| AsianDivaGirlsWebDude |
08-21-2013 09:22 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
(Post 19768373)
What war crimes were exposed? Odd, because I don't recall anything coming out of the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents Manning put online resulting in anything.
Just like Snowden - they call him a whistle blower but to date he hasn't exposed anything other than a handful of mistakes.
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http://hereandnow.wbur.org/files/201...eo-624x334.jpg
Quote:
This frame grab image taken from a video shot from a U.S. army Apache helicopter gun-sight, posted at Wikileaks.org and confirmed as authentic by a senior U.S. military official, shows a group of men in the streets of the New Baghdad district of eastern Baghdad just prior to being fired upon by the helicopter July 12, 2007. In a series of online chats Bradley Manning told of leaking classified diplomatic reports, along with this secret video, to the whistleblower website Wikileaks.org. (Wikileaks.org via AP)
A military judge has acquitted the former intelligence analyst of aiding the enemy, but convicted him of espionage, theft and computer fraud charges.
Army private Bradley Manning had already pleaded guilty to 10 charges, including sending hundreds of thousands of battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables sent by state department officials and video clips of battles.
He had refused to plead guilty to more serious allegations, including the charge that he ?aided enemies of the U.S.? which carries a life sentence.
So what is the material at the heart of this case? What did Bradley Manning reveal, and what are the prosecution and defense saying about it?
Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler, who was a witness for the defense in the Manning trial, says the prosecution?s case has broad and dangerous implications for the freedom of the press in covering national security issues.
?The basic theory that the prosecution has been pushing is that if you leak national security information to the media, and if the media publishers are on the internet, and if al-Qaida reads the internet, then you have communicated indirectly with the enemy. That essentially means that any leak to any organization that publishes on the net, is aiding the enemy,? Benkler told Here & Now.
JEREMY HOBSON, HOST:
Well, let's talk about the material at the heart of this case Yochai Benkler, who's a professor of law and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. We spoke with him before the verdict and I asked him what Bradley Manning revealed.
YOCHAI BENKLER: What the materials revealed was a broad range of issues, in particular that the levels of civilian casualties known to the U.S. military in Iraq was much higher than what was reported publicly and that various parts of the U.S. military knew that the Maliki regime was torturing political opponents and did nothing to stop this.
HOBSON: And there were videos from the battlefield that were released. I want you to listen to one. This was taken from a U.S. Apache helicopter, which fired on a small group in Baghdad in 2007.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Come on, fire.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Roger. Keep shooting.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Keep shooting.
HOBSON: Now apparently the soldiers mistook cameras for guns on the ground and ended up killing, among the dead, a Reuters news cameraman and his driver. Do you think those videos were crucial here?
BENKLER: The videos were the very first materials released and the very first materials leaked, and they offer the most vivid example of the violence of war, inhumanity, and I think the exposure represented a very visual and visceral example of how war can sweep in innocents, whether it was the Reuters cameramen who were trying to do their job on the ground, it should be said, with a group of armed insurgents.
But you also saw the gun crew shooting at a civilian van that just stopped by to try to sweep one of the injured cameramen out and to help, and the gun crew camera hears the injured two kids in the van, and they basically have this shrug, well, it's their own fault for bringing kids into a war zone. So it's a very visceral image.
HOBSON: But we know that things like this do happen in war. We know that there are accidents, and the military comes out occasionally, in the last decade of these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and says we made a mistake, we accidentally killed this innocent person. So why was this kind of detail from Bradley Manning's releases so important?
BENKLER: Reuters had been trying to get the Army to release this video for two years through Freedom of Information Act requests and had failed. And then the video came out, and it showed that essentially the Army had been resisting and refusing to acknowledge in this case an error, and the imagery moved the hypothetical understanding of collateral damage in the abstract into real human beings; a civilian walking down the street, being hit as a building is hit by a Hellfire missile. It made it human.
HOBSON: There were also 250,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department that were released. They got a lot of attention at the time, embarrassing ones. Cables from Tunisia, for example, showed that the U.S. was not behind the regime there. Some say that even helped trigger what happened there with the Arab Spring.
BENKLER: I think they actually didn't expose significant wrongdoing from the American perspective, although they certainly exposed things that American foreign diplomats did, like leaning on prosecutors in several European countries not to bring cases against CIA operatives. They did expose in various places American diplomats' observations about the local corruption, and they created significant accountability and openness in those other countries. It was very much of a global leak rather than merely an American leak.
HOBSON: So Professor Benkler, at the heart of this case is the question of aiding the enemy and whether this was just a release, an embarrassment, or whether it actually got into the wrong hands. And you have a real problem with that.
BENKLER: Absolutely. I think the prosecution's theory in this case is fundamentally dangerous to freedom of the press, fundamentally dangerous to the role of the press' watchdog in the area of national security. The basic theory that the prosecution has been pushing is that if you leak national security information to the media, and if the media publishes it on the Internet, and if al-Qaida reads the Internet, then you have communicated indirectly with the enemy.
That essentially means that any leak to any organization that publishes on the Net is aiding the enemy. Aiding the enemy is a death...
HOBSON: Well isn't it, though? I mean, couldn't you make that argument that it is aiding the enemy?
BENKLER: You could only make that argument that it is aiding the enemy if you could also say that publication of the Pentagon Papers aided the Viet Cong, if you could also say that disclosure of the illegal NSA wiretapping and its exposure aids the enemy. You would basically need to say that any exposure of our own error, illegality or incompetence aids the enemy.
HOBSON: Let me just push back against you there on one point, which is in this era, where it's so much more about intelligence than it was in the Vietnam War and just a little piece of information can be the key point, doesn't it change the circumstances?
BENKLER: I don't think so. Operational secrecy in discreet cases can be very important and even critical, but overall, our security depends on the resilience and robustness of our systems overall. And when we embrace secrecy to the point of being willing to shut down journalism, to the point of being willing to give up on the watchdog function of the state, what we will pay in terms of errors, incompetence and malfeasance will be vastly worse not only to democracy but even to security than what we gain in small-scale operational secrecy.
HOBSON: Yochai Benkler is professor of law and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. He was a witness for the defense in the Bradley Manning trial. Professor Benkler, thank you so much for joining us.
BENKLER: My pleasure, thank you.
HOBSON: And we spoke before the verdict. Again, Bradley Manning acquitted on that key charge of aiding the enemy, convicted on other charges.
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