America’s War On Patriots - David Sirota/Salon America’s war on patriots To expose U.S. war crimes and criminals is not to be lauded as a hero, but deemed a criminal with a long sentence By David Sirota - Salon 7/30/13 Two major precedents – one encouraging, the other troubling – emerge from today’s conviction of Bradley Manning on espionage charges, but not on charges of aiding the enemy. One is about the definition of journalism, and all the attendant protections that are supposed to come with that profession in a democracy. The other is about who America’s government defines as patriotic heroes and who it deems traitorous villains. The first precedent comes from the verdict’s rejection of the charge that Manning “aided the enemy” when he released the now-famous tranche of documents about the U.S. national security state. Though failing to prove Manning’s disclosures actually harmed U.S. national security, prosecutors based the “aiding the enemy” allegation on the assumption that while well-known, pro-establishment media outlets should be considered legitimate government-approved news organizations, lesser known anti-establishment media outlets can be deemed terrorist collaborators by virtue of their political leanings, newsgathering methods and publication protocols. Yes, as Manning’s prosecutor said during the court proceedings, disclosing information to “established journalistic enterprises like The New York Times and The Washington Post would be a crime” – but he said that wouldn’t necessarily merit the “aiding the enemy” charge. What would warrant such a charge, the prosecution asserted, was the fact that Manning dared to disclose information to a decidedly anti-establishment news outlet, Wikileaks. This, even though it is far from clear that the documents Manning disclosed actually harmed U.S. national security. “(Manning) identified WikiLeaks as the first intelligence agency for the general public,” the prosecutor said, as if such a distinction between a “news organization” and an “intelligence agency for the general public” should be simply assumed – and assumed to be incriminating for any outlet fitting the latter definition. By originally endorsing this as a legitimate line of argument when allowing the “aiding the enemy” charge to move forward, the judge created the possibility – if not likelihood – that we will see such charges in the future. However, the good news is that the final verdict could help create a precedentagainst a dangerous double standard. Yes, the verdict suggests the government cannot legally preference and protect one kind of speech and legally punish and persecute another kind of speechbased on what institution happens to be speaking. The precedent, in other words, rejects (at least for now) the idea that the government can protect legacy media organizations from “aiding the enemy” charges while at the same time subjecting newer non-traditional (and more adversarial) media organizations to such charges. Whether or not you happen to like or hate Wikileaks in specific, the general implications for journalism should be encouraging. At the very moment when the old media ecosystem is being upended by technological and economic forces, a court has now denied the U.S. government’s attempt to use its ultimate power – aka the death sentence that can come with an “aiding the enemy” prosecution – to legally preference legacy media organizations, who just so happen to often be the most reliable organs of state-sponsored propaganda. This is a welcome development that rejects the ugly logic of recent legislative efforts by the Obama administration to narrow the legal definition of journalism to exclude bloggers, freelancers and independent journalists – ie the class of journalists that are often the most adversarial toward the government. To appreciate how significant this ruling is, consider if the opposite had happened... More: salon/2013/07/30/americas_war_on_patriots/
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:27:41 +0000