The next time Pfc. Manning encountered evidence of war crimes, he took a different course of action.
On the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) shared by the Departments of Defense and State Manning soon found irrefutable evidence of possible war crimes, including a now-infamous "Collateral Murder" video in which a U.S. Apache helicopter mowed down some 18 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, on a street in Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The world has now seen and been shocked by this video which Reuters is alleged to have had in its possession but had not yet made public. Manning is alleged to have leaked it to the whistleblower site WikiLeaks in April 2010.
Manning also found a video and an official report on American air strikes on the village of Granai in Afghanistan's Farah Province (also known as "the Granai massacre"). According to the Afghan government, 140 civilians, including women and a large number of children, died in those strikes. He is alleged to have released that video as part of a tranche of some 92,000 military documents relating to our escalating war in Afghanistan -- already the longest war our nation has ever fought -- and Pakistan, where the war is steadily spreading. Manning is also alleged to have released to WikiLeaks some 392,000 documents regarding the Iraq War, many of which relate to the torture of prisoners, as well as some 251,000 State Department cables.
Now, in your judgment of Bradley Manning, please know that the stakes are indeed high, but not in the feverish way our political and media elites have been telling you from nearly every newspaper, channel, and website in the land. We will want you, a true jury of Manning's military peers, to ask a few questions about what's really been going on in this trial -- and in this country. After all, when we reward lawyers in the Justice Department who created memos that made torture legal with federal judgeships and regular newspaper columns, while locking lock up a whistle-blowing private, you have to ask: What country are we now living in?
This trial couldn't be more important or your judgment more crucial. The honor of our country is very much at stake in how you decide. When we let the aerial slaughter of civilian noncombatants pass without comment or review, when a reported 92 children die from an American air strike on an Afghan village and 18 civilians are shot dead on a Baghdad street without the slightest accountability, except when it comes to locking up the private who ensured that we would know about these acts -- let me repeat -- the honor of your country and mine is at stake and at risk. Not the security of your country, though the prosecution will claim otherwise, but the honor of our country, and especially the honor of our military.
Pfc. Bradley Manning is one soldier who has done his duty. He has complied with it to the letter. Now you must do your duty as members of this jury and as soldiers.
Our Whistleblower Laws Protect Pfc. Manning
The prosecution will surely tell you that none of our existing whistleblower protection laws, interpreted narrowly, apply to Bradley Manning.
I say otherwise, and so will the experts we will call to the stand. You will hear from legal expert Jesselyn Radack, an attorney and former whistleblower who was purged, punished, and then vindicated for her courageous acts of disclosing illegal wrongdoing inside the Bush administration's Department of Justice. Ms. Radack will explain to you why and how Bradley Manning is well protected by our current laws. After all, the Whistleblower Protection Act is designed to protect a government employee who exposes fraud, waste, abuse, or illegality to anyone inside or outside a government agency, including a member of the news media. This is well supported by case law. (See Horton v. Dep't of Navy, 66. F3d 279, 282 (Fed. Cir. 1995)]. Isn't that exactly what Pfc. Bradley Manning has done?
As a fallback argument, the prosecution is sure to suggest that WikiLeaks is not a real media entity in the way that the New York Times is. Any one of you who has ever gotten the news and information from the Internet knows otherwise.
The prosecution will also be eager to inform you that the Military Whistleblower Protection Act (MWPA) does not apply here. We, however, will prove to you that the act applies with great and particular force to Pfc. Manning. For one thing, the MWPA not only allows an even wider array of government officials to make disclosures of classified information, it also broadens the scope of what kinds of disclosure a soldier can make. It expressly allows disclosures of classified information by members of the armed forces if they have a "reasonable belief" that what is being disclosed offers evidence of a "violation of the law," "an abuse of authority," or "a substantial danger to public safety." In other words, the purpose of the Military Whistleblower Protection Act is to protect soldiers just like Pfc. Manning who report on improper -- or in this case, patently illegal -- activities by other military personnel.
Now, there is no strict precedent, the prosecution will claim, for any of our whistleblower protection laws to apply to Pfc. Manning. But as we will make clear, there is no contrary precedent either. That's because we've never seen a whistleblower disclosure as massive, vivid, and horrific as this one. We are in uncharted territory. If the plain language of these whistleblower protection laws is unclear, legal convention dictates that we look at the laws' intent. Clearly Congress meant, and legislative history supports this, for the whistleblower protection laws to protect whistleblowers, not -- as this administration seems to think -- to prosecute them.
The progress of our common law is prudent, it is incremental, it is slow. But our common law is not dead. It does progress. Whether the common law will take that small step forward in the case of Pfc. Manning is your duty to decide. And your decision will have repercussions.
For if you convict Bradley Manning, then you are also clearing the way to try and possibly convict Army Specialist Joseph Darby, the whistleblower who leaked the Abu Ghraib photos and thereby ended acts of torture and abuse that were shaming our military and our nation. Now, Specialist Darby did not leak the photos of this disgrace up the chain of command or to the Army Inspector General as our whistleblower law envisions. Instead, he leaked it straight to the Army Criminal Investigative Division, and this path is not strictly what our whistleblower laws allow. Was Spc. Joseph Darby doing his duty as an honorable soldier when he exposed the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib? Or was he just trying to damage the United States? Your verdict on Bradley Manning could reopen that question, and answer it anew.
If you convict Bradley Manning, you will also potentially be convicting the father of Army Specialist Adam Winfield. In February 2010, Winfield informed his father, Christopher Winfield, a marine veteran, via Facebook, of a homicidal "Kill Team" at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, that was murdering civilians. Winfield's father tried to sound the alarm via phone calls to the Army Inspector General's 24-hour hotline, to Senator Bill Nelson, and even to members of his son's command unit in Fort Lewis.
Both father and son went beyond the "proper" channels to stop the murder of innocent Afghan civilians. Spc. Winfield is now on trial for possible complicity in the "kill team" murders, but no charges have been filed against his father. Tell me, then: Is Winfield's father guilty of damaging his country because he tried to warn the Army about a homicidal "kill team" in the ranks? Whether you like it or not, whether you care to or not, this is something you will decide when you render your judgment on Bradley Manning's actions.
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