{"id":29793,"date":"2013-06-10T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=29793"},"modified":"2015-05-06T12:52:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T11:52:55","slug":"seven-myths-about-bradley-manning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/06\/seven-myths-about-bradley-manning\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven Myths about Bradley Manning"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Army<\/a>

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted into a courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, Tuesday, May 21, 2013, before a pretrial military hearing. (AP Photo\/Patrick Semansky)<\/p><\/div>\n

Today [3 June 2013] begins the court-martial of Private First Class Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks\u2019 source inside the US military. Because Manning was arrested over three years ago, the global news media have already written much about the young soldier from Crescent, Oklahoma. And though news accounts have frequently gotten the facts right (he\u2019s 25, was deployed to FOB Hammer in the Mada\u2019in Qada desert of Iraq, is 5 foot 2), most reports have written about the big issues that collide in this case without the slightest sense of context and perspective, leading to all kinds of basic errors and distortions\u2014for instance that the leaks were \u201ctop secret\u201d; that WikiLeaks is on a \u201cutopian\u201d quest for \u201ctotal transparency,\u201d that Manning did what he did not for political but for psychological (or sexual!) reasons. As Pfc. Manning\u2019s court-martial proceeds over the next three to four months in Ft. Meade, you can bet that media reports will continue to put across the same funhouse distortions. So to kick off my blog coverage of the court-martial for The Nation<\/i>, here\u2019s a quick debunking trip through the thickets of folklore that have sprung up around this case.<\/p>\n

First, it is routinely asserted or implied that Manning declassified the field reports and diplomatic cables because he is a nut job<\/b>, or because he is gay, or because he is a gay nut job. In fact, Manning\u2019s motive was expressly political: \u201cI want people to see the truth\u2026regardless of who they are\u2026because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.\u201d People can disagree about the consequences of Manning\u2019s leak, but his motive for declassifying the documents is plainly stated, and it has nothing to do with his mental health or sexuality. As former infantry soldier Ethan McCord (seen through the helicopter gunsight camera in the leaked \u201cCollateral Murder<\/a>\u201d video rescuing wounded children from a shot-up van) wrote, to fixate on Manning\u2019s sexuality \u201cerases Manning\u2019s political agency<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another common smear, Myth #2<\/b>, is that Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks are \u201cutopian,\u201d<\/b> probably the worst curse word in educated English, carrying as it does connotations of extremism and intolerance wrapped in na\u00efvet\u00e9, or that they are \u201cidealists,\u201d almost as bad. But is there anything \u201cutopian\u201d about declassifying less than 1 percent of what Washington classifies in a given year (92 million documents at last count<\/a>)? Manning\u2019s leak, though the largest security breach in US history, has not put us on the precipice towards \u201ctotal transparency,\u201d a mystical condition which neither Manning nor WikiLeaks has ever called for or even mentioned. The young soldier\u2019s act is best seen as a very practical, defensive move against dystopian levels of government secrecy\u2014again, the classified material that Manning leaked is less than 1 percent of the 92 million documents that Washington annually declares a state secret. (According to the feds\u2019 own Information Security Oversight Office, the annual cost of all this classification is about $11 billion<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

A corollary (Myth #3<\/b>) is that WikiLeaks is \u201canti-American,\u201d<\/b> perhaps because it palpably disapproves of the US invasion of Iraq\u2014but then this opinion is now shared by a supermajority of us Americans. WikiLeaks\u2019\u00a0mission statement<\/a> quotes Jefferson and Supreme Court Decisions\u2014an odd kind of anti-Americanism\u2014and its ideology of tech\u2019ed-up classical liberalism comes straight out of Silicon Valley. Digging through Manning\u2019s and WikiLeaks\u2019 public (and private) statements reveals no bias against the USA.<\/p>\n

On the level of straight fact, there is the common, false assertion, Myth #4<\/b>, that Bradley Manning leaked \u201ctop secret\u201d material<\/b>. It is true that Pfc. Manning did enjoy top-secret security clearance, a distinction he shared with the 1.4 million other people who are eligible for Top Secret security clearance<\/a>. (And how, by the way, can any secret accessible by a population the size of all of Vermont and North Dakota together, a group larger than the population of Washington, DC, itself, be a secret?) It so happens that not a single one of the documents that Pfc. Manning declassified was \u201ctop secret\u201d status. (By contrast, every last one of the thousands of documents comprising the Pentagon Papers was Top Secret, yet many of Manning’s critics claim to love Daniel Ellsberg.) More than half of the diplomatic cables are not classified in any way, and neither was the infamous helicopter gunsight video that shows an Apache gunship slaughtering a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters news agency employees.<\/p>\n

Although the US government has not embraced much responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died in the past ten years, it is frequently assumed (Myth #5<\/b> ) that Manning\u2019s leaks have gotten people killed or at least damaged US national interests<\/b>. But in the three-year span since these leaks came out, there is no evidence of a single civilian<\/a> or soldier<\/a> or even spy<\/a> being harmed by the documents\u2019 release. \u00a0(I’ve written at greater length for TomDispatch<\/a> about the accusations of Manning and WikiLeaks having “blood on their hands” come loudest from the same pols and hacks who backed the Iraq War and Obama’s Afghan Surge.) Yes, two US ambassadors were recalled from Latin American countries, but this is hardly the diplomatic Armageddon that then\u2013Secretary of State Hillary Clinton luridly promised us.<\/p>\n

A very different charge (Myth #6<\/b>), and equally false, is that Manning\u2019s leaks have been insignificant<\/b>. In fact, the leaks played a small but significant role in the Tunisian rebellion and they prevented the extension of American troops\u2019 increasingly unwelcome deployment to Iraq. The declassified documents supplied hundreds if not thousands of front-page stories in the world\u2019s leading newspapers and magazines from Berlin to Delhi to, yes, Washington. If Manning\u2019s leaks have been \u201cinsignificant,\u201d then all journalists should aspire to publish such bagatelles.<\/p>\n

The foundational ur-myth behind all of the above, its Genesis 1:1 and Myth #7<\/b>, is that knowledge puts us at risk and that cluelessness will bring us security<\/b>. It cannot be emphasized enough that the American military and humanitarian debacle in Iraq could never have been possible without extreme levels of government secrecy, distortion and even some lies. The same could be said about our even more catastrophic wars in Southeast Asia a generation and a half ago\u2014dystopian levels of state secrecy entail a very heavy cost in blood (and money), both of the United States and several orders of magnitude more on the foreign nations we invade. It should be no surprise that major foreign policy decisions wind up in catastrophe and failure when made without the benefit of essential information.<\/p>\n

These are the myths that have misshaped and deformed so much of the media coverage about Pfc. Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks\u2014and will continue to do so as the court-martial progresses through August and September to its inevitable conclusion.<\/p>\n

_______________________<\/p>\n

Chase Madar is a civil rights attorney in New York and the author of <\/i>The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower<\/a> (Verso).<\/i><\/p>\n

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

Myth # 1: It is routinely asserted or implied that Manning declassified the field reports and diplomatic cables because he is a nut job, or because he is gay, or because he is a gay nut job. In fact, Manning\u2019s motive was expressly political: \u201cI want people to see the truth\u2026regardless of who they are\u2026because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,59,65,57,139,48,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-nonviolence","category-anglo-america","category-militarism","category-justice","category-in-focus","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29793","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=29793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}