[d23]

For the life of me, whenever I hear someone call Manning a whistleblower, I cannot ever get the person to articulate exactly what he was blowing the whistle against. It's my understanding that most of what was released was nothing more than embarrassing personal cables that harmed diplomatic relations. Snowden revealed legitimate privacy concerns that the American people had not yet been privy to.

[morsch]

I couldn't off-hand recall anything, either. But a cursory search reveals: "There were hundreds of classified reports of torture, that continued even after the Abu Ghraib scandal."[0]

The diplomatic embarrassment is what made the news, but whose fault is it that -- and who stands to gain from it? People like a good embarrassing story. And I'm sure governments prefer you think of them as having their diary exposed to the public as opposed to the guys paying thugs to torture people.

[0] http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2013/08/2013...

[thetrb]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike

[d23]

Which doesn't really justify 99.9% of the other things that were released.

[dllthomas]

But that 99.9% (assuming your figure is accurate - I have no idea the proportion of damning vs. embarrassing vs. irrelevant information that was leaked) doesn't make Manning not a whistle-blower.

[ck2]

You seriously never heard of the "Collateral Murder" video?

Manning specifically released that among other information. It was incredibly important.