Honorable Military Whistleblower: Why Daniel Davis Is and Bradley Manning Is Not

[struggle4progress]

Posted on February 12, 2012 by bmaz

....

And then ... Colonel Davis ... began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.

Concurrent with Shane’s NYT article, Davis himself published an essay overview of what he knew and saw in the Armed Forces Journal ...

My instant point here, however, is how Davis conducted himself in bringing his sunlight, and blowing the whistle, on wrongful US governmental and military conduct. Davis appears to have attempted to carefully marshal his evidence, separated the classified from the unclassified, released only unclassified reportage himself and to the press, taken the classified reportage to appropriate members of Congress and the DOD Inspector General, and notified his chain of command. Davis insured that, while the classified information and facts were protected from inappropriate and reckless release, they could not be buried by leveraging his unclassified press publication. In short, Daniel Davis is the epitome of a true military whistleblower, both in fact, and in law.

As I have previously delineated, there is no common law “whistleblower defense” umbrella protection, whether under American military law or civilian law. Despite the indiscriminate bandying about of the term by commenters, pundits and analysts across the spectrum, the “whistleblower defense” is a creature of statute, and simply does not formally exist other than where specifically provided for as an available affirmative justification defense. There is, however, just such a specific statutory grant of a whistleblower defense for the US military, and it is spelled out in the Military Whistleblower’s Protection Act, codified in 10 USC 1034 ...

http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/02/12/honorable-military-whistleblower-why-daniel-davis-is-and-bradley-manning-is-not/


Linked in the blog above:
In Afghan War, Officer Becomes a Whistle-Blower
Truth, lies and Afghanistan

The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-afghanistan-report-the-pentagon-doesnt-want-you-to-read-20120210

[Warren Stupidity]

1. I'll take Daniel Ellsberg's word on Manning.