Reading 05: Chelsea Manning
As a committed American, I was and still am startled by the blatant disregard for US National Security that Chelsea Manning displayed with her decision to leak top secret data to WikiLeaks. While I am certainly not of the opinion that whistleblowing is always immoral, I believe that in this specific case, Manning was definitely in the wrong. Furthermore, I find her confession at her court-martial that she did not mean to put anyone at risk and had been “dealing with a lot of issues” when she decided to make the leaks to be a terrible excuse. Regardless of her intentions or whatever issues she was going through related to her gender dysphoria, the effects of her actions were the same – she compromised the safety of Americans and foreign collaborators who were listed in the leaked documents. Such an action is an egregious offense against the interests of the United States and should certainly be punished.
Those who defend Chelsea Manning typically fall into two camps, one of which has a much more rational position than the other. The first camp justifies her actions based mostly on her status as a transgender woman forced to live in the macho environment of the US Military. This position is absurd for the reasons I have already stated. Just because Manning faced significant personal doubts and hardship, it is not okay for her to lash out and endanger the lives of Americans and American collaborators. I certainly do not want to diminish Manning’s struggle, but simply being a transgender does not give one the privilege to blatantly break the law.
The second pro-Manning camp has a stronger position. They argue that the shocking content in some of Manning’s leaks made her decision the morally correct thing to do. Regarding with some of the content she leaked, I think (but am still not 100% sure) that I agree with this position. The leak of the videos of the 2007 Baghdad helicopter strike and the 2009 Afghanistan Garani air strike, both of which killed innocent civilians, could potentially be justified in an effort to keep the public informed of US Military actions and thus hold it accountable for such horrors. However, these leaks went much further, and Manning seemed to place no filter whatsoever on what she released. Manning released a trove of more than a quarter of a million documents. There is absolutely no way that she actually read through these documents, and her failure to do so shows a complete lack of responsibility. If Manning had just found and released a few documents she felt the public deserved to see, then her actions could potentially have been justified, but the fact that she just unleashed a trove without reviewing it removes any possibility that she did the right thing, even if it turns out there was no threatening information in the leaks. The fact that the Obama administration was scrambling to protect many people threatened by the info in the leaks going public only makes things worse.