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A heavily redacted Department of Defense report concludes that documents leaked to WikiLeaks had no "significant strategic impact" on the war in Afghanistan and "[had] no direct personal impact on current and former senior US leadership in Iraq":
The publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US documents leaked by the Army soldier Chelsea Manning in 2010 had no strategic impact on the American war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, a newly released Pentagon analysis concluded.
The main finding of the Department of Defense report, written a year after the breach, was that Manning's uploading of more than 700,000 secret files to the open information organization WikiLeaks had no significant strategic effect on the US war efforts.
The belated publication of the analysis gives the lie to the official line maintained over several years that the leak had caused serious harm to US national security.
[...] The conclusions are contained in the final report of the information review task force that the DoD set up in the wake of the Manning leaks to look into their impact in the hope of mitigating any damage. The report was obtained by BuzzFeed's investigative reporter Jason Leopold under freedom of information laws.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 23 2017, @03:38PM (1 child)
Pragmatism vs. idealism. Would you also argue we should disband the armed forces because war is unethical?
And before you say that analogy is hyperbolic, no, if you assume most other countries are spying as well, it's well-comparable.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @07:05PM
There are ethical wars. Armed forces are useful for defensive wars and other stuff (defense vs real pirates).
As for offensive wars, if leaders propose a war, a referendum should be required and held then if not enough people voted for war, the leaders who proposed war get put on death row. Later separate referendums get held to redeem each of them at convenient times. Those who do not get enough votes get executed. If in hindsight it turns out war would have been a good idea, they get a posthumous award and people can cry or pretend to cry at the ceremony. See: https://soylentnews.org/~TheLink/journal/1632 [soylentnews.org]