Ann Wright served in the military for 29 years and then had a career at the State Department. She’s a member of the Advisory Board for the Bradley Manning Support Network.
I share her deep concern for how Bradley Manning has been treated since his arrest for leaking a trove of State Department documents to Wikileaks. I also share her empathy for Manning’s motivations as a whistleblower. I can’t, however, say that Manning is a hero or that he should escape punishment. No government can function or maintain any decent diplomatic relations if it can’t keep its internal deliberations private. Manning’s error was to dump everything rather than focusing on the big, alarming stuff. The government is obligated to make a strong example of him, although I’d strongly argue that they’ve already gone way too far. A long prison sentence would have been more than sufficient.

In any case, I’m sure I’ll hear some pushback on my opinions about that, but what interests me is a question raised in Wright’s column for the Stars and Stripes.

Many civilians — and a surprising number of military personnel — are unaware that this system of classification is not grounded in any law passed by Congress. In fact, the entire edifice that allows the use of classification rests solely on the basis of executive orders that have been renewed and modified by various presidents. The ability to restrict information from the public is essentially an unchecked assertion of executive power.

However, according to Obama’s policy for classification of government documents (Executive Order 13526), there are several situations under which government information must never be classified. The government cannot use classification procedures “to conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency … or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.”

Administration officials have not provided any evidence that these WikiLeaks revelations have harmed our national security. They have, however, acknowledged that some of the material is personally, and professionally, embarrassing.

Obama’s Executive Order is a good reform. However, when we’re talking about international relations and national security, there is a natural tension between what is criminal and embarrassing and what can put our country at risk. Revealing the Abu Ghriab photos put our national security at risk, and many of those photos were not released for that very reason. If the country commits crimes and other people find out about it, it can make people want to attack us or our troops in the field. Yet, it’s really the crimes that are the primary problem. And if we don’t know about the crimes, we can’t stop them. With Abu Ghraib, we struck a sensible balance. No one was confused about what happened, but some of the most inflammatory stuff was held back. This enabled us to have a shot at holding people responsible and fixing the problem without maximizing the blowback effect. It might not have been perfect. If we had been more shocked, maybe we would have been more motivated to seek justice. But it at least operated as a justifiable compromise.

Wright says that the administration hasn’t demonstrated that the Wikileaks have harmed our national security. I don’t think there’s any question that that they’ve severely damaged our national relations in countless countries around the world. Foreign leaders can now read exactly what our diplomats think about them, and it is often not very complimentary. Security and relations are not synonymous, but they are closely related. It’s not a very high bar to clear to make the case that our national security has been harmed. “But it deserved to be harmed,” some say. To that I respond, “in some cases yes. In most cases no.”

Covering up the slaughter of an Iraqi family with an airstrike should harm our standing in the world. That an ambassador has a low opinion of a head of state’s wife, not so much. Manning gave us all of it. His greatest guilt is that he punished the innocent along with the guilty. In trying to do the right thing, he did something wrong. That doesn’t mean he should be mistreated. If he made a mistake in balancing what should be declassified, he also proved that the government makes that same mistake all the damn time. And the truly guilty people he exposed should face justice, too.