If so, those fellow soldiers have all been notably lucky; the Pentagon has admitted that none died as a result of Manning's leaks in 2010. But many of his fellow soldiers lost their limbs or their lives in U.S. warfare made possible by the kind of lies that the U.S. government is now prosecuting Bradley Manning for exposing.
In the real world, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, prosecution for leaks is extremely slanted. " Let's apply the government's theory in the Manning case to one of the most revered journalists in Washington: Bob Woodward, who has become one of America's richest reporters, if not the richest, by obtaining and publishing classified information far more sensitive than anything WikiLeaks has ever published," Greenwald wrote in January.
He noted that "one of Woodward's most enthusiastic readers was Osama bin Laden," as a 2011 video from al-Qaeda made clear. And Greenwald added that "the same Bob Woodward book [Obama's Wars] that Osama bin Laden obviously read and urged everyone else to read disclosed numerous vital national security secrets far more sensitive than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking. Doesn't that necessarily mean that top-level government officials who served as Woodward's sources, and the author himself, aided and abetted al-Qaida?"
But the prosecution of Manning is about carefully limiting the information that reaches the governed. Officials who run U.S. foreign policy choose exactly what classified info to dole out to the public. They leak like self-serving sieves to mainline journalists such as Woodward, who has divulged plenty of "Top Secret" information -- a category of classification higher than anything Bradley Manning is accused of leaking.
While pick-and-choose secrecy is serving Washington's top war-makers, the treatment of U.S. citizens is akin to the classic description of how to propagate mushrooms: keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.
In effect, for top managers of the warfare state, "the enemy" is democracy.
Let's pursue the inquiry put forward by columnist Amy Davidson early this year. If it is aiding the enemy "to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government," then in reality "who is aiding the enemy -- the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?"
Candid answers to such questions are not only inadmissible in the military courtroom where Bradley Manning is on trial. Candor is also excluded from the national venues where the warfare state preens itself as virtue's paragon.
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