{"id":13367,"date":"2011-07-11T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T11:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=13367"},"modified":"2011-07-07T18:15:11","modified_gmt":"2011-07-07T17:15:11","slug":"bradley-manning-american-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/07\/bradley-manning-american-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"Bradley Manning, American Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

Four Reasons Why Pfc. Bradley Manning Deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Not a Prison Cell<\/em><\/p>\n

We still don\u2019t know if he did it or not, but if Bradley Manning<\/a>, the 24-year-old Army private from Oklahoma, actually supplied WikiLeaks with its choicest material — the Iraq War logs<\/a>, the Afghan War logs<\/a>, and the State Department cables<\/a> — which startled and riveted the world, then he deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom<\/a> instead of a jail cell at Fort Leavenworth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Obama recently gave<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

Bradley Manning, awaiting a court martial in December, faces the prospect of long years in prison.\u00a0 He is charged<\/a> with violating the Espionage Act of 1917<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He has blown the whistle on criminal<\/a> violations<\/a> of American military law.\u00a0 He has exposed our secretive government\u2019s pathological over-classification of important public documents.<\/p>\n

Here are four compelling reasons why, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, he deserves that medal, not jail time.<\/p>\n

1: At great personal cost, Bradley Manning has given our foreign policy elite the public supervision it so badly needs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Do we even need to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9\/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan<\/a>, Yemen<\/a>, and Somalia<\/a>) has killed roughly 225,000 civilians<\/a> and 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country more than $3.2 trillion<\/a>?\u00a0 We are hemorrhaging blood and money.\u00a0 Few outside Washington would argue<\/a> that any of this is making America safer.<\/p>\n

An employee who screwed up this badly would either be fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision.\u00a0 Downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option.\u00a0 However, the website WikiLeaks<\/a> has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive statesmen and -women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary citizens.<\/p>\n

Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on distortions<\/a>, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure<\/a> of our major media to ask the important questions.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Might this not have prevented disaster?\u00a0 We\u2019ll never know, of course, but could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the circumstances?<\/p>\n

Thanks to Bradley Manning\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Thanks to those disclosures, we now know just how Washington leaned on<\/a> the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War and just how it pressured<\/a> the Germans to prevent them from prosecuting CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man and shipped him off to be tortured abroad.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s too late.\u00a0 A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us.\u00a0 In a democracy, the workings of our government should not be shrouded in an opaque cloud of secrecy.\u00a0 For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.<\/p>\n

2: Knowledge is powerful.\u00a0 The<\/strong> WikiLeaks disclosures have helped spark democratic revolutions and reforms across the Middle East, accomplishing what Operation Iraqi Freedom never could.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Wasn\u2019t it American policy to spread democracy in the Middle East, to extend our freedom to others, as both recent American presidents have insisted?<\/p>\n

No single American has done more to help further this goal than Pfc. Bradley Manning.\u00a0 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<\/a> the rebellion.\u00a0 In all cases, these societies were smoldering with longstanding grievances against oppressive, incompetent governments and economies stifled by cronyism.\u00a0 The revelations from the WikiLeaks State Department documents played a widely acknowledged<\/a> role in sparking these pro-democracy uprisings.<\/p>\n

In Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Yemen, the people\u2019s revolts under way have occurred despite U.S. support<\/a> for their autocratic rulers.\u00a0 In each of these nations, in fact, we bankrolled the dictators, while helping to arm and train their militaries. The alliance with Mubarak\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Perhaps once the Egyptians consolidate their democracy, they, too, will award Manning their equivalent of such a medal.<\/p>\n

3:<\/strong> Bradley Manning has exposed the pathological over-classification of America\u2019s public documents.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSecrecy is for losers,\u201d as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say<\/a>.\u00a0 If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

How pathological is our government\u2019s addiction to secrecy?\u00a0 In June, the National Security Agency declassified<\/a> documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense only last month declassified the Pentagon Papers<\/a>, publicly available in book form these last four decades.\u00a0 Our government is only just now finishing its declassification<\/a> of documents relating to World War I.<\/p>\n

This would be ridiculous if it weren\u2019t tragic.\u00a0 Ask the historians.\u00a0 Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and a founder of its international relations program, describes the government\u2019s classification of foreign-policy documents as \u201cbizarre, arbitrary, and nonsensical.\u201d\u00a0 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<\/em>, 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<\/a> by an agency with no intention of opening its records, no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny.<\/p>\n

Any historian worth his salt would warn us that such over-classification is a leading cause of national amnesia and repetitive war disorder.\u00a0 If a society like ours doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 Right now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania<\/a>, and dementia its end point.\u00a0 As an ostensibly democratic nation, we, its citizens, risk such ignorance at our national peril.<\/p>\n

President Obama came into office promising a \u201csunshine\u201d policy for his administration while singing the praises of whistleblowers.\u00a0 He has since launched the fiercest campaign<\/a> against whistleblowers the republic has ever seen, and further plunged our foreign policy into the shadows.\u00a0 Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is, however, impossible.\u00a0 No organization has the resources to fight this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now.\u00a0 Absent a radical change in our government\u2019s diplomatic and military bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t.\u00a0 This, in fact, has been the modus operandi of WikiLeaks.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He did what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office.\u00a0 For striking a blow against our government\u2019s fanatical insistence on covering its mistakes and errors with blanket secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves not punishment, but the Presidential Medal of Freedom.<\/p>\n

4.<\/strong> At immense personal cost,<\/strong> Bradley<\/strong> Manning has upheld a great American tradition of transparency in statecraft and for that he should be an American hero, not an American felon.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Take Daniel Ellsberg<\/a>, 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.\u00a0 Many of the documents it included were classed at a much higher security clearance<\/a> than anything Bradley Manning is accused of releasing — and yet Ellsberg was not convicted<\/a> of a single crime and became a national hero.<\/p>\n

Given the era when all this went down, it\u2019s forgivable to assume that Ellsberg must have been a hippie who somehow sneaked into the Pentagon archives, beads and patchouli trailing behind him.\u00a0 What many no longer realize is that Ellsberg had been a model U.S. Marine.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And Ellsberg is hardly alone.\u00a0 Ask Lt. Colonel (ret.) Darrel Vandeveld<\/a>.\u00a0 Or Tom Drake<\/a>, formerly of the National Security Agency.<\/p>\n

Transparency in statecraft was not invented last week by WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange.\u00a0 It is a longstanding American tradition.\u00a0 James Madison put the matter<\/a> succinctly: \u201cA popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.\u201d<\/p>\n

A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit<\/a>: \u201cSecrecy — the first refuge of incompetents — must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society\u2026 Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.\u201d\u00a0 John F. Kennedy made the same point<\/a> in 1961: \u201cThe very word \u2018secrecy\u2019 is repugnant in a free and open society.\u201d\u00a0 Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court had this<\/a> to say: \u201cThe guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.\u201d\u00a0 And the first<\/a> of World-War-I-era president Woodrow Wilson\u2019s 14 Points couldn\u2019t have been more explicit: \u201cOpen covenants of peace, openly arrived at<\/em>, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

We need to know what our government\u2019s commitments are, as our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s anything to learn from that decade, it\u2019s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent contributor to the<\/em> London Review of Books, the<\/em> American Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org<\/em>, and <\/em>Le Monde Diplomatique.\u00a0 His next book, <\/em>The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by <\/em>O\/R Books<\/em><\/a> this fall.\u00a0 He is covering the Bradley Manning case and trial for <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 To listen to Timothy MacBain\u2019s latest TomCast audio interview in which Madar discusses the Manning case, click\u00a0here<\/a>, or download it to your iPod\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2011 Chase Madar<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We still don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}