"The cancer of over-classification is threatening the very fabric of our free society. Over-classification hinders debate. It hinders what we know about our government. It hinders finding solutions to common problems [such as] how do we keep our way of life in a post-9/11 world."-- Lt. Col. David Coombs, Bradley Manning's lawyer,quoted in Dana Milbank's WaPo column, "Bradley Manning'ssentence and the zealous national-security state""From the beginning, the Pentagon has treated Manning extremely harshly . . . . It certainly looked like an instance of powerful institutions and powerful people punishing a lowly private for revealing things that they would rather have kept hidden."-- John Cassidy, in a newyorker.com blogpost, "HistoryWill Pardon Manning, Even If Obama Doesn't""When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system."-- Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy,and Technology Project (quoted by John Cassidy)by KenWe learn from Bradley Manning's lawyer, Lt. Col. David Coombs, that Manning has sent a statement to President Obama, and that the statement includes a request for a pardon. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank attended yesterday's sentencing at Fort Meade, and the subsequent press conference held at a nearby hotel by the lawyer -- "free to speak his mind at the end of the three-year legal saga." At the press conference Coombs read from his client's statement.
I understand that my actions violated the law. I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others. If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty.
It's a good thing Manning is prepared for the possibility of no pardon being issued, because no pardon is going to be issued. Even apart from the fact that the president has said that Manning's fate is a matter for the military, there's no reason to imagine that he is in any way inclined to leniency. On the contrary, all indications are that he has enthusiastically supported the persecution of Manning.The official line, as John Cassidy puts it in his New Yorker post ""History Will Pardon Manning, Even If Obama Doesn't," is --
to frighten other would-be leakers. "There is value in deterrence, Your Honor," one of the military prosecutors told [Judge Denise] Lind. "This court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information."
But Cassidy isn't so sure that deterrence is what was on the prosecutors' minds. You'll recall that they asked for a sentence of 60 years, but even at 35, the sentence they got, as Cassidy points, "the whistle-blower still faces the same sort of prison term handed out to murderers and gangsters." He understands that "military justice is meant to be harsh," being "designed to maintain discipline on and off the battlefield." But, he says, "this isn't a case of a solider deserting his post or handing secrets over to the enemy." As I've quoted Cassidy arguing at the top of this post, "It certainly looked like an instance of powerful institutions and powerful people punishing a lowly private for revealing things that they would rather have kept hidden."Though I'm not sure why Dana Milbank feels it necessary, or even appropriate, to use Manning to flog NSA leaker Edward Snowden, I like his summation of what the Manning prosecution came to represent.
Manning's dignity is a good model for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker now hiding from American justice in Russia. Manning admitted what he had done, and he used his trial and its conclusion to argue for the righteousness of his cause. That cause was artfully described by Coombs, who with the shaved head of a military man and the business suit of a civilian lawyer, stood before 20 TV cameras and took as many questions as reporters could ask."Under the current administration, an unauthorized leak to the media of classified information is viewed as being tantamount to aiding the enemy," a capital offense, Coombs said. "The government-wide crackdown on whistleblowers and the extension of this crackdown to journalists threatens to stifle the flow of information that is vital to our public." A country in which "you are faced with a death-penalty offense" for the simple act of disclosing information to a journalist, Coombs added, "is not the America that I would hope that we live in."
Milbank has made clear before and continues to make clear that he doesn't approve of Manning's actions. "I think he went too far, making some valid disclosures but losing his moral authority by dumping all kinds of government documents that embarrassed U.S. officials without serving any public good." And his sentence ("he will be eligible for parole in seven years") -- which you've no doubt heard he has announced he plans to serve as a woman, Chelsea Manning -- "could have been a lot worse."
But whatever you think about Manning, his trial and his pretrial treatment exposed how zealous the national security state has been, even under this Democratic president. The tiny offender, little more than a boy, was initially held under 23-hour lockdown in a small cell and denied clothing. Coombs said his hundreds of military clients have included murderers and child molesters -- "and those types of clients receive less time than Pfc. Manning."
It's not just those murderers and child molesters of Colonel Coombs's who've gotten off easier than Manning. One of John Cassidy's central points in his post is: "Much of the wrongdoing that Manning exposed hasn't been dealt with nearly as harshly as he has."
Amid all the discussion of the rights and wrongs of whistle-blowing and WikiLeaks, it's easy to forget what exactly Manning revealed. In an article last month calling for him to be pardoned, the New Republic's John Judis provided a useful reminder of some of the incidents captured in the battleground reports that Manning released:American troops killing civilians, including women and children, and then calling in an airstrike to destroy evidence; the video of an American Apache helicopter gunship shooting civilians, including two Reuters reporters; American military authorities failing to investigate reports of torture and murder by Iraqi police; and a "black unit" in Afghanistan tasked to perform extrajudicial assassinations of Taliban sympathizers that killed as many as 373 civilians.What has happened to those responsible for these acts? In most cases, not much. For example, no charges have been brought against the U.S. military personnel who were in the Apache helicopter when it opened fire in Baghdad, in July, 2007 -- an incident that my colleague Raffi Khatchadourian wrote about at length in his 2010 article on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. "When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system," the A.C.L.U.'s Ben Wizner said in a statement. Could anybody disagree with that?
"As he does his time at Leavenworth," Dana Milbank writes, "Manning can know that he contributed to an important debate about the reach of the national security state."
The administration, [lawyer David] Coombs pointed out, has suggested that reporters can be prosecuted for receiving classified information, and it has prosecuted more leaks than all previous administrations while roughing up whistleblowers. On top of that, he said, the prosecution of the WikiLeaks leaker "does send a message and it's a chilling one and it's endorsed at the very highest levels of this administration."You don't need to agree with what Manning did to agree with Coombs that government secrecy has gone too far.
And John Cassidy feels strongly, as the title of his post indicates, that "even if President Obama doesn't pardon Manning, history will." He evokes the example of Pentagon Papes leaker Daniel Ellsberg. (As I've noted here, no one has endorsed the analogy more forcefully than Ellsberg himself.)
In helping to reveal that the U.S. authorities had repeatedly misled the public about the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg also broke the law, of course. So do most whistle-blowers who are employed by the government. But history tends to be kinder to them than the courts, and I doubt that this case will be an exception. In fifty years, people will look on the Manning case as another blot on a dark era for the United States and the values that it claims to hold dear. As for Manning himself, future historians will surely agree with Ellsberg, who, speaking to the A.P. yesterday, described him as "one more casualty of a horrible, wrongful war."
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