by John W. Whitehead

Recently
by John W. Whitehead: Move
Over, Traffic Court, It’s Time for a New Money-Making Scheme – School
Truancy Laws Jail Parents and Levy Excessive Fines

Time and again,
throughout AmericaÂ’s history, individuals with a passion for
truth and a commitment to justice have opted to defy the unjust
laws and practices of the American government in order to speak
up against slavery, segregation, discrimination, and war. Even when
their personal safety and freedom were on the line, these individuals
spoke up, knowing they would be chastised, ridiculed, arrested,
branded traitors and even killed.

Indeed, while
brave men and women such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry David
Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman are lauded as American
heroes today, they were once considered enemies of the state.

Thanks to the
U.S. governmentÂ’s growing intolerance for dissidents who insist
on transparency and accountability, oppose its endless wars and
targeted killings of innocent civilians and terrorists alike, and
demand that government officials abide by the rule of law, that
list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing.

One such “enemy
of the state” is Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst who
has been targeted by the Obama administration for holding up a mirror
to the bloated face of American empire. Manning is being prosecuted
for leaking classified government documents which, like the Pentagon
Papers a generation ago, expose systemic corruption within AmericaÂ’s
military and diplomatic apparatus. The embarrassment caused by showing
that the emperor has no clothes, as it were, has made Bradley Manning
public enemy number one in the eyes of the federal government.

As Chris Hedges
explains:

“Manning
provided to the public the most important window into the inner
workings of imperial power since the release of the Pentagon Papers.
The routine use of torture, the detention of Iraqis who were innocent,
the inhuman conditions within our secret detention facilities,
the use of State Department officials as spies in the United Nations,
the collusion with corporations to keep wages low in developing
countries such as Haiti, and specific war crimes such as the missile
strike on a house that killed seven children in Afghanistan would
have remained hidden without Manning.”

Despite not
being convicted of any crime, Manning has been put through a horror
trip since the first day of his incarceration in the military brig
at Quantico. He has spent 1,000 days in jail without trial, a large
portion of which was passed in solitary confinement, imprisoned
in a windowless 6 x 12 foot cell containing a bed, a drinking fountain
and a toilet. Manning was kept under Suicide and/or Prevention of
Injury (POI) watch during his incarceration, largely against the
advice of two forensic psychiatrists. Under suicide watch, Manning
was confined to his tiny cell for 24 hours a day and stripped of
all clothing with the exception of his underwear.

Once he was
finally brought before a military court, Manning pled guilty to
ten of the twenty-two charges brought against him, admitting that
he leaked the documents because he believed that the public has
a right to know about the governmentÂ’s misdeeds. ManningÂ’s
admission guarantees that he will be put into prison for up to twenty
years. However, instead of proceeding to sentencing, government
prosecutors are insisting on pressing the most serious charges against
him, including “aiding the enemy,” in an attempt to imprison
him for life.

The governmentÂ’s
aim is clear: to make an example of Manning (what Yale professor
Eugene Fidell describes as an attempt to “scare the daylights
out of other people”), thereby discouraging anyone else from
defying the regime or daring to lay bare the inner workings of a
corrupt government.

Indeed, despite
promising unprecedented levels of transparency when he ascended
to the presidency in 2009, Obama has invoked the WWI-era Espionage
Act more times than all his predecessors combined as a means of
silencing all internal dissent and criticism. ObamaÂ’s administration
has also launched an all-out campaign to roust out, prosecute, and
imprison government whistleblowers for exposing government corruption,
incompetence, and greed.

Thus, Bradley
Manning is merely the latest whistleblower to be singled out for
punishment. So determined is the government to crucify Manning that
government prosecutors plan to make the case that Manning essentially
aided and abetted Osama bin Laden. ManningÂ’s trial, which promises
to be a government spectacle of manufactured “shock and awe,”
will feature testimony from an anonymous Navy Seal who took part
in the raid on Osama bin LadenÂ’s Abbottabad compound. This
Seal will reportedly testify that he recovered computer discs in
Osama bin LadenÂ’s personal effects containing government material
that originated from ManningÂ’s leak.

What the government
is attempting to suggest is that if an individual or news organization
publishes information that is accessed by terrorists over the internet,
for example, then those individuals or news organizations are essentially
guilty of collusion.

Stacking the
odds in their favor, government prosecutors have refused to allow
ManningÂ’s defense team to interview government witnesses or
to introduce evidence showing that ManningÂ’s leak of government
information did little, if any, harm to U.S. interests other than
showing that the Obama administration is no different from its predecessors.
In fact, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the publication
of the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary had “not revealed
any sensitive intelligence sources or methods.” As for the
leak of some 250,000 State Department documents, a report by Reuters
indicates that the damage caused was “limited,” and was
for the most part simply an embarrassment to the Obama administration.

Manning reacted
as one would hope any honorable American would react when they witness
their government acting in a manner that is corrupt, incompetent,
inhumane, immoral and, it must be said, downright evil.

To his credit,
Manning refused to remain silent. He spoke out, first to his superiors,
who turned a deaf ear to his concerns, then to the New York Times
and Washington Post. When he still could find no one willing
to alert the American people to what their government was really
doing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, he turned to Wikileaks.

The rest, as
they say, is history.

March
12, 2013

Constitutional
attorney and author John W. Whitehead [send
him mail] is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. He is the author of The
Change Manifesto (Sourcebooks).

Copyright
© 2013 The Rutherford Institute

The
Best of John W. Whitehead