Dupe or Whistleblower
I enjoyed this opinion piece by David Aaronovitch which appeared in the Times the other day and I agree with his central argument - that Bradley Manning forfeited any right to be regarded as a genuine 'whistleblower' by releasing all kinds of sensitive material to the narcissist and weirdo Julian Assange.
Now if Bradley Manning had restricted himself to blowing the whistle on individual acts of wrongdoing - he would no doubt still have been court martialled by the army for disobeying order - but I suspect his punishment would have been a dishonourable discharge which he could have gone on to fight in the court of public opinion.
In which case he would probably have been hailed as a real hero by most people in his own country - whereas now he has just been used by Julian Assange in his very one-sided and boringly anti-American political campaigning.
Bradley Manning is no traitor but he must still go to jail
By David Aaronovitch
The soldier’s supporters would change their tune if it was a right-wing activist leaking anti-immigration statistics
‘Millions round the world”, it was written and said many times yesterday, “regard Bradley Manning as a hero.” A hundred thousand of those millions have signed an online petition calling for the US Army private to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. They include three Icelandic MPs, two Swedish MEPs and a former and shortlived (not literally) Tunisian Minister of Sport.
In fact so much rhetorical overblow now surrounds the man who shared the US’s secrets with WikiLeaks and hence the whole world, and so much more will gust around us when he is finally sentenced, that it becomes difficult to concentrate on what the issues raised by his actions and his punishment actually are. Is it — pace Ms Corrigan Maguire — about America’s murderous wars? Is it about (as The New York Times charged yesterday) “a national security apparatus that has metastasised into a vast and largely unchecked exercise of government secrecy”? Does the Manning trial represent (as a leading writer in The Guardian charged) “not so much the beginning of a slippery slope for a democratic nation as a headlong plummet”?
We Brits will encounter far more of these arguments than those at the other pole — limited to America, it seems — who believe that Manning is a treacherous and unstable symbol of a lack of discipline in US society. Those making such arguments may have been disappointed that Manning was found not guilty of the most serious charge — aiding the enemy.
It won’t be a surprise to readers that, having described the extremities, this columnist argues why they should be avoided. And in the first instance I would suggest that some of Manning’s revelations — notably the video from a US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 in which two Reuters journalists died — entirely fit the description of things that the public and the world needed to know. No organisation would have released that video voluntarily; only a whistleblower would have done it.
Had Manning simply done what most whistleblowers do, and made public those things that he could not bear the public not to know, his position in the pantheon of doers of good would be easily agreed. However he did something else. The same New York Times editorial that I cited earlier made almost comical reference to the fact that “Private Manning’s original leaks seemed careless in some ways, including names and details of American operations that The [New York] Times and other organisations did not publish”.
“Seemed careless in some ways” doesn’t really quite cover the release of 700,000 classified US documents to WikiLeaks to do with whatever they wanted. There was no conceivable way in which Manning could have read even a proportion of those communications, let alone evaluated whether or not the whistle needed to be blown on them or used his non-existent expertise to decide if publication would be harmful. Handing all this over to someone with the sense of responsibility displayed by Julian Assange was like giving the keys to the drinks cupboard to a 13-year-old and going away for a long weekend.
And here one is obliged to point out again the problem of asymmetry. There are no Taleban Mannings, no Chinese Bradleys. It is a response more to the tone of his supporters rather than to their arguments to point out that a Russian Bradley Manning would have had a very bad time indeed. It’s a strange argument that Manning deserves credit for inadvertently not causing damage.
A betrayer of his colleagues and of his commitments, perhaps, but Manning is not a traitor. Animated in the first instance by conscience (or something like conscience) he did not seek to escape the law nor did he work for some other power. In that sense his actions should be seen as classic civil disobedience rather than whistleblowing.
For his supporters, this characterisation raises an awkward problem when it comes to his prosecution. If it is all right for Manning to act in this way should his conscience so dictate, would it also be acceptable for someone you don’t agree with to act in a similar fashion?
If, say, a right-wing activist in the Home Office gave an anti-migrant website the criminal records of all immigrants, would you regard that as justifiable? Or if an anti-abortion campaigner in the NHS handed over lists of all those who had undergone more than one abortion?
When you think about those examples and then expand the principle to cover the entirety of government and official secrecy (or confidentiality as we call it when we apply it to ourselves), then you can see why Manning had to be prosecuted and will have to serve time in prison. If Private First Class Bradley Manning can get away with breaching all the agreements he made when he became a soldier, why shouldn’t everyone else?
I would like to see as small a sentence as can adequately make that point. Not least because a large amount of the material released by Manning did not really need to be classified. One lovely irony of the embassy cables was just how little nefariousness was being practised by US diplomats around the world.
A further effective admission of unnecessary secrecy was made yesterday when the US Administration made public an earlier order to the communications company Verizon to hand over citizens’ phone records. Probably rightly, it decided that it had more to fear from suspicions of what it was up to than from its actions being known.
There is one other point that democratic governments — and their peoples — have to consider when they think about secrets. Many leaving university this summer were nine years old on 9/11 and missed the Cold War altogether by three years. The sense of collective jeopardy that binds societies to ideas of blind duty and necessary sublimation is dissipating. At the same time this generation has lived their entire lives in the information cornucopia of the internet age. Their loyalty can never be assumed because they will take every case as their consciences (and their generational fashion) finds it.
This is part maddening and part wonderful. It sends marvellous kids out around the globe to help people, but throws up Assanges, hacktivists and Snowdens whose understanding of the world is one hundredth as sophisticated as they think it is. Put very bluntly, it is hard to know what you can trust such a generation with, because their loyalty has to be earned anew at every twist in the public road.
For myself I think that part of the answer is to make as much open and transparent as we possibly can. I think it about government and I increasingly think it about citizens. And if it puts us at a temporary disadvantage when dealing with the Putins, then in the longer run I think we’ll gain from it.
