The 21-year-old private, Jack Teixeira, a retarded teenager is accused of a massive leak of secret documents. He just wanted to impress his friends with an online video game site. Futility and stupidity.
In the last big cases of leaks of secret American documents, the whistleblowers had public interest motivations which made their gesture meritorious.
Thus in 2013 Edward Snowden alerted the media that the electronic spy agency of the United States, the National Security Agency, was spying on the communications of American citizens, an activity that it was never authorized to do, therefore illegal. The fact that Snowden made it public was a public service, not a crime. And besides, predictably, no one at the NSA ever went to jail for authorizing these illegal wiretaps.
If Snowden fled to Russia, he had no other option. The United States had revoked his passport, preventing him from taking refuge in Ecuador, whose government was already giving refuge to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange at its London embassy.
Assange already ten years in detention
Australian and British lawmakers from various political stripes have called on the US not to extradite Julian Assange from the UK. Assange, an Australian citizen, had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for 7 years. He has been in prison since 2019 as he fights the US extradition request. There he would face the charge of having published hundreds of thousands of secret documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as diplomatic cables.
Assange had obtained these documents from Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. Barack Obama commuted his 35-year prison sentence before leaving the White House.
I’ve said it before: I think Assange deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. What did the American diplomatic dispatches that Manning transmitted to him reveal? That the United States is a declining universal empire ready for all the most despicable manipulations and schemes to defend its interests, even to the detriment of its allies.
And Assange only acted as an intermediary between Manning and some of the biggest media in the West (the New York Times, the Guardian, the World, Der Spiegel and El Pais) who published his information deemed to be of public interest and socially significant.
As is the case with the current Jack Teixeira leak, those who should go to jail for the Wikileaks leak are the chief information security officers of the United States. Their negligence allowed a simple soldier on duty in an outpost in Iraq to have easy access to data banks containing secret American diplomatic and military communications throughout the world.
The laced assholes who allowed this would face the firing squad… or fall out of a window, in countries like Russia and China.
In his statement at the start of his trial, Manning explained that he was disgusted to see how the United States government was acting secretly against his public statements.
State perfidy from yesterday to tomorrow
In the 1970s, the New York Times published the secret Pentagon files that exposed the treachery of successive American administrations regarding the Vietnam War.
States, said de Gaulle, are cold monsters. Deception, hypocrisy, bribery and embezzlement are common activities for most of them and those who lead them. See Machiavelli.