But know this: some 400,000 of your fellow soldiers died in the Second World War for the establishment of those principles. For that reason alone, they are something that you in the military ought to treat with the utmost seriousness.
And if the judge or prosecutor should tell you that the Nuremberg Principles don't mean a thing in our courts, they would be flat wrong. Courts have taken the Nuremberg Principles to heart before, and more and more have done so in the past few years. In 2005, for example, Judge Lieutenant Commander Robert Klant took note of the Nuremberg principles in a sentencing hearing for Pablo Paredes, a Navy Petty Officer Third Class who refused redeployment to Iraq, and whose punishment was subsequently minimized.
Similarly, at his court martial in 2009, Sergeant Matthis Chiroux justified his refusal to redeploy to a war that he believed violated both national and international law, and was backed up by expert testimony on the Nuremberg Principles. The court martial granted Sgt. Chiroux a general discharge.
A long line of Supreme Court cases, from Mitchell v. Harmony in 1851 all the way back to Little v. Barreme in 1804, established that soldiers have a duty not to follow illegal orders. In short, it is a matter of record and established precedent that these Nuremberg Principles have meant something in our courts. Yours will not be the first court martial to apply these principles, fought for and won with American blood, nor will it be the last.
Whistleblowers Are Patriots Who Sacrifice for Their Country
Whistleblowers who attempt to rectify the disastrous policies of their nation are not criminals. They are patriots, and eventually are recognized as such. Bradley Manning is by no means the first American to serve his country in such a way.
Today, Daniel Ellsberg is famous as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a secret internal history ordered up by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself that candidly recounted how a series of administrations systematically lied to the nation about the planning and prosecution of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg's massive leak of these documents helped end that war and bring down a criminal administration. How criminal? Midway through Ellsberg's trial in 1973, the Nixon administration offered the judge overseeing his treason trial the directorship of the FBI in an implicit quid pro quo, a maneuver of such brazen corruption as to shame any banana republic. The judge dismissed all the government's charges with prejudice and now Daniel Ellsberg is a national hero.
Those born after a certain date may be forgiven for assuming that Ellsberg was some long-haired subversive of an "anti-American" stripe. In fact, he had been, like Bradley Manning, a model soldier.
At the Marine Corps Basic School in Quantico, Virginia, Ellsberg graduated first in a class of some 1,100 lieutenants. He served as a platoon leader and rifle company commander in the Marine 2nd Infantry Division for three years, and deferred his graduate studies so he could remain on active duty with his battalion during the Suez Crisis of 1956. (You will note that deferring graduate school in order to stay on active military duty is the exact opposite of what so many of our recent, and current, national leaders did in those decades.) After satisfying his Reserve Officer commitment, Ellsberg was discharged from the Corps as a first lieutenant, and leaving the military went on to a distinguished career in government.
Daniel Ellsberg was a model Marine, and later a model citizen. His courageous act of leaking classified information was only one more episode in a consistent record of patriotic service. When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers he did so out of the profoundest sense of duty, knowing full well, just like Bradley Manning today, that he might spend the rest of his life in jail.
Ellsberg calls Pfc. Manning his hero and he is a tireless defender of the brave Army private our government has locked away in solitary.
Vandals trash things without a care in their hearts, but real patriots like former Lt. Ellsberg and Pfc. Manning do their duty knowing that the privilege of living in a free society does not always come cheap.
"Frankly and in the Public View": The American Tradition of Diplomacy
Today, Ellsberg himself is lionized, even by the U.S. government, as a national hero. The State Department recently put together a traveling roadshow of American documentary films to screen abroad, and front and center among them is an admiring movie about Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. But then it is only appropriate that the government recognize Ellsberg and his once-controversial disclosures as part and parcel of the American tradition.
After all, demands for more open and transparent diplomacy are as American as baseball and Hank Williams. World War I-era President Woodrow Wilson himself insisted on the abolition of secret treaties as part of his 14 points for the League of Nations; in fact, it's the very first point: "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
How can foreign policy be democratic if the most serious decisions and facts -- alliances, death tolls, assessments of the leaders and governments we are bankrolling with our tax dollars -- are all kept as official secrets? The "Bricker Amendment" was an attempt by congressional Republicans in the 1950s to require Senate approval of U.S. treaties, in large part to open up public debate about foreign affairs. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who served as representative to the U.N. for Republican President Richard Nixon, was also a severe critic of government secrecy and the habitual over-classification of state documents. These American statesmen knew that if foreign policy is crafted in secret, without the oxygen and sunlight of vigorous public debate, disaster and dysfunction would result.
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