By Cliff Montgomery – Aug. 6th, 2013
The last week has revealed quite a bit about the Obama Administration.
The ruling in the Bradley Manning case has shown that even U.S. military judges may find Obama’s crusadeagainst whistleblowers to be at least partly ill-founded. And the administration’s drive to persecute EdwardSnowden has made it a pariah in the eyes of international human rights groups.
First came the matter of Mr. Manning. In June, The Guardian ran an excellent article in which legal expertsprovided their thoughts on what was at stake with this trial. Their diagnoses provided food for thought.
“The trial of Bradley Manning, the US soldier who leaked a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks,” stated thenewspaper, “could set an ominous precedent that will chill freedom of speech and turn the Internet into adanger zone, legal experts have warned.”
“Of the 21 counts faced by the army private…by far the most serious [was] that he knowingly gave intelligenceinformation to al-Qaida by transmitting hundreds of thousands of classified documents” to WikiLeaks,declared The Guardian.
That ‘most serious’ charge was a supposed violation of Article 104 of the Military Justice Code. And it wasmost serious indeed – popularly known as “aiding the enemy,” the charge often brings with it the death penalty.Though federal officials apparently did not go so far as to howl for Manning’s blood, they were hoping he mightreceive “a maximum sentence of life in military custody with no chance of parole,” stated the newspaper.
Last week, the military judge in charge of the Manning case acquitted the Army private of “aiding the enemy,”but did convict him for violating the Espionage Act.
A number of legal and government accountability experts bluntly told The Guardian what they thought of theadministration’s actions against whistleblowers like Manning.
“This is part of Obama’s overall policy of criminalizing investigative reporting on national security,” declaredfamed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to The Guardian.
In 1971, Ellsberg became a household name after leaking a trove of U.S. government documents to The NewYork Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers- documents which revealed the true nature of theVietnam War. The matter of the so-called “Pentagon Papers” ended with a mistrial for the former militaryanalyst.
“If the government has its way, it will become very hard in the future to expose official corruption or discloseinformation in the public interest,” stated Ellsberg.
If left only to the career politicians, Americans will know nothing about their country’s actions “other than [the]leaks made by the administration itself,” he added.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the matter of Edward Snowden has put an exclamation point on thisadministration’s questionable activities.
Human rights groups are furious about the Obama Administration’s treatment of Snowden, who exposed theU.S. government’s illegal large-scale surveillance activities on American citizens and others around the world.
“No one should be charged under any law for disclosing information of human rights violations by the U.S.government. Such disclosures are protected under the rights to information and freedom of expression,”Widney Brown, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International, declared in June.
“It appears he [i.e., Snowden] is being charged by the U.S. government primarily for revealing its and othergovernments’ unlawful actions that violate human rights.”
Such spying is a direct violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 4th amendment, which bans “unreasonablesearches and seizures.”
Snowden went on the run after exposing the Obama Administration’s clear violations of the 4th amendment.
Perhaps predictably, Obama responded by charging the former National Security Agency contractor “with theftof government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and communication ofclassified information with a third party,” according to the human rights group.
Last week, Russia granted Snowden a one-year asylum.
Amnesty International was quick to point out that a person cannot be extradited if another country grantsthem an asylum.
“Regardless of where Snowden ends up he has the right to seek asylum. For such a claim to succeed, hemust demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution. Even if such a claim failed, no country can return aperson to another country where there is a substantial risk of ill-treatment,” stated Brown.
“His forced transfer to the U.S.A. would put him at great risk of human rights violations and must bechallenged,” added the Amnesty International official.
You know it’s a strange time when Russia is the country granting asylum to persecuted individuals, andAmerica is the tyrant. But last week’s events show this is the world in which we now live.
