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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

After WW2, the Allies condemned and executed a number of German and Japanese officers who had done little more than follow orders. What they had done was not against any laws at the time, and definitely within their organizations' code of conduct. I think that was a good thing because it established the principle that joining an organization does not absolve you from higher duties towards your fellow citizens or humanity at large. By exposing questionable decisions and arguably a number of war crimes, Manning broke his oath with the US Army but did a much greater service to the rest of us. By choosing to make an example out of his punishment, the US has struck a huge blow to its claims of moral superiority and American exceptionalism.

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People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war.

They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large. They do not have the right to expose classified information because they think it shouldn't be classified. They do not have the right to violate orders because they are stupid, or because they're bad policy.

They do not have the right to make those decisions because, in the US, the military is supposed to be entirely subordinate to the laws enacted by our elected officials. Not "subordinate as long as it's for the best overall." This is a good thing--when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup.

Obviously there are grey areas. After all, the Nuremburg trials punished people for violating laws that didn't exist during the commission of the crimes. If Manning had, say, only released extremely strong evidence of war crimes, I might agree that hiding that evidence was itself unlawful. But he didn't--he released a giant trove of classified diplomatic cables and military logs. These may have been unnecessarily classified, but were not unlawfully classified. Releasing them put Manning firmly in the "violating lawful orders" camp.

The US government, through various means, seems to be intent on removing from public discourse the very information needed for those in uniform to properly assess the legality of their orders. Also, in case they forgot, the Constitution is the Law, and if Manning saw that the government was violating the Constitution, I don't think it's wrong for him to expose such wrongdoing. That's the very definition of whistleblowing. And, to those who claim that he should have pursued his whistleblowing through established military channels, I would reply that the US government, the Military, as well as other agencies, seem intent on keeping the truth from the American People, so it is entirely reasonable to expect that the military and other agencies in the government would attempt to disallow the whistleblower's efforts.

update: fixed typo.

OK, and what unconstitutional activity was revealed by the release of many thousands of State Department cables? I mean, it's all very well to say that Manning saw the government was violating the Constitution, but I would like some specific examples of what he revealed. Abuses such as the operation of Abu Ghraib were not exposed by Manning.

Manning joined the Army in late 2007/early 2008, by which time the US had been involved in what a lot of people (including myself) consider to have been an illegal war in Iraq for 4-5 years; one in which the existence of appalling human rights abuses such as torture and extraordinary rendition were well documented, and which by then was well understood by the public to have been predicated on faulty intelligence.

It seems to me that if you have a negative view of war and militarism, then you should probably not join the organization involved in fighting that war in the first place. You could serve your country perfectly well and without taking part in military aggression by, say, joining the Coast Guard.

Frankly, I think the only reason Manning has hero status on HN is because he was a computer nerd, and so other computer nerds are willing to suspend their critical faculties because they can identify with him. I can identify with him up to a point, but not to the point of wanting to join the army 5 years into a clusterfuck like the Iraq war run by an administration that had tossed things like the Geneva convention out the window.

Well, that's the million dollar question isn't it? Should the State be allowed to keep this much stuff secret and still expect the Voting Public to accurately measure the effectiveness of government officials?

No, that's a totally different question. I asked what unconstitutional activity was revealed by all of those state department cables that were leaked. As best I can ascertain, the answer is 'none whatsoever.'

Torture?

Be more specific. There were 250,000 cables and it was several years ago, I don't remember any about us torturing people or about extraordinary rendition, but I'm happy to be corrected. I certainly don't remember any big smoking gun.

Information about Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was revealed in 2004 by the Department of Defense itself pursuant to its own investigation. Information about waterboarding (which as far as I am concerned is illegal torture) was widely available and the subject of intense public discussion in 2007, before Manning even joined the army.

>when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup

I'm not disputing that Manning broke the laws of the military. But calling his actions an incipient coup is laughable. In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace. I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.

What did manning release that was an actual war crime?

I imagine they'r referring to the video of a helicopter shooting someone in Iraq who turned out to be holding a camera rather than a rocket launcher, which Wikileaks released under the title 'Collateral murder.'

If you ask me the real war crime is that the administration we had at the time went to war in Iraq in the first place, based on an apparent mixture of personal animus between Presidents Bush & Hussein and an alarmingly thin piece of social engineering by an Iraqi criminal/defector known as 'Curveball' who wanted to (at best) destabilize the Saddam Hussein regime or (at worst, but quite understandably) evade prison in Iraq. This entirely optional conflict led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, or by some counts >1 million, while (IMHO) significantly prolonging the war in Afghanistan by turning that theater into a sideshow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB234/index.htm

I don't think Manning's information releases revealed very much about the war in Iraq other than to shed light on this particular helicopter incident which I think falls rather short of being a war crime, although I do think it was worth bringing to public attention.

On the other hand, I see no public benefit whatsoever in teh release of all the State Department cables, and as far as I can make out Manning took them and Assange released them just because they were classified by default. When their full contents became available because of carelessness with the crypto key outcome was some diplomatic red faces but there sure wasn't any big reveal of criminal activity.

Had he stopped at just the video I would be on his side. He didn't. He let loose 700,000 pages of documents that he shouldn't have and didn't need to do. He deserves the jail time.

That's roughly where I stand, though I don't think he deserves as much jail time, will get early parole, and was mistreated during his pretrial detention.

I'd grant him the information relating to the Granai airstrike as well. But on the other hand he wasn't facing jail time for that anyways; the judge had found him not guilty of that one.

> In a world in which the worst offenders at Abu Ghraib got ten years (and were released much sooner), sentencing him to 35 years (as a deterrent!) is a disgrace.

Does that mean that Manning doesn't deserve his sentence? If so, how?

> I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.

I hate this about Manning's supporters. He exposed a small amount of wrongdoing with his leaking. The majority of the stuff he leaked didn't show any kind of criminal behavior, and instead exposed internal communications by US govt officials for no legitimate purpose. These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments and jeopardized the lives of people in foreign nations employed by or cooperating with the US.

Stop pretending that he was a selfless warrior for truth and justice.

> and jeopardized the lives of people in foreign nations employed by or cooperating with the US.

Didn't independent studies/orgs show that this wasn't true, and was just a phrase paraded around by the government to get the public against Manning?

Yes.

I'd be interested in seeing such studies, especially the methodology. The Taliban themselves were quite clear that they would be on the hunt for any and all collaborators, and there are eyewitness accounts of foreign service agents who had to be rapidly withdrawn from their post (sometimes in the middle of the night while literally out in a field) due to their name being revealed in these leaks.

And no offense, but what is the simplest explanation here? That a bunch of collaborator names were leaked and not a single person was put into harm's way as a result of that? Keep in mind that we're not talking about some random subdivision of the IRS, we're talking about the organization that gunned down Malala and detonated a bomb in the middle of a policeman's funeral.

> These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments.

If truth hurts it's not a good sign.

This comment is so remarkably naive and juvenile, I have to assume it's parody.

Well it wasn't a parody.

From what I heard relationships with foreign governments were damaged by the fact that foreign governments found out that friendly diplomacy called them chumps behind their backs. When the truth about this talk and how american diplomats understand words "friend" or "ally" leaked out it did hurt. As I said, if revealing what you really think about others hurts you, that's not a good sign. It's a sign that you might be kind of an asshole.

It's quite the opposite of naive and juvenile.

Hint: you don't really want to hear everything your friends might think of you, much less your frenemies, acquaintances, or coworkers.

You'd be surprised but I really do want to know that and I believe it would benefit me greatly.

But would I get angry at my friend, or the person who told me what my friend secretly thinks of me?

The latter, of course. Humans are imperfect. Humans know that they are imperfect. Humans know that other people recognize their imperfections. Life goes on because we don't rub in each others' faces what we think of each others' imperfections. Sometimes it's necessary in cases where a particular imperfection is becoming a serious issue either in the persons life or in the friendship, but generally the best policy is to leave things be.

I love every single one of my friends dearly and would go to great lengths for them. But for any one I can point to a list of things that are flawed about them, and I'm sure every one of them could put together a long list of things flawed about me. I'd be pissed at someone who told one of my friends that, e.g. I thought they had unrealistic expectations about potential mates given their own looks, because the only reason someone would do that would be to either hurt my friend or to hurt me.

Human relationships are very often about delicacy, and part and parcel of delicacy is knowing what thoughts to share and what not to share. When someone takes away that discretion and makes that decision for you, you are entitled to get mad.

I find your opinion utterly bizarre.

Are you married? Do you tell your wife every thing you think of her all the time?

I'm not married, but I doubt that I would tell her everything. That's not what I have an issue with. My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.

^ I meant "reliant on dishonesty"

>My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on (dis)honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.

Well, I am sorry to say that in fact society is that brittle and you are being lied to in one fashion or another most of the time.

I do want to clarify what I mean by lying though because it would be easy to interpret what I am saying as conspiratorial. In fact what I mean is that your information diet is nearly completely full with selective information, weasel words, legalese and implied trust. The constructs between nations and even within our nation are the same and often worse than interpersonal relations. So the reason that you trust any entity is not because they are moral pillars, its because they don't show you the questionable things that people do on a day to day basis that make little difference. This is exactly the argument against the widespread intelligence gathering - everyone is doing something illegal at pretty much any time. Similarly everyone, whether they know it or not lies to others on a daily basis (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201111...)

So yes, it really is that fragile and it is insanely magnified at the global politics level way beyond you would even imagine.

> Well, I am sorry to say that in fact society is that brittle and you are being lied to in one fashion or another most of the time.

And you don't believe bit more honesty might be in order?

I would love to see that happen, but I don't think we can handle it from a biological perspective. We are too emotional, vain and have too muddled an understanding of our own goals and volition to be able to be honest even with ourselves let alone the rest of the world. It just doesn't seem feasible without some kind of widespread cognitive change.

In Europe we used to think that killing each other over some differences is a good idea. Two wars later, around 10% population lost and look how well we get along.

We used to like having slaves. All people used to hate gays and atheists. Women used to be perceived as incapable of having public lives.

At some point we might reach the conclusion that being lied to is not all that convenient because truth eventually comes out and if it's too far from perception it leads to shitstorms.

People can change. But they do not change by themselves. There is always some kind of technological advancement that forces people to change their ways. I sincerely hope that internet will lead us to more honest lives.

To wit, from the front page of HN right now: "Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23779561

Indeed you are correct that the truth will come out and I am the first person to support full transparency. I do know however that in this example, if the Japanese said they don't know what they are doing, please help - the people in charge would lose their jobs immediately. So it's not just a one way street with people being honest, it is also the public and everyone who has a voice understanding that there is a difference between incompetence, hostile intent and accidents.

People at the basic level demand perfection from people in power - so those in power do everything that they can to make it look like they are either infallible, or are victims. In one way or another how we as a society respond to failure that will determine how truthful we can be. If we continue to have the zero fault mindset for those in power, they will continue to lie.

Read some Eric Berne books. Human interactions are practically built on pretense and games (and it is not always bad - actually, unless you are caught up in a self-destructive game, it often is good). Unless you're communicating with robots all day, truth is not exactly the primary factor here. Otherwise morning greeting would look like:

- I notice you! Here's some meaningless words acknowledging the fact. - I noticed you too. Please don't tell me anything about your life unless it's exciting but not making me envy you in any way. - Same to you, and please don't waste my time anymore now unless you are going to benefit me in some way. - I'm going to depart now, and I don't care how the rest of you day goes. - Neither do I for you.

I would submit a world like this would be perceived as utterly bizarre by most of us.

"If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear"

Or I forget how the quote goes, but anyways I thought we supported the concept of privacy in general on this site. Governments need privacy to serve the interests of their people for the same reason people need privacy to serve their own interest.

Yeah. And corporations are people too. /sarcasm

Government should operate in the open. I might understand need for military secrecy of government of a small country in unfriendly region, but not for a broad secrecy of the government that has has largest military force in the world at its disposal. Unless you think that all this NSA thing is all good because government needs to have its privacy when it's spying you.

Don't be absurd. Of course I want to know these things. They don't stop thinking them because you don't find out, you know!

The very fact that lowly private Manning had access to this stuff should tell you that the intelligence services of literally any country in the world have access to this.

The system is only effective at hiding information from citiziens, who are not able to access the very information that politicians use to guide their decisions. That is, of course, why they happily go on record with blatant lies, at no risk of being exposed. Contrast this with their complete non-statements in this current NSA situation; they would rather make no statement at all than be exposed as a liar, for no one knows what else Snowden/Greenwald will release that could make previous statements look like disinformation.

Are you sure you want everybody know all the truth about you? Every fine detail, including your bathroom routine, your most secret thoughts, your dreams and your secret wishes? Does the word "privacy" mean anything to you? Yes, knowing the whole truth sometimes hurts. Some truths are not meant to be known by everybody.

> Does that mean that Manning doesn't deserve his sentence? If so, how?

Because it is immoral to remove a fellow human's freedom for lengthy periods of time unless absolutely necessary, when there is no other way to protect the public from their future actions. For example, in the case of unreformable violent criminals, who must be physically restrained lest they injure others if unrestrained, there may be no other option than multiyear or even (in rare cases) multi-decade imprisonment. But that does not happen often, and even most people who committed violent crimes pose much less risk once they grow older.

There is no way you would be sentenced to 35 years for a nonviolent crime here (Denmark), because the idea is preposterous. Not even if you leaked something that offended the fairly influential and US/NATO-loving military. Sentences longer than 2 years are rare, reserved only for extreme crimes (murder, rape, etc.), which seems quite correct.

Americans seems somewhat vengeful, even sadistic on the subject, rather than rational. Somehow absurdly long sentences like confining someone in a cage for 5 years or even 10 years is seen as a "short" sentence, I guess because compared to locking people in a cage for 30 or 50 years or outright killing them, it seems lenient in comparison. You even hear people joking gleefully about prison rape. Not sure how you could approach fixing that culture.

>He exposed a small amount of wrongdoing with his leaking. [...] These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments and jeopardized the lives of people

Abu Ghraib also damaged international relations and placed American lives at increased risk from terrorism. Plus, you know, it involved physically torturing people, not chatting online with Julian Assange.

Yet it is only Manning's crime that's judged worthy of deterrence (by a 3.5 times larger punishment). That's because his real fault is that of exposing the inner workings of a style of policy making that can only function effectively as long as the public is kept ignorant. Only this kind of a crime can "undermine the entire system", as the prosecutor very frankly put it.

Abu Ghraib may have embarrassed America, but the real no-no is exposing its government.

No, Manning's real crime to the military is disregarding orders and showing his own judgement.

Abu Ghraib was horrific, but it was close enough to what was ordered to be done by Mi, by the CIA, by special forces (water boarding, walling, stress positions, sleep deprivation) that no one thinks the soldiers really disregarded the chain of command (aside from the standing orders against prisoner treatment which others were by direct order ignoring), they just got out of hand. So from the military's point of view, it's not a discipline problem.

Abu Ghraib, as a systemic thing, is deterred by simple never issuing orders to do that kind of thing again and making it explicitly clear that it's prohibited. After all, non of the soldiers involved thought they were explicitly disobeying their superiors, they thought they were doing what everyone else did. If ordered not to torture people, they would not torture people.

Manning, on the other head, disregarded lawful orders stemming from the civilian command authority to protect information. He didn't do it because what he leaked exposed crimes against humanity(he leaked far more than leak the "collateral murder" video), he did it because he thought he knew what was best.

Soldiers don't get to decide what they think is best with in the context of lawful orders. If they could, they might decide they know what is best for the country and stage a coup, or frag their commanding officer, or any number of other things.

That's what they needed to deter.

Abu Ghraib a crime against humanity? Yes, that's similar to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. That's nearly exactly the same thing as the genocide in Rwawanda. That's definitely on the same level as Pol Pot.

The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk, it didn't endanger the lives of people. How many people died in Abu Ghraib from being photographed with underwear on their head? How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib? I am certainly not defending the soldiers involved in that situation but to try and draw some moral relativism between the two cases is absurd. You likely have no idea how Americans are treated by the Taliban and Al Q when they're captured.

Ask Daniel Pearl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pearl

By the way, the guys in Abu were fighting on the same side as the guys that beheaded Daniel Pearl. They were combatants. They weren't innocent little girls walking to school. The irony is if the US soldiers at Abu had shot those prisoners on the battlefield, nobody would have complained, but they put underwear on their heads and the world freaks the hell out, yet quietly forgetting about cases like Daniel Pearl. We could argue Geneva convention all day long, but until the Taliban is a signatory to that convention or wears uniforms declaring themselves as part of a legitimate military force, the Geneva Conventions never applied, though of course we (meaning the US military) still follow those rules. And those that didn't -- were punished.

While we're so busy being outraged, let's get outraged about the Taliban stoning women to death. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15688354 Bradley Manning helped the Taliban find informants. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wi...

One specific and direct result of Manning is the case of Shakil Afridi, the doctor in Pakistan that helped find Bin Laden. He's in a Pakistan prison for 30 years after ostensibly being tortured.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-18175964

Since Mr. Manning directly made his discovery possible, what punishment should Manning receive? There are dozens and dozens of intelligence sources and relationships that were significantly harmed because of Manning.

If you have ever spent any time with a security clearance, you'd know that there are countless unintended consequences that result from revealing a source or a collection method. Being morally outraged over Bradley Manning puts you in the same shoes as a Taliban sympathizer because not only was Manning a soldier, sworn to uphold the Constitution, the lives of his fellow soldiers, allies and others were in his hands. He was given a position of public trust and the responsibility that goes with it. Yet because he had emotional and personal problems he chose to do what he did.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/psychologist-wikile...

A raw information dump isn't "blowing the whistle," it's an intent to inflict harm on the United States and allies. If you wanted to expose a security hole in Gmail, for example, you wouldn't expose every single gmail user's information. You'd expose the amount necessary to reveal the problem. The simple truth is that Manning is a kid, he's intelligent to some degree, but he certainly isn't an Edward Snowden. Manning had no idea what he was doing. By his own words he said he didn't intend to harm the United States. Either he's a liar or a complete fool.

There are countless intelligence and diplomatic relationships that have been harmed, in addition to people who have been directly killed, captured or targeted as a result of Manning.

Snowden on the other hand, released information about illegal activities against US citizens that were in direct violation of the law. The Snowden releases, while potentially compromising national security from a strategic standpoint, didn't put any lives at direct risk. Manning's releases however put dozens of people directly in the line of fire. I am not going to defend Snowden, however a better case could be made for him than Manning and certainly no comparison could be made to Abu Ghraib. That's just tomfoolery.

> The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk, it didn't endanger the lives of people.

Manadel al-Jamadi is a pretty compelling witness to the falsity of this claim.

>You likely have no idea how Americans are treated by the Taliban and Al Q when they're captured [... T]he guys in Abu were fighting on the same side as the guys that beheaded Daniel Pearl. [... I]f the US soldiers at Abu had shot those prisoners on the battlefield, nobody would have complained, but they put underwear on their heads and the world freaks the hell out

Your obsession with terrorists' lack of scruples is causing you to become what you hate. You think it's OK to humiliate and torture them because they're terrorists, they think it's OK to behead us because of religion and nationality. How about a little show of strength and dealing with them without lowering to their level?

They didn't say it was OK to humiliate or torture people, so stop drawing your own conclusion on that please. They said it was not morally equivalent to an actual war crime, especially the kind that got people put in the dock at Nürnberg.

>>> Your obsession with terrorists' lack of scruples is causing you to become what you hate

Did it? Did he already cut off people's heads, blow up markets and issued fatwas calling for murdering infidels? Or did he just express an opinion that maybe war prisoner abuse, while being undeniably bad, is not the same as murdering innocent people or perpetrating genocide? If in your eyes that makes one the same as terrorist, your priorities are seriously messed up.

The difference however is Abu Ghraib didn't put intelligence sources at risk

The hell it didn't. (I stopped reading there, so maybe you made some good points later on.)

By discarding any pretense of adherence to the Geneva Convention, Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk.

> Abu Ghraib put every US soldier at risk.

At risk of what? What was already happening to both soldiers and civilians? You can't mean torture, death, or imprisonment. Hell, the Taliban and the like were doing far, far worse already.

So, I'm honestly curious, what was the increased risk?

> so maybe you made some good points later on.

The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.

I wonder if there is anything other than suspicious backing up your claims here?

I don't think you can think of "The Taliban" as a single coherrent group that have a "policy" on torturing american soldiers.

When Abu Ghraib was publicised, a lot of moderate taliban would have become radicalised. That seems rather logical to me.

Gee, I dunno. I'm no great military strategist or anything, but it seems like allowing the Taliban to establish the ground rules isn't the best approach.

For one thing, not all of the US's potential adversaries are radical Islamists. In future conventional wars, we will need the moral authority to demand that our prisoners be treated in accordance with international laws and treaty obligations. Debacles like Abu Ghraib -- to say nothing of the Iraq war in general -- rob us of that moral authority, in much the same way that the Roman Catholic Church loses some of its moral authority every time another child sex abuse case comes to light. To occupy the high ground, you must first take it.

The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.

No, orchestrating a bogus public health campaign led to Afridi's imprisonment. As far as I'm concerned, Afridi can take his place next to Mengele in medical infamy.

Manning did an unalloyed good thing in bringing the CIA's tactic to light [1]. I want foreign operatives to tell the Agency to fuck off when they come up with ideas like, "Hey, let's start a vaccination program so we can subvert the local populace and find our bad guy."

You seem to think that the ends justify the means. That's great, as long as you have perfect knowledge of future consequences. In that sense, both the US government and Bradley Manning made the same logical error. The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.

[1]: If, in fact, he did. There seems to be some disagreement with briandear's (lack of a) citation on this.

>>>> In future conventional wars, we will need the moral authority to demand that our prisoners be treated in accordance with international laws and treaty obligations.

A little wrinkle here is that most US adversaries in recent wars didn't give a flying duck about US moral authority. And there's no reason why that would change - it's not like US is going to war with Sweden or Canada. Not that supposedly civilized countries aren't capable of mass atrocities - look at what Germans did in 20th century. Did they care for the moral authority of the Jews they mass-murdered? I highly doubt so.

Moral authority is important only for US and only because winning the war while destroying one's society may not be worth it.

>>>> The difference is, his actions had some positive consequences as well as negative ones.

You mean, actions of US government don't have positive consequences? I think you're getting way ahead of the facts here.

You mean, actions of US government don't have positive consequences? I think you're getting way ahead of the facts here.

(Shrug) Unless you owned a lot of HAL or another big contractor, the Iraq war didn't have a lot of upside.

For you, maybe. Some would think removal of homicidal maniac dictator that openly paid terrorists, invaded neighboring countries, used chemical weapons, mass-murdered his own population and bribed top functionaries of the UN[1] to look other way is some upside. But I guess who cares what foreigners do to foreigners, there are billions of them anyway.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/04/iraq.unitednati...

I don't pay taxes to police the entire world. I can't afford to. Maybe you can.

Changing the topic, are you? I take it as an implicit admission you were wrong implying there were no positive effects of US policy at all. It is good that you realize now you overreached, hopefully next time you'd use less hyperbole and recognize that you can't just ignore facts you don't like.

Yep, sounds like you win this one. GG.

> At risk of what?

In the specific case of soldiers in Iraq, at risk of radicalisation of that part of the population which, prior to the events at Abu Ghraib and them becoming known in Iraq (which occurred before they were leaked in the West), had been supportive (or at least tolerant) of the occupation.

For the rest of the military, a greater risk of hostile populations and bigger psyops advantages for adversaries in foreign operations.

> The OP made mention of how Manning's leak directly led to intelligence sources imprisonment and death.

just because someone mentions something, does not make it true.

up is down.

Right because then the enemy might get really REALLY mad at US soldiers.

Do you have any source that would link arrest of Shakil Afridi to WikiLeaks and Manning documents?

I cannot find such a link.

> Abu Ghraib a crime against humanity?

Depends on how you define such, your examples meet old UN definition, Abu Ghraib meets newer ICC definition.

> How many people died in Abu Ghraib..

at least one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jamadi

> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?

Depends on how you define innocent, but given WMD was a false pretence, and regime change the moral justification retreat position, torture and prisoner abuse at the same site as the former regime is pretty damning. I would say a lot of lives were put at risk by this change in 'optics'.

> let's get outraged about the Taliban..

No problem.

> By the way, the guys in Abu were fighting..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jamadi was a suspect, not a combatant.

> One specific and direct result of Manning is the case of Shakil Afridi

There's absolutely nothing specific or direct about Manning and this, the link you provide makes no such suggestion.

> There are dozens and dozens of intelligence sources and relationships that were significantly harmed because of Manning.

This was not to the case according to military testimony: http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/31/59869.htm http://www.thenation.com/blog/174622/seven-myths-about-bradl... (see number five.)

EDIT: I misread, thinking you meant injured or killed. It just hurt relationships, I think that point is fairly hard to argue. Sure, it hurt relationships. I'd say Abu Ghraib looms larger in their consciousness than the leaks that took place though.

> Being morally outraged over Bradley Manning puts you in the same shoes as a Taliban sympathizer because not only was Manning a soldier

Echoes of GWB: you are either with us or against us. Most people have the maturity to rise above this simplistic level of thinking.

> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?

further to what I wrote above:

On April 20, 2004 insurgents fired forty (40) mortar rounds into the prison. Twenty-two detainees were killed and 92 wounded. Commentators thought the attack was either as an attempt to incite a riot or retribution for detainees' cooperating with the United States.[6]

reasonable to surmise shelling was to stop or prevent information being given up under torture.

So wait, now US soldiers must take the blame for one set of terrorists killing other terrorists to prevent the latter from talking? Maybe also the police is to blame when Mafia is killing witnesses? Abu Ghraib abuses are bad, but it looks like you're losing perspective here and try to paint every wrong being done as US fault, no matter who did it or why.

Blame isn't as black and white as you are making out.

If the police have a duty of care to witnesses, and the Mafia kill them, then the police should take some blame. Not as much as the mafia. Think of a witness protection program, if they fail at their task then they are partially to blame.

So no, I am not trying to paint it all as being US' fault, you can tell that because I wrote "insurgents fired".

You wrote "insurgents fired" but also you wrote that "innocent lives" (supposedly talking about imprisoned terrorists) are at risk because of what happened in Abu Ghraib and brought other terrorists firing as an example. SO you laid the blame not on terrorists that fired but on US forces that captured the terrorists.

in my initial comment, which applies as much to the staff as the people you assume are terrorists:

> How many innocent lives were put at risk because of Abu Ghraib?

Depends on how you define innocent

"Abu Ghraib a crime against humanity? Yes, that's similar to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. That's nearly exactly the same thing as the genocide in Rwawanda. That's definitely on the same level as Pol Pot."

Right, then, so you're fine with me murdering you as long as I don't torture you first? Better than the worst is not good enough.

"Manning's releases however put dozens of people directly in the line of fire."

Everyone keeps saying this. Can you explain how it is that the Army and the Obama administration, who have unparalleled interest in seeing Manning discredited and have gone to great lengths to do so, have so far failed to uncover a single instance of Manning's releases actually harming a human being?

> I don't see how you can defend the laws and regulations of an organization where it's much better to commit a crime against humanity than to publicize one and err on the side of too much info.

Abu Ghraib was a war crime, not a crime against humanity.

Doesn't it seem a bit dumb to require them to refuse unlawful orders, but also forbid them from determining for themselves what is "unlawful" so they have to rely on their superiors (who are the ones giving the orders in the first place)? Or they can be stuck with "my government says this order is lawful (and will do bad things to me if I refuse it), the people we're fighting say it's unlawful (and if they win will do bad things to me if I don't refuse it)".

Manning didn't refuse an unlawful order. Nor did he reveal other soldiers executing unlawful orders.

Manning broke the law to reveal an indiscriminate collection of State Department cables.

eh, so what if we're off-topic a bit?

They are not forbidden from determining that a given order is lawful or not.

However they are trained that the presumption is that a given order is lawful unless it's clearly contrary to the Constitution, law, regulation or policy.

As we phrase it in the Navy, no sailor has ever been court-martialed for following a legitimate order, but the same cannot be said regarding mutiny.

In short if you want to challenge an order go right ahead, but realize that your ass is going to be put on the line and even the Supreme Court will be biased on the military's side regarding it, if previous experience is any judge.

Also, the name of the rat is:

Adrian Lamo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo

When you join the military, you take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies "foreign and domestic" (emphasis mine)

That's first. Obeying lawful orders is second.

It's debatable how this oath applies in Manning's case, but I think it's rather telling what order the things you are swearing to uphold come in.

When I was in the military my interpretation was that anything I was ordered to do that was contrary to the Constitution was an unlawful order. If I were taking the oath seriously, that would have required active dissent, not just ignoring the order.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/oathofen...

What happens when every soldier feels within their rights to determine who the domestic enemies of the Constitution are, and takes unprecedented action against those enemies?

Did Manning reveal anything that was prima facie unconstitutional?

If the US wasn't breaking its own Constitution all the time, this wouldn't be even a problem. PRISM for that example breaks 4th, 5th and probably 9th Amendment. That's about a third of the Bill of Rights. Each and every NSA employee is under Oath to protect the Constitution. And then a person who tries just doing that (Snowden) is the one called traitor!

If not for things like PRISM the military and other branches of the Government wouldn't need to worry about soldiers/their employees reporting unconstitutional actions of the Government. Because it seems they break the law all the time, yes, that's a problem. The Governments problem not whistleblowers.

That was not the question. The question was if Manning specifically released ANY evidence of unconstitutional activity. The answer seems to be no.

Let me illustrate my point a little bit differently: you are a teacher at school. And there is this student Adam that constantly gets into trouble. On Monday he had a fight. On Tuesday he was absent on Math. On Wednesday he was calling names a younger girl from different class. Then on Thursday you find out that somebody broke window in a classroom. Are you surprised Adam is suspected?

Manning probably assumed that there must be some illegal stuff in the cables/documentation he revealed. And some documents show he was right.

So, the USG, similarly to Adam from my example has worked long and hard for its reputation. Don't blame some teachers/whistleblowers for suspecting usual suspects.

You are confusing wrongdoers here. All the wars are unconstitutional to begin with because Congress didn't declare them.

While you probably already know this, others may not: there is an organization called the Oath Keepers which is comprised of current and former uniformed members of military and civil services who affirm what you've stated - that the oath they took was first and foremost to defend the Constitution.

From their site (http://oathkeepers.org):

Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, reserves, National Guard, veterans, Peace Officers, and Fire Fighters who will fulfill the Oath we swore, with the support of like minded citizens who take an Oath to stand with us, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God. Our Oath is to the Constitution.

"They do not have the right to unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order because they think it is better for humanity at large."

What you should say is,

"They will be prosecuted if they unilaterally decide to violate a lawful order, even if they think it is better for humanity at large."

And I would add, "And sometimes duty to humanity will compel them to accept that they will be prosecuted, and they have to unilaterally decide what is right."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov

People in the military have the right, and legal duty, to refuse unlawful orders, including orders that violate the international laws of war.

So if they witness a crime, they should speak out. Manning did release evidence of several crimes leading up to and during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The cheerful murder of Reuters journalists and later innocents who came to help by that helicopter crew

The purchase of child prostitutes for entertainment by Dyncorp

The illegal collection of DNA from UN officials and representatives (straight from Dr. Strangelove!)

etc.

Now as you say he also released a lot of other material, which wasn't directly related to any crime, so he should expect to be punished for that indiscriminate release, and it weakens his case, but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups.

I don't think he deserves 35 years for that, compared to the 6 months sentence of Sgt. Sabrina Harman who tortured and abused detainees, it seems disproportionate.

> but I'd also expect some clemency given that the release was clearly in the public interest and revealed many unlawful orders and coverups.

The chain of command issuing the unlawful orders and participating in the coverups is unlikely to agree that revealing those things is in the "public interest".

Which is kind of the fundamental problems that whistleblowers always face (whether or not formal protections are in place) -- the people deciding whether or not to punish them (or whether or not the protections apply) are often the people on whom they are "blowing the whistle", or at least people with shared interest with the targets of the whistleblowing.

This is mitigated when there is involvement of an independent actor in the process, but in the case of military trials that are completely within the military chain of command within the executive branch, that kind of independence is hard to find.

The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President. Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.

In the actual military the untoward influence (real or perceived) of the convening officer on the outcome of the case is a B.F.D., just witness all the sexual assault/harassment cases that were being upended by Obama's condemnation of servicemembers who engage in them. In fact SECDEF himself had to issue a memo saying, in effect, that the POTUS expects trial members/judges to use their own independent judgment when considering the facts of a case, just as specified in the M.C.M.

You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, which is a completely separate chain of command from the one that was issuing orders relating actions in Iraq of Afghanistan.

> The military trials of which you speak deal with military penal code as set out by Congress, not by the President

Passing the laws is not being part of the process of applying them (its also inaccurate to say that the UCMJ is "set out by Congress, not the President", since the current version of the UCMJ wasn't adopted over a Presidential veto.)

> Likewise the trials are overseen in the end by the civilian Supreme Court.

Which, given the length (both procedurally and temporally) of the appeal chain is a far more distant involvement of a non-executive actor than is the case in civilian trials.

> You're right that an independent actor is what is needed in general, but Col. Lind does not report to the President on this, she reports to the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington

The existence of intervening steps on the chain of command does not make a military officer independent of the Commander-in-Chief.

With regards to your first "crime": How was that a murder? The unit on the ground received RPG fire, and the person was holding a large object and pointing at ground forces. What do you think is going to happen? For them to come down out of the helicopter and ask for the press pass? When you say murder you imply that the service men had the intent to kill some journalist. When in reality they thought they had weapons pointed at a previously attacked ground force, and had the helicopter crew asked permission to engage and protect the ground force.

In the first "crime"... No crime was committed nor was anyone ever convicted. It was a tragic result, but not one that the reporters could have mitigated the risk.

It's a difficult case, and I understand why you see it as a tragic mistake, but I don't think the helicopter crew were sufficiently diligent in checking who they were going to kill, particularly in the aftermath of the first shots where people tried to help the wounded, and were then mown down. Just because someone was armed, doesn't make them an enemy (they could be for example a bodyguard for journalists), and just because someone tries to give medical assistance to others in a battle, doesn't mean they also need to be killed. Their callous reaction to the news that children were in the van having just killed their father demonstrates their lack of care.

At the very least Reuters should have been provided with this footage (instead it was covered up), and an independent investigation held.

Having the "right to refuse unlawful orders" clearly implies that military personnel have some authority to evaluate the legality of orders.

They do have the right to do so, and in fact we expect them to independently evaluate it.

But much like a court of law, the presumption is that the order is lawful if given by proper authority, and the servicemember must then prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the order is unlawful, and be willing to take the risk of court-martial if they are wrong.

It also somewhat depends on the community you're in. Enlisted nuclear technicians on submarines probably disobey an order every other day at least, to keep an EOOW (or ENG) from doing something stupid to their nuclear propulsion plant.

> when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup.

No, we call it a mutiny.

A coup is specifically when the action they take involves displacing the lawful government, not merely disobeying its orders.

There's a pretty giant difference.

Endless war

Exactly. The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism, which Wikipedia defines as "a form of government as well as a personality and social trait [that] is characterized by absolute or blind obedience to authority, as against individual freedom and related to the expectation of unquestioning obedience."

It seems people are quick to point out that Manning broke some rules, but are too narrow-minded to look up and see the big picture. Manning undeniably made a service to the greater good, which is the good of his country. Whether he broke some rules internal to his organization should not even have come into play in this trial.

"The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism, which Wikipedia defines as [...]"

That is super stupid. You don't understand authoritarianism, then, citations of Wikipedia aside. You do a disservice to the actual victims of authoritarianism.

EDIT: Look at the downvoting.. and this is nice compared to what I wrote at first. Since I'm already -3, I'll remove the politeness filters and say that this comment is idiotic. Stubborn application of the law is authoritarianism? How is that not the dumbest thing written on the internet today. Perhaps I'm the stupid one for believing that WORDS have MEANINGS beyond what is convenient at the moment. It's like people saying that food stamps are socialism. It's not opinion, it's INCORRECT.

You may need a few more throw-away accounts after this one, friend.

I created it to allow myself a different degree of expression from my normal account. Sometimes I just want to release my id - say, for engaging with a not-unsubstantial population on HN of people whose intellect doesn't keep pace with their arrogance. I still try to be constructive and take care of as though it was a primary account. But I really don't care about karma/points. The account is serving precisely the purpose it was created for.

> Perhaps I'm the stupid one for believing that WORDS have MEANINGS beyond what is convenient at the moment.

Funny. That is exactly the point this "retarded" commment is making.

Explain how. Also, I removed that word. You were right to call me out for that.

It sounds like a totally reasonable definition to me. All you've done is to repeat over and over again that the definition is stupid, without identifying why it is stupid or how it could be improved. That's why you got downvoted, not because of your opinion.

Let's examine typical examples of authoritarianism: Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Franco, to name a few. Note these are people, not nations, yet they they instantaneously identifiable with the USSR, Cambodia, Chile, and Spain. This is a key aspect of authoritarianism - the origin of laws and their enforcement are from a person or cabal, not from the people of that nation. Dictatorship is not synonymous with authoritarianism, but they have a large overlap.

All of my examples are universally considered extremely immoral. However, there are also some countries that are mostly authoritarian, but are arguably not immoral (some middle eastern sultanates come to mind). There is an enormous body of though on the morality of laws. This starts in Greek time with Plato and The Republic, and has had contributions from Aquinas, Hobbes, and more recently MLK. A non-authoritarian state can easily pass immoral laws, too.

Finally, the degree of enforcement of law is a concept which I consider separate from the system of government and the particular laws of the society.

So my objection is that the post commingled three separate ideas: the origin of law within a society, the morality of law, and the rigor of law enforcement. I think the commingling was incorrect. I think some of this is so obvious that not recognizing it can be fairly characterized as stupid. Hope that I hope that clarifies things.

To offer my opinion, the US is not close to being an authoritarian state. However, it has some immoral laws. That can be rectified via a democratic process. I think the enforcement of those laws in this case was actually fairly lax, because he clearly committed crimes and it would not have been difficult to have made a case for treason which would have been eligible for capital punishment, as another commenter noted.

Much more useful. I would point out, however, that many people have begun to wonder whether bad laws can truly be rectified through a democratic process at this point. I am of the opinion that we have, or will soon, hit a sort of tipping point beyond which changing bad laws becomes unfeasible. At that point, aren't we essentially ruled by a cabal of economic and political elites, pushing us into the realm of "authoritarianism"?

I think the entire concept of an entire body of law without a single bad law is implausible on its face. We can't even get computers to do "good things" in all situations and they do exactly what we tell them to and obey what are essentially very simple rules.

So the question shouldn't be "why hasn't the democratic process rectified bad laws", but rather "is there a better process than the democratic process for rectifying bad laws"? I know this sounds like Churchill, but it's also a bit of Gödel if you think about it.

This trial was political: people vs. government. The government won by not upsetting the people "too much" by giving him a "light" sentence of only 35 years (what a deal). He will lose 5 years of his life for the service of the greater good.

I feel like you're fighting a different battle than the one that exists. One in which Manning uncovered and released targeted evidence of clear war crimes, instead of a bunch of unflattering information along with some evidence that was at best ambiguous and at most showed bad judgment on the part of some soldiers.

> The stubborn application of law is not justice. It is authoritarianism

No it's not. The stubborn application of the law is called "rule of law" and it's the foundation of the political theory coming out of Enlightenment liberalism. Authoritarian governments are characterized by personalistic/charismatic rule, and the use of fiat/decree in the place of pre-existing legal standards.

Bradley Manning knowingly violated a long-standing law in the military code of justice that he was fully aware of since signing up. Applying the law to Manning is an example of rule of law not authoritarianism.

Those officers oversaw the intentional mass murder of millions of Jews and Chinese.

That's slightly more serious than the secrets Manning leaked. And by "slightly" I mean "an unguessable number of orders of magnitude."

They only executed those officers for which they could prove this was the case, which is why only a few dozen were executed.

It's strange though, because nobody got executed for dropping atomic bombs, which was also intentional mass murder.

This is an excellent point. I think there is an argument in there somewhere for actions starting a war versus actions ending a war.

Also doing it Charlie Sheen style helps (winning!)

Winning the war is obviously the biggest factor in terms of who goes to the gallows.

But there's a difference between loss of life in combat versus deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation or of prisoners who are in your care. It's not about who has the highest scorecard of death and depravity.

Ask the same question about incendiary bombing, which happened throughout the war. The B-29s dropping incendiaries on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic attacks. Are those pilots war criminals? Are the artillerymen who leveled towns and villages full of people war criminals? Based on the "total war" approach embraced in WW2, they were not.

Yeah, I only meant the atomic bombs, which was quite clearly "deliberate murder of noncombatants outside of a combat situation" as far as I can tell.

I mean, it was essentially, "We have unlimited capacity to randomly murder 100,000 of your civilians at once, we've demonstrated it twice now, so submit to our authority." Well, they did.

Well, what you can tell is wrong. The atomic bombs were horrific in their destructions and death toll, but not really any more than the conventional bombings. Even the Japanese didn't think much of Hiroshima based on that alone (they had gotten used to cities getting wiped out) and it took Nagasaki to make clear that this was really a game-changer.

Here's an interesting article that stipulates Nagasaki really didn't add anything to the equation (and to your original point the Japanese were already used to this) - http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...

Dresden Bombings, Bombing of London, Tokyo Fire Bombings, Rape of Nanjing, take your pick, WWII was Total War in the closest sense of the Clausewitzian term, it was about breaking the will of a government (sometimes) and definitely it's people. The practice of protecting civilians of a foreign nation is really a western one rooted in chivalric code of conduct and to be fair, wasn't expected practice until fairly recently.

Under the military doctrine of the day, the enemy's means of production were legitimate targets. That included industry, transit points, and other things associated with urban areas. The Japanese adopted a similar strategy, especially in China.

FYI I'm not personally advocating that obliterating cities is ok. I find it morally repugnant. I'm Just recounting the generally accepted standard of the time.

What a bunch of pedantic garbage. The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to conquer and massacre Chinese people and Pacific islanders and surprise-bomb the USA while they were at it. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan. Any fourth grade history student would understand this.

When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.

> What a bunch of pedantic garbage. [ ] Any fourth grade history student would understand this. [ ] When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.

If you have a valid point, why do you need to resort to incivility?

> The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to massacre Chinese people; the USA took them up on the offer. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan.

So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.

> So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.

Even if the civilian deaths attributed to the A-bomb where less than that of a supposed land invasion?.

WW2 saw lots of that. Think of the bombing of Dresden when the Allies whipped out the city with incendiary bombs because it was a mayor city factory (ammo, etc.).

Yes, even then. Even if you could be sure that there would be more civilian deaths (which you really can't be), there is a big ethical difference between choosing to kill someone and being forced to do it.

No one "chose" to kill civilians at Hiroshima or Nagasaki though. The U.S. dropped leaflets all over both cities warning them of the bomb.

Either way by your logic firebombing attacks such as at Dresden or Tokyo would have been just fine (oh no, my bomb had to have hit a barracks, not a hospital!) even though they can't possibly all have been right. So it's not even true to say that conventional bombing wouldn't have killed civilians; every pilot who went on a bombing mission, conventional or nuclear, knew that they were killing civilians too.

And both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actual military value, it's not as if either of them were resort villages. If the Japanese decide to put tons of civilian structure in between the military establishments then that's on them. Conventional bombing was so inaccurate that practically the only thing you'd be sure to hit while trying to bomb a military target is everything around it.... including the civilian establishments.

I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future?

My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties.

If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.

> I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future?

As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver.

They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP.

To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.

Applying morals to war is really about maintaining your sanity/humanity, nothing more. It is all together too arbitrary to define into rules based on various moral structures. Risking oneself for a dying soldier is heroic in the western view, but from a bushido perspective was insanity. So very arbitrary.

Sure, I agree with this. Not everyone has the same morals, and it's hard to make them into rules. War essentially occurs in the absence of rules. However, that doesn't make all wartime conduct moral. If I were fighting, I would never kill an enemy civilian with the intent to display my strength. That's just because I consider this cowardice.

Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray. Sakhalin was the trigger, and their worst fears were confirmed when the soviets raped and pillaged their way through the island, killing some 20,000 civvies. Atrocious.

They surrendered because of Stalin and his unending and brutal (and brutalised, the Red Army was not a happy place) cannon-fodder, not the bomb.

Nuking two civilian populations was unnecessary, barbaric, and inexcusable, and I'm afraid to say pointless.

A fourth grade history student would know exactly what you say. A heavily read historian would say something quite different - or agree. It's pretty divisive, but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.

Here's a pretty decent source on the topic - have only skimmed it, after writing this and wanting to back up my statements, but it's pretty balanced. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501

> Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray.

People say this a lot, but no one has clearly explained how the U.S.S.R. would have been able to stage an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. It's not a matter of simply ferrying a bunch of people over the Trans-Siberian railroad, you also need a navy, sufficient air cover (which if I remember my geography correctly would have almost necessarily meant carrier-borne aircraft), and the logistics to back that all up. Japan knew this just as much then as we realize it now.

The Soviet gains after their entry into the war were in China and Korea, not in Japan itself. Their entrance into the war was earlier than expected on the Japanese's part, but they knew the U.S.S.R. would declare war (seriously, you may consider their senior and military leadership stupid, but that stupid?).

Likewise the attack on the Kwantung Army in China was surprising in that it came from every direction possible instead of the one direction they expected it from. But they knew the Soviets would attack, and in fact the attack fell while the Kwantung Army was changing positions to better guard the direction they believed the attack would actually come from.

So certainly the Soviet attack came as a shock, but it was militarily no more severe than any other setback to the Allies.

> but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender.

Don't take this the wrong way, but what does an opinion poll have to do with whether some event actually happened in a given way or not? It either did or did not happen for the causes described. If the rest of the world has better evidence for their belief then point to the evidence, but don't point to an opinion poll as prima facie evidence of something.

In the event we have evidence on the Japanese side that the atomic bomb proved a useful "excuse" to permit the Emperor to surrender. The Japanese were clearly ready to fight to the death (just witness the Battle of Okinawa), and that applied just as much against the Red Army as it did against the Americans. So simply changing the uniform of the person holding the rifle wouldn't have significantly affected the strategic calculus when the Emperor had to explain his decision to his people.

On the other hand, the atomic bomb was this technological doomsday device that even the most hardened Japanese militant couldn't speak against. You couldn't fight it in the battlefield; you couldn't simply hunker down like a brave citizen and start picking up pieces after the bombs had been dropped, now there were no pieces left to pick up at all.

Japan had nothing like it, and as such it gave the Emperor a clear line of reasoning for why he had to (had to) surrender for the sake of his people. It was something completely different and from out of this world, as opposed to a simple Soviet declaration of war.

> It either did or did not happen for the causes described.

Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable. But, thanks for the historical analysis here nonetheless.

> Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable.

Fair enough. But the people with the best understanding of events as they were happening, were those actually making the decisions at the time.... and they decided to drop the bomb.

For years after that it's been 'backseat drivers' second-guessing that decision despite their own claims being totally unfalsifiable. While it might be nice to be able to look back on hindsight, no one had a crystal ball at the time, which is why it's inappropriate to pin decisions made in 1945 with the moral qualms of a generation that has never seen world-wide total war.

I guess I just project my own personal worldview onto world affairs. I do stupidly bad things with some frequency, and I only ever recognize them as such in hindsight. Nobody acts against their own morals at the time, right? But I believe it's helpful to say, "Look, I did a stupidly bad thing because I didn't feel or think I had any other options, and I wouldn't have done it if I'd known better." Einstein said as much when he wrote, "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger."

We don't know if there could have been an alternative that definitively ended the war and cost less lives. Things were winding down at that point anyway. I don't even necessarily feel that dropping those bombs was a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, because it shone a light on the darkness that we are capable of as a species. Maybe those two bombs were all that prevented mutual destruction during the cold war.

But as an isolated event, nuking a city is just as horrific as pushing people into ovens - it's really quite comparable, actually - and I think it's best just to say, we did something awful, we thought we had to, it's over now, it won't happen again. Germany did this, for instance. And the only reason that didn't happen for the atomic bombs is because the US "won" the war.

Great insight, but I hope you don't think that Americans don't feel it was an awful, horrific action. It's considered exactly like you say, "something awful, but what choice did we have?".

"What choice did we have?" is very different from "We had choices but we lacked the perspective required to take them."

The first says, we did something bad, but it was justified, i.e. we didn't do anything morally wrong. The second says we did something bad, we thought it was justified, but it turns out that it was a mistake. Einstein is clearly expressing the latter, whereas official American policy expresses the former, and there has never been an apology.

So "perspective" is what's telling you to invade the islands and slaughter millions of civilians while causing millions of American casualties? Remember the goal here is to win the war that Japan started.

Presumably you have a proposed option to have done that without atomic weaponry and that the Americans should have recognized with the information available to them; what is that option?

First of all, I believe you're still missing my point, so maybe I need to be more clear. I'm fine with a simple "we didn't know better" since that's apologetic. That's not a falsehood even if it weren't possible for the Americans to know better; I'm willing to believe they acted in good faith on the best information they had. That's not even a falsehood even if there truly weren't any better options, which is of course impossible to know.

Instead you get "we did what we had to", which is unapologetic, and doesn't allow the possibility of there being better options. It basically comes down to admitting doubt vs. reinforcing belief (since asserting an unfalsifiable claim is a belief).

Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that invading Japan was the only alternative. I mentioned somewhere, perhaps not in reply to you, that dropping atomic bombs on remote regions of Japan would have demonstrated military superiority with far less casualties.

And another post in this thread linked to this article:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/29/the_bomb_di...

If you're actually really interested in this, and maybe you are since you're obviously interested in military stuff, I'm pretty sure there are entire bookcases filled with books and journal articles weighing the pros and cons of the decision to drop the bomb.

Nothing but a textbook example of Victor's Justice. Had the Japanese won, those trials would have taken place (well, executions at least, perhaps not trials).

Yeah, this was kind of my point about Manning, namely that justice is rather arbitrary and is transparently hypocritical at best. Nothing seriously bad happened to the people in the Collateral Murder video, for instance.

Quite right, and there is no shortage of more modern examples of it too.

"Murder" is unlawful killing. Even if you believe in the existence of international law, it's not unlawful to kill civilians in the course of a bombing campaign in a declared war.

Oh, I was using "murder" in the moral sense. I need to be more clear about these things. I believe that capital punishment is murder, for instance.

In layman's:

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Moral of this story: Don't join the military for any reason whatsoever. And if you are drafted in, claim on your defense: "I would have been executed otherwise"

Basically this is the only answer. I think of this (but rarely say it) when I hear people talk about supporting our troops and honoring their service. I don't honor people who willingly decide to be put in situations that almost certainly will be immoral.

The immoral act starts when you volunteer to join the gang that commits it.

LOL. SERIOUSLY?

I just met a guy who lost his legs to an IED that he KNEW was on the route he was ordered to take because they needed to get from A to B in the quickest possible time. He volunteered to go himself (he was the Captain of the platoon) but his team refused to let him make the run himself.

That was the THIRD IED he was hit by.

I'm glad we have people who are willing to risk their lives for us, no questions asked. They willingly go into hellish situations where they could lose life and limb and with little expectation of reward. Frequently the opposite.

You benefit from this sacrifice. You PROFIT from it. Don't pretend you're morally superior. Police go out and beat up bad guys so you can be safe.

If you were more of a man, you'd admit your cowardice and stay quiet otherwise.

This is precisely my point. People like you are wrong. Sure, your friend may have done something brave, but he still put himself in a situation where he would likely be asked to do wrong. He supported a government that uses force to try to get its way. We don't need that. I don't need that. Even if I profit from it, I didn't ask for it, and I really do have the moral high ground here.

Don't act like the people joining the military do it for some high flying idea of honor and defense of the country. They join in droves because they get to have an adventure with the feeling of danger but extremely low chance of injury. If we were actually fighting a real enemy that really could do us harm, I /might/ call that bravery.

You have an antiquated view of what it is to be "more of a man". You seem to be stuck in the past where blindly killing the others is somehow a good thing without stopping to think about the reasons. How about, why was your friend walking around in a foreign country in the first place?

I like how you couldn't try making your point with a reasoned argument, you had to use ad hominem. Classy.

I think that was a good thing because it established the principle that joining an organization does not absolve you from higher duties towards your fellow citizens or humanity at large.

Taking the high ground on soldiers just following orders in the context of WWII is bizarre. American soldiers killed a startling number of german soldiers and citizens during the post-war occupation. I imagine those American soldiers were just following orders too. The only reason the German and Japanese soldiers were demonized for following orders instead of the American soldiers is the fact we won and they lost. Morals are decided by the victor.

People still believe in moral relativism?

I hardly think pitchforking live babies into cauldrons of boiling water (as during the Rape of Nanking) is "just following orders".

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