Glenn Greenwald writes today: “The U.S. Army yesterday announced that it has filed 22 additional charges against Bradley Manning, the Private accused of being the source for hundreds of thousands of documents (as well as [the video 'Collateral Murder']) published over the last year by WikiLeaks. Most of the charges add little to the ones already filed, but the most serious new charge is for ‘aiding the enemy,’ a capital offense under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although military prosecutors stated that they intend to seek life imprisonment rather than the death penalty for this alleged crime, the military tribunal is still empowered to sentence Manning to death if convicted.”
Manning is alleged to have stated last year, prior to the uprisings now embroiling the Mideast: “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public. … Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed.”
COLEEN ROWLEY
Rowley, whose May 2002 memo described some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures, was named one of Time Magazine’s people of the year in 2002 along with Enron and WorldCom whistleblowers Sherron Watkins and Cynthia Cooper. She said today: “The charging of Bradley Manning with (somehow indirectly but intentionally) ‘aiding the enemy’ is consistent with the Department of Justice’s legal motion filed January 11 of this year in the Jeffrey Sterling case that asserted that leaking is worse than spying for a foreign enemy: ‘The defendant’s unauthorized disclosures, however, may be viewed as more pernicious than the typical espionage case where a spy sells classified information for money.’
“None of the four actual identified real spies of the last three decades (CIA agents Ivan Nicholson and Aldrich Ames and FBI agents Earl Pitts and Robert Hanssen) who sold United States national security information to the Soviet Union and Russia, ultimately faced the death penalty. These actual CIA and FBI agents’ spying for the Soviets did far greater damage to the U.S. than the mere embarrassment allegedly caused by Manning but they did not face the death penalty. The info that Hanssen and Aldrich Ames sold, led to the identification and execution of double agents by the USSR. But in fact Robert Hanssen’s wife even got to keep her portion of his FBI pension.
“If leaking to the public to expose governmental illegality and/or war crimes is considered worse than spying for a foreign country, the question then arises: ‘Who IS the enemy?’ Is it us?”
Rowley recently co-wrote a piece titled “OMB Orders Government Agencies to Monitor Disgruntled Employees — What’s Next?”
Note to producers: The song “You are the Domestic Enemy,” which features a voice mix with Noam Chomsky, may be appropriate as a lead in.
RAY McGOVERN
McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, whose duties included preparing the President’s Daily Brief and chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is featured in a recent Panorama segment on German TV. See in English
He said today: “After the U.S. Army abuses at Abu Ghraib became public in April 2004, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba led the first (and only honest) investigation. In May 2004 he completed a report that was extremely critical of the Army; it was leaked to the press. For Taguba, this was not career enhancing. [Read more...]
