PFC. Bradley Manning’s volunteer guilty plea to 10 lesser charges will not save him from facing more serious charges in his trail over providing hundreds of thousands of government documents to WikiLeaks. Eugene R. Fidell, a military law instructor at Yale, said that the government is making an example of Manning to discourage others from using the Internet to leak government secrets in such a massive scale. (The New York Times, March 1, 2013, by Scott Shane)
A Harvard law professor argues that the case poses a huge threat to free speech and American journalism should Manning be found guilty. Although prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty for Manning, they are making it clear that they might in future cases if it could be shown that releasing government documents aided the enemy. Writes Yochai Benkler, “If Bradley Manning is convicted of aiding the enemy, the introduction of a capital offense into the mix would dramatically elevate the threat to whistleblowers. The consequences for the ability of the press to perform its critical watchdog function in the national security arena will be dire.” (New Republic, March 1, 2013, by Yochai Benkler)
Mathew Ingram of paidContent, March 3, 2013 agrees with Benkler that the case could have dire consequences, “So if handing documents over to a media entity that subsequently publishes them qualifies as “aiding the enemy” in the eyes of the government, then giving them to the New York Times would fit that description just as well as giving them to WikiLeaks. And if providing classified documents to a publisher can qualify, then wouldn’t the entity that actually published them be guilty as well — regardless of whether it’s WikiLeaks or the Times?” -db