An interesting excerpt from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming memoir appears in the New York Times, offering an explanation of how and why she ended up violating her oath and revealing secret military information to wikileaks.
I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.
While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?
There are a few things this is expressly not about.
- This is not about believing the government to be right or good
- This is not about believing that the government does not conceal critical information from the public to cover its ass
- This is not about what Chelsea Manning did
What’s reflected in Manning’s essay is the mindset of the modern whistleblower.
I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.
It was clear to Manning. The subsequent outcome is irrelevant at this point, as the only information Manning possessed was what went through her own head, her own “dissonance” becoming “an all-consuming frustration” of not revealing to the Americans at home the classified information she possessed as a military analyst.
For the sake of argument, assume there are a million people in the military, its subcontractors and the government who possess, to some greater or lesser extent, classified information. Some may be top secret, so critical to national security as to be housed in Mar-a-Lago Fort Knox, but all to be held in confidence by whomever had access to the information.
Does each and every person, within and without government, believe that the need to maintain confidentiality must meet with their personal approval or they do no “moral” wrong by disclosing it publicly?
What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.
This rationale can be used by anyone and applied to anything, whether it’s nuclear secrets or a draft Supreme Court opinion. If a person with access to information that is held in confidence feels that the information should be made public, does their disclosure find justification in their belief that it’s “part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience”? Must secrecy pass personal muster with each and every one of those million people, each of whom may well have their own personal belief as to the propriety of keeping the information secret?
I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.
After President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in the waning hours of his administration in January, 2017, enlisted soldier Bradley Manning emerged from prison a celebrity, both because someone like Manning would be in Vogue and asked to lecture at no less an institution than Harvard, but because she was so important as to be targeted by the evil Fox News?
Who doesn’t want to be a hero of the resistance, a rebel, a celebrity in Vogue and hated by the likes of Fox News?
There is a difference between revealing crimes committed but concealed, although this distinction may be hard to discern given how many people believe that anything they feel is criminalish is a crime demanding disclosure rather than an actual malum in se crime, and secrets with which one disagrees should be secret.
How does a country function when those to whom its secrets are entrusted believe they have a right to reveal them when they create some personal sense of dissonance, or they just want to get their face in fronot of Annie Liebovitz’s camera? No matter how necessary secrecy may be to the functioning of a government, is every enlisted soldier now the arbiter of what should and should be a secret? Only one of that million needs to feel otherwise and confidentiality is lost.
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America is better off for Daniel Ellsberg, Hugh Thompson, and Chelsea Manning, and I’m glad that every American soldier is the individual arbiter of what constitutes a war crime.
What do war crimes have to do with anything? Didn’t Manning just indiscriminately release material? Eg, Wikipedia says that “Manning was also responsible for the ‘Cablegate’ leak of 251,287 State Department cables, written by 271 American embassies and consulates in 180 countries, dated December 1966 to February 2010.” The fact that some of the material happens to have included evidence of potential war crimes does not mean that was her motive, and the excerpt indicates that indeed it was not. To compare her with Thompson, who should have high schools named after him, seems quite odd. PS: Great screen name!
When I stated in the post that this was not about Manning, I assumed some narcissistic child would nonetheless make it about Manning because that’s what puny minds do. Now that we’ve gotten it out of the way, perhaps we can enjoy some not-moronic comments.
So much for your ostensible rules about keeping comments “civil and respectful.” Oh well, there are plenty of other blogs out there to read.
Yes there are. Go, enjoy, bye.
Lol. We have an influx of this shit at EW too lately.
Manning is nothing more than a stinking lousy Traitor. All that self righteous BS is just that BS to try and justify what he did when he broke his word.
If you believe this, you don’t understand the real world. What happens in the real world would be things like Abu Ghraib. Enlisted grunts who are expected to follow and do follow orders get hung out to dry when the war crimes become public. Officers are shocked and have no idea how it could have happened. What the law of land warfare is really good for is sacrificing low-ranking scapegoats as the need arises.
A certain former CIC seems to be confused about this too.
I wonder if Quinn will ever be able to see the irony?
Is irony the opposite of wrinkly/
Asking for a friend.
Manning was a low level minion, the equivalent of someone putting four bolts in a F-150 frame on the assembly line.
Manning was no more competent to determine the release of the material than the assembly line worker is competent to replace the Ford CEO.
FFS, last time I’m going to say this, but this isn’t about Manning. Every one of those million assembly line workers believes they get to decide for a nation, and QM approves.
How about less secrets to guard? Admit stupid mistakes, attach blame and move on. Publish or revel what you know those who shouldn’t do know. Spin it and throw in the usual BS to cover ass(s). Secrets and info sold for money that bring death to agents or armed forces should mean being stood up against wall and shot.
As an old judge once said, FUCKING FOCUS.
“No matter how necessary secrecy may be to the functioning of a government…”
Secrecy is only needed by people committing crimes, its only the guilty that need secrets. There should be no secrets in a Govt, the people who pay for it should be able to see every decision made and how it was carried out. The American war in Ukraine at the moment is a prime example, the censorship of opposing views and the propaganda of the mainstream meme is at a level never seem before.
Anyone who goes against those in power to shine a light on their crimes is a hero, the enemy is very rarely those in another country.
Kinda make a mess of the landing on D-Day if we let the Nazis know we were coming. You can’t possible believe something this dumb.
The tricky thing about taking an oath, whether ‘of enlistment’ or ‘of office,’ is that you are obliged to follow it. Perhaps it’s the Sicilian in me, but I believe it’s fair to judge a person by their ability to be faithful to their obligations.
Somebody has stolen Jake’s handle and written a sensible comment.
Just checked, that was really him.
Har har har, very funny, Scott.
If person A takes an oath that to them has moral, ethical and religious components, they take it seriously and are obliged to follow it. But while rare it is possible that a situation may arise in which they genuinely perceive they have an overriding moral, ethical and/or religious duty to violate that oath.
Which of course is NOT the same as mere “frustration” but requiring a more profound examination of one’s conscience that I doubt many are inclined to do…
Your comment reminds me of the famously oft-misquoted stanza from Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which is, of course, “Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.”
Most soldiers are not philosophers. Getting any of the enlisted and half the officers I’ve shared space with to understand the distance between what they are obliged to do and what they are obligated to do could be more complicated than convincing them to charge a heavily fortified position on a Crimean beach.
All of which is to say, it has been explained to me that to have a functioning national security apparatus, such matters are best kept simple. To the best of my knowledge, if a soldier has a concern, communicating it to their direct superior is encouraged, and communicating it to their congressman is allowed, but going public with a concern is a definite no no.
I was referring to morality, ethics, and religion, not legality. Sometimes the right thing to do is not legal, and vice versa, and having an oath (or affirmation) required, instead of simply e.g. signing an acknowledgment that one is aware that it is illegal to violate secrecy may complicate things for some. Presumably it’s to impress upon the person the significance of the matter, but by choosing to do so by an oath, that – to some – means something beyond legality.
I understood your point. My response was, perhaps, too wrapped up in allegory to be understood.
The Oath of Enlistment is very simple. Paraphrased, the agreement is I will defend, I will be loyal, and I will follow orders according to the UCMJ. So what’s an enlistee to do if they believe that, in order to be faithful to the first clause, they must blow the whistle on something? Well, see the third clause. They must follow orders. According to the orders they were first given in a classroom setting at basic military training and the UCMJ, they can tell their superior or tell their congressman. According to those very same orders every enlistee gets, they must not go directly to the public.
If every American soldier is the individual arbiter of what constitutes a war crime, then there are no war crimes. The are no crimes because there can be no standard by which to judge what is and what is not a crime other than the personal belief of each individual soldier. If I believe the indiscriminate killing of civilians in an occupied area is necessary because it will deter the enemy, then who is to say I am a war criminal? I am the arbiter of what constitutes a crime. What we are left with is a county not of laws or rules, but individual whim. Why have rules on secrecy or confidentiality in any setting? Just tell people keep secret what you think should be kept secret. We are not better off in such a system.
If you’re bringing in war crimes, actually every soldier is an individual arbiter, in the sense of, they should not obey illegal orders even if others do, and can be held responsible for following orders.
There’s a thin line between what most of us would consider heroism or treason. I suppose that line could be obscured by how we perceive our government. Obama wouldn’t pardon Snowden, yet Trump considered doing so, even while his CIA chief was calling for him to be executed.
For the last few years our government agencies have been trying to convince us that Russia was somehow in the wrong for influencing our elections, but I’m old enough to remember when a young man named Christopher Boyce was so upset after he found out that the CIA was interfering in the politics of other democratic nations that he had top secret documents delivered to the Russians as punishment.
There’s probably something that would be so unconscionable to all but the most thoroughly programmed of us that we would reach deep down inside and find the courage to ensure the word got out.
As a former LT in the Navy some 40 years ago I held a TS\SIOP\ESCI* clearance and had access to way too much classified shit. You swore to obey the rules when you took your oath.
Things are classified for many reasons that may or may not be obvious or to your liking, but the law is clear as to who does and does not have authority to declassify information. The average service member does not.
I just wonder how many people turned up dead after Snowden and Manning? How many programs were cancelled or rendered useless? How many people disappeared forever? How many of ours got killed because these leaks?
*Top Secret\Single Integrated Operational Plan\Extremely Sensitive Compartmentalized Information
As a civilian with clearances, every time I have been cleared into something new, the first page of the indoc briefing, before they splash the next page with all the new hieroglyphs up on the monitor, asks “DO YOU WANT TO BE BRIEFED???” And that’s after you have to initial the pages with all the relevant Federal statutes listed and quoted, spelling out your responsibilities if you take on this burden. I’ve never seen anyone walk out at that point, but the option is always there. If you don’t want the responsibility, don’t sign and don’t take the briefing. And if you signed, but don’t agree with what you’re doing or learning, there are always channels through which you can report your concerns, and the briefing covers that too.
TL;DR – don’t take on responsibility if you’re not willing to follow through. But the whole notion of responsibility seems passé to many nowadays.
That’s the funny thing about trust, once it’s broken it can never be fully restored. How many intelligence opportunities will we miss out on because a future source doesn’t trust that our government will keep their identity safe and secret, possibly saving multiple lives?
The part that Manning conveniently forgets is that he, like every other enlisted member of the U.S. Armed Forces, took an oath to, among other things, “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” He voluntarily enlisted–if he’d commissioned as an officer, his oath wouldn’t have included that statement (they must still obey orders under penalty of law, but they haven’t taken an oath to do so). But he wasn’t an officer; he voluntarily enlisted and took that oath. Actual war crimes are an exception to that–if you’re ordered to take part in My Lai (or Abu Graib, for a more recent example), you must refuse. But maintaining secrets–even if those secrets constitute evidence of a war crime (which isn’t/wasn’t his claim, at least for the bulk of the material he released)–is not a crime.
This can’t not be about Manning, but it’s equally about anyone else in the military, especially those who are more junior. When you enlist in the military, you have to accept that, in most cases, you aren’t going to be the decisionmaker. You may be able to give advice, if you’re lucky. And yes, as you gain seniority, you’ll be able to make some decisions (but the odds that you’ll ever reach a position of being able to declassify information are almost nil). But no matter how senior you get, there will be someone over you, and you must follow their orders.
Pardon? Manning was pardoned? At long last, has the blawgosphere collapsed completely, to the point that one of the few remaining blawgs claims that when Obama COMMUTED Manning’s sentence in January 2017, yet still left four months remaining before the sentence expired on 17 May 2017, this was the same as a pardon? Then why has Manning (unsuccessfully) attempted to have the conviction expunged, to no avail?
[Ed. Note: Balance of 10,000 word lunacy deleted, but I’ve allowed this paragraph because you are correct that Manning was not pardoned, but had his sentence commuted, and I have corrected the post, even if you can’t stop yourself from being your usual assholish nutjob.]
The military has several, well publicized avenues, both within and without the military, for anonymously reporting violations of all types. Many of these avenues REQUIRE investigation or reporting up the Chain of Command. Many have been used successfully to expose many bad things that ended up in the news. Even if you find yourself in the rare situation where going to the press is the only avenue, there are ways to do it that are narrowly tailored and (as I’m sure a lawyer here could describe better) leave you whistleblower protection when done right. Hell, as a Master Chief I can remember several times advising, “Talk to a good lawyer before you even THINK of going off the reservation with this”.
Data dumping everything you have access for to the public is NOT the right way.