[Infowarrior] - Manning trial draws focus on to Obama’s security state

[Richard Forno]

Manning trial draws focus on to Obama’s security state

By Geoff Dyer and Richard McGregor in Washington

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9799dbd4-ce02-11e2-a13e-00144feab7de.html

In the three years it has taken the US military to bring Bradley Manning to trial, the Obama administration might have hoped some of the political heat surrounding the biggest leak of classified information in US history would have dissipated.

Instead, the trial of the US army private, which began this week, is taking place at the worst possible time, just as the administration is already under fire for the heavy-handed way it is investigating alleged civilian leakers and the journalists they have helped.

In the form of Private Manning, a slight 25-year-old from Oklahoma, the administration now faces the prospect of a three-month-long trial that will leave it open to the same criticism levelled in recent weeks that it is trying to scare officials who release compromising information in a way that is threatening civil liberties.

“They are criminalising the embarrassment of the government,” says Alex Gibney, a film director who has made a documentary about the Manning case.

While Pte Manning may not enjoy broad popular support in the US, his treatment by US military authorities and continued prosecution despite a February confession have come to symbolise for many overseas the worst excesses of the US “war on terror” since the 9/11 attacks.

As a result, the trial is confirming one of the central paradoxes of the presidency of Mr Obama, a former constitutional law professor. At the very time he is trying to narrow the scope of counter-terrorism policy and call for a more nuanced assessment of the threats to the US from al-Qaeda, his administration has expanded important aspects of the post-9/11 national security state he inherited, from ordering drone strikes against alleged terrorists to prosecuting leakers.

Pte Manning, who worked in army intelligence in Iraq, is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, state department diplomatic cables, classified documents and two battlefield video clips to WikiLeaks in 2009 and 2010. In total, he faces 21 separate charges.

Earlier this year he confessed to leaking the information and pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges, which alone carried a penalty of 20 years in prison. However, the military prosecutors rejected a plea deal and decided to go ahead with the trial, including the most serious charge that he “aided the enemy”, which would lead to a life sentence if he were found guilty after the potential death penalty was withdrawn. 

The focus of the trial is now largely on Pte Manning’s intent when he leaked the documents, with prosecutors trying to make the case that he conspired from an early stage of his deployment in Iraq to collect information that was damaging to the US, while his defence lawyer has argued that he was greatly affected by the violence he saw in Iraq and, as Pte Manning put it in a pre-trial hearing, wanted to “spark a debate” about US foreign policy.

In a rare public comment on the Manning case, Mr Obama told a questioner last year that “he [Manning] broke the law” and that “we are a nation of laws and we do not make our own decisions about how the laws are applied”.

However, the nature of the case now against Pte Manning is being heavily criticised by some lawyers and civil liberties activists because of the potential implications for press freedom.

In his opening statement on Monday, Captain Joe Morrow claimed that Osama bin Laden personally asked to see documents about the war in Afghanistan that had been leaked – part of the prosecution’s attempt to demonstrate that Pte Manning had to know the information would be useful to America’s enemies.

“This is a logical leap that I have never seen before in a case and one that is really dangerous,” says Jesselyn Radack, a lawyer at the Government Accountability Project who has represented other officials accused of leaking.

“Once the information is on the internet, everyone has access to it, including terrorists and serial killers and all sorts of unsavoury people. If the FT or The New York Times had been found at the bin Laden compound, would that mean the newspapers were also aiding the enemy?”

William Leonard, a former Pentagon and National Archives official who was responsible for managing the system of classified information, says that the trial has exposed the deep flaws in the way secrets are established and kept.

More than 4m people now have access to classified information, while the amount of documents considered secret has expanded rapidly since 9/11. “The Manning case was the perfect opportunity to rethink the system, yet nothing is ever done to hold accountable people who abuse the classified system by creating phoney secrets,” he says. “Cracking down on leakers and ordering more polygraphs and background checks is not going to get you anywhere.”

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