Even the Washington Post gets it. In its article on the criminal charges brought against Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, the sub-headline to the article reads:
U.S. TAKING TOUGH LINE ON LEAKS
The opening paragraph states that the military charging Bradley Manning
is likely to further deter would-be whistleblowers.
I don't care if it's Bush or Obama at the helm. The biggest crimes of our generation--torture, warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary rendition--would not have come to light but for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. For the hand-wringing "but we can't willy-nilly reveal classified information" crowd, do you think Abu Ghraib wasn't classified?
Short of killing someone (think Karen Silkwood, and more recently, of the "worldwide manhunt" for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange launched by the Pentagon), this is the worst, and increasingly popular, form of retaliation that can be taken against a whistleblower: criminal prosecution for revealing the truth--which in both the Manning and Drake cases did no harm to national security, but instead committed the far worse "crime" of embarrassing the government. In fact, both these men were trying to expose conduct they thought, and that was, illegal.
