Maybe its just me… I’m sure its just me … but still…
Seems like he’d be all over the news for the last month if he was related to Sarah Palin or a card-carrying Tea Bagger.
What with all the wikileaks hang wringing and the DADT angle too. Now I see a crawl at the bottom of my TV that the UN is not happy with the way the poor guy is being treated.
Like I said, I’m sure its just me… hopefully I can be convinced that he is being treated exactly like your average alleged secrets leaker would be treated. I don’t want to continue to go thru life jaded this way.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. Are you asking if Manning is getting the publicity he wanted? I have no way of knowing how much publicity he wanted…from my observations of “men on the street” types, I’d say Julian Assange has much more notoriety amongst the hoi polloi than Manning.
“Average alleged secret leaker” is also a vague term. Other people have in the past leaked things that were classified as secret. One that immediately comes to mind is Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. He was charged but so many acts of government misconduct against Ellsberg were revealed during the trial that the judge dismissed the case. I don’t remember and can’t find out via Google whether or not Ellsberg was incarcerated while being tried, or if his incarceration was in the form of solitary confinement.
One big difference between Ellsberg and Manning is that Manning was active duty military, Ellsberg was a civilian analyst working for the Pentagon. It’s always been my observation that when the hammer comes down, the legal system is harsher on military members than the equivalent civilian courts are on civilians. People in the military tend to take their responsibilities seriously, and while a jury of civilians may have looked at Daniel Ellsberg as a hero who did something out of a sense of duty to the American people a jury of fellow service members are going to look first and foremost to the fact that Manning directly went against the policies and regulations of the military that they themselves have worked under for their entire careers. Manning’s end result is probably going to be very different than Ellsberg’s.
Most other “secret leakers” I can think of were spies, Aldrich Ames, the Rosenbergs, et cetera. Those people were definitely treated every bit as harsh as Manning is now, Ames I believe is housed in ADX Florence which is like perpetual solitary confinement. The Rosenbergs were executed etc.
Other secret leakers I can think of were people who leaked secrets pertaining to corporate misconduct, so those are very different from persons who broke statutes concerning the dissemination of classified information.
Another reason it is hard to compare Manning to other whistle blowers is what he actually did. His releasing the information about the shooting of Iraqis by a helicopter, that some have argued constituted a war crime–that could be seen as whistle blowing about an illegal action. However, within the military if you’re going to do that I believe there are channels–namely the “The Military Whistleblower Protection Act” which will protect members of the military who give information to members of Congress. Manning of course didn’t do that. Manning also released a lot of other information (really it seems like he basically grabbed everything he could, including lots of stuff that is mundane and uninteresting but still illegal for Manning to disseminate) as well that would be hard to classify as any sort of “Whistle blowing.” Ellsberg was spreading specific information around to a specific end, and Ellsberg himself even approached U.S. Senators privately long before the Pentagon Papers story broke–Ellsberg wanted a senator to read the papers into the Congressional record because a Senator cannot be charged for anything he says or enters into the record on the floor of congress. Manning didn’t do anything like that, and Manning, while he obviously had a specific ideological problem with some of the stuff he was leaking, really seems like he was just motivated out of a desire to take everything he had access to and make it public. The pure volume of data means Manning himself likely had no idea what was in 90% of the stuff he leaked.
Sure, all secret leakers are differant and hard to compare… but just imagine if this alleged secret leaker was a Tea Bagger instead of a gay soldier in the era of DADT.