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| Private Bradley Manning (on the left) "To leak, or not to leak, that is the question" |
For the Obama Administration, Private Manning's actions are questionable. It is arguable if he accomplished what he set out to do and didn't just publicly embarrass the United States of America. As quoted from the Detroit Free Press, "The Obama administration has said that the release of the documents threatened valuable military and diplomatic sources and strained America's relations with other governments. The administration has aggressively pursued individuals accused of leaking classified material, and Manning's is the highest-profile case." Has Private Manning actually changed anything? Of course, President Obama hopes for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible. However, I seriously doubt the WikiLeaks affair was a major factor in his decision-making process.
Interestingly, Private Manning claimed that tried contacting The New York Times and The Washington Post before he gave the files to WikiLeaks. CBS News states that the private was not taken seriously and his tips not returned. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has commented that "the only way to get these cowards to publish anything is to get WikiLeaks to publish it first."
So what's your opinion? Did the leaks unnecessarily damage public relations between America and other countries? Do you feel Manning made the best choice under the circumstances? Did he, whether intentionally or not intentionally, aid "the enemy?" I await your thoughts.
A video of the news is provided for your viewing pleasure.
3 comments:
Funnily enough, I haven't heard of this story in a while. Glad you brought it up again in the blog. I know there's this whole movement fighting for Bradley Manning. There was that whole thing where he was being semi-tortured and humiliated while in jail and they were just letting him rot and not bringing him to court. I guess there's some movement there, then.
As far as the public has been notified, these leaks haven't done substantial damage to our foreign relations. And I don't think that Bradley Manning leaked these cables just for giggles or to aid "the enemy." From all I've heard and read about him, he genuinely wanted to draw attention to the violence occurring and did so the best way he could--Wikileaks. So personally, I say hurrah for Bradley Manning. He was brave and knew that he could have been caught, but he went ahead with what he felt was right. At least, that's what I perceive to be true about his actions.
Lately, heroically-intended acts of providing the public with more information seem to be causing more trouble than its worth. Manning, and, recently, Aaron Swartz (the Reddit developer who committed suicide after getting caught and convicted for attempting to share illegally downloaded academic journals with the public) are not having the luck of Daniel Ellsberg, the man in charge of getting the Pentagon Papers published. When it comes down to it, the actions of these well-meaning activists were illegal, making them deserving of some sort of punishment. However, I stand by Taylor's opinion that these men were brave for following through with what they perceived to be right. Supposedly, the media should serve as the means of keeping the government in check. The fact that the NY Times and the Washington Post ignored Manning is very disappointing. In fact, they could potentially have saved the issue from going as far as it did.
I've been waiting to comment on this post until after I finished a (somewhat infamous) book written by David Leigh, one of the Guardian’s investigations editors who coordinated the publishing of the leaks with Assange. Prior to reading the book, I wasn’t sure what my opinion of Manning was. To me, it seemed like the whole WikiLeaks conundrum (including who was “in the right” and who was “in the wrong”) could be boiled down to the question of whether or not that information should, theoretically, be available to the public. As someone involved in journalism myself, my knee-jerk response was probably leaning towards the “yes to transparency of information” side. But when considering the faults (both legal and moral) of the different players in the WikiLeaks drama, I think it is important to separate our sense of “what is morally sound” from “what is morally defensible.” That seems like a minute distinction, but what I mean to say is that any given person may act upon a sound moral compass, but that doesn’t mean it is just. In the case of Bradley Manning, I see this to be true; some (not all) of the information that was ultimately made public was, indeed, justifiable (in that the press was legitimately holding government accountable, the public deserved to know, etc.) However, regardless of some of the information’s eventual righteousness, Manning has no moral—much less legal—defensibility for what he did. I do believe that he fully thought what he was doing was “right,” and I doubt that he had any other motives for leaking the files. Yet his actions were undeniably reckless, immature, and utterly illegal. He not only flat-out disregarded military law, but he also put top secret intel in the hands of someone—who he was only “pretty sure” was Assange—who could have easily leaked it to the world without consideration for not only national security, but individuals’ safety. In fact, I do not think it unlikely that Assange would have continued to recklessly publish unredacted documents had not external influences (i.e. other journalists) convinced him of the dangers of full transparency and the importance of redacting names. And, ultimately, the full unredacted cables have been leaked. The blame for this lies with many (including the U.S. government in the first place), but in the case of Bradley Manning, I think it is clear that he should be imprisoned for 20 years (if life imprisonment is dependent upon purposefully “aiding the enemy,” then I don’t think that should be his sentence, and shame on those who call for execution… cough, cough, Rep. Mike Rogers…). I have yet to form my opinion on both Assange and the other newspapers that published the leaked info (though I predict it will be be both more positive and more complicated), but if I discovered one thing from Leigh’s book, it is that humans (journalists, too, for better or worse) are undeniably subject to and blinded by their own biases, even when they believe they are acting in a morally defensible manner. In fact, in writing on the topic, Leigh reveals his own biases and the biases of the industry he defends. The whole story is laden with irony… I’m not, by any means, against accountability, justice, or truth, but none of those considerations are black and white.
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