“Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family,” Adm. Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in July 2010.
Before a press corps hollowed out to a skeleton crew after Manning’s verdict, that insinuation is falling apart. Top government officials testifying in open court for Manning’s sentencing in recent days have cited no credible evidence his leaks led directly to any deaths. They have instead spoken to diplomatic sources placed at risk and strayed foreign relations. In the words of one official, some allies got “chesty.”
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During the first phase of the trial, the judge overseeing Manning’s case prevented the defendant from presenting any evidence against claims that his releases caused any harm. So those revelations, endlessly fought over in the press since WikiLeaks’ releases, have all taken place during the sentencing phase of Manning’s court martial. They may shave years off his maximum 132.5-year punishment.
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[T]he most explosive claim about Manning’s leaks — that battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan got U.S. sources killed — seems to have been settled. The prosecution’s first witness was Brig. Gen. Robert Carr, who led the Department of Defense’s review of the WikiLeaks releases.
Carr’s order to lead the Information Review Task Force came straight from then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Carr and a team of 300 worked for over a year.
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Not a single death could be linked to names in the WikiLeaks files, Carr testified.
After more than a year of searching, the task force found a single instance where the Taliban claimed to have killed an Afghan source because of WikiLeaks. But then they discovered the cables did not actually contain the source’s name.
“The name was not there,” Carr said.
Gonna change a pronoun or two…
“Mr.Obama/Mr.Bush/US Congress can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family”
Might? Already do, in spades. American Exceptionalism at its finest.
The military whistleblower hit squads destroy a fundamental American principle:
(Van Buren, Huffpo). Thanks for doing your duty Manning, Snowden, Tice, and the rest of you still waiting in the shadows.
So the military cannot site a single instance in which someone died because of Manning’s leaks, yet, even after a successful defense motion, Manning still faces a maximum 90 year sentence.