In Defense of Bradley Manning

[Nada Jung]

 

December 28, 2011 - Jonah Redel Traub

 

Photo Courtesy of the Daily Telegraph

 

 

Bradley Manning is charged with leaking sensitive military information to Wikileaks. He’s currently on trial for his life. The military calls him a traitor, but he seems like a hero.

 

In 1971 a military analyst named Daniel Ellsburg leaked what’s known as  the “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times. The papers eviscerated many  government claims about the Vietnam war, and raised public pressure to  end the war. Ellsworth faced 115 years under the Sedition Act of 1917,  but due to governmental misconduct he was freed. The misconduct included  such incursions as warrantless wiretapping and, in a precursor to Watergate, a burglary of his psychiatrist’s office. Ellsburg remains a  widely respected figure and a hero to many.

 

Ellsburg’s tale  comes to mind because of its similarity to the current saga surrounding  PFC. Bradley Manning. Manning is allegedly the man behind the treasure  trove of secure military data that was made public on Wikileaks.

 

Wikileaks  released a staggering amount of U.S. intelligence, which ranged from  diplomatic cables to confidential information about the Iraq war. Some  of it was fairly benign, gossipy scuttlebutt about foreign leaders’  foibles, but some of the released material provided irrefutable evidence  of war crimes.

 

One widely seen video titled “Collateral Murder”  is particularly damning. In it an Apache helicopter is shown firing on  12 unarmed civilians, including 2 journalists from Reuters. As people  tried to rescue the civilians, the army fired on them, and to add insult  to injury, a tank drives over one man, cutting him in half. The Geneva  convention expressly prohibits killing civilians, preventing the rescue  of the wounded, and defacing dead bodies. Three war crimes in a little  over 17 minutes.

 

It turned out to be three strikes and you’re out,  for the U.S. in Iraq. One of the central reasons the U.S. has fully  withdrawn is that Obama was unable to negotiate for continued immunity  for U.S. fighters, and Wikileaks played a large part in Iraq’s refusal  to continue to act without impunity.

 

Wikileaks also helped spark  the “Arab Spring,” it revealed just how corrupt the Tunisian government  was. Protests sprang up in Tunisia, the President was deposed, and the  revolutionary promise ricocheted around the Muslim world.

 

By all  rights Pvt. Manning is a hero: he revealed U.S. war crimes which helped  bring a close to the deeply unpopular war in Iraq, and helped changed  the world for the better by bringing about regime change in several Arab  countries. But the Obama administration and the military see him in a  decidedly different light.

 

He has been held by the military for  the past 19 months, the first 9 months of which he spent in solitary  confinement. Manning was forcibly paraded around other prisoners naked  in an attempt to humiliate him. His treatment has been so rough that it   garnered attention from the U.N., which is now investigating his  imprisonment.

 

Last week the military held a 7 day pretrial  hearing during  which Manning was charged with 30 different offenses, including aiding  the enemy and violating the Espionage act. If convicted Manning will  likely spend the rest of his life in jail. The military presented a  compelling case that Manning did indeed leak the files, but failed to  show any instance in which the leaks materially hurt the U.S. It is  ironic that if Manning was in that Apache helicopter that massacred  civilians, today he’d be treated as a war hero — instead he’s in a battle  for his life for blowing the whistle on blatantly illegal activities.

 

One  might think our current President, the ex-constitutional professor,  might have sympathy for Mr. Manning, but defending civil liberties seems  to only be the dominion of true nut cases like Ron Paul.

 

In the  end, I’ll let Pvt. Manning speak for himself, on an online chat he  wrote: “If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw  incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public  domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC…  what would you do?” He doesn’t sound like a traitor to me.

Jonah Redel Traub