Kyle Smith at National Review
offers his view of the former U.S. Army private and convicted spy formerly known as Bradley Manning (seen above in his U.S. Army photo) being
called a “whistleblower" by the media.
Let’s say you published
something controversial on the Internet and you started getting death threats.
How would you like being “doxed”? In other words, what would your reaction be
if someone who didn’t like you tweeted out to the world your home address? And
your phone number? And your photo? And photos of your children? And the address
of their school? And information about when you left the house each day, the
license-plate number of your car, and the location where it was parked?
Would
you call someone who published this information a “whistleblower”? Let’s say
the same person simultaneously published accurate information about wrongdoing
by your neighbors or colleagues. Would that make you feel any better?
Picture
such an information dump on a massive scale. That’s roughly what then-Bradley
Manning did when he threw hundreds of thousands of secret military and
diplomatic documents into the public square. Manning made no effort to filter
out information that didn’t show evidence of wrongdoing. He indiscriminately
stole as many classified documents as he dared and sent them off for
publication on the Internet.
Chelsea Manning is not a whistleblower. Shame on
you, NBC News, for saying that he is. Shame on you, Time. You, too, Rolling
Stone, The Guardian, Sky News, Canada’s public broadcaster CBC News, and many
other outlets.
You would expect extremists at InfoWars and The Intercept to
label Chelsea Manning a whistleblower, and that is what they have done. But
mainstream-media outlets have blithely taken to using the preferred terms of
radicals when describing Manning’s actions.
Even if we assume that Manning (who
legally changed his name from Bradley to Chelsea in 2014) successfully exposed
some wrongdoing, it must be conceded that what he did was reckless. He endangered
the lives of countless American and allied military personnel, diplomats, and
others associated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only way his act
constitutes mass exposure of wrongdoing, and nothing more, is if you think
everybody in the U.S. military and everyone who worked with it is automatically
a moral criminal. Exposing personal information about people fighting a war
isn’t close to seeking justice for malefactors. It’s more like vigilantism.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
No comments:
Post a Comment