OPINION: The National Party's call to shun Chelsea Manning is particularly callous, given the charges laid against her were all about speaking out, and she has paid a high price for doing so.

The former United States army intelligence analyst spoke, and continues to speak, backed by proof, about serious crimes committed by those in power.

What's more, she has already served seven incredibly hard years, at times in solitary confinement, in prison for this.

SUPPLIED Chelsea Manning has served seven years in solitary confinement.

In what kind of surreal nightmare does a person who exposes war crimes against civilians and journalists undergo lifelong punishment? In whose interest is it to treat a whistleblower with more condemnation than the abusers she exposed? What does it say about us or, more accurately, about former immigration minister Michael Woodhouse, that Manning speaking out about those abuses feels like a threat to "our" interests?

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To repeatedly shout that Manning "is a convicted felon", as Woodhouse has done, is to loudly repeat a truism that does nothing to answer the question of whether she poses a threat to New Zealand society.

SUPPLIED To repeatedly shout Manning "is a convicted felon" is to loudly repeat a truism that does nothing to answer the question of whether she poses a threat to NZ society, Golriz Ghahraman says.

The latter is the only live question in the context of the National Party's call to ban her entry to our shores. In fact, what Woodhouse is calling for stands out as part of an alarming trend of elevating the so-called crime of exposing abuses of power by governments and corporations above the substantive abuses themselves.

Of course, changing the conversation from the abuse of public office to the so-called leak, has worked well for National recently.

In the context of WikiLeaks, this has long served those in power. Over the past decade whistleblowers have exposed countless alarming abuses, from unlawful mass surveillance, war crimes, to multinational organised tax evasion rings, all implicating operatives in New Zealand in various ways.

The cynical and undemocratic control of information is what has allowed these abuses to continue with total impunity.

What we must be most alarmed by is that even after exposition, the conversation is so easily turned into one about condemning and criminalising whistleblowers.

So we are told our outrage must move past the war crimes that Manning exposed, to the fact she was bound to suppress them, a bind placed upon her by the abusive army itself, of course.

* Golriz Ghahraman is a Greens MP and former United Nations lawyer.