Glenn Greenwald is infamous for his take-no-prisoners style of debate, in which he stokes a high sense of moral dudgeon with white-heat lawerly and journalistic brilliance. Basically, it's a faith question, however. Either you think the US government, even Obama, is a band of crooks and thugs utterly craven and evil who deliberately mounted a fake war in Iraq and killed 100,000 people, and nothing short of "cleansing fire" can fix this -- as somebody calling himself "Alan Watts" wrote in a comment here with the usual rant about "the prison industrial complex" blah blah -- or you don't, and have a different opinion. I do have a different opinion. It's easy to be against the war in Iraq and I was -- it's also ridiculously easy as the many Internet infantiles have illustrated in gadzillion comments -- to say "Bush lied, people died," because there were no mass weapons of destruction. Christopher Hitchens believed there really were. I used to wonder if maybe the Russians helped spirit them away with Syria's help, but I was happy to take the UN's word for it.
There was indeed a weapon of mass destruction that killed 100,000 people, however, and that was terrorism. And you will not get me to agree that this is "caused" by American troops and that after the WMD thing was over, in fact fighting them wasn't really the tacit reason for the war. I think liberals have a lot to answer for, when they can't come up with a way to combat terrorism except ensure happy childhoods.
In what sense does "decency" compel — or even permit — that line of thought? Packer, as he usually does, is simply giving voice to the standard mindset of Washington’s political and media class. As Charles Davis put it to me by email a couple of days ago when discussing David Corn’s expressed admiration for Hitchens — the irony that the Washington Bureau Chief of Mother Jones, of all places, waxed so effusive about one of the nation’s leading war zealots:
That’s Washington. Issues of war and peace — life and death — are just something you argue about from 9 to 5, and only when the cameras are on. Disagreeing on the wisdom of invading and occupying other nations is like disagreeing on whether the minimum wage should be $9.50 or $9.25: nothing serious enough to end a relationship over (see: Lake, Eli). And what’s a few hundred thousand dead brown people between friends?
Oh, that's just leftist hyperbole talking. You can't claim Hitchens didn't care about "brown people" in Iraq when he supported the war against "Islamofascism" precisely because he believed that would liberate them. And it's hardly fair to tar David Corn with that brush, he surely cares.
The reality is that quite possibly Glenn Greenwald and Charles Davis are really the ones objectifying these "100,000 dead brown people" -- as if they were victims of racism! -- because they can only exploit them in their hateful theory of American war criminality. Their deaths were more complicated than that, and their own people and Al Qaeda-supported fellow Muslims killed them. Terrorists. It really does damage to the truth to keep converting these 100,000 into "victims of America". They aren't. They are for the most part victims of terrorists. Terrorists who could have fought like men, and fired only on troops or even only on police. But terrorists who killed civilians in unprotected civilian places like marketplaces or universities or places of worship. And who are continuing to kill people in exactly this way after our troops have left.
In Greenwald's universe, people who disagree with your highly moral take on things aren't just people with another point of view, they're villains -- intellectual cowards. And I understand that style and myself share a high sense of morality -- it's just that we have different moral instincts. So people who both claim to have moral rectitude really find very different things to say about 100,000 dead people -- I will continue to blame terrorists and extremism for their deaths, regardless of whether American troops triggered them or exacerbated them -- and Glenn Greenwald will go on ardently believing that we are to blame for every single death fully. As I said, these are faith questions, they are usually passed off as "science" by the left. Whle not exonerating US military action in Iraq, I will also put the view squarely on the terrorists and demand accountability there -- a factor seemingly absent in Greenwald's world view on Iraq but at least present in some form -- albeit in a bloodthirsty manner I found repugnant -- in Hitchen's world view.
Hence, my answer to his column about The Intellectual Cowardice of Bradley Manning's Critics.
Sorry, but I don't feel any bit of "intellectual cowardice" in looking at this case and concluding Manning is very different than Daniel Ellsberg.
First, Ellsberg himself was in government, in a study group, with access to classified documents he was working with. He leaked his own documents.
Second, Ellsberg wasn't in the military. He was not under any military code of conduct.
Third, his purpose was consonant with his general stance of conscience regarding the Vietnam War, and he took action for the purpose of making US policy better, and ending the war.
By contrast, Manning was under military discipline and it was not his job to access the 250,000 cables and other items like the "collateral murder" video; it was not part of his job assignment and he was not working with these documents.
He had some conscientious objection regarding certain things he saw, like the Iraqis arrested with the printing press, which he thought was wrong and overkill, but he didn't leak documents directly related to that case (nor did he even seem to seek them).
Instead, he just did as much damage as he could, deliberately, as part of an anarchic "the worse, the better" sort of Internet-bred ideology to stick it to the US government, and harm it, not make it better.
It doesn't matter if Ellsberg's documents are "more top secret" than Manning's. So what? Intent does matter; and job description does matter; and past position of conscience does matter, too.
Ellsberg was in a connected circle of people and documents that were intimately related to his job and his moral stance as a citizen; it was his career. Manning was not, he was a kid who decided to stick it to the man because he was upset about many things, including -- we're told by his lawyer -- his "gender disphoria" (I find this defense anti-LGBT myself, and don't accept it fundamentally).
It doesn't matter that Ellsberg himself doesn't see these distinctions between the circle of colleagues and New York Times reporters in the world before the Internet, when there was less disassociation and disaggregation, in fact more relevant connection to conscience and action. He has his ideological axes to grind with his "progressive" agenda, and he is grinding them on this case that is like a bastard child of his own story. Let him. That doesn't take away from the real issues of military discipline, job description, and anarchic vengeance -- which shouldn't be confused with acts of conscience and deliberation.
Assange was also directly connected with Manning -- something the leftist press has denied through this entire 18 months but which is now revealed as false by the prosecution's evidence. And Assange did not approach this act as a thoughtful one of conscience-driven necessity, but rather with the extremist, anarchist position of bringing the US to its knees by forcing such openness on it that it would be forced to close and therefore become crippled in its activities. He makes this abundantly clear in his writings (and see i.e. the excellent explications by his sympathizer, Aaron Bady).
Newspapers that use sources -- Ellsberg was a source, and Assange was a source -- shouldn't be prosecuted under existing US law and Supreme Court precedent (Pentagon papers case). But what are you to do when ethics-free anarchic hackers enter the picture? (And thus the case may include Assange.) Ellsberg did his own leaking of his own materials to which he had access with, without having anarchic locksmiths, bag men, etc. in the chain.
Manning took advantage of the affordances of the modern machine to do as much damage as possible. He even asked that question at several points -- wouldn't this material or that material have a terrible effect? His act is not one of conscience or civil disobedience, but of massive vandalism.
Now, the more serious part of your article is this: whether we can say, if the WikiLeaks shows the US to be committing war crimes or mass crimes against humanity or any serious human rights violations, that even anarchic vandalism should be exonerated, even if it isn't an act of conscience. Or worse, that "only anarchic vandalism" can work against such "horrific" crimes. And here I'm simply not persuaded by *your* writings that this is the case. But I don't rule out that in fact the Iraq war logs may show something that should be prosecuted. I don't see that Cablegate does, but I haven't read every single cable. My sense at this point is that it does not -- but see if you can get a case brought, using this material, if you can, as a lawyer.
We're probably not going to agree on the "collateral murder" video. It has been outrageously and tendentiously presented in many quarters, including from WikiLeaks Jacob Appelbaum, as a story of American troops wantonly killing journalists and even children. I don't accept that analysis because the journalists were roaming around with men with guns, and the soldiers couldn't have possibly known that there were children in the van of a man who stopped to pick up one of the wounded people. Again, there may be a case here for excessive US of force or wrongful death. But the spin of evil, bloodthirsty war criminality that the left has put on it just doesn't hold up.
I don't feel any necessity to "contrive" a difference between Manning and Ellsberg. It's very clear as day to me how these are difference cases involving completely different degrees of conscience and its connection to action. Ellsberg belongs to the honourable American tradition of whistle-blowing in positions of government or corporate power; he was in power himself. Manning belongs to the dishonourable American tradition of political vandalism.
At the end of the day, it's about the nexus between thought and action, conscience and deed. It's not about "disloyalty" or fetishizing of the national security state. It's about morality. Ellsberg's actions were consistent with an intellectual life of conscience that involved material he directly comprehended and had even written or commented on or had *lawful* access to himself. Manning's actions were consistent with the anarchic nihilism of the Internet generation and involved *unlawful* access, in defiance of rules and regulations and training. Lax oversight or hackability aren't defenses here.
The only thing wrong in the charges against Manning is "aiding the enemy". What enemy? The terrorists who kill the overwhelming majority of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan already saw the collateral damage video years ago when human rights groups saw it, too. They don't need the weakening of the US by over-exposure to already commit their deadly acts. The authoritarian countries exposed in diligent and even inspired reports from State Department officials and diplomats are only more contemptible, not the US. No, we have met the enemy and he is us, but the enemy isn't the government itself or the military, normally protecting the secrets that a liberal democratic state does get to keep. The enemy is Wikitarianism that led to the wikification of this material in the first place in injustifiable ways; the enemy is Internet-bred cynicism and anarchy that has a chance to be amplified and accelerated and made more vicious and malignant. And that is something the government will have to go on coping with even more as a result of this case, and if Manning is not prosecuted, we will cede the cause of the organic liberal thinking human to the machine and the cynical vandals.
And in reply to a further comment:
No, I think whistle-blowing is a time-honoured tradition and even to some extent legally-protected act, and as I explained, Ellsberg was leaking his own documents and those he *legally* had access to. Manning was committing politically-motivated vandalism, not leaking his own work or materials he had *legal* access to. Indeed, he didn't seem to look for or publish anything about his one ostensible concern of conscience -- the Iraqis with the printing press.
I don't believe the liberal democratic country of the United States under Obama is "paranoid and punitive." But that's because I don't start with the premise that the US is "the worst" of all countries or that it is "a war criminal" because of findings in these leaks.
I also don't buy the line that the NYT did something shameful or wrong in somehow "not reporting the facts of the war in Iraq." They did report them -- if that's your point. Gosh, the New York Times was good enough for Assange to leak to at first, you know?
If Manning doesn't think the New York Times is any good and somehow doing something dastardly, then that reveals him to be a very extreme sectarian or simply someone very young and impressionable and easily led by extremist chatter on the Internet. I don't take the NYT to be the problem that you do.
And maybe we're going to be learning more about how Assange coached Manning from army prosecutors.
We've read on Gawker.com from Adrian Chen that Manning had a friend in the White House, in charge of special media projects. So he could have gone to the top.
As for the Iraqi video I made the same point, I said others had it long before, media, human rights groups, etc. In fact, they didn't make the tendentious hash of it that Assange did, while they urged the military to conduct an inquiry.
I didn't say the video was hard to come across. Huh? I said that Assange deliberately tendentiously presented it and ballyhooed it. And you can read about how in the New Yorker piece here:
I've always condemned Wikileaks absolutely roundly, along with Manning.
I haven't made assumptions about Manning's intent and his relations with WikiLeaks and Assange, I've merely read the chat logs Wired published which were leaked by Lamo. It's all pretty obvious there. And they tell the story. That story is now validated by the military's forensics.
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