Transparency Isn't Treason: NY Times Journalist questions charge

PFC Bradley Manning. Photograph: AFP/Brendan Smialowski/Getty

Susan Brannon

20 January 2013

I agree with the New York Times editor Margaret Sullivan and the Los Angeles Times editorial regarding the charges against Bradley Manning.  Our Press freedom is at stake, those how would be our sources is at stake and journalists who help keep our governments accountable to its citizens through investigative reporting are at stake.  In the end, our freedom is at stake.  With these types of open ended interpretations of our laws, then anyone could be viewed as "aiding our enemy" with the call for treason. If a journalists finds important information that the public has the right to know, and a high level government official does not like the "news" then what was written can be twisted and viewed in a way that could lead to "aiding the enemy". 

Manning did not have evidence of contact with "hostile nations or terrorists"...in fact, how that that phrase be viewed? Am I as a journalist, who has entered into Gaza, Jenin, Ramallah considered having contact with "hostile nations"?  I was reporting the news plain and simple.  I went into Jenin after 40 days of incursion and bombing of tons of homes to report what had happened.  Yes, I admit I did speak to some Palestinians, and that is not a crime.  I interviewed people who were eye witnesses to what happened while all news agencies were blocked form entering.  Actually, I snuck inside during near the end of the 40 day incursion, bullet proof vest and all.  Could our American government now say that I may have both "aided the enemy and had contact with hostile nations?  The contact depending on which side is the "right" side, actually.  I had contact on both sides, I spoke with the IDF, Mozan, those on the ground.  Umm, what enemy did I aid?  I wonder.

Repost: Bradley Manning Website

Last week in Fort Meade, MD, government prosecutors said that if PFC Bradley Manning had released documents to the New York Times instead of WikiLeaks, they would still charge him with indirectly ‘aiding the enemy,’ which carries a life sentence.

This would be unprecedented: never before has a soldier been sent to jail for ‘aiding the enemy’ as a result of giving information to a news outlet. Government prosecutors argue that Manning needn’t have intended to aid the enemy; merely that he knew Al Qaeda could use the information is enough. This would turn all government whistle-blowing into treason: a grave threat to both potential sources and American journalism.

Following this contention in court, the Los Angeles Times called on the government to drop the ‘aiding the enemy’ charge, writing in an editorial, “That charge strikes us as excessive in the absence of evidence that Manning consciously colluded with hostile nations or terrorists.”

Since then, even higher-profile media members have condemned the military’s pernicious claim and the precedent it would set. In an email in which she explained she couldn’t speak on behalf of her newspaper but could comment as a lifelong journalist and a former newspaper editor, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan said,

“The implications for press freedom in the Bradley Manning prosecution trouble me, as does the federal government’s unprecedented targeting, in recent years, of whistleblowers and those who leak to the press.  The issues certainly aren’t black and white, but if the public expects the press to do its crucial job in our democracy, people ought to be more worried than they apparently are.  And I agree with the Los Angeles Times editorial that the “aiding the enemy” charge, which could result in a life sentence, is excessive.”

New York Times columnist and former executive editor Bill Keller said, “I think the treatment of Manning feels heavy-handed and out of proportion to actual harm done.”

In Michael Calderone’s story for the Huffington Post, “Manning Case Raises Troubling Questions For Journalists,” about the implications of this argument, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest said, “they don’t want other people to get the idea that they should be doing this,” and that it’ll have a “chilling effect on sources.”

Glenn Greenwald wrote for the Guardian, “[the government’s argument] can be – and almost certainly will be – just as easily applied to the vast majority of leaks on which investigative journalism has always relied.”

Mainstream news outlets, Greenwald said,

“might want to take a serious interest in this fact and marshal opposition to what is being done to Bradley Manning: if not out of concern for the injustices to which he is being subjected, then out of self-interest, to ensure that their reporters and their past and future whistle-blowing sources cannot be similarly persecuted.”

So why does the government continue to prosecute this way? Keller said, “It’s been clear from the outset that the government decided to make a lesson of Bradley Manning,” and that “the extreme conditions of his early confinement and the aiding-the-enemy charges suggest a deep animus toward Bradley.”

As the government works to discourage future leakers and to tighten security, it also classifies exponentially more documents every day. This harms the very people Bradley Manning wanted to inform in the first place: the American people.