Swedish Judges Says Assange Allegations 'A Mess'

[struggle4progress]

87. Manning isn't being persecuted, as far as I can tell. He had access to restricted information,

due to his position as an enlisted man in the army, and after warnings from the army about his carelessness regarding security, he seems to have decided to release something like three quarters of a million documents to Wikileaks, including perhaps a quarter of a million diplomatic cables stretching over a period of forty some years

For a very small handful of those documents, he might be able to say honestly that he was driven by concern or outrage, but the size of the release clearly indicates that he could not possibly have even read most of the documents, let alone understood in any coherent way what the documents might mean. There were avenues along which Manning could have proceeded lawfully: in particular, under Federal law, he would have been entirely safe to raise any issues and shown any documents, that might have concerned him, with his Representative or Senators. Had he been interested in leaking to the press a small number of documents relating to specific issues, he might well have gotten cooperation from the press and might have much more support

Instead, he chose to send everything to a third party, whose use of it would be unclear. The Index on Censorship broke with Assange when reports surfaced that Assange's friend "Israel Shamir" had been peddling the embassy cables to the Belarusian regime to help them identify dissidents. A number of reporters at the Guardian became disillusioned when Assange, in response to concerns that the Taliban would use the cables to identify persons cooperating with the US in Afghanistan, expressed the opinion that the safety of such persons was of no interest to him

The US is governed by civilians, not by the military, and the conduct of US foreign policy, including decisions about release of embassy cables, lies with the civilian government, not with military personnel -- whether they be generals or privates. Manning's vandalism forced the re-posting of a number of foreign service employees, at some considerable cost and inconvenience

There is no credible scenario under which Manning would not be prosecuted under the UCMJ for randomly dumping hundreds of thousands of documents. If the military refused to prosecute him, the civilian government could only interpret that as a violation of the principle of civilian rule, and military officers would be removed and replaced until the principle of civilian rule was decisively restored

The military, moreover, will have its own internal reasons to prosecute: military matters often require a certain secrecy, and the military is not going to establish the precedent that dumping huge volumes of information, for everyone to read, is acceptable. I think we can say with some confidence that during WWI or WWII any Allied soldier, who released to the general public thousands of restricted documents (regardless of their content), would have been hanged quickly: fortunately, these times are not those times, so Manning does not face execution, though he will face a long prison term. I hope he gets out of prison still young enough to do something worthwhile, since he obviously has some intelligence

I suspect you and I share similar views regarding oligarchy, plutocracy, and war-mongering profiteers. If we do not share similar views regarding the importance of conventionial politics, then I might urge you to heed the advice of Anatoly Kuznetsov's advice in his lengthy Babi-Yar: "Despise politics, but never ignore it!" I hope we share similar views regarding the importance of grassroots organizing. But IMO success requires careful accurate thinking rooted in facts and details, and I worry that over-hasty idealization and easy sloganeering produces setbacks, disillusionment, and cynicism