[Bradley] Manning Up - International Prose

[Bradley] Manning Up
by Randall Amster via may - New Clear Vision Saturday, Dec 8 2012, 1:58am
international / prose / post

An outstanding man of character and conviction - a cut above the rest!

Being accused of revealing the “emperor’s new clothes” is likely to land one in hot water, but Manning’s treatment has crossed all bounds of fairness, decency, and legality. Having one’s life stripped down (literally) to its most basic functions, being confined in a space barely the size of a standard bathroom, having to formally ask even for toilet paper while standing at attention, and getting access to the outdoors for only 20 minutes per day is the sort of thing that could drive anyone mad. The fact that the military has justified the conditions of Manning’s confinement by asserting that he was a suicide risk is a specious argument; being in such a state can cause one to seek any way out, and putting all options on the table is more a sign of sanity than the opposite.

We can speculate how any of us would hold up in similar circumstances, which hopefully we’ll never have to find out. But the art and science of breaking down the human spirit is pretty well-developed by now, and the harshness of Manning’s confinement is likely intended as a warning and deterrent to anyone else even contemplating blowing the whistle on the architects of empire. It is thus all the more important and impressive that Manning has endured this brutal captivity — doing so through methods like dancing in his cell, “working out” with imaginary weights, and making faces at himself in the small mirror on the wall. In fact, as Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights observed upon attending the recent hearing on Manning’s confinement, the testimony Manning gave showed him to be “dignified, articulate, smart and self-aware…. His incredible sincerity and strength was visible to all. We are lucky to have people with the courage of Bradley Manning.”

Where Manning found this resolve will likely be a subject for biographers someday, but early signs indicate that the military itself may have ironically contributed to it. From his first days as a soldier, Manning seemed to be ill-suited for the role, at least in the eyes of some of his colleagues. In an interview with The Guardian, an anonymous soldier who served with Manning recalls the situation: “The kid was barely 5ft — he was a runt. And by military standards and compared with everyone who was around there — he was a runt. By military standards, ‘he’s a runt so pick on him’, or ‘he’s crazy — pick on him’, or ‘he’s a faggot — pick on him.’ The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he tried. He really did…. A lot of people let him down. He is not the first one they let down and he is not the last one.” If we subscribe to the school of thought that says our scars make us stronger, then Manning’s early duress may have steeled him for what would come later.

In another irony, Manning’s first post after basic training was at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona, where human rights activists would gather annually to demonstrate against the base’s claim to fame as being the headquarters of U.S. Army military intelligence and the place where the “torture manuals” for the War on Terror were developed. The nonviolent protests there specifically addressed cruel treatment of detainees: “We practice nonviolence at Ft. Huachuca to call for civilian, human-rights centered oversight of all interrogation training and practice, which must include absolute prohibition of cruel treatment and command responsibility for any violation of this prohibition.” Indeed, the history of nonviolent praxis is replete with examples of people enduring suffering for their principles. Gandhi referred to this as tapasya, meaning “austere devotion” and often implemented as a willingness to suffer for one’s beliefs rather than inflict suffering on another.

In the annals of nonviolence, Thoreau’s famed essay “Civil Disobedience” stands out as a testament to the principled endurance of unjust confinement: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” In his equally celebrated “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. extols the virtues of myriad activists for justice “willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake.” Perhaps Manning, implicitly if not outright, was aware of the essence of these teachings when he made the alleged decision to transgress the hegemon by revealing its secrets. If so he would be in good company, as validated by the “198 methods of nonviolent action” developed by Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution and their inclusion of “disclosing identities of secret agents” among the list of tactics — which we can extrapolate to include disclosing damning evidence of the sort that Manning is said to have given to Wikileaks.

Manning may be guilty of revealing state secrets, but that action pales before the state’s guilt in perpetrating atrocities and committing them to secrecy in the first place. In a recent accounting of what these revelations demonstrate, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange catalogues their import:

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