The Passion of Bradley Manning (16 page)

No longer. Schmitt's ready-made conceptual lexicon for political emergencies, non-state combatants, and the need for strident executive authority has proven irresistible to ambitious American intellectuals in the revolving door between federal government and the finer law schools. These tweedy immoralists urge us to relax our square-john commitment to the rule of law and embrace strong executive action. Surely the moralizing banalities of rule-of-law theorists are inadequate for the unique challenges of the post-9/11 global order, they tell us.

But as the events of the past decade plainly show, one would be on safer ground drawing the opposite conclusion about the Rule of Law's value—and its effectiveness in ensuring national security. Our government responded to 9/11 with numerous extraordinary measures contemptuous of ordinary legality, and virtually every one of them has been disastrous in its consequences. From the illegal conquest of Iraq to rampant torture to mass warrantless wiretapping to the military commissions of Guantánamo, these policies have been exorbitantly costly in blood (of many nations, including our own), money, and American prestige. Has any part of our frenzied rejection of legal restraints improved national security? Just how did any of these radical above-the-law measures help the United States, let alone the world?

Vermeule is correct to note that these black holes are likely to dilate rather than contract as an imperialist foreign policy strains our legal system, not only with the panic and fervor of war but with juridical conundrums of extraterritoriality, non-state belligerents, and geographically far-fetched definitions of self-defense. (Drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and the tribal regions of northwest Pakistan are all rationalized by State Department lawyers on the grounds that they are in “defense” of United States territory)

Millions voted for Barack Obama because he promised a restoration of something approaching the Rule of Law after the unremitting “emergency” of his predecessor, and its lawless spree of self-inflicted disasters. Instead, the Obama Administration has failed to rethink, much less reform, the extralegal emergency measures installed by George W. Bush, an opinion widely shared not just among civil libertarians but among former Bush-Cheney officials. Filling in the many legal black holes in America might include shutting down Guantánamo (wherever it may be located) and radically rethinking our post-9/11 security policies. The clamp on information that has kept the public ignorant about so many critical foreign policy issues would have to be loosened considerably. Instead, Obama has preserved, streamlined and often intensified his predecessor's bellicose foreign policies, reserving the government's vindictive fury for whistleblowers.

Those of us who defend the alleged deeds of Manning appeal to a sense of justice. We have no choice but to use the language of law in defending him, even if we recognize that such appeals are in vain. A great many of the approximately 700,000 leaked documents are not classified at all; many should be covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act. But many would not be so covered, and Manning—or whoever it was— deserves all the more credit for this act of civil disobedience. It is because he broke the law that we know so much more; it is because he broke the law that we honor him.

Bradley Manning's alleged act was an act of intense political courage. The United States is an increasingly depoliticized society, and we struggle to comprehend the very concept of the political. Instead, our media have tended to see Manning as motivated purely by individual psychology, or by his less-than-ideal childhood and family life, or by his sexual preference and gender identity. All the while, the leaks themselves have furnished the world's most prestigious print media with story after story after story. Instead of protecting their source, major newspapers have been content to label Bradley Manning a headcase.

This is nonsense. Releasing the war logs and the diplomatic cables was a practical solution to a severe problem of government obfuscation. The past ten years have been a costly disaster for American foreign policy— and for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Government secrecy and distortion have played a major role in creating this blood-soaked mess. Only with some knowledge can the course be corrected. Manning was perfectly clear about this in his discussion with the informant who turned him in, after telling him that “it was forwarded to WL”:

(02:28:10 AM) bradass87:
i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public

(02:28:10
AM
) [email protected] :
I'm not here right now

(02:28:50
AM
) bradass87:
if i knew then, what i knew now… kind of thing…

(02:29:31
AM
) bradass87:
or maybe im just young, naive, and stupid…

(02:30:09
AM
) [email protected]:
which do you think it is?

(02:30:29
AM
) bradass87:
im hoping for the former

(02:30:53
AM
) bradass87:
it cant be the latter

(02:31:06
AM
) bradass87:
because if it is… were fucking screwed

(02:31:12
AM
) bradass87:
(as a society)

(02:31:49
AM
) bradass87:
and i dont want to believe that we're screwed

If the disclosures have failed to alter American statecraft, then the fault lies not with the whistleblower, but with a society incapable of receiving this great gift of knowledge.

December 17, 1987: Bradley Manning is born in Crescent, Oklahoma, a small and heavily Evangelical town in the north central part of the state. His father, Brian Manning, works as an information technology manager for Hertz Rent-a-Car in Oklahoma City. Manning's mother, née Susan Fox, is a Welsh woman whom Brian Manning met and married while deployed in the US Navy (with a classified security clearance) at Cawdor Barracks, Wales.

1990s: Bradley Manning wins three consecutive science fairs at Crescent's K-12 school and is a member of the student team representing Crescent at academic competitions across Oklahoma. He teaches himself HTML and designs his own website at age ten.

2002: Susan Fox and Brian Manning divorce, and Bradley Manning moves with his mother to Haverfordwest in her native Wales, where he enrolls in local schools and joins a computer club.

2005: Bradley Manning surprises his semi-estranged father by calling from Wales and asking if to move in with him and his second wife at their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Manning is in London renewing his passport during the terror attacks on the London underground of July 7, 2005. Manning's father sets his son up with a job at a local software company, which Manning, who is 17, is unable to hold down.

2006–2007: After fighting with his father and stepmother, he leaves their home and drifts from Tulsa to Chicago, working a series of low-wage jobs and living out of his car. In mid-2007 he moves in with an aunt in Potomac, Maryland where he works both in retail clothing and as a Starbucks barista.

October 2007: Bradley Manning enlists in the United States Army and is sent for basic training to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Manning, who is 5' 2” and weighs 115 pounds, is routinely picked on by both drill sergeants and fellow enlistees. “There are two kinds of short guys; the kinds who'll take your head off if you mess with them and the kind who gets bullied. Brad Manning was the second kind,” says a Fort Leonard Wood contemporary. Manning is placed in the “discharge unit” for enlistees about to be rejected by the Army, where he is bullied further. In the end, faced with low recruitment figures and in urgent need of soldiers with IT skills, the Army decides to “recycle” Manning back into active service for training as an intelligence analyst.

August 2008: After intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Manning is deployed to Fort Drum in upstate New York in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division. There Manning's superiors record his throwing chairs and screaming at higher-ranking soldiers in his unit. Manning develops a romantic relationship with Brandeis University sophomore Tyler Watkins, whom he visits in Boston on weekend leave.

October 10, 2009: Bradley Manning is deployed to Iraq to work as an intelligence analyst at Forward Operating Base Hammer, one of the most isolated bases in the Iraq theater, located some thirty-five miles east of Baghdad in the Mada'in desert. Manning works as an intelligence analyst in the base's Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, or SCIF. He has access to SIPRNET, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, used by the Defense Department and the State Department to transfer classified data, and JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System.

November 12, 2009: Manning is promoted to the rank of specialist with a top secret security clearance.

November 2009–April 2010: In the course of his intelligence duties at FOB Hammer, Manning investigates the detention of fifteen Iraqi citizens by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing “anti-Iraqi literature,” namely, a pamphlet decrying corruption in their government titled “Where did the money go?” Manning has qualms about peaceful activists being detained by the Iraqi authorities, whose practice of torturing prisoners has been comprehensively documented by the US military. When he brings his concerns up the chain of command, his superior tells him to “shut up” and think about how they can help the Iraqi Federal Police round up more detainees.

Late 2009: On the SIPRNet database, Manning finds the video footage in a Judge Advocates General officer's folder that will later be released by WikiLeaks as the “Collateral Murder” video. According to Manning, there are “about two dozen more where that came from.”

December 2009: A supervising master sergeant has the bolt from Manning's rifle removed out of concerns over the intelligence analyst's mental health.

April 5, 2010: WikiLeaks releases a video filmed from the gunsight of a US Army helicopter that records the crew opening fire on and killing at least 14 Iraqis, including several children and two Reuters employees, and wounding several other civilians, in a suburb of Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The video, called “Collateral Murder,” becomes a global sensation.

April 2010: Renowned hacker and convicted felon Adrian Lamo is involuntarily institutionalized in Sacramento, California for nine days.

May 7, 2010: Manning is demoted from Specialist to Private First Class after punching a female superior officer in the face.

May 21, 2010: Bradley Manning commences an instant message dialogue with Adrian Lamo. Over four days, Manning tells Lamo about his childhood, family life, sexual orientation and gender identity; the disclosures he has made to WikiLeaks and his relationship with the organization; his motives for leaking the files, citing in its entirety a 1919
New York Times
editorial on the virtues of “open diplomacy.” Two days into the chat, Lamo contacts federal authorities. For the rest of his chats with Manning, Lamo is working as an informant.

May 29, 2010: Manning is arrested by military police and imprisoned in Kuwait.

July 5, 2010: Manning is charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, a statute designed originally to punish spies but used with increasing frequency to punish whistleblowers. The Obama administration prosecutes more cases under this act than all previous administrations combined.

July 25, 2010: WikiLeaks releases the “Afghan War Logs” to
The Guardian
,
Der Spiegel
and the
New York Times
. 75,000 of the 91,731 files are available on the WikiLeaks website; the rest are withheld to minimize risk of harm to individuals named in the documents. Military officials and many journalists condemn the release of the names of some Afghan nationals who have worked with the International Security Assistance Force.

July 29, 2010: Manning is moved from Kuwait to Quantico Marine Corps Base in northeastern Virginia, where he is placed in maximum security detention under prevention of injury watch; in other words, solitary confinement.

September 2010: The Department of Defense admits they have no evidence of Afghan nationals being targeted by the Taliban for collaborating with ISAF forces.

September 27, 2010: At the launch of his new Christmas-themed children's book,
Can't Wait till Christmas
, Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, former Republican presidential candidate and an evangelical pastor, pauses from book-signing to recommend that Bradley Manning be executed.

October 22, 2010: WikiLeaks releases the “Iraq War Logs,” 391,832 documents, onto its website. The logs, based on “SigAct” field reports of individual incidents, document the widespread use of torture by Iraqi authorities; a civilian death toll estimate, which the Pentagon had previously denied doing; a tally of Iraqis shot at military checkpoints by US and allied troops, among many other from-the-field reports of the war and occupation. Like the Afghan War Logs, these records make a pointillist portrait of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

November 8, 2010: WikiLeaks begins the slow release of 251,287 classified US State Department cables. Instead of making most of the documents available at once on its website, WikiLeaks releases the documents in a trickle to chosen newspapers and magazines whose editors redact the documents, editing out information that could put innocent people at risk. The documents reveal, among many other things, the American embassy's role in suppressing minimum wage legislation in Haiti; the nepotistic corruption of the Ben Ali family in Tunisia; and a request that Department of State employees covertly gather biometric, credit card and other personal information from foreign diplomats. More than half the leaked cables are not classified; 6% are classed as “secret.”

November 29, 2010: Republican Representative Peter King, a longtime supporter of the Irish Republican Army, calls for the US Attorney General to designate WikiLeaks a terrorist organization and to prosecute Julian Assange for espionage and treason. The same day, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares these disclosures to be “not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests” but “an attack on the international community.”

November 30, 2010: The Office of Career Services at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs sends an email to students warning them that if they post about WikiLeaks on their Twitter or Facebook, it may deter prospective employers from hiring them.

December 1, 2010: The neoconservative
National Review
publishes an article condemning Manning's pretrial detention in solitary confinement.

December 16, 2010: MIT computer researcher David House tells
The Guardian
that in his twice-monthly visits to Manning at Quantico he has noted a marked deterioration in his friend's focus and mental faculties.

December 19, 2010: Vice President Joseph Biden calls Assange a “high-tech terrorist.”

January 20, 2011: David C. Macmichael, former Commander of Headquarters Company at Quantico, writes letter condemning Manning's treatment in detention.

January 23, 2011: Manning's friend David House and journalist Jane Hamsher are turned away from visiting Manning at Quantico.

January 26, 2011: Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, reveals that the Quantico base psychiatrist has for months determined that there is no medical rationale for keeping Bradley Manning in solitary confinement.

March 1, 2011: Manning receives a second set of charges, again including the allegation that he violated the Espionage Act of 1917.

March, 2, 2011: Manning comments to guards that the POI restrictions on him are useless as he could still kill himself with the elastic waistband if he really wanted to. Prison authorities subsequently deprive Manning of his underwear at night, forcing him to stand to attention naked every morning at 5
AM
.

March 10, 2011: US State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley says in a press conference that the treatment of Manning at Quantico is “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid and I don't know why the DoD [Department of Defense] is doing it.” Crowley resigns two days later.

March 11, 2011: President Obama is asked at a press conference about the treatment in detention of Bradley Manning. Obama assures reporters that he has looked into it, and that the punitive regime of solitary confinement is for the prisoner's own safety.

March 19, 2011: Ann Clwyd, British member of parliament for Cynon Valley, Wales, condemns the pretrial detention of Manning and calls on her government to raise the issue with US counterparts. “It's just a shame—it's more than a shame, it's a disgrace really that he is being treated like he is,” says John Broughton, former Deputy head teacher at the school Manning attended in Wales. “It really is fairly shameful that the British government isn't doing anything about one of its own citizens.”

April 11, 2011: Over 250 law school professors, including Obama's Harvard Law School mentor, Laurence Tribe, sign a letter condemning the pretrial solitary confinement of Bradley Manning as “degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.”

April 12, 2011: The German Bundestag's human rights committee sends a letter to President Obama condemning the treatment of Bradley Manning at Quantico.

April 20, 2011: Nearly nine months after being placed in solitary confinement, Manning is transferred from Quantico to the Joint Regional Corrections Facility at Fort Leavenworth where he is placed in the communal, medium-security population.

April 21, 2011: At a $5,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraiser at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco addressed by President Obama, a table of ten donors stands up and interrupts the proceedings with a song about Bradley Manning. When they confront the President, his filmed response to them is “He broke the law.”

June 7, 2011: Daniel Ellsberg, former US Marine captain and leaker of the Pentagon Papers, declares Bradley Manning a hero and praises his alleged disclosures.

July 1, 2011: 6,600 prisoners held in solitary confinement in Pelican Bay go on hunger strike demanding improvements to their condition. Over 25,000 prisoners remain in some form of long-term solitary confinement in US federal prisons.

July 12, 2011: The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, expresses concerns that the Obama administration had denied his request for an unsupervised visit with Manning.

July 13, 2011:
Wired
magazine releases the complete instant chatlogs between Manning and Adrian Lamo, the hacker and informer who turned him in to military authorities.

September 2, 2011: WikiLeaks releases all 251,287 State Department cables in unredacted form. The cables had long been available after
Guardian
journalist David Leigh published the secret password to the cache, believing it to be only temporary; the security breach had been vocally advertised by disgruntled former WikiLeaks member Daniel Domscheit-Berg. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland condemns the leaks as “irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous” and alleges they jeopardize the security of foreign nationals revealed to have cooperated with the US government.

September 11, 2011: An Associate Press investigation surveys a broad sample of State Department foreign national sources whose identities were revealed by the unredacted cables. The investigations finds that no harm has been done to any of the sources surveyed, many of whom were surprised to learn that their communications had ever been seen as a state secret.