From: The Guardian
Bradley Manning
supporters demonstrate outside FBI headquarters in
Washington. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
After 17 months of pre-trial imprisonment, Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old US army
private and accused WikiLeaks source, is finally going to
see the inside of a courtroom. This Friday, on an army
base in Maryland, the preliminary stage of his military
trial will start.
He is accused of leaking to the whistleblowing site
hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, war reports,
and the now infamous 2007 video showing a US Apache helicopter
in Baghdad gunning down civilians and a Reuters
journalist. Though it is Manning who is nominally on
trial, these proceedings reveal the US government's
fixation with extreme secrecy, covering up its own crimes,
and intimidating future whistleblowers.
Since his arrest last May in Iraq, Manning has been
treated as one of America's most dastardly traitors. He
faces more than 30 charges, including one – "aiding the
enemy" – that carries the death penalty (prosecutors will
recommend life in prison, but military judges retain
discretion to sentence him to die).
The sadistic conditions to which he was subjected for
10 months – intense solitary confinement, at one point
having his clothing seized and being forced to stand nude for inspection –
became an international scandal for a US president who
flamboyantly vowed to end detainee abuse. Amnesty
International condemned these conditions as "inhumane";
PJ Crowley, a US state department spokesman, was forced to resign after denouncing Manning's
treatment. Such conduct has been repeatedly cited by the US as human rights
violations when engaged in by other countries.
The UN's special rapporteur on torture has complained that his investigation is being
obstructed by the refusal of Obama officials to
permit unmonitored visits with Manning. (Even the Bush
administration granted access to the International Red
Cross at Guantánamo.) Such treatment is all the more
remarkable in light of what Manning actually did, and did
not do, if the charges are true. For these leaks have
achieved enormous good and little harm.
From the start, US claims about the damage done have
been wildly exaggerated, even outright false. After the
release of the Afghanistan war logs, officials accused
WikiLeaks of having "blood on their hands", only to admit weeks later that they were
unaware of a single case of anyone being harmed. That remains true today.
Even Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief, mocked alarmism over the diplomatic cables
leak as "significantly overwrought", dismissing its impact
as "fairly modest". Manning's lawyer is seeking internal
government documents that, he insists, concluded there was no
meaningful harm to US diplomatic relations from the
release of any documents. None of the leaked documents
were classified at the highest level of secrecy – top
secret – but rather bore only low-level classification.
By contrast, the leaks Manning allegedly engineered
have generated enormous benefits: precisely the benefits
Manning, if the allegations against him are true, sought
to achieve. According to chat logs purportedly between Manning and
the informant who turned him in, the private decided to
leak these documents after he became disillusioned with
the Iraq war. He described how reading classified
documents made him, for the first time, aware of the
breadth of the corruption and violence committed by his
country and allies.
He explained that he wanted the world to know what he
had learned: "I want people to see the truth … regardless
of who they are … because without information, you cannot
make informed decisions as a public." When asked by the
informant why he did not sell the documents to a foreign
government for profit, Manning replied that he wanted the
information to be publicly known in order to trigger
"worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".
There can be no doubt that these vital goals have been
achieved. When WikiLeaks was awarded Australia's most
prestigious journalism award last month, the awarding foundation described how these
disclosures created "more scoops in a year than most
journalists could imagine in a lifetime". MORE
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