Imagine for a moment if you will …

Army Specialist Bradley Manning — 2012 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
Excuse me while I shake my head in disbelief.

The 24-year-old Manning, who since 2010 has become one of the world’s most polarizing figures, has been nominated for one of the most esteemed awards in the world by two different organizations — the Icelandic parliament and the Oklahoma Center for Conscience and Peace Research — for being, according to the Nobel criteria, “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Manning, for those of you who aren’t aware, is the U.S. Army Soldier who stands accused of leaking roughly 260,000 diplomatic cables, 90,000 intelligence reports and other classified military information to the website WikiLeaks; leaks which many attribute to spurring 2011’s Arab Spring throughout the Middle East and in bringing light to alleged U.S. war crimes.

Supporters have touted Manning as a whistle blower; a hero who has risked a potential life imprisonment to expose what he felt was widespread corruption and deceit on the part of our government.

As a journalist, I value transparency. I not only strive for it in the stories I write and the sources I speak with, but I also demand it from the news I read daily and the legislative bodies which govern my life.

I also espouse whistle blowers; those people with enough fortitude to come forward to news sources and expose acts of wrongdoing, corruption or evil.

Furthermore, our legislative bodies have established protection for such persons, hence multiple statutes which exist throughout the U.S. alone.

Transparency and the act of whistle blowing are among the many pillars that hold up our ideals of free speech and press in the U.S., and help to maintain accountability across the board.
I am, however, also a military veteran. One that believed to the bone in the very oath he uttered upon enlisting in the U.S. Army several years ago.

An oath in which each soldier, Marine, sailor or airman pledges to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of
Military Justice.”

You see, Manning took this same oath. He took it of his own free will, at that — he wasn’t drafted nor did anyone force him to enlist.

If he is indeed guilty of leaking sensitive military information, Manning blatantly violated that oath where he swore to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same” — his fellow comrades-in-arms — and obey orders.

Such leaks placed many members of the military at risk of redemptive attacks from opposing forces by violating what is known in the military as operational security, and those attacks could very well have killed soldiers.

Such leaks of the diplomatic cables, while supposedly contributing to the birth of the Arab Spring, also might have cost many innocents their lives in those Middle Eastern uprisings and fostered ill will between the U.S. and other foreign nations.

So, when those factors are taken into account, where are the Nobel staples of “fraternity between nations” and “promotion of peace congresses” Manning has supposedly led?

What it simply comes down to is Bradley Manning, the accused, is not a whistle blower. He is not a martyr for free speech and press, or even a hero.

And he is certainly not worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.

What is most telling about this situation is that Manning himself, in his legal defense, alludes in no way to being a whistleblower. That very aspect, which Manning’s supporters trumpet for his Nobel nomination, is absent from his defense.

Instead, in the attempt to avoid a life imprisonment for multiple charges including aiding the enemy, Manning’s defense team has pulled out homosexuality, a gender-identity disorder and paranoia as scapegoats for his erratic behavior and why he shouldn’t have been allowed access to classified documents.

This is Manning’s – the whistleblower held aloft by the world – defense for his alleged actions. As if not enough aspersions are cast already toward the homosexual and gender-questioning communities, Manning wants to use those reasons for his defense in possibly the biggest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

That certainly doesn’t sound like a Nobel Peace laureate – a distinction held by such figures as Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Albert Schweitzer.

Instead it sounds more like a soldier, who if guilty, knowingly violated the trust placed in him by his command, his fellow soldiers and not least his own country – putting all three at tremendous risk.

It also reeks of a man who, knowing he committed an unethical act of wrongdoing, attempting to save his own hide.

Excuse me while, once again, I shake my head in disbelief.