Chelsea Manning will be released from Fort Leavenworth Men’s Army Prison in Kansas on May 17 after serving seven years in prison. The usual suspects are furious and venting their outrage through the usual channels. Intrepid media outlets basically have been reporting that Manning was convicted of violating the espionage act by taking around 700,000 documents and videos and giving them to Wikileaks.
Ever present in the coverage is the likes of Rep. Paul Ryan’s statement that “Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets.”
Or, along the same lines, the diatribe of Sen. John McCain claiming that the disclosures “…endangered the lives of American troops, diplomats, and intelligence sources by leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents to Wikileaks.”
President Obama’s granting Manning clemency is nothing short of miraculous, given that he’s persecuted whistleblowers more aggressively than all other previous presidents combined.
Now let’s interrupt the punditspew with a moment of truthfulness: In 2010, at the height of the vilification of Manning and Wikileaks over the release of State Department cables, Vice President Joe Biden, when pressed, said on MSNBC, “I don’t think there is any substantive damage, no.”
He went on to say, “Some of the cables that are coming out here and around the world are embarrassing, but nothing that I am aware of that goes to the essence of the relationship that will allow another nation to say ‘they lied to me, we don’t trust them, they really are not dealing fairly with us’.”
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in 2010 that official concerns about the leaks were “fairly significantly overwrought.”
On Jan. 18, Manning’s appellate attorney, Nancy Hollander, told Democracy Now, “There was not a single individual ever identified who was harmed by what Chelsea did. What Chelsea did actually helped the United States. It helped Americans. It helped people around the world understand about human rights violations, understand … what happens to people in Iraq and Afghanistan. … There has never been a single bit of evidence that anybody was harmed or that national security was harmed.”
The reason our government is so intent on punishing whistleblowers is to intimidate people from exposing wrong doing. The powerful want to prevent the American people from learning what heinous, illegal and often unconstitutional actions our government, financial institutions, intelligence agencies, military and police take, not only against foreigners but also against us. The one thing I most clearly remember of all Manning’s disclosures was a 2007 video taken from an Apache helicopter gunsight camera, later titled “collateral murder.” https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/.
Complete with audio, it shows the brutal slaughter of over a dozen civilians including two Reuters news staff. The gunship then opened up on a would-be rescuer, killing him and wounding two children in his van. All the while you can hear the commentary of the crew, as they request and obtain permission to open fire, encourage one another and joke about the dead and dying civilians. I remember one who seems to be directing the fire who just keeps saying, “keep shooting, keep shooting, keep shooting,” as the unarmed men desperately scrabble for cover.
This revelation is “embarrassing” to say the least, but it’s not as if the people of Baghdad didn’t know this was going on regularly. What was “damaging” was for the American people to learn what’s being done in our name?
And for that, thank you, Chelsea Manning.
Jake Jacobs is a 747 pilot who lives in Kailua-Kona and writes an opinion column for West Hawaii Today