What If Manning Had Leaked To the New York Times? 348
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."
Why he didn't submit to the NY Times (Score:5, Insightful)
He wanted it to get out.
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, I'll bite.
The end result of a journalist's work is a product (called a newspaper even if it's only rehashes of things we all know and it's posted digitally).
What's your job, and what's the end product?
Quite simply lies (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Gosh, I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if they would have simply sat on them for a year, like they did with the NSA wiretapping matter [nytimes.com] 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?"
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
The New York Times publishes lies (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
Re:Controlled Media (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, big shot. Why don't you go ahead and tell me what rampant crime is running through our neighborhoods that isn't being reported on. Because I can tell you, with an extremely high level of confidence, that every single act of violence or criminality is taken by the media to be sensationalized and spun as a talking point for whatever agenda they are being paid to promote this week. Unless of course those acts of violence or criminality are being perpetuated by the people paying them the money, in which case yes, you won't hear a thing about it.
But the kinds of crimes that those people are perpetuating aren't the kind that make you batten down the hatches and dive under your bed. As a matter of fact, as far as real, violent crime is concerned, it's at it's lowest level in decades. But turn on the local ActionNews, and you'd think we're living in some post-apocalyptic Mad Max world, where just going outside is going to get you robbed and killed.
Funny, really. Because when I go outside, I still see the birds and the bees and the trees and things seem to be just like they've always been. It's all a matter of perspective.
WTF?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:all well and good after the fact (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Did you read the article? That's exactly what they said in the article:
In his statement to the military court, Manning said that before he fell in with the antisecrecy guerrillas at WikiLeaks, he tried to deliver his trove of stolen documents to The Washington Post and The New York Times. At The Post, he was put off when a reporter told him that before she could commit to anything she’d have to get a senior editor involved. At The Times, Manning said, he left a message on voice mail but never got a call back.
The only problem with this NY Times article is that the author is completely ignorant of why a whistleblower would use something like only payphones and not e-mail to make contacts for divulging this information:
It’s puzzling to me that a skilled techie capable of managing one of the most monumental leaks ever couldn’t figure out how to get an e-mail or phone message to an editor or a reporter at The Times, a feat scores of readers manage every day.
DUR, well, I guess if you can't figure out why he didn't want a paper trail or electronic message then he shouldn't have given you the information after all! Did the voice mail start with "I'm calling from a payphone with a physical disc in my possession ... "? Because unless he wanted to be easily caught, I'd guess that'd be the way to go.
Re:Manning is a Hero and a Traitor (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why he didn't submit to the NY Times (Score:5, Insightful)
exactly. This would never see the light of day with the NY times, because the NY times is not a press/journalism organization. It's a media-spin government friendly organization which refuses to cover actual issues.
Where was the NYT with the revolutions in the middle east? Not covering them, that's where. NYT is instead always too busy not fact checking anything [techdirt.com].
meanwhile the line of unedited cables line is full of shit. minstrelmike is clearly trolling. Whereas NYT can't even get basic information right [nytimes.com], wikileaks actually edited the information before releasing it.
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
The best interview I saw on the whole episode was on the Colbert report. Where Colbert pointed out the obvious. Even calling it "Collateral Murder" is stepping out of the bounds of journalism and into editorial. It's fine to have an opinion. But selective editing and inaccurate wording meant to push an agenda that is not completely factual... That's propaganda, and just as bad as some/much of the whitewashing done by the DoD. Difference is, the DoD doesn't intend to be anything other than what it is.
Re:Manning is a Hero and a Traitor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Manning is a Hero and a Traitor (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Gosh, I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
According to the article, he tried that too. When he uncovered what was supposed to be damning evidence of anti-Malaki propaganda was actually just an academic pamphlet on his regime (translated by a colleague), they told him to "drop it". Interesting stuff.
Re:Quite simply lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Yesterday I had 14 mod points. Today I have none. I wish I could have given them all to you for that insightful comment, rather than have them vanish. You are spot on, and sum up perfectly what the correct response to this article is.
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:5, Insightful)
Comeback without the strawman and total misunderstanding of systemic poverty and we can talk. Until then, fuck off.
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
And it wasn't WikiLeaks who published the unedited cables. Wikileaks was careful to redact the ones they published.
You might want to check facts before speaking, although around here that's obviously not a requirement for an "Informative" rated post. I read a LOT of those cables, and frankly speaking most of them were boring drivel that didn't have anything to do with any wars at all, and didn't reveal any kind of criminal activity.
So... I take it you don't know what "redact" means? Because nothing you said there contradicts what the poster you're replying to said.
The point is that if the NYT had received a mass of cables, they would have picked through them to identify the ones which actually had newsworthy material.
And that's just the thing. They would have picked through to identify what they thought was newsworthy. And since human labor is expensive, they probably would have done it by a bunch of keyword searches, then reading the ones that the searches caught on - or, more likely, getting some interns to read those.
By publishing all the cables, Wikileaks allowed the public to determine for themselves what is and isn't important, and allowed a "many eyeballs see all things" approach.
And if they would have posted the infamous "helicopter video" they'd have published the whole thing instead of editing it down to make it look worse like Assange did.
Don't know anything about that, so can't comment on it.
The world needs a NEUTRAL place for leaks and whistleblowing, not a site used to pump a particular political agenda, which is what Wikileaks has become.
Until someone starts one, though, Wikileaks is what we have. Anyone who wants to make a leak site with another slant is free to - having multiple ones would be a good thing!
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
And it wasn't WikiLeaks who published the unedited cables. Wikileaks was careful to redact the ones they published.
You might want to check facts before speaking, although around here that's obviously not a requirement for an "Informative" rated post. I read a LOT of those cables, and frankly speaking most of them were boring drivel that didn't have anything to do with any wars at all, and didn't reveal any kind of criminal activity.
Do you know what redacting is...?
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Troll and Flamebait are used since Slashdot has no "-1 conflicts with my ideology" moderation option.
I even address the fact that I was not supporting such a thing, but people still get upset if they see any remark that conflicts with their worldview.
More to it than that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what sort of Communist society you live in, but in America people create jobs for people because they profit from it, not for charity. Jobs will be created when there is demand for those jobs (or the products that those jobs create). If there is no demand (for example, if there is no middle class to buy the products) then the rich people will not the create jobs. And they shouldn't. But, if all the rich people decide to stop creating jobs ("going Galt"), then there will still be demand and middle class or poor people will create the jobs themselves (because there is potential to make money - this is how small businesses are created).
It boggles my mind that all these Republicans think they have to worship rich people as gods or they will take all the jobs away. I don't thank my boss for giving me a job. My boss thanks me for being hardworking and productive by giving me bonuses and raises. My boss (who is a conservative) made a joke right after the election that he is going to have to fire people because his taxes were going to go up. I told him (lightheartedly of course) that if I did not already make him more money than I cost, then he should go ahead and fire me because I don't work for charity. Guess what? I am still working (he did not fire me).
No, things tha tlooked like RPGs. (Score:0, Insightful)
And those embedded reporters with the US army? Walking around with folks armed with RPGs and M16s.
And how can you see their identification if you can't tell the difference between a telephoto tv camera and an RPG?
Next up, what about the dad with their kids in the van, picking up the wounded and taking them to safety? Oh, I get it, they were near people who, until they were shot down, carrying RPG-looking objects and maybe AK47s and had no identification, right?
Re:Manning is a Hero and a Traitor (Score:4, Insightful)
Free market capitalism is as removed from reality as ideal communism, and just as unworkable in practice with large groups of people. Social Security has zero contribution to our national debt -- if anything, Congress needs to stop looting it for purposes entirely unrelated to public welfare.
As for Bradley Manning, I wish we as a nation would grow a spine and stand up against the injustice against him, the injustice against other whistleblowers, and the injustices he helped expose. We need to drag the authoritarians kicking and screaming through an equitable process to make this happen, but it's something we would all be better off doing.
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's stick with Manning. He was basically IT like most of us. IT staff see and hear people PLAN to violate contracts or the law, or just plain be dicks a lot more than most people. But at the point you dump your bosses email box and hand it to the press, you better have a really good reason. We all miss that what he did was a MASSIVE breach of trust that would get ANY of US fired just for discussing on the job.
Does the public DESERVE to see that important WAR decisions are made based on grade school playground spats. ABSOLUTELY. Did he violate his employers trust, absolutely as well.
Re:Why he didn't submit to the NY Times (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup.
The media has failed this guy as completely and as utterly as any organization possibly could. He has repeatedly called for the public to have a discussion or debate about the role of the United States' military in the geopolitical landscape. As far as I can tell, no such discussion has been fostered by the media. But why would they? It's the media's job to keep us stupid, to prevent us from learning what is actually happening in the world.
Bradley Manning is simply someone who figured out what is actually going on, and it bothered him. Bothered him enough that he wanted to share that information with the world.
"I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the affected environment everyday." - Bradley Manning
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [guardian.co.uk]
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.
Looks like the Times is still pissed at assage. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the public DESERVE to see that important WAR decisions are made based on grade school playground spats. ABSOLUTELY. Did he violate his employers trust, absolutely as well.
Some might argue - and I'm not sure I'd be amongst them - that ultimately his "employers" are the citizens and taxpayers of the United States of America, and the superior officers - up to and including the President of the United States - are just middle managers. As such, Manning was working for the good of his "employers" by reporting other, problematic employees.
Still, the whole idea of equating public service to basic employment - essentially, reducing a country so it is just another large corporation - is somewhat disquieting to me. I know the concept of patriotism is oft times spurned on Slashdot but - in moderation - I think it is a worthy thing. A country is, after all - more than just a material thing; it incorporates (or it should) the beliefs and philosophy of its people. Saying "I respect that and I'll support those goals and beliefs" is honorable. Patriotism only becomes a problem when it is blindly given and assigned to individuals (politicians, military leaders) without leaving room to question whether those individuals are supportive of the philosophy behind the country. I'd rather we look at public servants in that light than simply equate them to the hirelings of a corporate master, and judge them not on their "efficiency" but whether they are standing true to the ideals of the nation.
The question with Manning truly boils down to his motive; whether he released the documents based on an earnest belief that it was necessary for the citizens of the United States to have this information, or if it was the result of his personal issues spiraling out of control. Sadly, it more and more looks as if it was the latter and - necessary as his actions may have been - they were not taken with adequate judgement or forethought. As such, discipline does not seem an outrageous expectation, although the punishments suggested do seem excessive, given the beneficial (for the citizenry, not the politicians) results of the leak.
Re:Assumptions (Score:5, Insightful)
You might argue about the first strike, but the second strike was obviously targeted at the relief efforts, that is collateral murder.
Re:Left wing bird cage liner (Score:4, Insightful)
The constitution is and always has been a flawed legal document. It was amended before it even took effect to fix some of the flaws; it has been repeatedly amended since. It has too much bolt-on shit that's ineffective and poorly works around the framework it provides, and needs to be torn down and rewritten.
Gun crimes are committed by both legal and illegal gun owners--legal gun owners with your psychological profile are the likely to commit gun crimes, while those with more reservation and less paranoia are less likely. Legal gun owners with your mentality also commit more "justifiable homicide" because of a pattern of zero tolerance--of immediately and fatally employing a firearm where it would be legally and even barely justifiable, more concerned with "he had it coming, I was protecting myself" than trying to stay human. The strict, mechanical decision process of "there is a threat, I must eliminate it by any force" is inhuman.
Socialism is a good thing... in moderation. Socialist programs support and balance an economy, whereas pure socialism and pure capitalism both concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few.
Further, context is important: Extremely small economies--for example, colonies of less than 100 people--benefit from full scale socialism because any other economy is infeasible; but as the colony grows, these economies quickly fail. This is because a family unit is inherently socialistic, and a small community must be socially tight-knit to survive. Larger, socially disconnected communities (nations of hundreds, thousands, millions) quickly lose such motivation because they lose sight of the need, and then lose the need outright; thus capitalism comes into play. As nations get quite large, capitalism fails; thus regulations must come into play to retain the benefits offered by capitalism.
Political parties promise the world, while economic theorists are used to back up assertions about capitalism and socialism and how we'd be much better off in a feel-good socialist utopia or a freedom-driven capitalist free market. The truth is all systems can be exploited; on a small scale exploitation is impossible because the risk is unmanageable (exploit your power in a colony of 50 people barely trying to survive as is and you'll probably collapse the economy, then you die with everyone else--if they don't hang you first and get on with their lives), but on a large scale it's too easy.
Micro-managing an economy is simply impossible on a large scale: socialism works, but only when you absolutely understand the needs and constraints of the entire economic system on all levels; you can't, and so capitalism allows for these details to work themselves out (i.e. delegation).
Capitalism is ripe for exploit and stagnation, however, and so minor socialist practices--regulations, tax incentives, etc--are put in place to guide the system. Excessive or improper use of these practices is destructive to the economy, but so is not employing them at all.
There is a balance. Nobody seeks it. Those in power seek more power, or seek to push ideals they believe will universally solve all problems; they won't.
Re:Why he didn't submit to the NY Times (Score:5, Insightful)
Some more examples:
- At Bradley Manning's trial, a case with significant national interest with major implications for whistleblowers and the freedom of the press, and for the Times itself (which had been one of the papers that had gotten the story from Wikileaks), the New York Times couldn't be bothered to send a reporter until there was a lot of public shaming of the paper about it.
- The New York Times has admitted on many occasions to suppressing stories for the sole reason that the White House asked them to. That was true under both the Obama and Bush administrations.
Basically, I read the New York Times the same way I'm guessing a lot of Russians read Pravda back in the day: The point isn't to discover the truth, it's to discover what the government wants you to think is the truth.