Bradley Manning’s Own Defense Appears To Concede He’s No Hero
by Dan Abrams | 12:03 pm, January 2nd, 2012
... Hailed as a hero by some for exposing what they claim are U.S. government misdeeds, as well as illegal and immoral conduct, he has websites like BradleyManning.org devoted to him and many prominent supporters — aside from, of course, Wikileaks editor Julian Assange. Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg stated flatly that he “was Bradley Manning” and that he was profoundly affected by Manning’s decision to leak. “I never thought,” he said of Manning, “for the rest of my life, I would ever hear anyone willing to do that, to risk their life, so that horrible, awful secrets could be known.” Manning himself can allegedly be counted among those promoting the lionization of his image, accused of having said about his own conduct: “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare.”
Unfortunately, that sort of principled position is far from what his own defense team suggests motivated Manning’s alleged perfidy. No, they appear to be pursuing the defense that he was a gay man in a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military, struggling with gender identity issues, who never should have had access to the files in the first place. His attorney focused on Manning’s alter ego, Breanna Manning, and quoted an email from Manning where he said his “entire life feel(s) like a bad dream that won’t end. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what will happen to me. But at this point I feel like I am not here anymore.” That characterization suggests he was no hero; not a man standing for principle nor acting in the best interest of the country but, rather, a sad troubled soul worthy of sympathy. It is a defense which appears to concede that he leaked the documents but also abandons any pretense of righteousness in exchange for an apologia for his behavior. That is a trade Assange himself would likely detest since he complained to then New York Times Editor Bill Keller that a profile of Manning “psychologicalized” him while giving “short shrift” to his “political awakening.”
Sure, his lawyer also said the disclosures were relatively harmless. “The sky is not falling,” defense attorney David Coombs argued. He briefly invoked Martin Luther King on civil disobedience and cited the famous quote from Justice Louis Brandeis that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” but the defense’s larger argument as to why he did it appears to be that Manning was a mentally disturbed individual who should have been stopped by his superiors. Essentially, the duty of stopping Manning from leaking the documents, goes this argument, would fall to superiors, because Manning was mentally incapable of stopping himself ...
http://www.mediaite.com/online/bradley-mannings-own-defense-appears-to-concede-hes-no-hero/
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