The Harassment of Manning and Snowden

The military trial against Private Bradley Manning, accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret Pentagon and State Department documents to WikiLeaks — documents that were subsequently provided to some of the world media, among them this newspaper, for journalistic production and public distribution — culminated yesterday with a 35-year prison sentence. The process was fraught with arbitrariness, inconsistencies and paradoxes.

This includes the fact that while Manning has been sentenced to more than three decades in prison, the politicians, intellectuals and other accessories responsible for the crimes against humanity documented in some of the material that have become known to the world thanks to the convict, find themselves free. Another devastating inconsistency is that a government recently revealed as the biggest promoter of espionage in the world — political, military, commercial, industrial and diplomatic — has had the temerity to accuse Manning of espionage. A third is that the punishment was imposed on a young soldier who, contrary to what he was required to declare, has not caused any harm to the security of the United States, while his accusers have subjected the political class and the government of Washington to what is possibly their greatest loss of prestige and credibility.

Certainly, compared with the century in prison initially asked for by the prosecution against Manning, the sentence that was imposed is moderate, but this should not distract from the fact that the process that ended yesterday in Fort Meade was highly political and had as its main purposes to warn any other hackers on the one hand and, on the other, to gather other elements to build a criminal prosecution against Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. In that sense, although Manning’s trial resulted in a shorter sentence than originally feared, the process has been a clear sign of persecution, arbitrary and contrary to basic rules of human rights.

The ongoing persecution is not limited to the United States government against Manning. Last Sunday at an airport in London, Brazilian David Miranda, partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was arrested based on an anti-terrorist law. Greenwald, for his part, received from Edward Snowden documentation on illegal surveillance systems mounted by Washington in many countries as well as in the United States, which constitute a flagrant violation of freedoms and individual rights, and is a crime in the countries where they have operated telephone and digital wiretaps. Since last June, Greenwald has been disseminating information from Snowden’s documents.

At Heathrow Airport, Miranda was interrogated for nine hours by British police, who demanded the delivery of all information held by his partner and took his cell phone, computer and multiple external hard drives. Such action — which Washington had knowledge of and which could have been coordinated with United States law enforcement agencies — is disgraceful as an anti-terrorism measure; it should be understood, instead, as a flagrant violation of freedom of expression and human rights.

In short, in the persecution of Manning, Snowden and Julian Assange, the United States and British governments are sliding into a state of authoritarian police regimes, oblivious to the rule of law.