The Manning Verdict

Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was found not guilty on Tuesday morning on charges of knowingly aiding enemies of the U.S. by transferring 750,000 pages of military files to WikiLeaks, the Associated Press reported.

  Raw Story

Bradley Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks trove of secret disclosures, faces a possible maximum sentence of 136 years in military jail after he was convicted on Tuesday of most charges on which he stood trial.

  UK Guardian

Yes, 17 guilty charges.

Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over the court martial of the US soldier, delivered her verdict in curt and pointed language. "Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty," she repeated over and over, as the reality of a prolonged prison sentence for Manning – on top of the three years he has already spent in detention – dawned.

Oh, but she’s a fair judge all right.

A further 112 days will be taken off the sentence as part of a pre-trial ruling in which Lind compensated him for the excessively harsh treatment he endured at the Quantico marine base in Virginia between July 2010 and April 2011. He was kept on suicide watch for long stretches despite expert opinion from military psychiatrists who deemed him to be at low risk of self-harm, and at one point was forced to strip naked at night in conditions that the UN denounced as a form of torture.

A whole 112 days.

“While we’re relieved that Mr. Manning was acquitted of the most dangerous charge, the ACLU has long held the view that leaks to the press in the public interest should not be prosecuted under the Espionage Act,” ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project head Ben Wizner said in his organization’s statement.

  Raw Story

Not much of a relief for Manning that he was acquitted on aiding the enemy when he could still be sentenced to 130 years.  It’s not like he would have ended up with anything worse than life in prison. But the avoidance of the precedent that would have set could be a relief to anyone else considering leaking anything. That is if they don't have 20 other charges tossed in.

“Since Manning already plead guilty to charges of leaking information – which carry significant punishment — it seems clear that the government was seeking to intimidate anyone who might consider revealing valuable information in the future.”

“We now live in a country where someone who exposes war crimes can be sentenced to life even if not found guilty of aiding the enemy, while those responsible for the war crimes remain free,” CCR’s statement read.

Indeed we do. Indeed we do.

Amid the controversy, [Iowa Sen. Chuck] Grassley has introduced a Senate resolution marking Tuesday as National Whistleblower Day.

[...]

Grassley wants Americans to recognize the sacrifices he has seen whistle-blowers make over the past three decades he has spent advocating on their behalf.

"Anything we can do to uphold whistle-blowers and their protection is the right thing to keep government responsible," Grassley said. "If you know laws are being violated and money's being misspent, you have a patriotic duty to report it."

  USA Today

And the subsequent privilege of having your life destroyed by that same government. Because, if they can waste billions of dollars, they can certainly afford to harass, persecute and prosecute you till the end of your days.

Grassley views his involvement as his duty to protect truth-tellers. Quoting his longtime inspiration Fitzgerald, Grassley said: "The only crime whistle-blowers commit is telling the truth."

Which turns out to be one of the MOST heavily prosecuted crimes in our country.

The verdict [comes] on the same day that America passed its first whistleblower protection law. The law passed by the Continental Congress on July 30, 1778, declared that it was the “duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other the inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by an officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”

[...]

Manning did not go to Congress with his information but had he gone to Congress it is a virtual guarantee that he would have lost his security clearance for trying to provide information to Congress that included evidence of torture and other war crimes. The world would never have seen the information he disclosed to WikiLeaks.

[...]

[The 1778 law] was passed unanimously in response to a whistleblower, Marine Captain John Grannis, who presented a petition to the Continental Congress on March 26, 1777, to have a commander of the Continental Navy, Commodore Esek Hopkins, suspended after he tortured British sailors who were captured.

  The Dissenter

So just what DID we learn from the Manning leaks?

Take the video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack, which shows two Reuters journalists being gunned down in Baghdad. The soldiers in the video known as “Collateral Murder” feature soldiers begging superior officers to give them orders to fire on individuals, who are rescuing wounded people. Soldiers also openly hoped a wounded man crawling on the sidewalk would pick up something resembling a weapon so they could finish him off. And, “The most alarming aspect of the video,” as Manning said, is “the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have.”

Consider the military incident reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, which he thought “represented the on the ground reality of both of the conflicts” the US was waging in those countries. In Afghanistan, the reports obtained by WikiLeaks and released as the “Afghan War Logs” showed an assassination squad, Task Force 373, was operating. It kept classified lists of enemies and went on a mission on June 17, 2007, to target “prominent al Qaeda functionary Abu Laith al-Libi.” The squad staked out a “Koran school where he was believed to be located for several days.” An attack was ordered. The squad ended up killing seven children with five American rockets. Al-Libi was not killed.

Reports from Iraq, also obtained by WikiLeaks and released as the “Iraq War Logs,” revealed an order, Frago 242, which the US and the UK appeared to have adopted as a way of excusing them from having to take responsibility for torture or ill-treatment of Iraqis by Iraqi military or security forces. The reports also showed US interrogators had threatened Iraqi detainees with the prospect of being turned over to the “Wolf Brigade” or “Wolf Battalion,” which would “subject” them “to all the pain and agony that the Wolf Battalion is known to exact upon its detainees.”

If those revelations are not enough to make him a whistleblower, over 250,000 US diplomatic cableswere slowly released (up until 100,000 were rapidly published on to the Internet by WikiLeaks in August 2011), and they revealed: US diplomats spying on United Nations leadership, the Yemen president agreed to secretly allow US cruise missile attacks that he would say were launched by his government, Iceland’s banking crisis had partly been a result of bullying by European countries, US and China joined together to obstruct a major agreement on climate change by European countries, US government was well aware of rampant corruption in the Tunisian ruling family of President Ben Ali, the FBI trained torturers in Egypt’s state security service, both the administrations of President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama pressured Spain and Germany not to investigate torture authorized by Bush administration officials, and foreign contractors managed by DynCorp hired Afghan boys to dress up as girls and dance for them.

Should that still not be enough, Manning also provided WikiLeaks with more than 700 detainee assessment reports on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. The assessments showed children and elderly men were imprisoned, information from a “small number of detainees” who were tortured was relied upon by US authorities and al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj had been sent to the prison “to provide information” on the “al Jazeera news network’s training program, telecommunications equipment and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview” of bin Laden.

  The Dissenter

And none of that will be punished.  But Bradley Manning is going to spend the rest of his life in the brig.  Nice going, America.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.   And watch this (scroll down a bit for the video):