Bradley Manning Won't Be SF Pride Grand Marshal

[struggle4progress]

10. Not everyone who supports Manning is a progressive, nor is everyone

who opposes Manning a militarist

He assumes a symbolic role with mythic qualities in some quarters, because it is much easier to announce one's "support" for Manning than to engage in the hard nuts-n-bolts political work needed to advance progressive causes. Various anti-government ideologues "support" him because they simply want a breakdown of government, as described by Assange in an early manifesto. Some libertarians "support" him in the hopes of splitting a critical mass of progressives from the Democratic Party, a strategy Greenwald outlined shortly after the 2010 election. Certain conservatives have "supported" him because his deeds caused SoS Clinton a large diplomatic headache, requiring the reassignment of diplomatic personnel. Such mythologizing requires constant misrepresentation of what Manning actually did, his motives for doing so, and the actual effects of his acts. And once he is sentenced for his massive document release, we can expect these legions of "supporters" to melt away, as they transfer their vocal energies to their next mythic symbol

In fact, Manning is a bright but disturbed young man, who was scheduled for early separation from the military due to his personal problems. He dealt with these problems in various ways, which included physically attacking a woman, before he apparently decided he could win social approval through a massive document leak. The sheer size of the leak, which runs to hundreds of thousands of pages, indicates that he could not have had any clear idea about the actual significance of most of what he was leaking. Moreover, the group to whom he leaked has some history of indifference to the effects of their leaks. Whatever he says his motives were, Manning made no serious efforts to take advantage of existing mechanisms to protect whistle-blowers reporting real problems

There are a number of reasons Manning is being prosecuted. The military has a motive to prosecute him to maintain good order and discipline and to reassure other soldiers that their comrades are unlikely to be leaking sensitive material that could endanger their lives. The military cannot be expected to ignore massive leaks by soldiers entrusted with access to sensitive or secret documents. On the civilian side, there is the important principle of civilian control of the military and the recognized need for some secrecy in diplomatic communications: the civilian government does not delegate to the military the conduct of diplomacy, and no one in the military has the right to interfere with the civilian government's ultimate control over the country and its foreign policy. Thus, if the military had chosen not to prosecute Manning, the civilian government would have removed military brass until the military was once again controlled by persons respecting the principle of civilian control

The effects of Manning's acts are multiple. They probably include loss of anti-Taliban Afghanis and costly transfers of diplomatic staff. There have also been political repercussions. The 2010 Wikileaks disclosures effectively killed a whistle-blower protection act that had been expected to pass Congress without difficulty. The day after Manning was arrested in May 2010, the House passed an amendment to the 2011 NDAA that would have repealed DADT, but by the time the bill got to the Senate conservatives united to kill the amendment, probably motivated by the old accusation that homosexuality poses a security risk, with new life breathed into it by Manning's acts: this delayed DADT repeal by half a year or more

One certainly can be an anti-militarist without supporting Manning

... David Leigh and Luke Harding's history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro's, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. "Well, they're informants," Assange replied. "So, if they get killed, they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths ...
The treachery of Julian Assange
The WikiLeaks founder, far from being a champion of freedom, is an active danger to the real seekers of truth
Nick Cohen
The Observer, Saturday 17 September 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/18/julian-assange-wikileaks-nick-cohen