Edward Snowden and the State-Identified Journalist

Edward Snowden and the State-Identified Journalist:

And from Marshall's point of view, Bradley Manning did not have a very good reason to give thousands of government documents to WikiLeaks:

Coming from this perspective, it's hard to see any justification for what Manning did, which is basically downloading everything he could find and giving it to a foreign national (Assange) with the expectation that he'd just dump it into the public. There were a couple clear cases of wrongdoing revealed in his documents. But the vast majority were fairly mundane diplomatic cables, military records and so forth.

Now, the idea that WikiLeaks didn't reveal much in the way of U.S. wrongdoing is an article of faith in corporate media–and it's not true. But consider the larger context: Manning released documents relating to the "war on terror," in which the United States invaded and occupied two countries, killing hundreds of thousands, waged undeclared war on several other countries via a secret drone assassination program, and imprisoned thousands of people it accused of being enemies without trial, subjecting many of them to torture. Does that add up to a "really, really good reason"? Not if you "basically identify with the country and the state," apparently.