As much hay as the government has made about the supposed damage done to the United States by Pfc. Chelsea Manning’s massive leak of classified documents to WikiLeaks three years ago, you might think that those revelations were the biggest breach of U.S. national security in American history.
Leavenworth Penitentiary
Manning’s sentence of 35 years surpasses by far any punishment that anyone has ever received for similar offenses. By comparison, former Navy intelligence officer Samuel Morrison was sentenced to two years for giving classified satellite photographs toJane’s Defense Weekly in 1985.
The 35 years that Manning got was so far removed from what could be considered reasonable that even the New York Times – which has maintained a relatively neutral stance over the case for the past three years – was compelled to call it “far too long a sentence by any standard” in an editorial Wednesday.
Indeed, 35 years is a harsh sentence in the extreme, one that should be reserved only for the most heinous crimes – for example, violence against children, rape, murder and torture.
Ironically, it was precisely those sorts of crimes that Manning exposed three years ago that got her in so much trouble in the first place.
After being rebuffed by her commanding officer and rejected by traditional news outlets like the New York Times, the young Army intelligence analyst provided three important bodies of documents to WikiLeaks.
The Iraq war logs consisted of 391,000 field reports, including the notorious “Collateral Murder” video of U.S. soldiers gunning down a crowd of Iraqi civilians, injuring two small children and killing two Reuters journalists in July 2007. These logs also included documentation of the Haditha massacre in which 24 Iraqi civilians, most of them women, children and the elderly, were systematically murdered by U.S. Marines (a crime for which the perpetrators were never punished).
Following that release, there were 90,000 Afghan war logs, revealing how coalition forces had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents in Afghanistan and how a secret “black” unit of special forces had hunted down suspected Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.
And, finally, Manning’s document release included 260,000 diplomatic cables, which arguably had the most impact globally, providing for example the spark for the Arab Spring.
Indeed, it could be argued that the biggest journalistic stories of the past half-decade can be attributed to the courage that Pfc. Manning showed by providing these documents to WikiLeaks back in 2010. But, in a sense, none of these are the biggest revelations that Pfc. Manning brought to light.
Sadly, the biggest story is the lengths that the U.S. government will go to in its attempts to silence and punish whistleblowers, and the shameful silence of the American public at large when these abuses are carried out in plain sight.
Read more at :-http://my.firedoglake.com/natparry/2013/08/23/mannings-biggest-revelation-of-all/
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