The charge of "aiding the enemy", of which whistleblower Bradley Manning, was thankfully acquitted on Tuesday, said much about the level of security hysteria with which the Obama administration has become infected. The message was being sent out that Manning, and indeed the media that published the Wikileaks material, were involved in nothing short of treason and abetting Al Qaeda, a preposterous, intimidating message, that, if confirmed by the court martial, would inevitably have cast a deeply chilling shadow over freedom of the press. Aiding the enemy is punishable by death.
In the end presiding judge Col. Denise Lind pulled back. After being held without trial for three years, nine months of which amounted to punitive and abusive solitary confinement, Manning was convicted on 19 of 22 counts, including multiple violations of the Espionage Act, espionage – a first for a US whisleblower – theft and computer fraud. He had leaked some 720,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, insisting during a pre-trial hearing he did so to expose the US military's "bloodlust" and disregard for human life, and what he considered American diplomatic deceit. He could still face up to 128 years in prison from the sentencing hearing currently under way.
There is no sign, moreover, that anyone has yet been called to account for any of the crimes he exposed, most notably many cases of the killing of innocent civilians by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. Shooting the messenger is easier and less threatening to a state in denial.
The context of the prosecution is what the New York Times has called the emergence of "a national-security apparatus that has metastasized into a vast and largely unchecked exercise of government secrecy and the overzealous prosecution of those who breach it". Bizarrely, as many as 4.2 million state employees and contractors are sufficiently part of this apparatus to have clearance to view the sort of material Manning released and many of the 92 million documents the state classifies every year.
Overzealous pursuit of leakers/whisleblowers has now become standard operating procedure for this administration, but has not stopped the revelations coming – Edward Snowden, still trapped in Sheremetevo airport, blew the lid off the National Security Agency's indiscriminate, and illegal, collection of all Americans' telephone logs and widespread surveillance of private communications in supposedly friendly countries.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, with some justice, called the verdict "an example of national security extremism". He clearly remains the government's next target – prosecutors made repeated attempts, apparently unsuccessfully, to steer the evidence towards a conclusion that Assange and Manning were co-conspirators.
It is high time, however, for the administration to pull back from its security obsession. Its point has been made, and thoroughly, and justice would be best served by a moderate sentence on a man who is at worst a misguided patriot.