New York Times Disappears Bradley Manning

The following February 13 letter by Ray Bishop, Workers Vanguard editor, was sent to the Public Editor of the New York Times, Margaret Sullivan, following the publication of her article “Keeping Secrets” (9 February).

You applaud the Times’ decision to finally report the location of a U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia while bemoaning how long it took the Times to approve releasing the information, which had been kept secret at the government’s request. Maureen Dowd’s column (“I’m Begging, Don’t Hack the Hacks”) printed the same day objects to the policy of drone attacks while raising alarm over Chinese hackers breaking into government and media computer systems. In neither piece was any mention made of Bradley Manning, who has suffered enormous abuse and faces a possible life sentence if a military court finds him guilty of releasing a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks. That material shed welcome light on U.S. diplomatic schemes and wartime atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan. The omission of his case is simply cowardice on the part of the Times, which you had earlier taken to task for ignoring the bulk of Manning’s pretrial hearing in December.

You acknowledge that the policy of the Times is to keep information from the public when Washington officials make the case that such news would threaten “national security.” The other side of that coin is that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, then-Times reporter Judith Miller recounted tales of Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” (the pretext for the U.S. invasion of Iraq). By contrast, making the documents available to WikiLeaks—which were subsequently published in part by the Times—was an act of truth-telling. If indeed it was Bradley Manning who released the videos, reports and cables, he provided a valuable service to humanity and now deserves the support of all who oppose the barbarity and machinations revealed in them.