Travesty of justice – Bradley Manning on trial

The United States should be in the dock, not Bradley Manning, The Independent, Owen Jones, 2 June 2013 The whistleblower has allowed us to scrutinise the hidden realities of US power “…..Today, American hero stands in the dock, damned for a relatively tiny ray of light he shone on the darker recesses of this elite. Over three years ago, US soldier Bradley Manning – even now just 25 years old – leaked 250,000 US diplomatic cables and half a million army reports. There has never been a bigger leak of classified material in the history of the United States.

His punishment has already been severe. According to Juan Méndez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, he has faced cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. For months, he was deprived of human contact. He was stripped of his clothes, left without privacy, and forced to sleep without any darkness. In 2011, P J Crowley was forced to resign as the US state department’s official spokesman after slamming Manning’s treatment as “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid”.

Manning now begins a military trial, charged with a capital offence, , though the prosecution promise not to seek the death penalty, leaving him facing 20 years in prison. As two US champions of the First Amendment on free speech, Floyd Abrams and Yochai Benkler, have written: “If successful, the prosecution will establish a chilling precedent: national security leaks may subject the leakers to a capital prosecution or at least life imprisonment.”

Manning is partly being tried under the Espionage Act, a piece of legislation dating back to the First World War. He faces 22 charges in total: to 10 of them he has pleaded guilty, including wilfully communicating to an unauthorised person. But the most alarming charge is that he was “aiding the enemy” – in other words, that he intentionally helped al-Qa’ida.

No wonder powerful interests in the US want to make an example of Manning. Among the videos he released was an Apache helicopter conducting a bombing raid that killed Iraqi civilians and a Reuters journalist. “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust they appeared to have,” Manning has said, appalled by the lack of “value for human life” shown by the pilots’ descriptions of “dead bastards”. Here was the “on-the-ground reality” of both the Iraq and Afghan wars, he claimed.

The truth is Manning has done a great service, both to the American people and to the world as a whole. US foreign policy depends on secrecy, not simply because of fear of US enemies, but because the reality would often horrify the American people…..

There is nothing patriotic about the poorly scrutinised actions of the US foreign policy elite. Scores of young men or women are sent to be killed or maimed: those who call for bringing them to safety are smeared as “unpatriotic”. US civilians are put at risk of “blowback”, a CIA word for the unintended consequences of foreign interventions. They can even fail disastrously on their own terms. Back in the 1950s, the US helped overthrow Iran’s last democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, fuelling anti-American sentiment that helped drive the Iranian Revolution.

That is why Manning has done us such a service. He has encouraged us to scrutinise the hidden realities of US power, and consider the dire consequences of decisions shrouded in secrecy. His actions should compel us to build a more open, balanced world, where great powers are less able to throw their poorly understood weight around. It would be a long-term investment: the US is in long-term decline, and autocratic China may take its place, quite possibly using its power more unjustly. Better, then, to challenge this world order now…. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-united-states-should-be-in-the-dock-not-bradley-manning-8641164.html.