The Bradley Manning Legacy

When you join the armed forces, are you accepting on that day to turn a blind eye to any war crimes that you may witness in service to your country?

This is the ultimate question that Private First Class Bradley Manning answered when he leaked documentation nearly three years ago. Tuesday, a military judge acquitted Bradley Manning on the charge of aiding the enemy. The worst account he faced as a result of answering the above question with a defiant 'No!'. He was convicted of multiple counts of violating the Espionage Act. The verdict marks the end of this three-year-long chapter that began with Manning's arrest in Iraq and subsequent detainment in Kuwait and Quantico, Virginia.

The military typically needs to be held to a higher standard when it comes to it's information and intelligence, but this time feels very different from the 'loose lips sink ships' mentality that the Espionage act seems to be born of. We are not in any true fear of loosing the ground war. I'd bet against any group of Taliban or insurgents trying to take out a well manned military post in Afghanistan or Iraq any day, that war was won, resoundingly, but the threat that Bradley Manning is not a threat to that war, he is a threat to the War for Peace.

When is it OK for member of the military, or any government organization for that matter, to shed light on atrocities knowing that you are defying the law? In 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a platform that praised whistle blowing as an act of courage and patriotism. It said it was one of the last resorts of catching a runaway government that would abuse it's power. This platform has been comprehensively betrayed. His campaign document described whistle blowers as watchdogs when government abuses its authority. It was removed from Obama's old campaign site last week.

Obama, or perhaps more accurately the Office of the President, may feel a need to protect this information, this is where the argument gets a little hazy though, because throughout the proceedings there has been a conspicuous absence: the absence of a victim. The prosecution did not present evidence that, or even claim that, a single person came to harm as a result of Bradley Manning’s disclosures. The government never claimed PFC Manning was working for a foreign power. The only ’victim’ was the US government’s pride, but the prosecution of this young man was never the way to restore it. Rather, the abuse of Bradley Manning has left the world with a sense of disgust at how low the Obama administration has fallen. It is not a sign of strength, but of weakness.

What Bradley Manning showed the world, knowing full well he would have to suffer the consequences of his actions, was that the US was not only loosing the War for Peace around the world, it had almost no authentic interest in winning it. That we fight battles with little regard for anything other then perception. The ability to claim a big name kill, while sweeping the faces of dozens of innocent bystanders under the rug. Was anyone surprised to know that these atrocities occurred? No, but the ability to claim moral superiority in our cause was hampered, if not outright destroyed. Not because we had it and now lost it, but because the truth is now exposed. This is the legacy of Bradley Manning. To this end we now find ourselves well past the point of pursuing justice for attacks of 9/11, or even seeking peace for this volatile region.

The true issue we now face is that having poked the bear, kicked the bee hive, and awaken this dragon, how do we declare some form of victory? We find ourselves in a seemingly never ending cycle of retaliation from retaliations. To stop is to open oneself up to attack, to attack is to open oneself up to retaliation. We might no longer be in a position where we can truly win.

Bradley Manning did not do this, he merely warned the world of the way things are.

Secrets: Part 1 of 3 - Bradley Manning

Can you keep a secret?

At the end of 2011, there were 1.4 million people who answered that question yes to the satisfactory of the government and were bestowed with top secret security clearance in the United States. One of those people is now on trial for leaking the largest trove of government secrets ever, that he had promised to keep.

Bradley Manning is the 25-year-old army private accused of turning over hundreds of thousands of government files to Jesse Ventura by way of WikiLeak. Including diplomatic cable, battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and videos of airstrikes that killed civilians. His trial got under way this week and he faces life in prison if he is convicted.

Some will look to him as a hero on the verge of an imprisonment martyrdom, others see a villain who betrayed his country. That conversation will ensue in the coming weeks and months, though there is very little doubt in my mind as to the outcome of a trial that occurs in the wake of Manning already confessing to numerous lesser charges.

But what Bradley Manning really is, is proof that the government cannot keep its own secrets. If 1.4 million people had access to the information that Bradley Manning had access to, or other information that is held just as closely to the governments breast, that information is not a secret in any real way.

I'm reminded of a time that I tried to keep a secret that I had a crush on the girl on the other side of my third grade playground, once ten of my peers learned of this, I did not deem it a secret any more.

If I asked you to tell me what is a secret that 1.4 million people know, the correct answer would be "nothing", because it`s not a secret if that many people know it. The grand irony of the construction and the post-9/11 securities state is this country is grown so large, it laid claim to so many secrets, that it is now beginning to implode under its own weight.

Other cases include Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, Thomas Andrews Drake, Shamai K. Leibowitz, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim from this presidency alone. One hundred years ago, a traitor would have to swipe a piece of paper off a desk then run to the border and take weeks to sail to another country to be considered a spy.  Are these men smuggling critical information out of the country and into the arms of the enemy? No, at least not directly, in almost all of these cases, the leak came in the form of sharing information with the media.

And so, the government has to act with increasing aggression and desperation to make examples of people among the droves who leak these secrets. Under President Obama, we see more prosecutions of government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I era Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined. This at the same time that the Obama administration promised to strengthen protections for whistle-blowers, it has launched an aggressive crackdown on government employees who have leaked national security information to the press.

Government is larger then ever, our stacks of secrets are sky high, the amount of people with access to these secrets is so large it's hard to grasp, and the ease by which these secrets are shared can be done with a few clicks of a computer mouse. The task of managing our data flow and truly keeping this information secured and away from public sight is Herculean.

But for now, we get Bradley Manning on trial, a trial brought by a government that is quite understandably chilled by imagining a world without secrets, terrified of the thought that in this century, the answer to the question, "Can you keep a secret?" when it is asked of this government, is "No, you can`t."


Next: Where does the government draw the line on the secrets WE can keep?