Bradley Manning Makes Statement

Bradley Manning, the 25-year-old U.S. Army soldier who allegedly leaked hundreds of thousands of internal memos about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been held by the government for two and a half years. On Thursday he pleaded guilty 10 of 22 charges brought against him, and now he has released an official statement. Here's an excerpt: "On 3 February 2010, I visited the WLO website on my computer and clicked on the submit documents link. Next I found the submit your information online link and elected to submit the SigActs via the onion router or TOR anonymizing network by special link. ... I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to the Washington Post. It provided rough guidelines saying ‘It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information– perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day. After sending this, I left the SD card in a camera case at my aunt’s house in the event I needed it again in the future. I returned from mid-tour leave on 11 February 2010. Although the information had not yet been publicly by the WLO, I felt this sense of relief by them having it. I felt I had accomplished something that allowed me to have a clear conscience based upon what I had seen and read about and knew were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan everyday."

Comments

Its hard to tell

[DFurno2003]

If any good come from this... Has it caused any measurable change in government policy? Or did it just cause tightening of their grip on classified data?

Re:Its hard to tell

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking about this the other day.

WRT Manning: I feel a bit bad for him. I absolutely understand that there's a need for secrecy in war-fighting, and I appreciate that the military has the ability to enforce that secrecy with punishment. I still feel bad for him. This young man was not in the best frame of mind, and it sounds like he really thought he was trying to do something right.

WRT the material: The first strike seems entirely legit. The one that killed the two Reuters people. They met with armed belligerents, at night, in an area where they knew there was fighting. Everyone wishes they hadn't been in the mix when our pilots and gunners did what they were supposed to. This, however, is going to happen when you have reporters pushing the limits of sanity to get a story in a war zone. Beyond that, it's chopper gunners shooting at a group of enemy combatants with RPG's and small arms, just like they're supposed to.

The second strike was wrong, and demonstrates what Manning was talking about when he talks about the fog of war. Bad things happen. The people on the guns obviously weren't trying to kill innocent, unarmed people. But they did, acting on invalid assumptions from the earlier strike, and it's tragic. There's no way around that.

WRT the handling of the material: The military's approach to the material (denying FOIA requests) was shady, but a pretty obvious function of, "err on the side of keeping stuff secret." You can't have war without casualties, and any time it happens somewhere where people live, some of those are going to be bad kills.

That said, handling of the material was absolutely atrocious. The "collateral murder" video was a selectively edited, perversely annotated, propaganda piece. Every effort was made to point out there were two people with cameras, not AK's, and no efforts (at all) were made to point out the loaded RPG's and small arms carried by the people they were meeting.

It's a mess. I feel bad for the kid... he was in a bad place before, and an even worse place now. I feel bad for every serviceman that got a bad rap from this situation, and I can see how unfair the whole thing was to our military in general. I do think the military made it worse by denying the release in the first place, and turning Manning into a Streisand situation.

WRT lessons learned: Don't deal with wikileaks. Deal with proper news outlets carefully. Don't deal with shady 3rd parties over IRC. Do everything you can to stay "on the level", lest you become the story, instead of what you're trying to report.

Re:Its hard to tell

[IamTheRealMike]

Given that the only people who knew what was in the files before BM were the people in the government, it's hard to see why it'd cause any changes in government policy. It did embarrass a bunch of politicians in other parts of the world (and revealed a US spy in the German government), but mostly these days those other parts are too focused on domestic economic problems to think much about foreign policy.

I think the impact of what Manning did is real, but it'll be a slow burn, long term kind of thing. People read day after day in the news about the US drone strike program, but whilst ink on paper is one thing, seeing a video of a bunch of journalists get nuked from the air is something quite different. It really brings it home to people in ways other mediums just can't. The other thing it did is expose to what extent much of the rest of the world had become servile to US interests, for instance, the al-Masri story was quite shocking and I think the cables were really the first time hard evidence surfaced that it was true. Before that the best evidence that the story was correct was isotopic testing of his hair. It also revealed that the German government had basically been penetrated and owned by the CIA at several levels.

Just generally there's a ton of useful background on so many issues in those cables that people will be using them as evidence to back up positions for years to come.

Re:Its hard to tell

[femtobyte]

WRT the material: The first strike seems entirely legit. The one that killed the two Reuters people. They met with armed belligerents, at night, in an area where they knew there was fighting.

Funny that the term "belligerents" is rarely used to refer to the side that imported routine flaming death from the skies to the region, and actually has the option to pack up their stuff and go home. The horrifying thing revealed/verified to many people by these leaks is not that "a few bad apples sometimes do wrong in the fog of war," but that the US has created a system where it is perfectly normal and "legit" behavior to be flying around looking for folks to gun down. The phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind for this.

Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[anagama]

Read this by Harvard Law prof, Yochai Benkler:

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112554#

If Bradley Manning is convicted of aiding the enemy, the introduction of a capital offense into the mix would dramatically elevate the threat to whistleblowers. The consequences for the ability of the press to perform its critical watchdog function in the national security arena will be dire. And then there is the principle of the thing. However technically defensible on the language of the statute, and however well-intentioned the individual prosecutors in this case may be, we have to look at ourselves in the mirror of this case and ask: Are we the America of Japanese Internment and Joseph McCarthy, or are we the America of Ida Tarbell and the Pentagon Papers? What kind of country makes communicating with the press for publication to the American public a death-eligible offense?

Note, the espionage act doesn't apply only to people in the military.

Re:Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[anagama]

But the technology won't matter if people face the death penalty for leaking information regarding government malfeasance. That's the heart of this issue, the Government's desire to control every piece of information about what it does. Certainly the mainstream media (i.e., administrative stenographers and press release mills) has gotten to total lapdog status, but the reason WikiLeaks was so hated was because it actually performed the function the press was supposed to perform. But what will WikiLeaks or its successors leak if people honestly fear that death is the punishment for getting caught? If nobody comes forward, the technology is irrelevant.

Re:Before all you blowhards cheer the Feds ...

[greenbird]

But what will WikiLeaks or its successors leak if people honestly fear that death is the punishment for getting caught?

I think you underestimate people. At least from historical evidence people have fought oppression in the face of death or even worse punishments when caught.

Arab Spring

[betterunixthanunix]

This was a big factor in the Arab Spring. There is a chance of good things resulting from that (it will be years before we know).

Re:Arab Spring

[anagama]

Democracy in the middle east is not considered a "good" by the Feds. They much prefer friendly ruthless dictators. Not for example how we've never invaded Saudia Arabia and never have a bad word to say about them. Or how HRC considered Mubarak a friend of the family ( http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/01/secretary-clinton-in-2009-i-really-consider-president-and-mrs-mubarak-to-be-friends-of-my-family/ ).

Re:Arab Spring

[the eric conspiracy]

I don't think they care if it's a dictatorship or not. The key word is friendly.

For example Turkey has been a staunch ally since the Truman Doctrine and has the highest Democracy Index in the region excluding Israel.

Re:Arab Spring

[cold fjord]

Democracy in the middle east is not considered a "good" by the Feds. They much prefer friendly ruthless dictators. Not for example how we've never invaded Saudia Arabia and never have a bad word to say about them.

Your post is largely nonsense. Democracy is considered good, even in the Middle East, although elements of the local culture and religion can make that problematic. Saudi Arabia has never given the US cause to invade it as it is a friendly government to the United States, one which the US spent considerable treasure and blood to defend. (You may recall that it was Saddam Hussain's conquest of Kuwait and direct threat to Saudi Arabia which resulted in the first big step towards his downfall.)

And yes, the US does ciriticize Saudi Arabia, regularly.

2010 Human Rights Report: Saudi Arabia

The following significant human rights problems were reported: no right to change the government peacefully; torture and physical abuse; poor prison and detention center conditions; arbitrary arrest and incommunicado detention; denial of fair and public trials and lack of due process in the judicial system; political prisoners; restrictions on civil liberties such as freedoms of speech (including the Internet), assembly, association, movement, and severe restrictions on religious freedom; and corruption and lack of government transparency. Violence against women and a lack of equal rights for women, violations of the rights of children, trafficking in persons, and discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, sect, and ethnicity were common. The lack of workers' rights, including the employment sponsorship system, remained a severe problem.

One more thing, since so many people are confused on this point, the fact that 15 of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia points to the problem they have with extremists, not to hostile action by the Saudi government. The 9/11 attacks against the US were no more Saudi government policy than the Fenian raids against Canada were US government policy.

Re:Arab Spring

[quax]

Saudia Arabia is state sponsor of Wahhabism and supported the spread of madrassas in Pakistan/Afghanistan that teach this radical form of Islam.

There'd be no Taliban nor Al Quaeda if Wahhabism wasn't so influential and well funded.

Re:Torturing ants

[1s44c]

Ah yes, because standing by and doing nothing while innocents are being slaughtered somehow lets you claim a clear conscious. Dictators and tyrants count on people like you to turn a blind eye to atrocities and genocide as it lets them get away with murder by the million.

I was complaining about the US's war crimes, or don't they count as crimes if your own country does it?

Re:Torturing ants

[ATMAvatar]

Things are not quite so simple. Our continual war also serves to justify the indefinite imprisonment of non-citizens without trial, giant military contracts handed-out to friends of those in power, and widespread and warrant-less surveillance of the public at large, among other things. In short, it's a nice means to expand power and corruption in US government.

Re:Torturing ants

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean hands you have there, keep that chin up and remember useful idiots like yourself are as indispensable to mass murders like Stalin, Milosevic, Assad etc as their own armies. Carry on with pride, job well done, no blood on your hands at all. How's that Syria thing working out for you?

On the other hand, the demand for hasty action leads to stupid foreign policy blunders like supporting fascist extremists conducting genocide in a war of their own aggression against relatively secular and moderate leaders like Slobodan Milosevic and Bashir Assad.

Compare Milosevic to Izetbegovic, and then read the news from Syria: the rebels receiving foreign guns and money and winning military victories are explicitly al-Qaeda, while the Free Syrian Army is only a front group that pretends to be secular in front of Western audiences.

Re:Torturing ants

[Demena]

You got your information wrong. Iraq was not destroyed because it had anything to do with 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with it. Saddam Hussein was an opponent of Al Quaida. Iraq was destroyed because Hussein presumed to sell oil for Euros thus elimination the world wide requirement to purchase US dollars to buy oil which would decrease the US economy if the use of Euros became widespread.

Re:Torturing ants

[gknoy]

AH, but here's the rub: How do you know that he has lied? There's no way you can trust his information before the Bad Thing happens, because it's unverifiable. And, as cold reading shows us, it's very possible for him to tell you what he thinks you want to hear, once you start hurting him enough that he'll do anything to make it stop.

There's a reason the Inquisition was able to get people to confess to things which were untrue: torture.