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Manning is no hero, let's not go overboard. At best, she made a well-intentioned but horribly reckless mistake.


She's a hero if someone says she is, and that's all there is to it. I think she was a brave, selfless person in doing what she did, and I'm glad that the US got its ass handed to it in this way. American military crimes are heinous, and the entire nation is doing nothing effective about it. There are millions of people suffering because the American public are too cowardly to confront their own military.

So by sticking her neck out and releasing the Collateral Murder videos, she is most definitely my hero.

(EDIT: s/Damage/Murder/ - this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0)


She also released hundreds of thousands of pages of other documents. I can sympathize with carefully targeted disclosures -- like the Collateral Damage videos -- but there's no way she reviewed all the documents she dumped. Wildly irresponsible.


I would blame the US for invading Iraq and Afghanistan before blaming Manning even a tiny bit for anything.


Manning can be responsible for her own actions.


It's Collateral Murder, not Collateral Damage.

If she's a hero "if someone says she is", the same logic canonizes Lamo.


Ned Kelly is considered by equal numbers as either a heroic Bush Ranger sticking it to the man in Australia, or a callous murderer who attempted mass murder when he ripped up the train tracks near Glenrowan.

You can be a hero to some and a villain to others.


I do agree with her that some of that stuff did need to see the light of day. But it was foolish to blindly turn everything over to Assange. It would have been better if she'd only released the few worst items.


Is that the correct usage of 'at best'? Isnt that just minimizing the range of discussion? Shouldnt the objective range be: At best, she's a hero. At worst, she's a villain.


That's the point elefanten was conveying: "at best, she's no hero and only someone that made a reckless mistake".




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