filtherton-
I think you may have mischaracterized a portion of the position. What is common knowledge is that, in general, war is dirty, bloody, and foggy - and that mistakes will be made which harm people not wishing to be involved. So, reading details of the dirt, blood, and fog in practice doesn't enlighten to that fact. However, reading the details might expose tactics, methodologies, communication streams, perhaps process timelines - things that ~may~ be of value to an adversary trying to wage war against us. As I haven't read the documents, I don't know if this sort of information is contained, I am speculating. I hope that clarifies what I view the position to be.
rb-
I spent a little more time thinking about it and thought I might take a crack at framing my position with regards to the acts of the GI. When I think of a whistleblower, I think of a person who takes only the evidence of a violation and then exposes it (and only it), as the purpose of their action is to expose a particular criminal or civil wrong and make it right.
In this case, we have a single individual who downloaded and distributed close to 100,000 classified documents, which is hardly a defined -er- whistle blow? This person didn't take the communication stream of a village slaughter or something like that - it was a mass download of communications with a huge array of subjects and events. So, the motivation appears to be dramatically different than whistleblowing.
As the congress, for better or worse, authorized military action in the Afghan theatre - it is a legal military operation (I find that concept as bizarre as you, but I think you know what I mean), so 100,000 documents pertaining to that operation could hardly be considered exposing an illegal act. It appears to me as if the GI wishes to undermine a massive military action.
There's been talk that some informants' names and villages were included and exposed in these documents. So, there may be indigenous people who are now in danger because of this leak. I can't confirm that that information is there, and it might not be the case. Certainly, it could make it difficult for our troops to get new informants for fear that someone back in the states will leak their name, even 5 years later.
I think this GI probably views himself as a whistleblower, but his conduct doesn't seem to meet that definition.
For the record, my (evil Libertarian
) view is that all wars should go through the Constitutionally defined process. Congress must declare war on a nation-state. This vietnam, iraq, afghanistan, somalia, kosovo style of diplomacy is a cop-out. No clear objective. I think that when Congress is forced to debate and then formally declare war, I believe it would bring objectives into sharp focus and shortens the military campaign. As we have it, our objective is "to kill people in the land we are in, but only if they try to kill us. Go home when enough time has passed without someone trying to kill us." Welcome to a decades long "war".