If a person signs on for a job that handles classified materials, they are bound to honor the status of those materials and keep them secret.
Could a justifiable argument be made that at times these documents should be made public? I do think there are times like that.
I also believe that if our clandestine network operatives are all given a free pass to do just that, we would cease to function as a nation in short order.
Our enemies would know our most secret information, and could devise ways to exploit that information to take our nation down.
If we’re talking about a government program that focuses on citizens to eliminate them or some such, fine. I do not want a free pass for folks like Manning.
> Could a justifiable argument be made that at times these documents should be made public? I do think there are times like that.
Given the contents of the documents released, there’s a strong argument that this was one of those times. The motive was clearly to inform the public - of information we have a need to know in order to make informed choices at the voting booth. We did need to know this material, just like we needed to know the contents of the DNC emails or the Podesta emails.
An bureaucracy that can launch secret wars on its own authority cannot be reasonably argued to be compatible with a representative form of government.
My disturbed level is composed 0.1% of Manning’s crimes, 99.9% of the government’s crimes. A government that does what those documents prove our government does is not being faithful to our Constitution or the rule of law or the ideals by which it was brought into being. Fundamental legitimacy issues arise when decisions of war and peace are made without even a proxy for citizen participation.
Those powers have not been delegated to the federal government under our Constitution. Can these activities truly be lawfully cloaked by classification at all? If so, is this really a republican form of government?