Manning’s Wikileaks choice has implications for Snowden

Pvt. Bradley Manning, who leaked the largest trove of classified documents in United States history, faces upwards of 130 years in prison after being convicted of a host of charges earlier this week.

Sentencing got underway on Wednesday at Fort Meade, but it’s already known he won’t face the death penalty after being found not guilty of the most serious charge — aiding the enemy.

A key issue in determining Manning’s sentence is the question of his intent. Why did he leak the documents and what did he think was going to happen after they were made public?

These now pertinent issues weren’t considered during Manning’s trial. In military court, the government must prove only that the accused knew his leak could fall into enemy hands. 

“The bar for what the government had to prove was actually quite low, so it says a lot that the government wasn’t even able to prove that on the aiding the enemy charge,” said Elizabeth Goiten, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Project at NYU’s School of Law.

Much has been made about Manning’s choice to bring his information to Wikileaks, which has a notorious reputation in comparison to traditional news outlets. Some consider Wikileaks to be anarchic or anti-American, and thus projected that onto Manning, a man with a difficult family history and was just 22 at the time of the leak.

“I think also there is a sort of an added animus, unfairly, but really aimed at Bradley Manning because of his alliance with Wikileaks which is perceived as a kind of hacker, anarchist, anti-American outfit,” said Bill Keller, former New York Times Executive Editor. “That contributes to this aura that what Manning did is not only criminal but somehow traitorous.”

At one point, he considered taking the many thousands and bits of classified footage to the New York Times, Washington Post or Politico, but eventually chose Wikileaks just months into his deployment to Iraq in 2010. 

Whether public and court opinion of Manning’s actions would have been different had he confided in a more broadly respected news outlet is unknown.

“I think there would have been a case anyway,” Keller said. “There’s no the way the military was going to look the other way at a young man in uniform, in the field of battle — I mean he did this leaking sensitive documents about the war.”

However, it’s likely that a more traditional outlet would have handled the information with more regard to national security than Wikileaks, whose avowed intention is to make all information transparent and available, regardless of specific sensitivities. 

“One of the things that happened as a result of Wikileaks’ dissemination of these documents is that some stuff got out that probably shouldn’t have; identification of confidential sources, you know dissidents and people who speak to Americans in countries where that could put them in peril,” Keller said.

Public opinion regarding Manning’s case remains divided. Some consider him a hero, some are uncertain, and others, including the military prosecutors, regard him as a traitor of historic proportions.

“His lawyer portrayed him as a naive idealist. The prosecutor portrayed him as sort of a self-important anarchist. If you read the comments that are appended to all the news articles you’ll find, you know, ‘Free Bradley Manning’ followed by ‘Hang Bradley Manning,'” Keller said.

The outcomes of Manning’s case will surely have implications for Edward Snowden, the man responsible for leaking classified NSA program documents to the public. His is the biggest leak since Manning’s but, should he be brought back to the United States, his case would be handled in a civilian court where the procedures are quite different — but the punishments still stiff

“If I were Snowden’s attorney, I’d be nervous,”Goiten said. “I think what we’re seeing in this case is the continuing trend of motive being dismissed, essentially, as irrelevant certainly at the guilt phase of the trial.”