Bradley Manning: Man of conscience or traitor?
The pre-trial hearing of 25-year-old US military intelligence analyst Private Bradley Manning, who has now admitted to releasing hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents, Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and videos to WikiLeaks, is almost a non-story in the American mainstream media. Even the New York Times that cooperated closely with WikiLeaks and upped its sales by splattering Manning’s revelations over its front pages is giving the soldier’s court appearances a mere cursory mention.
Some analysts are attributing the media’s seeming lack of interest to sour grapes over the fact that a whistle-blowing website got the scoop of the century. Certainly there’s little love in the US press for WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange currently holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London’s Knightsbridge evading extradition to Sweden to be questioned on sexual abuse charges. But it’s more likely that newspaper and TV channels which profited from the leaks are now attempting to distance themselves from prosecutors’ accusations that Manning materially ‘aided the enemy,’ a charge, if proven, could see Manning imprisoned for life without any chance of parole.
US authorities would love for Manning to implicate Assange as a co-conspirator which he has steadfastly resisted until now. On the contrary, the whistle-blower insists that before contacting WikiLeaks he attempted to offer the cables to a Washington Post journalist who neglected to take the offer seriously. “I asked her if the Washington Post would be interested in receiving information that would have enormous value for the American public,” he recounts in a statement put before the court. “She informed me that the Washington Post would possibly be interested, but such decisions were made only after seeing the information I was referring to and after consideration by the senior editors.”
Manning then tried to call the New York Times public editor number but only succeeded in getting through to an answering machine. He left a message stating he had access to important information about Iraq and Afghanistan but never received a call back. He planned to pop in to Politico’s offices but was deterred from doing so by bad weather. It was only then did he make contact with WikiLeaks. Those failed attempts have put paid to the idea that Bradley was in cahoots with Assange from the get-go or that Assange encouraged him or offered him inducements to download the material onto writable CDs for publication.
Although there are reports of a secret indictment and grand jury awaiting Assange under the Espionage Act, it now appears that Assange is off the hook — or rather should be — as his role in the controversy was merely journalistic. If Assange is put before a US grand jury as a spy then the editors of the New York Times, the Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel who authorized publication of the leaks simultaneously with WikiLeaks should be standing in the dock along with him; they would dispute that as they have gone out of their way to dispute any collaboration with Assange who they contend is “a source” rather than “a partner.”
As Al Jazeera’s program “The Listening Post” highlighted this week, the Manning trial should be a big news because it has serious implications for press freedoms when the prosecutor announced that even if the soldier has passed secrets to US newspapers he would still be culpable of aiding the enemy. He went on to note that clippings of WikiLeaks cables were discovered in Bin Laden’s bolt-hold in Pakistan as evidence of this assertion. This has serious implications for US press freedoms. In the first place, the media could be hidebound not to publish any whistle-blowers accounts holding the government or the Pentagon to task in case such material reaches the hands of America’s enemies which it would always do as long as there’s an Internet. If the media becomes open to the charge of aiding the enemy or, worse, treachery, no government could ever be held to account for wrongdoing.
As for Manning, there is no doubt that he broke the law and should be punished accordingly, but should he be deemed a traitor bent on aiding and abetting the enemy or a man of conscience who believed the American people had a right to know what was being done in their name? By his own account it was his conscience that led him to do what he did. He felt that the on-the-ground reality in Iraq and Afghanistan meant that “we were risking so much for people that seemed unwilling to cooperate with us, leading to frustration and hatred on both sides.” He became depressed with counter-insurgency operations “obsessed with capturing and killing human targets on lists” while “being suspicious of and avoiding cooperation with our Host Nation partners.” He hoped release of the facts into the public domain would “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He was particularly troubled by a video showing an “aerial weapons team” targeting Reuters’ employees and others before striking good Samaritans who drove a van to the scene to assist the wounded. “The most alarming aspect of the video to me, however, was the unseemly delightful blood-lust the Aerial Weapons Team seemed to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging and seemed to not value human life, and referred to them as “dead bastards” and congratulated each other on their ability to kill in large numbers…” he wrote in his 10,000-word-long court statement.
There’s no proof that Manning’s disclosures, as embarrassing as they were, have resulted in any American being harmed. Nevertheless he will likely face the full wrath of the establishment. His life is probably ruined but I believe he will go down in history as a courageous individual cut from the same cloth as Vietnam War whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg who leaked documents evidencing Johnson administration’s lies, thus helping to turn the public tide against one of the most vicious and ill-conceived conflicts of all time.
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