Bradley Manning: A Case Against a Case

After 18 months of detention, Bradley Manning has finally been called forward for his pretrial hearing.  The evidence against him is considerably solid.  Transcripts from his communications with hacker Adrian Lamo, files allegedly pulled from his hard drive, and chat logs between Manning and Assange make it difficult to deny Manning’s association with the WikiLeaks release.  Polarized political opinion, however, and not the legality involved in the case remains the sliding glacier likely to impact both Manning’s outcome and the bureaucratic tremors to come- if they haven’t already.

The left places him in the same limelight as Ellsberg while pockets of the right tend to cite his homosexuality as the root of a personal grievance toward the military that resulted in the actions committed.  Neither side, however, is objectively taking a few steps back and a few steps forward to catch every angle in the case.

Certainly Manning’s whistle-blowing, particularly with the gunship killing Reuters journalists, was done out of good intent, if not, at least to vet a clearly immoral occurrence.  The problem is that Manning assumed full control of a situation without critically weighing the outcomes.  Considering that the gunship footage Manning procured was stored on a JAG server, it’s likely that an investigation in a closed-circuit manner was already under-way.  In an extremely sensitive case such as this, containment is necessary.  When Pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran earlier this year, viral footage of his actions resulted in a violent protest in Afghanistan that killed 12- that’s without considering the underlying currents that fuelled militancy.  Manning’s actions alone in releasing the footage placed soldiers deployed to Iraq in a dangerous predicament of becoming scapegoats for public and radical venting due to an isolated event. 

In defense of turning Manning in, Adrian Lamo makes a valid point when he notes that it was a choice “between greater and lesser harm.”  While the US State Department historically has a quite subpar track record, Manning’s release of the diplomatic cables to Wikileaks was a dangerous breach of privacy.  First off, the cables, while sensitive information pertaining to identification were withheld, placed diplomatic missions in already high-profile zones in further harm’s way.  Second off, Manning’s actions set a precedence for any individuals considering releasing sensitive material in the future. Thirdly, the cables released did not necessarily promote transparency and honesty.  In fact, when organizations such as Razones de Cuba, a government-owned website, procured the cables, they published portions out of context in order to advance their own propaganda.  Massive information dissemination, especially from third parties to a third audience, both of which have no on-the-ground idea of what is going on, allots a dangerous amount of wiggle room for rash opinions to flourish.  Lastly, the cables had a reverse effect worldwide.  In China, it launched a witch-hunt by nationalists against US affiliates, two Zimbabwe army officers faced court martial’s for under-the-table relations with the US, and an Ethiopian journalist was purportedly forced to flee his country.

Bradley Manning’s case already has several metals in the fire.  The outcome will likely be measurably harsh in an effort to deter such future actions while balancing the fact that his decision out of intent to nurse transparency and decency is commendable.  Ultimately, however, the dangers involved in out-of-context framing of leaked classified material and the implications abroad that could gravely impact individuals working overseas does not and cannot justify a massive, un-vetted release of sensitive information.