opinion

Demand Reality Winner's freedom, give her a Pulitzer

An anniversary is an arbitrary milestone that we in journalism use sometimes to address a topic. The problem with waiting for the one-year anniversary of Reality Winner's incarceration is that she isn't just a topic. She is a person.

To her, June 3, 2018, will be just another day in jail. Procrastinating until that day, as I previously intended, seems cruel in retrospect.

If my daughter had done what our government has accused Reality Winner of having done and been jailed indefinitely for it, I would be at once fiercely proud and at my wit's end. I can't imagine the pain of seeing my daughter behind bars instead of receiving the medal for whistle-blowing valor that Reality Winner deserves.

Winner is accused of what we in my profession hand out Pulitzers for having done — letting us, the American people, know what we are entitled to know but that our government chose wrongly to keep from us. We know that the Russians breached our voting systems in 21 states only because of a classified information leak attributed to her.

Imagine still not knowing that. That's the real crime — that we still might not know.

"Accused of" is the fair, impartial, clunky language of traditional news reporting and defense lawyers. It dances around whether she did it. Her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, and other sympathizers adhere to it faithfully in their daily social media barrage. They also focus primarily on the issue of her having been denied bail and incarcerated without having been read her rights.

To me the real issue shouldn't be whether she did it. It was the right, patriotic thing to do. It wasn't criminal behavior. It doesn't deserve the label "espionage." It didn't compromise national security. It was heroism. Keeping it classified was — is — criminal.

Her mother points out that the government is using everything right and good about her daughter against her. Reality Winner became fluent in Middle Eastern languages for the purpose of serving her country, which she did for six years in the Air Force. She went straight from high school to military service despite clearly being college material. The Air Force credits her language skills directly for the capture or killings of hundreds of enemy combatants.

And now she's being held as a flight risk, portrayed as some kind of Jason Bourne ninja because she's multilingual, intelligent and trained militarily.

Paul Manafort, who has an ankle bracelet, and combat veteran Michael Flynn, who has no ankle bracelet, are my idea of flight risks. Both have wealth and friends in high places worldwide. The pro-Reality social media machine cites this imbalance often.

I have been puzzled since I first heard the unusual name "Reality Winner" why all patriotic Americans aren't outraged that she is in jail, facing serious charges under the 1917 Espionage Act.

As time passes, I become more and more puzzled that there isn't a daily Reality Winner incarceration watch on the Rachel Maddow Show or on the front pages of newspapers nationwide, including this one. South Texans, especially, should feel violated and demand to know more. Reality Winner is from Kingsville. In her freshman year of high school she was the Kingsville Brahma mascot.

Her name got a lot of late-night comedy-show attention last year when the initial stories broke. But big-media interest seemed to wane once all the jokes had been told.

Thank God for Twitter and other social media. She is a daily event on Twitter and, according to her mother, a topic of intense interest in Western Europe and Scandinavia, where skepticism of our government runs high. Apparently Germans, Swiss, Norwegians and Brits love Reality Winner like Germans love David Hasselhoff.

It should be the same here in this country, where suspicion of the government is supposed to be a badge of honor. Surely no one buys that treason malarkey our government is trying to sell.

For the sake of devil's advocacy, which is part of what I do for a living: No, we shouldn't pick and choose which laws to disobey. If smuggling a classified document that shouldn't have been classified, like Daniel Ellsberg did, is indeed a crime, then let the punishment fit the crime.

In Ellsberg's case, all charges under the same Espionage Act were dismissed eventually. That was justice.

It's shameful that Reality Winner faces a potential 10-year sentence. A fitting punishment would have been, at most, a year of probation only for the sake of preserving the so-called rule of law, during which she could have been required to teach yoga to the underprivileged, which she probably would do anyway as a kindness. Then, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This has been a mere surface scratch at her story. After waiting too long, I've not said nearly enough. In journalism we have arbitrary word limits.

Contact Tom Whitehurst Jr. at tom.whitehurst@caller.com or 361-886-3619. Join him on Twitter @WhitehurstJr. Join Billie Winner-Davis on Twitter @bjwinnerdavis. Also join @standbyreality.