Last week  on WBCR, I told you about Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Icelandic MP and Wikileaks member  who was in NY to talk about the Bradley Manning case. She was at a round-table event last Friday at Judson Memorial Church in New York along with a group of journalists who’ve been covering the case for those of us who don’t trust the evening news. I wasn’t telling you the whole story on Ms. Jónsdóttir–she has been a longtime activist in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the US government is after her. Her Twitter records have been demanded, for example. She was joined by a coterie of journalists who are responsible for nearly all the serious reporting being done on the Manning case. Alexa O’Brien has a complete set of documents on case available on her website, and Kevin Gosztola (a journalist with FireDogLake) has provided first-rate coverage of the issues involved. There’s more about the evening here. And yesterday, Ms Jónsdóttir joined Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! to talk about the Bradley Manning case. You can access the interview here.

I’m not going to type a lot here–it’s more important that you see the video from Friday night (and the video from Democracy Now! from Monday morning). This is a special shout-out to my journalist/aspiring journalist friends at Sex And Politics–in trying Manning for charges under the Alien Espionage Act of 1917, the Military is setting up a precedent for civilians as well as military personnel. And it’s easy to see how they will shift their focus from the whistleblower to the journalist who reports the story. Right now, there’s a Grand Jury empaneled in the state of Virginia to look at possible charges against Julian Assange of Wikileaks. If Manning is convicted on all charges, look for the government to come after Wikileaks as well.