The U.S. is Guiltier than WikiLeaks

Here’s an interesting tidbit published by CLG News.com on November 30, 2010:

WikiLeaks: US Senators call for WikiLeaks to face criminal charges --'WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.' 28 Nov 2010 Members of the United States Congress reacted with fury at WikiLeaks on Sunday, calling on the group to be designated a "Foreign Terrorist Organisation" and urging the United States government to pursue a prosecution. "Leaking the material is deplorable," Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, told Fox 'News.' "The people at WikiLeaks could have blood on their hands ... People who do this are low on the food chain as far as I'm concerned. If you can prosecute them, let's try."

I don’t disagree with Senator Graham that to the extent that such leaks as this one endanger lives the crime should be prosecutable. But where was Senator Graham’s when the Vice President of the United States’ outed Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband’s opposition to the Iraq war?

For that matter, I think politicians who are willing to violate the Constitution they swore to uphold by imprisoning and/or torturing people without proof of criminal action should be open to prosecution – not to mention those who manufacture evidence in order to take the nation into war.

Now don’t you wingnuts start screaming at me for that last one. I am not just talking about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, (Although I’m betting that they are the first people who came to mind when you read that sentence.) but also include our current president’s continued persecution of untried prisoners. There’s no way to prosecute the following, but calls to war from Teddy Roosevelt’s ouster of King Kamehameha to give an American corporation control of Hawaiian fruit production to insurgencies in South and Central American nations and LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin incident were also criminal. (For a compilation of these offenses see: “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” by Stephen Kinzer. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York. 2006.)

The point is that our country has used boogey man enemies to stir up support for war after war. By comparison Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks publication of classified documents is a pretty minor offense. Apparently Pfc Bradley Manning actually downloaded the info and gave it to WikiLeaks – maybe even conceived the idea himself – but his fate will still be little more than an echo of another of our favorite diversions – prosecuting someone at the bottom of the ladder so those at the top can go on pulling their deadly shenanigans. In effect, he may be more of a whistleblower than a traitor.

The fact is that the number – if any – of lives endangered by these leaks doesn’t come close to the number wasted by our invasions of other countries. By that measure this young man’s transgression is a drop in a sea of official sins that we will continue to support by ignoring them.