I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much,” wrote American soldier Bradley Manning in an online chat with a confidant three years ago about leaking military secrets. He just did not want pictures of himself as a boy in the press after the event.
Private Manning pleaded guilty in February to revealing hundreds of thousands of secret documents to Australian hacker Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks site. The trove included video of soldiers gunning down civilians, from an Apache helicopter in 2007, mistaking them for guerrillas – a gruesome scene in which one hears a voice saying: “Light ’em all up!”; and then: “Dead bastards!” It included names of Afghan informers and state department cables. Prosecutors allege Pte Manning downloaded personal information on every soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. His court martial for espionage, disobeying orders and “aiding the enemy” (punishable, in this case, by life in prison) began at a military base in Maryland on Monday.
But the clamour for punishment is not as loud as Pte Manning feared. Part of world opinion questions whether he did anything wrong at all. We appear to forgotten the meaning of treason. There are a few reasons why.