Standing up for the principle of righteousness in the face of adversity is a standard rarely encountered. Knowing a crime was committed Manning tried through inside channels to do the right thing. That effort was repelled. He then went on to publicize the wrong to shed light on it since his superiors were more concerned with saving face.
Manning fulfilled his legal duty to report war crimes. He complied with his legal duty to obey lawful orders but also his legal duty to disobey unlawful orders.
Section 499 of the Army Field Manual states, "Every violation of the law of war is a war crime." The law of war is contained in the Geneva Conventions.
Article 85 of the First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions describes making the civilian population or individual civilians the object of attack as a grave breach. The firing on and killing of civilians shown in the "Collateral Murder" video violated this provision of Geneva.
He did his duty.
In return he was charged with aiding the enemy in his efforts to inform the public of the wrongs being committed in our name.
A charge the prosecution failed to prove in their chance to lay out the case against him.
Ambiguous U.S. Army report
The only evidentiary item tied to Manning’s knowledge and that mentions terrorist organizations is a U.S. ACIC report, titled ‘Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?’
But as the defense established in cross-examination, as the interrogative title implies, and as Marcy Wheeler notes, the document isn’t definitive about whether these groups visited WikiLeaks.
“[N]ot only doesn’t this report assert that leaking to WikiLeaks amounts to leaking to our adversaries; on the contrary, the report identifies that possibility as a data gap,” Wheeler writes. “But it also provides several pieces of support for the necessity of something like WikiLeaks to report government wrongdoing.”
When defense lawyer David Coombs asked Captain Casey Fulton, who deployed to Baghdad with Manning and headed his intelligence section, about any specific websites that America’s enemies were known to visit, she could only cite social networking websites where people post personal information, like Facebook, and Google Maps.
Manning’s instructor from intelligence analyst training, Troy Moul, admitted in court, “I had never even heard of the term WikiLeaks until I was informed [Bradley] had been arrested.”
So despite the training directly applied to prevent aiding the enemy never even mentioning the supposed threat wikileaks presents in being a news clearinghouse we are led to believe Manning knew he was aiding the enemy in publicizing the information he did. Except the government has not proven that to be the case in any sense of the word.
The irony of charging Manning for aiding the enemy by showing Americans and the world the war crimes committed is laughable when one stops to think. How could the enemy not know we fire on first responders and reporters that are present with the enemy? Confounding logic to say the least. And detrimental to our troops led to believe they are doing their fellow soldiers good by covering up these crimes. The reality that it is the crimes themselves endangering our troops not letting the public know what is being done in our name.
Lawyers for accused Army whistleblower Bradley Manning have opened their defense at his military court-martial with a bid to dismiss a number of charges, including aiding the enemy. We’re joined by the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, Col. Morris Davis, who has just wrapped two days of testimony for the defense. Davis told the court that many of the files Manning leaked on Guantánamo were already out in the public and that they had no value to enemy groups and could not have harmed U.S. national security. We’re also joined from Fort Meade, Maryland, by Kevin Gosztola, a civil liberties blogger covering the trial for Firedoglake.com and co-author of "Truth And Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning."
So even most of the information our government is claiming was secret before Manning transferred files was actually accessible well before they were released.
As Glenn Greenwald wrote earlier this year,
“If bin Laden’s interest in the WikiLeaks cables proves that Manning aided al-Qaida, why isn’t bin Laden’s enthusaism for Woodward’s book proof that Woodwood’s leakers – and Woodward himself – are guilty of the same capital offense? This question is even more compelling given that Woodward has repeatedly published some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, including information designated “Top Secret” – unlike WikiLeaks and Manning, which never did.”
As Michael Isikoff reported in 2010, Woodward’s book disclosed
“the code names of previously unknown National Security Agency programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”
This information is of certain interest to al Qaeda, so does its publication mean that Woodward (and his sources) “aided the enemy” and should be charged like Bradley Manning?
Prosecutors would extend their argument at least that far. In January 2013, they claimed that they would charge Manning the same way if he had leaked to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks. Times journalists denounced the claim and the charge more broadly, calling it “excessive.”
“Excessive” is an understatement. If Judge Lind affirms the government’s dangerous theory on exceptionally thin evidence, whistleblowing as we know it will essentially be considered treasonous.
Capt. Lim testified that key sources were referred to by number, but that occasionally some could be identified by name by mistake. Capt. Lim said he wasn’t sure if the war logs revealed Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) but said that the enemy could use data like Battle Damage Information (BDI) – which documents how a vehicle was impacted by an enemy attack. The defense established, though, that that information was already readily available to enemies who could see how vehicles were impacted out in the open.
The defense also made a point of asking, as it has for many witnesses who would know, about what an intelligence gap is. Whether foreign adversaries used WikiLeaks was listed as an intelligence gap in the Army Counterintelligence Report that the government is using as evidence of Manning’s knowledge. Capt. Lim testified, as others have, that a gap refers to information that the U.S. doesn’t have and wants to investigate further.
Capt. Lim testified that he didn’t recall any training on the enemy using WikiLeaks specifically. Asked if he saw anything on the enemy using WikiLeaks in an unofficial capacity, Lim said “only on TV and in the media.”
So if the military thought wiki leaks was a threat one would assume that those whose job it was to assess threats would be made aware of it, yet they were not advised this news organization was a threat.
Similarly, the defense’s other security expert, Charles Ganiel, reviewed the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks as Cablegate, drawing on his nearly 28 years of military experience as a security specialist. He compared the 125 charged cables with open source material, and found that all but 2 of them had corresponding data. He felt generally that “lot of information was already in the public domain.”
So what the prosecution has proven thus far is that their efforts are not attributed to any direct threat to the troops as claimed. But they have proven they will go to any lengths to keep the public misinformed of what is really happening in our war zones. Especially if it shows we are in the wrong. Information our purported enemies are actually experiencing thus have no need to look it up online.
Update, link here to available transcripts:
The US military has refused to release transcripts of Bradley Manning's trial. In addition, they've denied press passes to 270 out of the 350 media organizations that applied. Without public transcripts or a press pass, it's virtually impossible for media organizations to accurately cover the trial and for the public to know what the government is doing in its name.
In response, Freedom of the Press Foundation has crowd-sourced funding to place a professional stenographer in the media room covering the trial. We will post full transcripts shortly after each day's proceedings end. The morning session with be posted by 7 pm the same evening. The afternoon session will be posted by 9 am the next morning. The transcripts will be released under an Attribution 3.0 Unported Creative Commons license.