Читать книгу The Passion of Chelsea Manning - Chase Madar - Страница 5
Оглавление(03:31:33 PM) bradass87: I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy.
Forward Operating Base Hammer was a tough deployment. Even with the espresso bar, the workout room, high-speed internet in all the tents, the musical combos that came together and apart again when the soldiers were deployed elsewhere; even with a visit from Washington Redskin cheerleaders over Thanksgiving 2007, or any of the college squads who visited for MWR (Morale Welfare and Recreation), FOB Hammer was a tough deployment. Built in early 2007 for the “Surge” of additional US troops into an exploding Iraq, the base is forty miles east of Baghdad in the middle of the Mada’in Qada desert. There is not a hut or hamlet in sight. The isolation is no accident: the base was sited deep into nowhere to minimize the bootprint that a garrison of foreign troops would leave on Iraqi hearts and minds.
It’s a desolate place. “The base was in the middle of the desert. There was sand everywhere, we had dust storms quite often, I don’t know, once a month or so while I was there,” said Jimmy Rodriguez to The Guardian. “Just a bleak place, everything was brown over there.”1 Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republic and since his return to civilian life has been working at a boxing gym in New York while apprenticing as a carpenter. Rodriguez’s impression of FOB Hammer is widely shared. “There was a fog that would come in almost every morning that was pollution from nearby,” says Jacob Sullivan, who served as a biological and chemical weapons expert with the Second Battalion Special Brigade, redeploying home with the rank of Private First Class. Sullivan comes from Phoenix, Arizona and is now back there again, a full-time university student with entrepreneurial aspirations. “[The fog] smelled sour and nasty, and would just wave through and linger, and create an eerie atmosphere.”2
The tedium of landscape is by all accounts a pretty good metaphor for the monotony of a deployment at FOB Hammer. “Life on base for many of the FOBbits—that’s what they’re called—was really very boring, with nothing to do but work, eat and sleep, and the work was twelve, fourteen hour shifts with the same people, day after day,” says Peter Van Buren, a State Department Official who was posted at the base from October 2009 to May 2010. “There were a lot of Groundhog Day jokes.” Van Buren’s in northern Virginia now, having just been squeezed out of the State Department after two decades in the Foreign service, with stints in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK and Hong Kong. (Van Buren’s sin was linking to one of the thousands of leaked State Department documents on his personal blog, a violation of official policy; his real crime was publishing a scabrous memoir of reconstruction follies in Iraq.) During his time in Iraq he saw a lot more of the country than most of the people at Hammer. “I got outside the wire several times a week, but a lot of the FOBbits never left the base at all during their whole deployment. They got flown into Baghdad under cover of night, and a year later got flown out, also at night. For many soldiers, the base was all they ever saw of Iraq.”3
It bears repeating: a deployment at FOB Hammer was no great adventure. “Morale I think was generally really low for everyone that was there that I talked to,” says Rodriguez. “All the soldiers, they didn’t like it, nobody had a purpose out there.”
The harsh climate doesn’t help any. Temperatures can hit 100 degrees even in springtime, said another soldier, “but I’d prefer the heat over the peanut butter that forms when it rains… I grow three inches in height when it rains here.” These are the observations of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who served at FOB Hammer from October 2009 till late June 2010. Manning is brainy, and he kind of knows it. (“I don’t think 99% of the people I work with would make such observations.”) He also has a habit of thinking for himself, which can be a liability in the military. During his deployment, which lasted from October 2009 till late June 2010, Manning spent many long shifts at a computer terminal inside the base’s SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), where access is granted only to those with security clearance. Like many of his fellow FOBbits, Manning was, by his own admission, pretty miserable for much of his deployment.
Today, Bradley Manning’s name is notorious, cursed and exalted. In America, elite politicians have called for his execution, and former ACLU bigwigs have eagerly admonished us “to be tough on the people in the government who are like Manning.”4 Fierce defenders have also stepped forward, among them veterans, peace activists, writers and intellectuals—a sprinkling of solidarity groups have sprouted up across the nation—across the world, in fact. The months of extreme solitary confinement inflicted on Manning made the State Department’s head public relations spokesperson, normally a bland font of official euphemism, erupt in a diatribe against the punishment, which led swiftly to his resignation. Abroad, Pfc. Manning has inspired passionate defenses on the floor of the German Bundestag, earned enthusiastic plaudits from the staid Council of Europe and won a major British newspaper’s readership vote for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize—and by a wide margin.5 Bradley Manning has been denounced as an immature, treasonous, pathological headcase who embodies why gays and lesbians should never be allowed in the military. (Manning is gay, and according to as yet unauthenticated instant-message chatlogs, he was seeking to commence male-to-female gender transition at the time of his arrest.) Manning has also been praised as a whistleblower, a patriot and a hero who sacrificed his freedom for the honor of his military, the good of his country and the world’s enlightenment—a young lion of dissent against state secrecy and imperial violence.
But before he allegedly exfiltrated the Iraq War Logs (including the gruesome “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunsight video), the Afghan War logs, and 251,287 State Department cables from the SCIF at Hammer and passed them all to Wikileaks; before he become a hate-figure and a public enemy; before he became an icon, a cause and an international hero, Bradley Manning too came from somewhere.
Crescent, Oklahoma is the kind of place that lazy metropolitan journalists often respond to with Gertrude Stein’s shopworn laugh-line that “there is no there there.” Of course, Oklahoma is dense with historical there-ness, being both terminus of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears and origin of the great Dust Bowl exodus. As journalist Denver Nicks was the first to point out, Bradley Manning isn’t even the first gay whistleblower of stature to pass through this small town: before him there was Karen Silkwood, the trade unionist who worked at the now-defunct Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant, also in Crescent.6 After taking note of safety failures at the plant, she died in a mysterious car crash while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times on the night of November 13, 1974. This small town of 1,400 people has a rock-solid claim to be the queer whistleblower capital of the world. The red dirt of Oklahoma has bred hardy rebels, from Woody Guthrie to Ralph Ellison to Clara Luper.
Not to mention Angie Debo, the whistleblowing historian from Marshall (pop. 354) whose 1940 masterpiece, And Still the Waters Run, chronicles how local whites stole vast portions of the state from the Indians.7 Her book named plenty of locally prominent names, had its initial publishing contract canceled and got the author blacklisted from teaching in Oklahoma universities. Debo, who came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon in 1899 at the age of nine and died in Marshall in 1988, has since become a revered local hero whose work is now quoted in gubernatorial inauguration speeches.
More prosaically, Crescent is a bedroom community about an hour’s drive north of Oklahoma City. Although the camera crew of PBS “Frontline” made a point of shooting the town’s main street right at dawn, with long and lurid shadows over empty parking spaces, Crescent is far from a ghost town.
Bradley Manning (born in 1987) grew up with his parents and big sister on a few acres three miles outside the town center. A two-story house—Brad has his own bedroom—and a “hobby farm” with a couple horses, a cow, pigs and chickens; as described by his older sister to the Washington Post, it sounds positively idyllic.8 His parents, Brian Manning and Susan (née Fox) Manning, met and soon married in her native Wales where Brian Manning was deployed at the Cawdor Barracks with the US Navy in the 1970s. What precisely he was doing in the military he’s not allowed to say, but he had a security clearance and learned enough about computers to later land work as an IT manager with the Hertz rental car agency in Oklahoma City, a job that made him good money and took him around the world.
Young Bradley took after his father, a tech whiz from an early age, always playing with his father’s hand-me-down computers. In fact he was a bit of a prodigy, reading (by his own recollection) at age three, doing multiplication and division by age four. According to family members, Manning was doing C++ programming by age eight and had designed his first website at the age of ten. Bradley took the grand prize three years running at the Crescent science fair, beating out students several grades ahead. With a few other classmates, he represented the town at “academic bowl” competitions all over the state. While other boys might be content to play video games, young Bradley liked to hack them and tweak the coding.
Bradley Manning definitely has a mind of his own. Despite being raised Catholic, the boy refused to utter the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance, a startling act of freethinking for an elementary school student anywhere in the United States, let alone a small town that is heavily Evangelical. As Rick McCombs, currently the principal in Crescent, told reporter Denver Nicks, “You would say something, and he would have an opinion which was a little unusual for a middle school kid. This young man actually kind of thought on his own.”9 Sometimes he took it upon himself to correct teachers. “Well Bradley, little munchkin that he is, he would stand up for what he believes,” remembers Mary Egleston, a family friend and former substitute teacher in Crescent.10 Bradley was precociously high-minded, arguing even in elementary school that the US had a right to assert its military power overseas to protect its interests, according to hometown friend Jordan Davis. As Davis told the Washington Post, even the video game “Call to Power II” soon led young Manning to a serious conversation about the powers of technology to achieve democracy. “He was basically really into America,” Davis told one reporter; “He wanted to serve his country.” When Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001, Bradley Manning’s friends turned to him as a source of wisdom and judgment. An independent mind joined to a deep sense of patriotic obligation is a constant in Bradley Manning’s life, even as his concept of what it meant to serve his country matured with age and experience.
Bradley Manning was a child who enjoyed knowing things; he read the encyclopedia for fun. Manning learned to be a quiet child—not anti-social, but quiet. It probably didn’t make Bradley’s life at school any easier that he, like his father, was on the small side and grew to be 5′2″. The boy got his share of bullying and abuse. And there was something else. As he later confided to a stranger over instant messaging in 2010:
(11:33:46 AM) bradass87: i didnt like getting beat up or called gay [didn’t really know what gay meant, but knew it was something bad]
(11:34:06 AM) bradass87: so i joined sports teams, and started becoming an athlete
At age 13, Bradley Manning told his two closest friends that he was gay, a difficult conversation for any teenager virtually anywhere in the United States. Still, these are no different from the troubles that other young people face and overcome, hopefully with the help of a supportive family.
It is not clear that Manning ever got such support from his family. Today, his parents are in the supremely unenviable position of having their childrearing dug up and held up to the light by a curious public. How many mothers and fathers could survive this without looking at least a little like monsters? And yet this is essential to the story of Bradley Manning. The locals of Crescent have had unkind things to tell reporters about Brian Manning—that he was demeaning, “a dick”, verbally and physically abusive, that his son was “more afraid of his father than normal.” Manning’s mother was an alcoholic through much of Bradley’s childhood; she told the Washington Post that she started the morning with vodka in her tea and finished the day with rum in her Coke. Despite living miles from town, she never learned to drive a car, and leaned heavily on her young son to write out checks to pay bills. (Her ex-husband describes her today as semi-literate.)11 Neither parent attended parent-teacher conferences at Bradley’s school, and when their son was the first Crescent student to win a statewide academic trophy in Oklahoma City, his parents were absent from the audience. And then they divorced. How they arrived at this domestic cataclysm is best told by Bradley himself from these (as yet unauthenticated) instant messages from mid-2010.
(11:34:19 AM) bradass87: around this time (middle school)… my parents divorced
(11:36:34 AM) bradass87: my father in a drunken stupor got angry with me because i was doing some noisy homework while he was watching TV… he went into his bedroom, pulled out a shotgun, and chased me out of the house… the door was deadbolted, so i couldn’t get out before he caught up with me… so my mother (also wasted) threw a lamp over his head… and i proceeded to fight him, breaking his nose, and made it out of the house… my father let off one or two shots, causing damage, but injuring nobody, except for the belt lashing i got for “making him shoot up the house”
(11:36:59 AM) bradass87: i went to school the next day, and my teachers noticed the wounds, and got social workers involved
(11:37:11 AM) bradass87: he immediately stopped drinking, and my mother filed for divorce
(11:37:29 AM) bradass87: after the divorce, my mother attempted suicide…
(11:38:23 AM) bradass87: after taking care of her for awhile, and gaining custody of me, my mother took me to her hometown, haverfordwest, wales… to live and go to school
In Wales, Bradley found himself more an outsider than ever: still small, still nerdy, but now a foreigner with a funny accent and all the more easily bullied and ostracized. (His mother remembers Bradley going on a group camping trip only to awake in the morning to find that all the other campers had pulled up stakes and ditched him overnight.) But the outspoken independence of mind had not changed. “He always had this sense that ‘I’m going to right a big wrong,’” says Welsh school friend Tom Dyer. “He was like that at school. If something went wrong, he would speak up about it if he didn’t agree with something. He would even have altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right.”12 By sixteen, he achieved the British equivalent of a high-school diploma. With a few of his mates—Manning had a small circle of friends, all into computers—he tried his hand at an internet startup venture. Like the great majority of such endeavors, it went nowhere. He cared for his mother, who, ailing from a series of strokes, leaned on her son more heavily than ever. Manning was not happy. Lonely and despondent, the seventeen-year-old surprised his father in the summer of 2005 by calling him up and asking if he might have room for his son at his new home, with his new family—Brian Manning had remarried—back in Oklahoma.
Brian Manning found a job for his computer whiz son at Zoto, a software company in Tulsa. His boss, Zoto cofounder Kord Campbell, told the Post that he was wowed by young Manning’s skills, and by his adult intellect. With the Iraq War becoming more unpopular by the day, international politics were a topic of conversation everywhere in America, and Bradley had a point of view. “Here I was, a grown man, and he could run circles around me” talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, Campbell told the Post. “He didn’t like that people were being killed, particularly the citizens, innocent people. I remember us specifically talking about how we were having a hard time getting information on how many people were being killed.” Campbell seems to have gone above and beyond to help his young employee along, even taking time to teach Bradley how to drive. But though Bradley had the computer skills, the teenager did not have the emotional stability to hold down an adult nine-to-five job. Campbell recalls Bradley zoning out and going catatonic on the job, and with reluctance, he had to let the boy go. (Manning’s version is a little different; he later told a friend that “it was company funding and lack of manpower that killed my job at zoto… Flickr creamed us because my boss was a marketing retard;” he also claimed to have proposed an engine that would convert uploaded videos and stream them through Flash, i.e. YouTube before it was a reality, but that his boss didn’t heed his young intern’s advice.)
At home, tensions grew, and he fought with his father and stepmother about money, his smoking, his attitude, his sexuality.After one particularly energetic row, she called the police. The next day, Manning left, later telling a reporter at a rally against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in Syracuse, New York that he was thrown out of the house for being gay;13 his father denied that his son’s sexual orientation had anything to do with it.14 An unemployed adult child made to leave home after friction with a stepparent: it’s a scene that plays out every day in every state of the union.
Bradley fled to Tulsa, moved in briefly with his boyhood pal Jordan Davis and took minimum-wage service jobs. He drifted to Chicago, doing odd jobs there. He was a pícaro, a Joad without the family, a homeless kid on his own who slept in his pickup in the O’Hare parking lot. He was all alone. There are thousands in America like him.
In the spring of 2006, Bradley moved in with his father’s sister in the Washington DC area. He got a job in retail at an Abercrombie & Fitch shop, and then a better job behind the counter at Starbucks. He enrolled in a local community college, then dropped out after doing poorly on an exam. “He was extremely organized, extremely tidy,” his aunt told the Washington Post. “This was not somebody who was flailing around.” He networked with people in the DC political world—staffers, people on the hill. He liked to know things; he liked to know what was going on politically.
Then, in late 2007, Bradley Manning did the last thing that anyone would expect of a 5′2″ openly gay nineteen-year-old with a fierce independent streak.
He enlisted.
Why do so, and in addition do so in the middle of a shooting war that to all indications he did not approve of? We have already noted Bradley Manning’s high-minded spirit of service to his country, a spirit far removed from chauvinistic nationalism that often passes for patriotism in America today. Then there is the example of his father, however estranged, still exerting a strong gravitational pull on the teenage son. (Brian Manning admitted to a PBS “Frontline” correspondent that he did twist his son’s arm a bit to get him to enlist and give his life some direction.15)
Like all the other soldiers he wound up with at FOB Hammer, Brad Manning wanted to get something out of the army aside from the fulfillment of patriotic duty. Peter Van Buren, the foreign service officer who overlapped with Manning at Hammer, recalled the soldiers there: “Each of them was proud to serve but each of them had at least another reason that they carried around for joining the military, their own little secret weight.[…] Ran away from an evil girlfriend, needed money for college, father said get a job or get out, that sort of thing.”16 Bradley Manning could check more than one of these boxes.
Bradley wanted to go to college, but he had no money and apparently no financial support from home. With the GI Bill, the Army could pay his tuition later. (When deployed at Fort Drum in upstate New York, he told a friend “i hope i can SOMEHOW get into a nice university and study physics for a bachelors or masters (doctorate if im smart enough?)” He dreamt of “those fancy sounding colleges […] UC Berkely, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, University Chicago.” He even exhorted his friend to think seriously about going to college; after all, “someone like me is spending 4 years in the military just to get the opportunity.”
Manning reported for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in October, 2007. How would he fare in the army, this 5′2″ eighteen-year-old with an independent mind and mouth, a young man whose sexual orientation was not so difficult to detect?
In basic training,Bradley Manning stood out.The drill sergeants picked on him. He fought back; it’s his way. They picked on him some more. Before long, Manning found himself in the “discharge unit”—the separate barracks for soldiers who have essentially flunked basic training and are being “outprocessed,” that is, rejected and expelled from the military.
A team of investigative reporters at The Guardian newspaper found a contemporary of Manning’s from the Fort Leonard Wood discharge unit. It is worth quoting at length from The Guardian’s interview with the discharged soldier who knew Bradley Manning.
The kid was barely 5 feet—he was a runt. And by military standards and compared with everyone who was around there—he was a runt. By military standards, “he’s a runt, so pick on him,” or “he’s crazy—pick on him,” or “he’s a faggot—pick on him.”The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he tried. He really did. […]
He wasn’t a soldier—there wasn’t anything about him that was a soldier. He has this idea that he was going in and that he was going to be pushing papers and he was gonna be some super smart computer guy and that he was gonna be important, that he was gonna matter to someone and he was gonna matter to something. And he got there and realized that he didn’t matter and that none of that was going to happen. […]
He was in the DU. That means he was not bouncing back. He was going home. You don’t just accidentally end up in a Discharge Unit one day.You have somebody saying, “You know what, he is no good—let’s get him out of here. There are a lot of steps to go to before you even hit a DU let alone before you go from a DU to a bus or a plane home. […]
The DU at any given time had about 100+ men. It was basically one big room, it had a group of bunks, bunk-beds and that’s where we all lived.
He was being picked on—that was one part of it. Because you know Bradley—everybody said he was crazy or he was faking and the biggest part of it all was when rumors were getting around that he was chapter 15—you know, homosexual.They’d call him a faggot or call him a chapter 15—in the military world, being called a chapter 15 is like a civilian being called a faggot to their face in the street. […]
For Bradley, it was rough. To say it was rough is an understatement. He was targeted […] by bullies, by the drill sergeants. Basically he was targeted by anybody who was within arm’s reach of him.
There was a small percentage, I’d say maybe 10–15 guys tops, who didn’t care what chapter he was, who just wanted to coexist until they could get out and just get along. But the rest of them—we’re talking mentally unfit. Some of them were there for criminal charges. Everyone who was there was getting kicked out. And between being mentally unfit and mentally unstable and being criminal, and then being locked in this room with the guys saying, “Oh, here’s this little guy”—it was open season on him. Being gay—being Bradley Manning and being gay in the DU—it was hostile. He was constantly on edge, constantly on guard. […]
They have all these beds and bunks that are all lined up and at the front there’s a common area. It’s not much of a common area but there’s a desk and doors, bathroom, storage room and then the entrance to this place. And there were three guys who had him cornered up front, and they were picking on him and he was yelling and screaming back.
And we got there—it was me and a couple of other guys who went up there to start breaking it up—and I’m yelling, “Get the hell out of here, back off.” And I started pulling Manning off him while the other guys were taking care of the ones who were picking on him. And I got Manning off to the side and yeah, he pissed himself. That wasn’t the only time he did that, but that was the time I remember. It happened a few other times, I know a couple of guys who could tell you the same story.17
Manning seems plainly not to have been soldier material. But he was not discharged. Instead, he was “recycled” back into the system. The unnamed soldier from the Fort Leonard Wood discharge unit had thoughts about this, too:
There is something wrong with the system. First off, I was in the DU for a month and in that entire month no one person was recycled from the DU. When I got out, I went home and I was getting periodic phone calls from the guys. Bradley was the only one who got recycled. And like I said, for the life of me I still don’t understand how or why. […] I think I am saying what is wrong with the system. Why was the US Army in such a mess that they were recycling the likes of Bradley Manning?
I know for a fact that in 2007 recruiting numbers were the lowest they had ever been. They were lowering recruitment standards like crazy. I mean, facial tattoos, too tall, too short, too fat, criminal record—it didn’t matter. […] It was take everybody you could get. Keep hold of everybody you can get.
I can’t help Bradley out. I tried to help him out then. A few others of us did but I can’t do anything to help him. […] I’m just saying a lot of people let him down. He is not the first one they let down and he is not the last one. That shit is going on right now at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. It is going on at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and it is going on everywhere there is a training facility.18
At the end of his trials at Fort Leonard Wood, Bradley Manning moved one step closer to the SCIF at FOB Hammer.
With desperate optimism, Manning told a friend (according to the Washington Post) that he was sure that intelligence training in Fort Huachuca would be better. “I’m going to be with people more like me.” And he did enjoy intelligence training. He was mildly reprimanded for broadcasting information about the base that might be considered sensitive on YouTube. But he still got a top-secret security clearance, and in August 2008 joined the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in far-upstate New York. Another step closer to the SCIF.
At Fort Drum, Private Manning was a paradox the military was scarcely able to digest. On the one hand, he was wholly committed to his work as a soldier. He was doing “computations and analytical work,” he told a friend, and preparing weekly intelligence briefings for the commander. He saw his role in the military as a protector of human life, and it was a mission he believed in: “I feel a great responsibility and duty to people. […] I’m more concerned about making sure that everyone, soldiers, marines, contractor [sic], even the local nationals, get home to their families.” It was more than a task; it was a calling, a life. He fervently believed in the power of intellectual development to help him carry out his duties to his fellow soldier, to his fellow human.
im reading a lot more, delving deeper into philosophy, art, physics, biology, politics then i ever did in school… whats even better with my current position is that i can apply what i learn to provide more information to my officers and commanders, and hopefully save lives… i figure that justifies my sudden choice to this[.]19
What we know about Manning’s time at Fort Drum comes largely from a series of instant-message chats he held over several months with a Chicago youth named Zach Antolak who posts her thoughts in drag as Zinnia Jones on YouTube. Manning reached out to and told her—she is a sympathetic listener—about himself. Revealing conversations with a total stranger who becomes a virtual friend; it is a practice common among Bradley’s generation, and it later brought him to grief.
Manning spent his weekend leave in Boston; he found a steady Brandeis undergraduate boyfriend and a social niche among the idealistic wing of the IT crowd, young people who believed in the emancipatory potential of digital technology and communications. Manning demonstrated against the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy designed to keep gays closeted in the military. He found a world of hip young people, where being gay and brainy is perfectly natural, perfectly normal.
But away from the libertarian paradise of Boston’s undergraduate scene, Bradley Manning did not fit in with quotidian military life at Fort Drum. He couldn’t get along with roommates, one of whom he thought was homophobic, another racist. He was written up for tossing chairs around in a fit of rage. He was written up for yelling at his superiors. He was required to get mental health counseling. Was Manning aware of the clash between his ideal of patriotic service and the reality of actual military life? Sometimes he was:
i actually believe what the army tries to make itself out to be: a diverse place full of people defending the country… male, female, black, white, gay, straight, christian, jewish, asian, old or young, it doesn’t matter to me; we all wear the same green uniform… but its still a male-dominated, christian-right, oppressive institution, with a few hidden jems [sic] of diversity.
Eventually Manning’s vision of the American military as a global protector of freedom came under strain. As one of his Boston friends told the Washington Post, Manning “expressed a feeling to me like how messed up the situation is [in Iraq]. He said things like, ‘If more people knew what was going on over there, they would not support the war.”
According to his superiors at Fort Drum, Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq. However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier.This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed to FOB Hammer in Iraq as an intelligence analyst.
Upon arrival at FOB Hammer, Bradley Manning was happy: finally, he saw a chance to use his training and skills to keep people out of harm’s way in the middle of a shooting war. In the SCIF where Manning did his tasks, a large windowless warehouse full of computers and desks and power cords, there were moments of intense and earnest teamwork. Much of the time, though, the SCIF is a big room full of bored soldiers working twelve to fourteen hour shifts, day after day.
There was entertainment available in the system. According to former FOBbit Jimmy Rodriguez, “This stuff was all in a folder. It had a generic name on it so no one would look into it. A mix of games, sex and violence. They loved to watch these clips of Apaches gunning down people and whatnot. It was definitely entertainment.”20 The whole base environment was heavily mediatised, with a live-feed projection from a drone flying over Iraq up on a big screen in the Op Center. “It was mesmeric,” says Van Buren. “We called it ‘war porn,’ though I never saw actual shooting on screen.”
At first Manning thrived in his new setting. He privately informed his supervisor that he was gay, according to a Boston friend, and the supervisor told him it didn’t matter as long as the soldier did his job well. Though still freely posting LGBT-supportive messages on his Facebook page, Manning was discreet about his sexual orientation on base. It really wasn’t clear that anyone cared. “From my time on the base, I’m not sure how important that gay or straight was to any of the soldiers,” says Van Buren. “What people are really worried about is whether their fellow soldier is reliable, and can do their job.”21
Manning had access to SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, used by the Defense Department and the State Department to transfer classified data, and to JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. In November he was promoted to the rank of specialist, when he began to learn the true meaning of success in his line of work.
We know this because by November, Manning had made internet contact with an American “gender counselor”: the soldier was considering gender transition. As momentous and potentially wrenching as this decision can be, it was not what troubled Manning. As the therapist told New York Magazine, what was upsetting the young intel analyst was his work: specifically, a targeting mission in Basra that turned ugly. “Two groups of locals were converging in this one area. Manning was trying to figure out why they were meeting,” said the counselor to New York journalist Steve Fishman. From the SCIF, Manning advised an Army unit to move in quickly; it did. “Ultimately, some guy loosely connected to the group got killed,” said the counselor, and Manning felt deeply complicit in the bloodshed.
Manning’s real Damascene moment came when he investigated the arrest of Iraqi civilian protesters for an act of faultless good citizenship. He later confided the whole story to someone he believed to be a friend:
(02:31:02 PM) bradass87: i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything
(02:35:46 PM) bradass87: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
(02:36:27 PM) bradass87: everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently
(02:37:37 PM) bradass87: i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…
The arrest of nonviolent civilians was of particular concern because torture, as Manning well knew, remained a common practice among the Iraqi authorities even six years into the American occupation. (The gruesome facts of Iraqi torture were amply documented by the US military in documents that were later released by Wikileaks.) True, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace had in December 2005 publicly contradicted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by declaring that it was the duty of every US soldier in Iraq to stop torture if he or she saw it happening. (Pace’s tenure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not renewed for a second term.) But when it came to actually enforcing this rule, the whole chain of command in Iraq turned out to be remarkably easygoing. Pace’s mandate was hollowed out anyway by Rumsfeld’s own secret legal directives in the form of Fragmentary Order 242, which set forth a specific policy of noninterference in Iraqi torture. Deployment to the war zone taught Manning that military occupation is, by its very nature, less protective than predatory.
Gunsight videos of Iraqis getting blown away by AH-64 Apache gunships were ambient “entertainment” inside the SCIF. Like so many others, Manning watched one such video shot from over half a mile above the outskirts of Baghdad on July 12, 2007. In the video, a group of civilians mingling with insurgents is fired upon by a gunship. Wounded Iraqis crawling away are shot dead. A van comes by to retrieve the wounded, and the helicopter opens fire on it too. The van turns out to be full of children. Throughout the gunsight video, pilot and crew are cracking wise, nervously, gleefully, callously. “Look at all those dead guys.” “Well,it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”When the thirty-nine minute video is over, at least eleven people have been killed, most of them unarmed civilians. Two of the civilians killed turn out to be Reuters News Agency employees; the company files a FOIA request to find out about the death but is stonewalled. Washington Post reporter David Finkel gets a copy of the video and writes about it in his book The Good Soldiers—which Manning will read—but Finkel is unable or unwilling to release the video. This is just one incident in a war that has, by conservative estimates, killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
Bradley Manning did not see this video as entertainment. He dug deeper.
(03:10:32 PM) bradass87: at first glance… it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter… no big deal… about two dozen more where that came from right… but something struck me as odd with the van thing… and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory… so i looked into it… eventually tracked down the date, and then the exact GPS co-ord… and i was like… ok, so thats what happened… cool… then i went to the regular internet… and it was still on my mind… so i typed into goog… the date, and the location… and then i see this http://www. nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html
Manning’s dreams of using his skills to safeguard human life died hard. He decided to do something about it.
(03:07:01 PM) bradass87: i just… couldnt let these things stay inside of the system… and inside of my head…
(03:07:26 PM) bradass87: i recognized the value of some things…
(03:11:07 PM) bradass87: i kept that in my mind for weeks… probably a month and a half… before i forwarded it to them
The “them” was Wikileaks.
It is not clear when Bradley Manning allegedly began transmitting documents to Wikileaks; the government in its charge sheet against the private claims it was November 2009. By then, the anti-secrecy group had already achieved celebrity in tech-libertarian and media circles by publishing the Yahoo email account of Sarah Palin and various 9–11 text messages sent from inside the burning towers. Founded in 2006, the website offers a place for whistleblowers around the world to post important revelations, with source anonymity protected by the latest encryption technology. The site’s content is backed up by mirror-sites around the world. Wikileaks is by no means the first such site; before it came Cryptome—and it will surely not be the last.
On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks premiered the helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington DC, slapping the gratuitous title “Collateral Murder” on the clip. In days, millions of people around the world watched the video, and for the most part responded in horror and disgust. America’s international lawyers rushed to provide the disquieting assurance that the aerial assault was in perfect conformity with the laws of armed conflict. A few members of the helicopter crew stepped forward to apologize to the families of the Iraqi dead and wounded. America still had 98,000 troops in Iraq (not counting mercenaries and other contractors), and their purpose there was questioned anew. Bradley Manning saw all of this. He became Facebook friends with the American infantryman, Ethan McCord, who at the scene of the aerial attack went back to the shot-up van to retrieve two wounded children and rushed them to a hospital. Manning felt a loop had been closed:
(02:07:41 AM) bradass87: event occurs in 2007, i watch video in 2009 with no context, do research, forward information to group of FOI activists, more research occurs, video is released in 2010, those involved come forward to discuss event, i witness those involved coming forward to discuss publicly, even add them as friends on FB… without them knowing who i am
(02:08:37 AM) bradass87: they touch my life, i touch their life, they touch my life again… full circle
The “Collateral Murder” video is only the beginning of what Manning allegedly exfiltrated to Wikileaks. There are the Afghan War Logs, 91,731 “Significant Action” military field reports that provide a mosaic for a pacification campaign going poorly. There are the Iraq War Logs, 391,832 more SigAct field reports, another pointillist portrait of a failed campaign. And 251, 287 State Department cables, most of which are not classified, many of which are “confidential” and some six percent of which are “secret.” (Not one of the documents that Bradley Manning has allegedly disclosed is “top secret.”)
How might he have done it? In fact, sending hundreds of thousands of documents from the SCIF at FOB Hammer would have been easy. The “infosec”—information security—at FOB Hammer was not so much faulty as nonexistent. As former FOBbit Jacob Sullivan remembered:
There were laptops sitting there with passwords on sticky notes. If someone in uniform came in and sits beside me at a computer and I didn’t know him, I’m not going to stop him and say excuse me, can I see some ID, I’m just gonna be like, “whatever.”22
And Manning himself in these unauthenticated chatlogs is even more candid about the wholesale absence of security at the SCIF.
(02:00:12 PM) bradass87: everyone just sat at their workstations… watching music videos / car chases / buildings exploding… and writing more stuff to CD/DVD… the culture fed opportunities
(02:01:44 PM) bradass87: hardest part is arguably internet access… uploading any sensitive data over the open internet is a bad idea… since networks are monitored for any insurgent/terrorist/militia/criminal types
(01:52:30 PM) bradass87: funny thing is… we transffered [sic] so much data on unmarked CDs…
(01:52:42 P.M) bradass87: everyone did… videos… movies… music
(01:53:05 PM) bradass87: all out in the open
(01:53:53 PM) bradass87: bringing CDs too [sic] and from the networks was/is a common phenomeon
(01:54:14 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: is that how you got the cables out?
(01:54:28 PM) bradass87: perhaps
(01:54:42 PM) bradass87: i would come in with music on a CD-RW
(01:55:21 PM) bradass87: labelled with something like “Lady Gaga”… erase the music… then write a compressed split file
(01:55:46 PM) bradass87: no-one suspected a thing
(01:55:48 PM) bradass87: =L kind of sad
(01:56:04 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: and odds are, they never will
(01:56:07 PM) bradass87: i didnt even have to hide anything
(01:56:36 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: from a professional perspective, i’m curious how the server they were on was insecure
(01:57:19 PM) bradass87: you had people working 14 hours a day… every single day… no weekends… no recreation…
(01:57:27 PM) bradass87: people stopped caring after 3 weeks
Career foreign service member Peter Van Buren condemned the lack of security to me. “It’s lax that no one ever disabled the disk drives in the SCIF computers, and the idea that anyone could burn a disc in there is insane, and breaks every single security rule.”23
This amazing lack of “infosec” has been a major point among pundits and journalists horrified that the leaks’ information was brought to light. For those who welcome the disclosures, what is more disturbing still is how it took so long for these documents to be leaked. After all, some three million Americans have a security clearance: did none of these people who came into contact with the “Collateral Murder” video see fit to release it to the public? Until Manning’s alleged leaks, there apparently was no need for infosec measures, given how thoroughly those with a security clearance had internalized the government’s mindset.
Back at base, Bradley Manning’s career as a soldier—his only ticket to the university education he craved—was fast disintegrating. By May 5, his superiors thought he was behaving erratically; they removed the bolt from his service rifle. He was more and more intent on gender transition, which he could only commence outside the military. On May 7, Manning slugged a female superior in the face: he was demoted back to Private First Class, sent to work in the supply room—but retained his security clearance. He was soon to be discharged, for adjustment disorder (“in lieu of ‘gender identity disorder’,” he’d later say), and he was very, very lonely.
Pfc. Bradley Manning reached out to a stranger.
On May 21, Bradley Manning contacted Adrian Lamo, a renowned computer hacker whose name was accidentally released in a Wikileaks fundraising missive. Surely Lamo, a famous hacker, once convicted on felony charges for his digital mischief, would understand the greatness of Manning’s alleged achievement. Besides, Lamo was bi; he has an ex who is male-to-female transgender; he has another ex who was counterintelligence in the army. Manning and Lamo flirted a little. Manning related his life story, his aspirations, his reasons for disclosing the documents. They joked about Lamo turning Manning in to the authorities.
What Manning didn’t know was that two days into the conversation, Lamo in fact went to the federal authorities. And his handlers were obviously feeding him questions to ask Manning—“in all seriousness, would you shoot if MP’s showed up?” On May 29, military police came to FOB Hammer to arrest Bradley Manning, who was soon taken to Kuwait for further interrogation under detention.
For turning in Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo has been cast both as a responsible, patriotic citizen and a duplicitous snitch. (He introduced himself to Manning as a journalist and a minister, free to take confessions in confidentiality. Was this a joke, or sarcasm? Did Manning ever believe it?) Famous as Lamo is inside hacking circles, to those outside that sphere he simply resembles other police informants: a convicted felon with a history of mental illness. (Lamo was involuntarily committed in California just a few weeks before his chats with Manning.24) Lamo has defended his decision to turn in Manning with a mix of faux-worldly cynicism and high-minded patriotism, neither quite ringing true. Adrian Lamo had much to lose from being implicated in another felony, especially the greatest security breach in United States history. He most likely turned in his new and unsolicited acquaintance to protect himself from a prison sentence. How many of us, in Lamo’s situation, would do otherwise?
The lengthy chatlogs between Lamo and Manning are the primary document of Manning’s life, his alleged leaks and motives. But for the amazing deeds they recount, the chatlogs read like the typical diary of an intelligent, intense, earnest twenty-two-year-old. The intel analyst’s intent is conscious, coherent, historically informed and above all it is political. These segments of the chatlogs are worth quoting at length, as they have for the most part been studiously ignored by a mass media determined not to comprehend Bradley Manning’s motives.
(12:15:11 PM) bradass87: hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… say, 8–9 months… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?
(12:16:38 PM) bradass87: or Guantanamo, Bagram, Bucca, Taji, VBC for that matter…
(12:17:47 PM) bradass87: things that would have an impact on 6.7 billion people
(12:21:24 PM) bradass87: say… a database of half a million events during the iraq war… from 2004 to 2009… with reports, date time groups, lat-lon locations, casualty figures… ? or 260,000 state department cables from embassies and consulates all over the world, explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective?
[…]
(12:52:33 PM) bradass87: Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and finds an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public… =L
(12:53:41 PM) bradass87: s/Hilary/Hillary
(12:54:47 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: What sort of content?
[…]
(12:59:41 PM) bradass87: uhm… crazy, almost criminal political backdealings… the non-PR-versions of world events and crises… uhm… all kinds of stuff like everything from the buildup to the Iraq War during Powell, to what the actual content of “aid packages” is: for instance, PR that the US is sending aid to pakistan includes funding for water/food/clothing… that much is true, it includes that, but the other 85% of it is for F-16 fighters and munitions to aid in the Afghanistan effort, so the US can call in Pakistanis to do aerial bombing instead of americans potentially killing civilians and creating a PR crisis
(1:00:57 PM) bradass87: theres so much… it affects everybody on earth… everywhere there’s a US post… there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed… Iceland, the Vatican, Spain, Brazil, Madagascar, if its a country, and its recognized by the US as a country, its got dirt on it
[…]
(1:10:38 PM) bradass87: its open diplomacy… world-wide anarchy in CSV format… its Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth… its beautiful, and horrifying…
(1:11:54 PM) bradass87: and… its important that it gets out… i feel, for some bizarre reason
(1:12:02 PM) bradass87: it might actually change something
[…]
(03:15:38 PM) bradass87: i dont know… im just, weird i guess
(03:15:49 PM) bradass87: i cant separate myself from others
(03:16:12 PM) bradass87: i feel connected to everybody… like they were distant family
(03:16:24 PM) bradass87: i… care?
(03:17:27 PM) bradass87: http://www.kxol.com.au/images/pale_blue_dot.jpg <– sums it up for me
(03:18:17 PM) bradass87: i probably shouldn’t have read sagan, feynman, and so many intellectual authors last summer…
(03:24:10 PM) bradass87: we’re human… and we’re killing ourselves… and no-one seems to see that… and it bothers me
(03:24:26 PM) bradass87: apathy
(03:25:28 PM) bradass87: apathy is far worse than the active participation
(03:26:23 PM) bradass87: >hug<
(03:29:31 PM) bradass87: http://vimeo.com/5081720 Elie Wiesel summed it up pretty well for me… though his story is much much more important that mine
(03:29:48 PM) bradass87: *than
(03:31:33 PM) bradass87: I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy.
[…]
(03:35:44 P.M) bradass87: i think ive been traumatized too much by reality, to care about consequences of shattering the fantasy
**
[..]
(02:20:57 AM) bradass87: well, it was forwarded to WL
(02:21:18 AM) bradass87: and god knows what happens now
(02:22:27 AM) bradass87: hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms
(02:23:06 AM) bradass87: if not… than we’re doomed
(02:23:18 AM) bradass87: as a species
(02:24:13 AM) bradass87: i will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens
(02:24:58 AM) bradass87: the reaction to the video gave me immense hope… CNN’s iReport was overwhelmed… Twitter exploded…
(02:25:18 AM) bradass87: people who saw, knew there was something wrong
[…]
(02:28:10 AM) bradass87: i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public
**
(02:23:25 PM) bradass87: i could’ve sold to russia or china, and made bank?
(02:23:36 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: why didn’t you?
(02:23:58 PM) bradass87: because it’s public data
(02:24:15 PM) info@adrianlamo.com: i mean, the cables
(02:24:46 PM) bradass87: it belongs in the public domain
(02:25:15 PM) bradass87: information should be free
(02:25:39 PM) bradass87: it belongs in the public domain
(02:26:18 PM) bradass87: because another state would just take advantage of the information… try and get some edge
(02:26:55 PM) bradass87: if its out in the open… it should be a public good
(02:27:04 PM) bradass87: *do the
(02:27:23 PM) bradass87: rather than some slimy intel collector
(02:29:18 PM) bradass87: im crazy like that
**
(04:42:16 PM) bradass87: im not sure whether i’d be considered a type of “hacker”, “cracker”, “hacktivist”, “leaker” or what…
