An interesting excerpt from Chelsea Manning’s upcoming memoir appears in the New York Times, offering an explanation of how and why she ended up violating her oath and revealing secret military information to wikileaks.
I knew the official version of why these secrets had to be kept secret. We were protecting sources. We were protecting troop movements. We were protecting national security. Those things made sense. But it also seemed, to me, that we were protecting ourselves.
While I felt that my job was important, and I took my obligations seriously, a part of me always wondered: If we were acting ethically, why were we keeping so many secrets?
There are a few things this is expressly not about.
- This is not about believing the government to be right or good
- This is not about believing that the government does not conceal critical information from the public to cover its ass
- This is not about what Chelsea Manning did
What’s reflected in Manning’s essay is the mindset of the modern whistleblower.
I was constantly confronted with these two conflicting realities — the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. It was clear that so much of the information people received was distorted or incomplete. This dissonance became an all-consuming frustration for me.
It was clear to Manning. The subsequent outcome is irrelevant at this point, as the only information Manning possessed was what went through her own head, her own “dissonance” becoming “an all-consuming frustration” of not revealing to the Americans at home the classified information she possessed as a military analyst.
For the sake of argument, assume there are a million people in the military, its subcontractors and the government who possess, to some greater or lesser extent, classified information. Some may be top secret, so critical to national security as to be housed in Mar-a-Lago Fort Knox, but all to be held in confidence by whomever had access to the information.
Does each and every person, within and without government, believe that the need to maintain confidentiality must meet with their personal approval or they do no “moral” wrong by disclosing it publicly?
What I did during my enlistment was part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience — a tradition we have long drawn upon to force progress and oppose tyranny. The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.
This rationale can be used by anyone and applied to anything, whether it’s nuclear secrets or a draft Supreme Court opinion. If a person with access to information that is held in confidence feels that the information should be made public, does their disclosure find justification in their belief that it’s “part of a deep American tradition of rebellion, resistance and civil disobedience”? Must secrecy pass personal muster with each and every one of those million people, each of whom may well have their own personal belief as to the propriety of keeping the information secret?
I emerged from prison a celebrity. I had been made, without consultation, into a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas. Some of that was fun — Annie Leibovitz photographed me for Vogue’s September issue. Some of it — the C.I.A. director pressuring Harvard to uninvite me from a visiting fellowship, Fox News seizing upon my very existence as a cheap way to rile up its viewers — was much less so.
After being pardoned by President Obama in the waning hours of his administration in January, 2017, enlisted soldier Bradley Manning emerged from prison a celebrity, both because someone like Manning would be in Vogue and asked to lecture at no less an institution than Harvard, but because she was so important as to be targeted by the evil Fox News?
Who doesn’t want to be a hero of the resistance, a rebel, a celebrity in Vogue and hated by the likes of Fox News?
There is a difference between revealing crimes committed but concealed, although this distinction may be hard to discern given how many people believe that anything they feel is criminalish is a crime demanding disclosure rather than an actual malum in se crime, and secrets with which one disagrees should be secret.
How does a country function when those to whom its secrets are entrusted believe they have a right to reveal them when they create some personal sense of dissonance, or they just want to get their face in fronot of Annie Liebovitz’s camera? No matter how necessary secrecy may be to the functioning of a government, is every enlisted soldier now the arbiter of what should and should be a secret? Only one of that million needs to feel otherwise and confidentiality is lost.
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