The Passion of Chelsea Manning. Chase Madar
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in statecraft was not invented by Julian Assange. It is a longstanding American tradition that dates back to the first years of the republic. A 1960 Congressional Committee on Government Operations report caught the same spirit: “Secrecy—the first refuge of incompetents—must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society… Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people.” John F. Kennedy made the same point in 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.” Hugo Black, great Alabaman justice of the twentieth-century Supreme Court, had this to say: “The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.” And the first of World War I-era president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points couldn’t have been more explicit: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
We need to know what our government’s commitments are. Our foreign policy elites have clearly demonstrated they cannot be left to their own devices. Based on the last decade of carnage and folly, without public debate—and aggressive media investigations—we have every reason to expect our foreign affairs to keep playing out as Madison predicted.
Many of the principle players in this tragic farce have taken home a Presidential Medal of Freedom. George Tenet, the CIA director who maintained that the case for invading Iraq was a “slam dunk,” got his medal in 2004, as did L. Paul Bremer, the American proconsul under whose administration occupied Iraq slid into chaos. (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had already won the medal for stints in previous administrations as Secretary of Defense.) And let us not forget Tony Blair, given the award in 2010 by Barack Obama. The list of recipients reads like a Who’s Who of the past decade’s foreign policy mayhem.
If there’s one thing to learn from the last ten years, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money.And though information is powerless on its own, it is still a necessary precondition for any democratic state to function. Thanks to the whistleblowing revelations attributed to Bradley Manning, we have a far clearer picture of what our own country is doing. If Manning is 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, an apology from the government that has persecuted him and the heartfelt gratitude of the citizens of his country.
(03:31:33 PM) bradass87: I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy.
Forward Operating Base Hammer was a tough deployment. Even with the espresso bar, the workout room, high-speed internet in all the tents, the musical combos that came together and apart again when the soldiers were deployed elsewhere; even with a visit from Washington Redskin cheerleaders over Thanksgiving 2007, or any of the college squads who visited for MWR (Morale Welfare and Recreation), FOB Hammer was a tough deployment. Built in early 2007 for the “Surge” of additional US troops into an exploding Iraq, the base is forty miles east of Baghdad in the middle of the Mada’in Qada desert. There is not a hut or hamlet in sight. The isolation is no accident: the base was sited deep into nowhere to minimize the bootprint that a garrison of foreign troops would leave on Iraqi hearts and minds.
It’s a desolate place. “The base was in the middle of the desert. There was sand everywhere, we had dust storms quite often, I don’t know, once a month or so while I was there,” said Jimmy Rodriguez to The Guardian. “Just a bleak place, everything was brown over there.”1 Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republic and since his return to civilian life has been working at a boxing gym in New York while apprenticing as a carpenter. Rodriguez’s impression of FOB Hammer is widely shared. “There was a fog that would come in almost every morning that was pollution from nearby,” says Jacob Sullivan, who served as a biological and chemical weapons expert with the Second Battalion Special Brigade, redeploying home with the rank of Private First Class. Sullivan comes from Phoenix, Arizona and is now back there again, a full-time university student with entrepreneurial aspirations. “[The fog] smelled sour and nasty, and would just wave through and linger, and create an eerie atmosphere.”2
The tedium of landscape is by all accounts a pretty good metaphor for the monotony of a deployment at FOB Hammer. “Life on base for many of the FOBbits—that’s what they’re called—was really very boring, with nothing to do but work, eat and sleep, and the work was twelve, fourteen hour shifts with the same people, day after day,” says Peter Van Buren, a State Department Official who was posted at the base from October 2009 to May 2010. “There were a lot of Groundhog Day jokes.” Van Buren’s in northern Virginia now, having just been squeezed out of the State Department after two decades in the Foreign service, with stints in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK and Hong Kong. (Van Buren’s sin was linking to one of the thousands of leaked State Department documents on his personal blog, a violation of official policy; his real crime was publishing a scabrous memoir of reconstruction follies in Iraq.) During his time in Iraq he saw a lot more of the country than most of the people at Hammer. “I got outside the wire several times a week, but a lot of the FOBbits never left the base at all during their whole deployment. They got flown into Baghdad under cover of night, and a year later got flown out, also at night. For many soldiers, the base was all they ever saw of Iraq.”3
It bears repeating: a deployment at FOB Hammer was no great adventure. “Morale I think was generally really low for everyone that was there that I talked to,” says Rodriguez. “All the soldiers, they didn’t like it, nobody had a purpose out there.”
The harsh climate doesn’t help any. Temperatures can hit 100 degrees even in springtime, said another soldier, “but I’d prefer the heat over the peanut butter that forms when it rains… I grow three inches in height when it rains here.” These are the observations of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who served at FOB Hammer from October 2009 till late June 2010. Manning is brainy, and he kind of knows it. (“I don’t think 99% of the people I work with would make such observations.”) He also has a habit of thinking for himself, which can be a liability in the military. During his deployment, which lasted from October 2009 till late June 2010, Manning spent many long shifts at a computer terminal inside the base’s SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), where access is granted only to those with security clearance. Like many of his fellow FOBbits, Manning was, by his own admission, pretty miserable for much of his deployment.
Today, Bradley Manning’s name is notorious, cursed and exalted. In America, elite politicians have called for his execution, and former ACLU bigwigs have eagerly admonished us “to be tough on the people in the government who are like Manning.”4 Fierce defenders have also stepped forward, among them veterans, peace activists, writers and intellectuals—a sprinkling of solidarity groups have sprouted up across the nation—across the world, in fact. The months of extreme solitary confinement inflicted on Manning made the State Department’s head public relations spokesperson, normally a bland font of official euphemism, erupt in a diatribe against the punishment, which led swiftly to his resignation. Abroad, Pfc. Manning has inspired passionate defenses on the floor of the German Bundestag, earned enthusiastic plaudits from the staid Council of Europe and won a major British newspaper’s readership vote for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize—and by a wide margin.5 Bradley Manning has been denounced as an immature, treasonous, pathological headcase who embodies why gays and lesbians should never be allowed in the military. (Manning is gay, and according to as yet unauthenticated instant-message chatlogs, he was seeking to commence male-to-female gender transition at the time of his arrest.) Manning has also been praised as a whistleblower, a patriot and a hero who sacrificed his freedom for the honor of his military, the good of his country and the world’s enlightenment—a young lion of dissent against state secrecy and imperial violence.
But