Cleared of the most serious charge — aiding and abetting the enemy — but convicted of most everything
else, including espionage, Pfc. Bradley Manning is now facing sentencing, which could land him behind bars from roughly zero to more than 100 years.
It’s a wild range, and the result will ride on whether the military court views him as a naive but sincere whistleblower (his attorney’s and supporters’ belief) or a callous traitor (the prosecution) who knew or should have known that his massive leak of classified documents to WikiLeaks would have negative consequences for American lives and interests around the world.
in Moscow; the director of “The Act of Killing” describes reenacting real life executions in Indonesia; and Bradley Manning acquitted of aiding the enemy.
But how does Manning stack up in the taxonomy of recent spillers of national-security secrets?
It’s a difficult case, says Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, because the sheer volume of Manning’s leaks (more than 700,000 pages of classified documents, plus videos) encompasses such varied material. He says the release of the “Collateral Murder” video, which shows U.S. forces gunning down unarmed civilians in Afghanistan in 2007, counts as a “public service,” while the disclosure of hundreds of names of people working with U.S. and Afghan forces was “reckless.”
“When you’re leaking hundreds of thousands of cables and logs of [military] interactions with civilians, you’re leaking a lot of names of people who are going to be put at real risk,” he says.
Still, he says that the government routinely marks material as classified that doesn’t need to be and that the government tends to overreact to leaks. And many see a sort of sister issue in the acts of Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who disclosed the government’s massive phone surveillance program to the Guardian and The Washington Post and then fled abroad.
As high-profile as these cases are, how many can even remember the name of Samuel Loring Morison?
He’s the only other government employee to have been convicted of espionage for giving classified documents to the media. In 1985, Morison gave a British military publication, Jane’s Defence Weekly, classified pictures of Soviet military assets. Convicted and sentenced to two years in prison, he was pardoned by Bill Clinton in 2001.
There was a big to-do, but it didn’t last, and that’s part of the issue with the Manning case, several national security experts say. The case’s intense media coverage gives an inflated image to what might not turn out to be all that dramatic in terms of actual damage to national security. By contrast, the case of Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI agent turned KGB informer, was deadly serious but did not reverberate for several years in daily news reports.
“The Hanssen case played out largely in private because he pleaded guilty, there was no trial and the actions occurred before the Internet era,” says David A. Vise, author of “The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History”.
Courtesy: Washington Post.