Thanks to Bradley Manning, the world learned important information about the U.S. government’s misconduct abroad. He pled guilty February 28 to leaking 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, the international source that has exposed the malfeasance of institutions the world over. He leaked these documents to reveal the government’s obsession ‘with killing and capturing people’ and ‘to make the world a better place.’ The documents shined light on mistreated detainees at Guantánamo and such atrocities as the now notorious 2007 civilian killings in Iraq that were publicized in the ‘Collateral Murder‘ video three years ago. Some have argued that some of the tens of thousands of diplomatic cables helped incite the Arab Spring.
Manning is expected to serve up to 20 years in prison. This, after he already languished for over a thousand days in detention. The Obama administration held him in a particularly sadistic form of solitary confinement for nine months, which over 250 lawyers protested in an open letter to the government.
Such solitary confinement was, of course, a form of torture, as most of the civilized world recognizes, despite Obama’s campaign promises to abolish the gruesome practice. Manning’s treatment also calls into question another one of Obama’s political vows: He had pledged in 2008 to rigorously protect whistle-blowers, whose ‘acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.’
Instead, Obama has undertaken a war on whistle-blowers that makes George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. The politician who promised and continues to boast unprecedented transparency arguably presides over its least transparent administration in history, which classified 92 million documents in 2011, and which, according to the Bloomberg News, has ‘prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all [of Obama’s] predecessors combined, including law-and-order Republicans John Mitchell, Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft.’ Manning is among those so far targeted by this draconian legislation. This crackdown on whistle-blowers almost surely has a profound chill effect, discouraging people from coming forward with information about government wrongdoing.
The legal process Manning has faced has been even more a sham than usual. Â …
Update: Would you read the comments under the Huffington Post version? Liberals. My God, they’re conservative.
