Maybe Matt Taibbi feels that he is just balancing the ledger. If a bunch of hack reporters are unjustly trashing Bradley Manning and making the debate about his trial too much about Manning’s personality quirks, then Taibbi is justified in airbrushing out the seriousness of Manning’s crimes. In reality, Taibbi is as guilty of hackdom as the reporters he excoriates.
The following paragraph is dead wrong.
Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.
Why the parentheses around the word classified? Does Taibbi dispute that Manning was complicit in the dumping of 270,000 classified documents on the internet? How many of those documents involved war crimes or other behavior that warranted public disclosure?
The trial has everything to do with who Bradley Manning is and what his motives were, because he is being accused of knowingly aiding the enemy. If he had restricted himself to disclosing videos and cables that indicated that the government was covering up war crimes, then his motive would not be in question. He would be an unambiguous whistleblower.
What he did, however, was to unilaterally declassify our State Department’s internal communications. I think it’s important to realize that he didn’t intend for it all to be published, but he is the one that made it possible for others to publish it. This is not whistle-blowing. It is leaking on the grandest scale. And it goes beyond embarrassment. It impacted our ability to do diplomacy.
As an institution, our government is never going to agree that it is rotten to the core and that its employees have the right to expose that anytime they want. Even if there are problems with over-classification, we have a system in place for declassifying documents. We can improve this system but we can’t abandon it wholesale. It’s true that the public can learn many things that it ought to know if we make all our diplomatic cables public, but it’s also true that the State Department cannot function if it can’t have the reasonable expectation that it can communicate in confidence.
If there is anything being under-discussed in the debate over Bradley Manning, it is the importance of deterring a repeat of leaks on this scale. How do you best assure that no one will ever get it into their head again that it is a good idea to leaks hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables? That’s a completely legitimate question. And the prosecution of Bradley Manning is the government’s answer to that question.
Unless Manning’s supporters are willing to come up with an alternative answer, rather than simply defending Manning and criticizing the government, then they won’t have any say in this debate.
His trial might have been about war crimes if all he had revealed were war crimes. But that isn’t even close to what happened.
Taibbi has it just right.
It was low level classification — not the super-duper secret stuff (like assassinations, coups, economic destabilization, hacking into the computer systems of friends and foes). It was mostly embarrassing stuff that in a real democracy wouldn’t warrant classification. As for the criminal stuff — if done by those not protected by our government, you’d be the first to scream for their heads.
The first line of defense by governments and powerful individuals against truthtellers is often that they are crazy. Ellsberg and Martha Mitchell are two recent examples that come to mind. All the DFH is crazy. Wasn’t Al Gore “crazy” in 2000? Meanwhile the real crazies, the sociopaths, are rewarded with more power and wealth with many of their nefarious deeds hidden in the name of “national security.” Beats me why any sentient ordinary person would support and defend that.
I agree that a better system is needed.
But right now it’s better to just leak than to keep it all under wraps until we find a better system. It is that bad. And that’s why to me, Manning will always be a goddamned American hero.
No doubt Manning is a hero. He was aware of the potential consequences if caught, yet went ahead. His plea should be accepted and the sentence should be the minimum allowable.
I should add that Manning has, in my view, already been punished enough as he was holed up in conditions that the UN consider torture. Those responsible for that will surely skate free.
You seem to have missed the entire point of this post. It’s not that you disagree with it; you simply don’t see it.
How do I know this?
Because you are talking about low-level classification.
That is entirely irrelevant. What he did was basically render our state department’s system of communication useless. It wasn’t his fault that the system was so vulnerable, but he’s the one who exploited and exposed that fact.
I think it should be obvious that a diplomat cannot be candid in his communications if he or she fears that it will be published on the internet. Their assessment of the character of some crown prince in Tunisia can help spark a revolution if it is divulged to the world. It might seem like the fact that the prince has his ice cream shipped in from St. Tropez requires a low level of classification, but that is not necessarily the case. What Manning did is make that kind of routine communication dangerous.
It’s hard to express the damage done by these leaks, notwithstanding the good that came from them. As an institution, the government has to punish this severely.
I’m not particularly convinced by Taibbi’s theory that we’re throwing the book at Manning because he revealed evidence of war crimes, but I don’t think your theory or justification for the “aiding the enemy” charge holds much water either. The fact that he indiscriminately leaked a ton of material, and that he ended up compromising the ability of the State Department to carry on its business goes a long way to justifying the charges he’s already plead guilty to. Those charges could put him away for 20 years even if he’s acquitted of aiding the enemy.
The charge of aiding the enemy just seems vindictive. I don’t think the vindictiveness is so much about retaliation for war crimes so much as it is about just intimidating leakers in the future. It’s consistent with the general push to criminalize leaks, and a lot of the leaks other people have gotten in trouble over have had precisely nothing to do with war crimes. But just because Taibbi’s wrong doesn’t make you right.
I think you’re right. Though, it’s not so much vindictiveness as it is pure deterrence.
The US Constitution does not provide legal justification for “deterrence” as a reason for conviction, even in cases of treason. Criminal law is about events that have already happened.
Inflating charges for their deterrence factor is the quick way to government oppression. Inflating charges in order to get innocent people to plea bargain for a conviction is already a major abuse of prosecutorial discretion.
The Constitution does not provide the government the absolute right of secrecy. Judicial precedent, based on common law arguments from monarchial legal traditions have established an absolute privilege of state secrets and that only occurred in 1953.
And that would be a bad thing? Whereas keeping those assessments (assessments that we must never forget we the people pay for and is mostly not different from what real reporters obtain on the ground which states and the MSM and most blogs dismiss as unfounded or worse CT) secret to prop up princes, kings, queens, dictators, fascists is a good thing? And then presto, not secret when those secrecy advocates decide it’s time to foment a revolution or civil war because they would prefer to deal with say a Chalabi than a Saddam.
It’s not whether or not it’s a bad thing. It’s that such things cannot be reported at all if the system is insecure.
Because State Dept communications didn’t exist until a few decades ago?
All electronic communications systems are more or less insecure. Please let’s not try to criminalize Manning because State Dept employees were too indiscreet and unprofessional by forwarding reports they labeled sensitive over an insecure system. Most of it was junk and/or served no diplomatic purpose. Exposing the State Dept for being a subsidiary of the US MIC and corporate America instead of fulfilling its stated mission, might, just might make the world a bit less hostile, but not because the rest of the world doesn’t already know what we’re up to but because ordinary Americans don’t.
Because State Dept communications didn’t exist until a few decades ago?
All electronic communications systems are more or less insecure. Please let’s not try to criminalize Manning because State Dept employees were too indiscreet and unprofessional by forwarding reports they labeled sensitive over an insecure system. Most of it was junk and/or served no diplomatic purpose. Exposing the State Dept for being a subsidiary of the US MIC and corporate America instead of fulfilling its stated mission, might, just might make the world a bit less hostile, but not because the rest of the world doesn’t already know what we’re up to but because ordinary Americans don’t.
No system is secure if the individuals who use it are willing to share the information.
This kid should not have had access to the information, but that doesn’t exonerate him in any way. If David Petraeus was the leaker, he’d be no more guilty.
And if Dick Cheney insta-declassified it,….
In terms of harm, Dick Cheney blinded US intelligence to what was going on in Iran’s nuclear program–likely, the US is still blind on this score — in order to ensure that they could continue to argue that Iran was becoming a nuclear threat. And to punish someone who contradicted the Bush narrative. I guess Cheney’s action was justified deterrence, eh.
Mannning, Wikileaks, and Wikileaks’s journalistic partners — NYT, Guardian, Pais,…have been very responsible about what information was made public. They have not exposed methods or sources of intelligence critical to US national security.
The Obama administration is way off base with its witch hunt for folks who are trying to let the American people know what is really going on in the world. This won’t change as long as there are folks still willing to uncritically carry water for the administration.
The bars of a national security police state are slowly closing in around ordinary citizens, based on the notion that 9/11 changed everything. Lots of folks voted twice for President Obama in hopes that that trend would be reversed.
At this point, those disappointed people are faced with one of two hypotheses:
–President Obama has willfully misled them about his commitment to Constitutional law and restraint of the military-industrial complex.
–President Obama is threatened by the military-industrial complex if he doesn’t serve their interests.
The President’s behavior and the response of folks close to the White House communication operations lead me to believe those disappointed folks might be onto something.
If that is not the case, there need to be some changes inside the White House bubble.
The public is not buying the White House line. But the public is also adjusting to it as the “new normal”. That they are to know nothing about what their government is doing but the government is to know everything about what they are doing.
Taibbi sees the danger in that sort of complacency and tries to get enough outrage going to get some public pushback. That, to my mind, is exactly the right debate. Why Democrats close to DC have such a hard time grasping that is very troubling. Senator Church in the 1970s certainly understood the fundamental issues. Sens. Wyden and Udall have been using hand signals as best they can to communicate their concerned despite being gagged by their positions on the Intelligence Committee. But outside of that on the Democratic side—crickets.
So he exposed the incompetence in our much vaunted “security system” and that’s a bad thing? If common gossip can spark a revolution somewhere, that revolution was waiting to happen anyway. You keep talking about how dangerous this all is. Try giving an example that’s not a joke. Oh, you can’t, can you, because that’s classified.
Remember how the data came in three big dumps: first the Baghdad helicopter video, then all the Iraq and Afghanistan war documents, and finally the State Department cables. It was the first two that were important, maybe less as evidence of war crimes than seriously dreadful discipline on the one hand and criminal mismanagement on the other. But it was the third that got all the attention, with the hilarious coverage of thugs from France to Kyrgyzstan to North Korea. I don’t think it was as damaging as you suggest–I remember thinking at the time that the State Department was riding it out really well–but maybe it would have been better left alone. It certainly would have been better if the first two dumps had been treated as serious whistle-blowing, which they were, demonstrating that the conduct of the wars was not improving under the new administration. To me Manning is a genuine tragic hero, like Oedipus or Antigone: deserving of punishment and admiration at the same time.
He strikes me more as Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
Nice. Psychologizing a person whose view to you has been carefully controlled by the government.
I have no idea who Bradley Manning is behind all the mythology built up around him because he has not been allowed to speak freely. Even his one statement in court, that the government tried very hard to prevent coming out, was carefully controlled by the necessities of his defense team’s strategy.
We on the outside have absolutely no idea if he actually did what he has confessed to. And that is because of the way that inflated charges are used to force plea bargains of innocent people under prolonged detention. Don’t you see how all of the expedients that the government has created over the past 30-40 years prevent the establishment of justice?
If he released the “Collateral Murder” video, he is a hero of the order of Daniel Ellsberg because he is standing up under horrendous punitive consequences before trial. A lot of the Iraq-Afghanistan daily information reports was historical, filled with jargon, and exculpatory of the idea that war crimes were widespread among the US military. The major revelation of the State Department cables was that Yemen was providing a fig leaf to the US drone strikes, something that was apparent anyway.
So, Boo, you’re seriously claiming that every one of those 270,000 documents were so potentially damaging to “national security” that they needed to be classified? Really? How many do you think?
The government makes it a habit to hide everything it can in the name of “security”. Either just because that’s easier, to cover their ass for valid crimes and misdemeanors, or to spare some agency or official from exposure and embarrassment. They are under no oversight as to what they can hide, and the “system in place” is a morbid joke. FOIA requests are routinely ignored, delayed, or simply tagged as “essential secrets in the war on terror” with no real evidence beyond the assertion.
As the “trust me” system remains in place despite the many examples of its total abuse, it’s a bit much to expect people to respect it enough to take it seriously. There’s still no public evidence, as far as I know — do enlighten us — as to what damage these leaks caused. Secrecy is obviously necessary for more than one specific reason. When it’s abused, as in the latest wiretapping cases, it’s also the prime building block of tyranny. Manning would not have been driven to do what he did if there were any transparency or real oversight in the “system in place”.
First of all, the damage done by the leaks transcends any specific information within them. To help you understand this, let’s look at one particular piece of specific information:
Forget about Arturo. What about anyone else in the world who might be considering talking to a U.S. diplomat or maybe even a spy.
When our systems are not secure, we cannot make assurances to people. And if you are like me and prefer the State Department’s activities to the CIA’s activities, or the military’s activities, then you have reason to be doubly pissed that it was the State Department’s cables that were leaked. In any case, I don’t know why anyone would risk talking to our diplomats without their government’s permission. And that makes it harder for us to understand what is going on in the world.
So, asking me which of the 270,000 cables were damaging is just a weird thing to ask. It’s the security breach itself that is as damaging as the information.
To fix the problem, of course, the military has to be shielded off from the State Department, meaning that they now know less about the world.
You also refer to wiretaps, but none of these stories have been about wiretaps.
And let’s look at what Manning did. He didn’t just get sick of the government lying and covering up a war crime. That would have been the right thing to do and he ought to have limited his theft to the things he needed to prove it. That would not have done damage to our diplomatic efforts and any damage to national security would have been mitigated by forcing the government to take corrective measures that would have benefitted our security in the long run.
Except as Arturo points out, this was “the U.S. State Department’s error”. You note that “When our systems are not secure, we cannot make assurances to people.” To me, what this amounts to is making Manning the scapegoat for the government’s failure to do its job. The various “terror warriors” spend billions for unknown purposes, yet can’t set up secure systems and routines? And this is Manning’s fault?
I agree that he should have done this in a more focused and reasonable way. But the government’s bullyboy overkill, as in the ridiculous charge of “aiding the enemy”, and its total denial of any responsibility despite its core role in the incident, and its brutish treatment of Manning, makes it impossible to be on their side. I’m not convinced that the bullyboy attempt at deterrence doesn’t do more harm to American interests here and abroad than taking advantage of a broken (or nonexistent) secure communications system and prattling clueless diplomats.
He didn’t hack into the system, you know. The information was too widely distributed, it’s true. But the specific problem here would exist no matter how tightly held the information was kept. Because the problem was that someone who had access decided to leak. How does he get a pass for that just because he wasn’t high-ranking enough? I don’t understand that logic at all.
If the cables were not available to the military intelligence folks, and Manning worked as an attaché at the State Department, would it be any different? What’s to prevent John Kerry from dumping his cables on the internet? Find me a system that would prevent that from happening.
The blame doesn’t belong to anyone but Manning.
Personally, I think he should have his sentence vastly reduced from whatever it is going to be. But that is because of how he was treated and not because of what he did.
This hero/villain stuff is ridiculous. Part of what he did was noble and admirable, and part of what he did was stupid and dangerous. The judge should recognize that when dispensing justice. The judge should also consider the importance of deterrence.
When I listen to many of my progressive brethren talk about this case, I am reminded of why the left-wing of the Democratic Party has been so distrusted on national security for so long.
If you can’t even be counted on to protect the country’s secrets or not to applaud those who leak, then who in their right mind would allow you to be in charge?
He didn’t hack into the system, you know.
But the Chinese do, as you probably know. You know the boondoggle called the F-35? The Chinese know as much about that plane as we do, probably. It’s public knowledge, if you know where to look. And yet we think the government can keep us safe?
Except as Arturo points out, this was “the U.S. State Department’s error”. You note that “When our systems are not secure, we cannot make assurances to people.” To me, what this amounts to is making Manning the scapegoat for the government’s failure to do its job. The various “terror warriors” spend billions for unknown purposes, yet can’t set up secure systems and routines? And this is Manning’s fault?
And if you didn’t want your house robbed, you should have gotten a better security system.
Really, you can’t blame the robber.
What do you think the aiding the enemy charge is all about?
It deals directly with the classification of the material released. I can remember material being given secret and top secret designations that were about as secret as the sky being blue.
As we use to say when I was in the army once you were charged with a crime: You were guilty and until proven more guilty. Innocence never plays any part in these circumstances.
Quotes, not parens.
And he deserves a stiff punishment, but not the cruel, unconstitutional, and illegal crap they’ve been forcing on him.
This is Obama’s doing and he’s being a son of a bitch about it all.
There are far too many people like Taibbi, who think that willfully distorting and spinning is acceptable if done for the “right” side.
Writing the way he does is an insult to his readership. It’s a process of treating them like pawns to push around in the direction he, Matt Taibbi, feels is appropriate. He could strive to write as truthfully and fairly as possible – that is, to treat his readers like adults who can be trusted with complexity and deserve to be given the truth – but he’s decided to treat them like things because he thinks it is more useful for his purposes to do so.
Clearly, there are people who like being manipulated like that, but I just tune out when I see that happening.