Maybe Matt Taibbi feels that he is just balancing the ledger. If a bunch of hack reporters are unjustly trashing Bradley Manning and making the debate about his trial too much about Manning’s personality quirks, then Taibbi is justified in airbrushing out the seriousness of Manning’s crimes. In reality, Taibbi is as guilty of hackdom as the reporters he excoriates.
The following paragraph is dead wrong.
Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.
Why the parentheses around the word classified? Does Taibbi dispute that Manning was complicit in the dumping of 270,000 classified documents on the internet? How many of those documents involved war crimes or other behavior that warranted public disclosure?
The trial has everything to do with who Bradley Manning is and what his motives were, because he is being accused of knowingly aiding the enemy. If he had restricted himself to disclosing videos and cables that indicated that the government was covering up war crimes, then his motive would not be in question. He would be an unambiguous whistleblower.
What he did, however, was to unilaterally declassify our State Department’s internal communications. I think it’s important to realize that he didn’t intend for it all to be published, but he is the one that made it possible for others to publish it. This is not whistle-blowing. It is leaking on the grandest scale. And it goes beyond embarrassment. It impacted our ability to do diplomacy.
As an institution, our government is never going to agree that it is rotten to the core and that its employees have the right to expose that anytime they want. Even if there are problems with over-classification, we have a system in place for declassifying documents. We can improve this system but we can’t abandon it wholesale. It’s true that the public can learn many things that it ought to know if we make all our diplomatic cables public, but it’s also true that the State Department cannot function if it can’t have the reasonable expectation that it can communicate in confidence.
If there is anything being under-discussed in the debate over Bradley Manning, it is the importance of deterring a repeat of leaks on this scale. How do you best assure that no one will ever get it into their head again that it is a good idea to leaks hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables? That’s a completely legitimate question. And the prosecution of Bradley Manning is the government’s answer to that question.
Unless Manning’s supporters are willing to come up with an alternative answer, rather than simply defending Manning and criticizing the government, then they won’t have any say in this debate.
His trial might have been about war crimes if all he had revealed were war crimes. But that isn’t even close to what happened.
