As the court martial for 25-year-old Pfc. Bradley Manning enters its fourth week, the military whistleblower is finding support not just from human rights and whistleblower advocates, but Hollywood A-listers.
As part of the “I Am Bradley Manning” campaign, stars such as comedian Russell Brand, director Oliver Stone, actors Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, and Pink Floyd musician Roger Waters have lent their support to Manning’s cause. They have also encouraged fellow Americans to do the same.
The almost 5-minute-long video includes more than 20 actors, musicians, activists and other pop culture celebrities expressing their support for Manning’s “heroic efforts to expose war crimes.”
“He’s a whistleblower,” writer Matt Taibbi says in the video, “and the whole concept of whistleblower laws and whistleblower protection are you cannot get into trouble for reporting about illegal or improper activities.”
“To take a risk and take a stand, knowing that in all likelihood you’ll be persecuted, penalized, demonized, and punished for it — that’s incredibly bold,” Russell Brand says in the clip.
Manning is on trial for releasing more than 700,000 battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and video clips he accessed while working as an intelligence analysts in Baghdad in 2010. One of the most significant documents he released was a video referred to as “Collateral Murder.”
The video shows two U.S. Apache helicopters shooting at a group of unarmed adults and children in Iraq in 2007. Two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, were killed along with about a dozen other people.
Initial reports from the U.S. military said the adults who died were insurgents in a battle with U.S. forces. Reuters tried to obtain a copy of the video to conduct an investigation into the deaths of their employees, but the request was delayed. However, once the video was released along with transcripts, it became evident there was no battle. The journalists’ camera bags were misidentified by the soldiers as AK-47 assault rifles.
For releasing the video and other information, Manning has been charged with more than 20 crimes — the most serious being “aiding the enemy” under the Espionage Act. If he is found guilty, he could face life in prison without parole.
Laurence Tribe, a professor at Harvard University and an expert on constitutional law in the U.S., told The Guardian that if Manning is convicted of aiding the enemy, it could set a dangerous precedent and impact free speech.
“Charging any individual with the extremely grave offense of ‘aiding the enemy’ on the basis of nothing beyond the fact that the individual posted leaked information on the web and thereby ‘knowingly gave intelligence information’ to whoever could gain access to it there, does indeed seem to break dangerous new ground,” he said.
Whistleblower precedent
Because the trial is viewed by many as an indication of how whistleblowers will be treated in the future, many celebrities have gotten involved not only to express support for Manning, but also to spread awareness about the case’s implications.
Comedian Russell Brand has been particularly vocal on this issue and said he got involved in Manning’s case not because he knows a “great deal about international espionage,” but because he’s hoping to point out that Manning released the documents out of patriotism, not greed.
“If I say, ‘Oh, that Bradley Manning seems that he was really trying his best to expose information he thought was important to American people regarding what was being done in their name,’ all I’m hoping is that people who would otherwise entirely ignore it may have a flickering awareness, and some who would have had a flickering awareness would investigate further. So it’s a very modest ambition. I’m not single handedly imagining that I could make any particular impact,” he told Gawker.
Brand stressed that Manning has “a genuine love of the people of this country and concern for the people,” and said he thinks whistleblowing is necessary.
“I think it’s really brave,” Brand said. “We know that institutions have a tendency toward corruption. And we are, to some degree, dependent on people within those institutions to arbitrate their conduct. No one within those institutions in higher positions is going to go, ‘Oh, we’ve got to be honest: we’ve done some dodgy stuff.’ So it’s going to take some sort of rare quirk, some peculiar anomaly like Bradley Manning to demonstrate or highlight injustices.”
Brand’s statements seem to align with Manning’s explanation of his actions. When he pleaded guilty earlier this year to 10 lesser charges, including providing the documents to WikiLeaks, the military whistleblower said his intent was to spark a conversation about why the U.S. was in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Manning said in his statement before the court on Feb. 28.
Well-known in Hollywood
Hollywood’s involvement with the Manning trial is not limited to just this video. Actor John Cusack and John Perry Barlow, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, are on the board of directors for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The group was launched in December 2012 to help promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism that exposes mismanagement, corruption and law-breaking in government.
In line with its purpose and mission, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has been fundraising to provide a court stenographer to help journalists cover the Manning trial. As Mint Press News previously reported, the need for an independent court stenographer first arose after it was announced the government would not be releasing transcripts or government briefs to the public.
“When it comes to freedom of information, leaks and whistleblowers, this is one of the most important trials in 40 years,” said Trevor Timm, the group’s executive director. “As even detractors of Manning will say, this really could affect future whistleblowers, and it’s vital to the public to be able to see exactly what arguments the government is making.”