Back in late 2009, the U.S. Military realized it had a problem on its hands. A video of a deadly helicopter attack from 2007 was released to the well-known online whistleblower haven WikiLeaks. The site released it to the public in an edited state and titled it "Collateral Murder."
Soon, however, the problem exploded. In all, roughly 700,000 documents and videos were handed over to the website, and it was eventually traced back to one man, Bradley Manning. Allegedly, the 24-year-old private used his security clearance to break protocol and transfer the information.
It took quite a while, but Manning now faces a court-martial for his actions. He is accused of 22 charges, including aiding the enemy, which could carry the penalty of death. Prosecutors say they will not press capital punishment.
However, supporters like the Bradley Manning Support Group don't cast it in that light at all. They claim that Manning is not a criminal, but a whistleblower that exposed corruption and war crimes in the military.
The group has been actively campaigning since Manning was jailed for his release via Internet petitions and protests all over the world.
From cablegate, as the information dump is now known, some good did come. Some of the hundreds-of-thousands of documents did expose corruption. Some of the documents exposed war crimes.
But let's think about this a little more.
Even if you were to very generously assume that each of the thousands of documents was two pages long, that would still mean almost one and a half million pages of reading.
Imagine it like this: that's the equivalent of readingMoby-Dick 1,700 times.
Obviously Manning thought that some of the information contained in the dump would expose corruption, but would be practically impossible to assume that over the course of less than a year he actually read that many documents.
He wasn't just giving out vital information; he was wantonly spewing everything he could get his hands on.
Manning's lawyers argue that the information that was released (one of their many pronged "hope one of them stick" defenses) wasn't very harmful to national security. Yet not only is the damage from this information dump very difficult to quantify, there are examples where the information was harmful.
In one case, WikiLeaks published information that contained the names of Afghans who were working with the US Military. That kind of information would be very useful to the Taliban, and could deter civilians from aiding in the reconstruction of Afghanistan.
What it all boils down to isn't whether or not good came of what he did or whether or not everything that came of his actions were bad. What he did was a criminal act of taking sensitive, classified information.
Let's make an analogy. You break into 700,000 peoples houses and find information that 1,000 are involved in various crimes ranging from illegal file sharing to murder and drug trafficking. Sure, you did some good by exposing the bad things, but you also committed the crime of breaking and entering. Shouldn't you be punished for that?
Manning is not a hero. He disregarded the lives he could hurt and damage he could do in an ill-conceived effort to expose corruption.
