At 1 p.m. on Tuesday July 30, 2013, Private First Class Bradley Manning, the self-confessed source of the WikiLeaks cables, learned the result of his eight-week-long trial. Manning is found not guilty charged with aiding the enemy, which could result in life in a military prison with no opportunity for parole, but was found guilty of other charges including multiple violations of the Espionage Act. The sentencing will be handed down on Wednesday.
For this case, the American government argued that PFC Manning knew that by releasing those more than 700,000 documents, that PFC Manning was aiding Al-Qaeda and other anti-American forces. PFC Manning, on the other hand, says that he released the files because he was "depressed about the situation here," and "[he] believed if the public was aware of the data, it would start a public debate of the wars."
PFC Manning has already plead guilty to 10 lesser crimes of the 21 with which he is charged, which could result in up to 20 years in prison. Manning got nothing in exchange for his plea.
News agencies have already noted that this verdict could set several important precedents. For instance, it could scare potential leakers or whistle blowers into not publishing their information, even when they have information that the public would benefit from knowing. It could paint the United States internationally as opposed to freedom of information and encourage the notion that the American government has dark secrets to hide.
What this verdict will not do, however, is prosecute those who committed the possible crimes and committed the (to put it mildly) disturbing actions revealed by some of the documents PFC Manning released. The footage and files that upset PFC Manning so much he risked life in prison to bring them to public attention have, unfortunately, not led to the end of the wars or the prosecutions for war crimes that he might have anticipated.
For instance, this video of American soldiers firing on civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, while attempting to shoot two possibly-armed men in the street and subsequently indiscriminately firing on a van of Iraqis attempting to remove the bodies of the dead and wounded from the road has not led to a high profile criminal case. Reuters previously requested the footage under the Freedom of Information Act, but it was denied.
The military objected to the video's release and defended the soldiers' actions. Said Captain Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman at U.S. Central Command, "It gives you a limited perspective. The video only tells you a portion of the activity that was happening that day. Just from watching that video, people cannot understand the complex battles that occurred. You are seeing only a very narrow picture of the events … Our forces were engaged in combat all that day with individuals that fit the description of the men in that video. Their age, their weapons, and the fact that they were within the distance of the forces that had been engaged made it apparent these guys were potentially a threat."
Arguably, this video may have achieved what PFC Manning wanted and what the government has accused him of doing. The sight of American soldiers killing Iraqi civilians has clearly not endear them to local populations and could be used by terrorists as a recruiting tool. It has also exposed to the American public some of what the American military is really doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether or not it spurred the national debate PFC Manning hoped or the prosecution of those soldiers.
So, PFC Bradley Manning will possibly spend decades in jail for attempting to alert Americans and the world to the fact that the way wars are conducted is difficult to control, potentially deadly even to non-combatants, and unknown even to the populations of the countries claiming to be at war. Those who killed civilians and journalists from a helicopter, on the other hand, will not.
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