Star Witness Yochai Benkler at Bradley Manning’s Defense:

“On the final day of Bradley Manning’s defense’s case, Harvard Law Professor and renowned scholar Yochai Benkler testified about how the Internet has transformed journalism’s function in a democracy and why WikiLeaks should be considered a legitimate news organization that is devoted to exposing corruption.

He testified that since its inception WikiLeaks has played a critical role in investigative journalism and that the leak of the Iraq and Afghan war logs revealed large disparities between civilian casulaties reported by the government those reported from the released documents.

Benkler was extremely critical of the unlawful pretrial abuse Bradley Manning endured and said that such abuse was meant to strike fear into future whistleblowers, and that it threatened investigative journalism as a whole. Further, the charges gainst Manning, if found guilty, would set a dangerous precedent whereby any news organization or journalist covering government corruption could be charged with ‘aiding the enemy’.”

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