Bradley Manning, American Hero
Four
Reasons Why Pfc. Bradley Manning Deserves the
Presidential
Medal of Freedom, Not a Prison Cell
by Chase
Madar
We still don’t know if he did it or not, but if
Bradley Manning, the
24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks
with its choicest material -- the Iraq
War logs, the Afghan
War logs, and the State
Department cables -- which startled and riveted the world, then
he deserves the Presidential
Medal of Freedom instead of a jail cell at
Fort Leavenworth.
President Obama recently gave
one of those medals to retiring Secretary of Defense Robert Gates,
who managed the two bloody, disastrous wars about which the
WikiLeaks-released documents revealed so much. Is he really
more deserving than the young private who, after almost ten years of
mayhem and catastrophe, gave Americans -- and the world -- a far
fuller sense of what our government is actually doing abroad?
Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December,
faces the prospect of long years in prison. He is charged
with violating the Espionage
Act of 1917. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the
line so that Americans might know what our government has done -- and
is still doing -- globally. He has blown the whistle on
criminal
violations
of American military law. He has exposed our secretive
government’s pathological over-classification of important
public documents.
Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the
government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail
time.
1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has
given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly
needs.
In the past 10 years, American statecraft has moved from
calamity to catastrophe, laying waste to other nations while never
failing to damage our own national interests. Do we even need
to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9/11 in Iraq and
Afghanistan (and Pakistan,
Yemen,
and Somalia)
has killed roughly 225,000
civilians and 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country
more than $3.2
trillion? We are hemorrhaging blood and money. Few
outside Washington would
argue that any of this is making America safer.
An employee who screwed up this badly would either be
fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision. Downsizing
our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option.
However, the website WikiLeaks
has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive
statesmen and -women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary
citizens.
Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on
distortions,
government secrecy, and the complaisant failure
of our major media to ask the important questions. But what if
someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the
necessary government documents, which would have made so much
self-evident in the months before the war began? Might this not
have prevented disaster? We’ll never know, of course, but
could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the
circumstances?
Thanks to Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures, we
do have a sense of what did happen afterwards in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and just how the U.S. operates in the world.
Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned
on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how
it pressured
the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped
an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad.
As
our foreign policy threatens to careen into yet more disasters in
Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, we can only hope that more
whistleblowers will follow the alleged example of Bradley Manning and
release vital public documents before it’s too late. A
foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us.
In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded
in an opaque cloud of secrecy. For bringing us the truth, for
breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley
Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
2: Knowledge is powerful. The
WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic
revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what
Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.
Wasn’t it American policy to spread democracy in
the Middle East, to extend our freedom to others, as both recent
American presidents have insisted?
No single American has done more to help further this
goal than Pfc. Bradley Manning. The chain reaction of
democratic protests and uprisings that has swept Egypt, Libya,
Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and even in a modest way Iraq, all began in
Tunisia, where leaked U.S. State Department cables about the
staggering corruption of the ruling Ben Ali dynasty helped
trigger the rebellion. In all cases, these societies were
smoldering with longstanding grievances against oppressive,
incompetent governments and economies stifled by cronyism. The
revelations from the WikiLeaks State Department documents played a
widely
acknowledged role in sparking these pro-democracy uprisings.
In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people’s
revolts under way have occurred despite
U.S. support for their autocratic rulers. In each of these
nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm
and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak’s
autocratic state cost the U.S. more than $60 billion and did nothing
for American security -- other than inspire terrorist blowback from
radicalized Egyptians like Mohammad Atta and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Even if U.S. policy was firmly on the wrong side of
things, we should be proud that at least one American -- Bradley
Manning -- was on the right side. If indeed he gave those
documents to WikiLeaks, then he played a catalytic role in bringing
about the Arab Spring, something neither Barack Obama nor former
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (that recent surprise recipient of
the Presidential Medal of Freedom) could claim. Perhaps once
the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award
Manning their equivalent of such a medal.
3: Bradley Manning has exposed
the pathological over-classification of America’s public
documents.
“Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator
and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used
to say. If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to
find a bigger loser than the U.S. government.
How pathological is our government’s addiction to
secrecy? In June, the National Security Agency declassified
documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense only last month
declassified
the Pentagon Papers, publicly available in book form these last
four decades. Our government is only just now finishing its
declassification
of documents relating to World War I.
This would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic.
Ask the historians. Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of
history at Stanford University and a founder of its international
relations program, describes the government’s classification of
foreign-policy documents as “bizarre, arbitrary, and
nonsensical.” George Herring, professor emeritus at the
University of Kentucky and author of the encyclopedic From Colony
to Superpower: A History of U.S. Foreign Policy, has chronicled
how his delight at being appointed to a CIA advisory panel on
declassification turned to disgust once he realized that he was being
used as window
dressing by an agency with no intention of opening its records,
no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny.
Any historian worth his salt would warn us that such
over-classification is a leading cause of national amnesia and
repetitive war disorder. If a society like ours doesn’t
know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a
itinerant amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it
will end up tomorrow. Right now, classification is the disease
of Washington, secrecy
its mania, and dementia its end point. As an ostensibly
democratic nation, we, its citizens, risk such ignorance at our
national peril.
President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine”
policy for his administration while singing the praises of
whistleblowers. He has since launched the fiercest
campaign against whistleblowers the republic has ever seen, and
further plunged our foreign policy into the shadows.
Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is,
however, impossible. No organization has the resources to fight
this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now. Absent a
radical change in our government’s diplomatic and military
bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue.
If we hope to know what our government is actually doing
in our name globally, we need massive leaks from insider
whistleblowers to journalists who can then sort out what we need to
know, given that the government won’t. This, in fact, has
been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks. Our whistleblower
protection laws urgently need to catch up to this state of affairs,
and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us
part of the way. He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on
coming into office. For striking a blow against our
government’s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and
errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment,
but the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
4. At immense personal cost,
Bradley Manning has upheld a great American
tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an
American hero, not an American felon.
Bradley Manning is only the latest in a long line of
whistleblowers in and out of uniform who have risked everything to
put our country back on the right path.
Take Daniel
Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, a Pentagon-commissioned
secret history of the Vietnam War and the official lies and
distortions that the government used to sell it. Many of the
documents it included were classed at a much
higher security clearance than anything Bradley Manning is
accused of releasing -- and yet Ellsberg was not
convicted of a single crime and became a national hero.
Given the era when all this went down, it’s
forgivable to assume that Ellsberg must have been a hippie who
somehow sneaked into the Pentagon archives, beads and patchouli
trailing behind him. What many no longer realize is that
Ellsberg had been a model U.S. Marine. First in his class at
officer training school at Quantico, he deferred graduate school at
Harvard to remain on active duty in the Marine Corps. Ellsberg
saw his high-risk exposure of the disastrous and deceitful nature of
the Vietnam War as fully consonant with his long career of patriotic
service in and out of uniform.
And Ellsberg is hardly alone. Ask Lt. Colonel
(ret.) Darrel
Vandeveld. Or Tom
Drake, formerly of the National Security Agency.
Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by
WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange. It is a longstanding American
tradition. James Madison put
the matter succinctly: “A popular government, without
popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue
to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations
report caught the same
spirit: “Secrecy -- the first refuge of incompetents --
must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society… Those
elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must
recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the
people.” John F. Kennedy made the same
point in 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is
repugnant in a free and open society.” Hugo Black, great
Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this
to say: “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the
expense of informed representative government provides no real
security for our Republic.” And the first
of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points
couldn’t have been more explicit: “Open covenants of
peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private
international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall
proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
We need to know what our government’s commitments
are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they
cannot be left to their own devices. Based on the last decade
of carnage and folly, without public debate -- and aggressive media
investigations -- we have every reason to expect more of the same.
If there’s anything to learn from that decade, it’s
that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood
and money. Thanks to the whistleblowing revelations attributed
to Bradley Manning, we at least have a far clearer picture of the
problems we face in trying to supervise our own government. If
he was the one responsible for the WikiLeaks revelations, then for
his gift to the republic, purchased at great price, he deserves not
prison, but a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the heartfelt
gratitude of his country.
Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent
contributor to the London Review of Books, the American
Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org, and Le
Monde Diplomatique. His next book, The Passion of
Bradley Manning, will be published by O/R
Books this fall. He is covering the Bradley
Manning case and trial for TomDispatch.com.
To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio
interview in which Madar discusses the Manning case, click here,
or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 Chase Madar
This article appeared originally in TomDispatch.com
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