Glenn Greenwald: The intellectual cowardice of Bradley Manning’s critics

[JackRiddler]

69. Who has suggested that Manning is being prosecuted under international law? The point rather is...

that the criminals he helped to expose are not being prosecuted under international or any other law, although they should and must be before the US government is ever again to claim legitimacy or the status of a civilized nation.

Elements of the United States government planned and committed a war of aggression on several nations, but the case of Iraq is clear-cut and especially monstrous. A plan was devised over years, a pretext was invented, a campaign of lies was waged against the American people, and an aggression was launched on a nation that posed no threat to them. Hundreds of thousands are dead as a direct consequence or predictable result, millions are maimed, traumatized and displaced, the wealth and well-being of a people is shattered, an ecology has been poisoned.

The planners and perpetrators are known. The government and its agencies have committed a long series of foreign aggressions in recent decades. In the words of Martin Luther King, it still represents "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Covert aggressions have been among the most frequent and significant of its crimes; the State Department has been a tool and cover for these crimes, as well as more of a pedestrian water-carrier for private corporate interests regardless of the interests of the people (as the cables have usefully documented).

Under the doctrines of international law introduced and propagated by the Allied victors of World War II, (in an effort that the US spearheaded) soldiers and civil servants have a duty to resist the machinery of aggression. In the aftermath of military aggression and genocide by states that conferred on themselves the mantle of legalism, the Nuremberg doctrines defined a category of crime so obvious to any natural human being and so heinous by nature that it cannot be protected by devices of written law; such a regime can arrange the law to render its murders are legal, but that does not make it so. All regime members and servants have a duty to resist such crimes, and cannot use the following of orders as their excuse for committing them.

Assuming the allegations against him are true, Manning followed his duty to this higher law, which again, I must emphasize: is based in doctrine devised by the United States. He had no duty to follow the legalistic channels you mention (IGs and whistleblower "protections," that is a laugh) by which such crimes are usually not revealed, but rather covered up and minimized. The murders he witnessed on the Apache helicopter video had already been covered up for years.

As long as the regime criminals, whose crime reached genocidal proportions, remain unpunished, this government has no claim to legitimacy in the area of "national security" and the idea is absurd that Manning is being prosecuted for revealing truth (under whatever torturedly precised rendering of laws protecting precious and usually overclassified memos) while the planners and mass murderers are free and prosper and to a large extent still in power. He is defamed and called a traitor while everyone from the architects of war crimes to the animals who massacred civilians and their rescuers from aerial fortresses in a country they had invaded as aggressors go untouched. It's some kind of bitter joke.

The cult of secrecy, the idea that several million people have "clearance" to know the practical aspects of what a supposedly democratic government does, but the citizen in whose name this government commits its crimes have no right to know how their taxes are spent, is essential to enabling crimes and protecting the criminals.

Manning's prosecution is rendered all the more absurd by the self-evident period of torture practiced on him for most of the 18 months of his detention, most of that time without charges. The treatment and harsh further punishments planned against Manning (ridiculously disproportionate) are meant as a frightful example to all others who would follow their consciences.