to say "we're doing awful shit and it needs to stop."

I'd call the cops on bank robbers even knowing they may get "damaged" during capture because I think the benefits to society outweighs the harm.

Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.

Repeating a discussion that is being mad in a neoghbour thread, I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.

> I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.

So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay".

First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.

How exactly could've you made out these figures as civilians and not enemy combatants? From POV of the camera, you already have seen one of them with an RPG, and the opposing force doesn't really use uniforms either.

Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.

International law and the rules of engagement requires you to positively identify enemy combatant as well as not engage enemy combatant that are incapacitated. There's nothing in the video indicating that they person getting picked up by the van or that the people picking him up has weapons.

(from the transcript [0])

05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded. ... 06:01 He's getting up. 06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand? 06:04 No, I haven't seen one yet. ... 06:33 Come on, buddy. 06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... 06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage. ... 07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons. .... 07:36 Picking up the wounded? 07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage. ... 07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

There's nothing unclear here or anything to be misunderstood. If they had seen weapons they would have engaged already instead of asking for permission. It's just that the crew of the helicopter really wants to shoot them and that they, the US military nor the US public don't really give a shit if they are civilian as long as they can get away with it, which they can.

[0] https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/en/transcript.html

Exactly right. These really were war crimes, and Chelsea did have a moral imperative to leak them.

Let's give you the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily earned as the other poster points out but let's roll with it. You have successfully defended between two and eleven civilian deaths that were not hidden before the leaks. That leaves you merely with the task of explaining the around twelve thousand that were hidden prior to the leaks.

Let's even pretend that the pilots are totally blameless. The military covered this up. They don't get to cover things up, because that's how we get war crimes.

Had this been reviewed properly, yes. A "Mistakes Happen" stamp could probably be used. But by hiding it and lying about it, they turned it into something we can't ignore.

Also, I don't think the pilots are blameless. If they ever hit civilian court that transcript would hang them.

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