Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious\u2014and revealing\u2014is \u201caiding the enemy.\u201d<\/p>\n
A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and over the entire country:<\/p>\n
* \u201cWould it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?\u201d<\/p>\n
* \u201cIn that case, who is aiding the enemy\u2014the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?\u201d<\/p>\n
When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can\u2019t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government\u2019s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: \u201cThis is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy\u2014material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
If so, those fellow soldiers have all been notably lucky; the Pentagon has admitted that none died as a result of Manning\u2019s leaks in 2010. But many of his fellow soldiers lost their limbs or their lives in U.S. warfare made possible by the kind of lies that the U.S. government is now prosecuting Bradley Manning for exposing.<\/p>\n
In the real world, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, prosecution for leaks is extremely slanted. \u201cLet\u2019s apply the government’s theory in the Manning case to one of the most revered journalists in Washington: Bob Woodward, who has become one of America\u2019s richest reporters, if not the richest, by obtaining and publishing classified information far more sensitive than anything WikiLeaks has ever published,\u201d Greenwald wrote in January.<\/p>\n
He noted that \u201cone of Woodward’s most enthusiastic readers was Osama bin Laden,\u201d as a 2011 video from al-Qaeda made clear. And Greenwald added that \u201cthe same Bob Woodward book [Obama\u2019s Wars] that Osama bin Laden obviously read and urged everyone else to read disclosed numerous vital national security secrets far more sensitive than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking. Doesn’t that necessarily mean that top-level government officials who served as Woodward\u2019s sources, and the author himself, aided and abetted al-Qaida?\u201d<\/p>\n