The American Conservative: In Support of Bradley Manning

Source: The American Conservative



A great editorial piece by Chris Bray.
Selected comments below.

Madar cogently examines the culture of unchecked government secrecy. There’s something vaguely Soviet about the American security state these days, a familiar sense that the surreptitious and the pathetic are one in the same. In 1991, Madar writes, the federal government classified six million documents; in 2010, it classified 77 million. The rapid growth of secrecy matches the rapid growth in bad ideas and administrative incompetence, as overclassification protects “the delicate ego of the foreign policy elite, whose performance in the past decade has been so lethally sub-par.”

The phrase at the end of that sentence is my favorite moment in the book. Nor is it only in foreign policy that our political elites are implicated in this lethal mediocrity. The worse they get, the more they hide.

Examining at some length the material Manning is alleged to have leaked, Madar compares the claimed harm and the known harm from several leading examples. A classified list of “vital strategic interests” compiled by the State Department reveals such sensitive information as the fact that the Strait of Gibraltar is “a vital shipping lane” and that the Congo is “rich in mineral wealth.” Secrets like these, he writes, may as well have been “tabulated by a reasonably capable undergraduate intern” but their release prompted agonized howling from government spokesmen. “Have we in America become so infantalized that tidbits of basic geography must now be state secrets?” Madar asks. “Maybe better to leave that question unanswered.”

The secrecy isn’t exactly secrecy, though. A government that increasingly targets leakers and whistleblowers from its lower and middle ranks is the same government that leaks constantly from the top. But the difference is in the use of those leaks, as senior officials shape political perception by the process of control. Leaks are okay, as long as they serve the interests of power; “when official Washington decides to leak, the law fades away.” Again, the taste is faintly Soviet, and Madar correctly describes the effect of metastasizing classification in a government that also freely hands out secret information when it serves state purposes. “If a rule is selectively only enforced it ceases to be a rule and becomes something else—an arbitrary instrument of authority, a weapon of the powerful—but not a rule.” If anything, Madar is being too polite on this point.




PW Says:


Manning was a shady little prat who put people’s lives in danger, and he did not do it out of some sense of patriotism or nobility or anything like that. It was a temper tantrum and maybe some pay for play only — he did it for himself. And he did put quite a lot of people in danger (may have gotten some — and their families, remember that) killed (very brutally)– that should always be kept in mind.
Also, he wasn’t selective — he document dumped; the folks he gave the info to have been selective — and he had a fairly high security clearance (he was 35F; they all have pretty high clearance — now, the military does have a problem with dropping the ball there, that probably needs to be investigated).

Flush out your heads; this isn’t the hero you’re looking for — defending him makes you look bad, really bad.

By the way, if he was really a whistleblower, there probably would have been more whistleblow-y stuff, don’t you think? Rather than intel on foreign information sources and troop movements?

P replies:


So whose lives have been endangered by Bradley Manning’s actions? Rather than just claim that it *must* be true, let’s hear you provide some citations and verifiable factual examples.

As for “whistleblow-y stuff”, how about Wikileaks revelation that DOD contractor Dyncorp had been procuring boy prostitutes for parties in Afghanistan, and that the Afghan Minister of Interior asked the US ambassador to suppress media reports about it? Is that “whistleblow-y” enough for you? In the cable, the Afghan minister is quoted as saying that if the news media got a hold of the child sex trafficking story then lives would be in danger — Perhaps those are the lives you were talking about?
If you have any doubt about the nature of the issue, here is a [painful to watch] investigation by Frontline about the sexual trafficking of boys in Afghanistan.

Why was there no evidence of official investigation or prosecution? One could guess that it is be because the US govt doesn’t want anything coming out of Wikileaks to be perceived as legitimate.

Oh, and PW, in case you are a US govt. employee and are censored from looking at the Wikileaks site, here is an alternative page from the Guardian where you can view it.



I commented (it's awaiting moderation)

Well @PW, if what Brad Manning had was a “temper tantrum”—then what do you call what Bush and Cheney did, with the murderous results for millions of people?
Manning didn’t have a “tantrum” –that implies flying off the handle, a loss of control…and there is no evidence that happened. In fact, he tried to go through his chain of command to address the wrongful deaths he was seeing around him. He was told to stuff it. He got nowhere. And if he had endangered someone, for real, you know we’d have heard all about it by now, from the people who are calling for his head on a plate. Put Brad Manning next to any single one of the war criminals, and tell me he’s a bigger criminal. Go ahead and try it. Try to do it with a straight face. Of course it’s easy on the Net. I really wonder how the prosecutors and even the judge in this farcical proceeding can do what they do, with their names attached to it—in front of the whole world who knows it is a kangaroo court. From within the US, with censored media, opinion is molded by the rantings and ravings of an unqualified jabbering class of tv heads—so people like PW generally don’t know that he’s the one who looks like an ass for standing on the side of fascism.