Bradley Manning Is Guilty of ‘Aiding the Enemy’ – If the Enemy Is Democracy

Of all the charges against Bradley Manning, the most pernicious—and revealing—is “aiding the enemy.”

A blogger at The New Yorker, Amy Davidson, raised a pair of big questions that now loom over the courtroom at Fort Meade and the entire country:

• “Would it aid the enemy, for example, to expose war crimes committed by American forces or lies told by the American government?”
• “In that case, who is aiding the enemy—the whistleblower or the perpetrators themselves?”

When the deceptive operation of the warfare state can’t stand the light of day, truth-tellers are a constant hazard. And culpability must stay turned on its head.

That’s why accountability was upside-down when the U.S. Army prosecutor laid out the government’s case against Bradley Manning in an opening statement: “This is a case about a soldier who systematically harvested hundreds of thousands of classified documents and dumped them onto the Internet, into the hands of the enemy—material he knew, based on his training, would put the lives of fellow soldiers at risk.”

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