Chelsea Manning and The Lesson of Betrayal
Who betrays whom? From the perspectives of polarized American society, both Manning and the U.S Government are considered to be “traitors”, despite for their acts aim for good deeds, the pursuit of something mighty, noble, and inadvertently controversial.
Throughout the recorded history, humans have become finely attuned to the possibility of betrayal by others. Knowing who to trust and how much to trust them is critically important for survival mechanism, applied for both animals in the wilderness and men in highly complicated society. Treachery and betrayal have been considered among the worst offenses one could commit against their kith and kin. Dante, the Italian poet, relegated traitors to be immediately descended the coldest and lowest region of hell, to be frozen up to their necks in lake of ice with blizzards storming all about them, as punishment for acted so coldly toward others. From sexual infidelity to disclosing friend’s secret, betraying another person or group of people implies a significant image of disloyalty and distrust, a violation of what is good and properly righteous. Thus, the act of treason merits the most severe punishment, including the death penalty.
But Chelsea Manning (newly changed legal name of Bradley Manning), on the other hand, redefines the betrayal, by leaking up to 700,000 state documents, including war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, and a recorded video of a U.S Apache helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad. She was sentenced to 35 years in military prison and already served seven years before receiving presidential commutation from Barack Obama in his final acts in his office. She began extracting sensitive classified documents in December 2009 and established a secret communication channel with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks in the following month. Having a clueless idea of the consequential outcome to Manning, and to the general public by exposing the vulnerability of the national security, Manning, the whistleblower was arrested in late May 2010, having already handed over 91,000 classified documents from Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 from Iraq, which were released by WikiLeaks in July and October, respectively. Handing state secrets to hostile foreign intelligence service resonates the definition of treason, and this was what Manning did. She was found guilty of various counts of espionage and theft, though she was acquitted of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy.
Yet her so-called brave, courageous and inspirational act of treason with the means of protecting and preserving the constitutional rights of citizens, including the liberty, autonomy and integrity, endangers the innocent lives. Her heroic attempts to expose the U.S government by the revelation of state secret actually demonized her actions and intentions, and put American lives at potential risks, because of her unsolicited, irrational and chaotic means to serve democratic liberalism. Neither for public interest nor individual interest, she represents a symbolic manifestation of ‘moral’ betrayal that has gone badly wrong and it generates unpleasant consequential outcomes, that never be foreseen by rebellious anarchists, Assange, Manning and Snowden. It is difficult to confirm when the act of treason has been praised and celebrated so well, and the notion of safety and security have been downplayed, and ranked below the privacy and civil liberties.
Being applauded by the likes of Amnesty International and others as heroic “whistleblower”, Manning prosaically reconfigured the historical perspectives of betrayal and celebrated her unearned liberty. She was not an ordinary “leaker.” When she leaked hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic secrets into the public domain, she violated every single tenet of the warrior ethos. She abandoned the mission. She “accepted” the defeat and, through the data dumps, worked to facilitate it. She turned her back on comrades, knowingly consciously aware of her treacherous act could cost the lives of soldiers and innocent civilians, acting with utter, callous disregard for their lives. Her message to her former unit and to the nation was clear that she would clandestinely disobey lawful orders and risk killing her comrades to instigate violence, provoke international political debates, and nonstop pro-democracy demonstration. It is assumed that she seemingly withstands her decision of leaking classified document, either serving the public interest nor individual interest, she deliberately chose to ignore the many lives at stake, and defends her righteous justification of revealing the ugly truth that should be kept hidden for the mutual benefits. Her judgments eventually cost the government a big deal of challengingly cunning issue, a seriously exasperating problem that still reverberates among the public, demanding the government to proactively engage in ultimate transparency and truth telling. To decide her judgements are obscure or misleading, it has to depend on citizen’s monumental decision to categorize her sort of action.
For all the love and hatred toward oppressive governments, Americans and other citizens in both democracies and non-democracies have been demanding unequivocal compliance over honesty and courage when it comes to the subject of irrepressible nations security. At least for some reasons, Democrats and Republicans share the common ground, an almost visceral hatred of whistleblower like Manning. She is probably the most hated whistleblower in the U.S history, not to mention, she is the exceptional transgender woman, who revealed the absurdity, depravity and oddities of hundred of thousands of classified documents. The “hero” after commuted by Barack Obama surely did not expect an easy-going progress after being released from tethers and incarceration. She recently terminated a phone call with the dean of Harvard Kennedy School to express her disappointment and frustration at the university’s decision to revoke her visiting fellowship, pressured by the CIA. This has been warned that being a “traitor” by any means, especially betraying to her own country, is a serious offense, and it is inevitable that there would be no happy-ending outcome for such typical individual like Manning. No promise has been made, no public consensus adheres that Manning would live the rest of her life as inspirational figure representing the emergence of transgender groups in contemporary American society that is highly polarized.
A member of Manning’s support team challenged Elmendorf to explain why Harvard was so anxious about giving her the title of “visiting fellow” when in the same roster of this year’s fellows they had included Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s former White House press secretary, and Trump’s former presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was charged with assaulting a reporter during the 2016 race. But the issue regarding turning back on the country and defending the country have been debated for several counts of occasions. Being a former recipient with battered image of a disputable and possibly defamatory presidential administration ever to be found in the U.S history, is something and at least this manifests a repertoire of conservative political ideologies, trying to defend the state from self-destruction with hostile, provocative, unsettling and unambiguous rhetorics. At least they represent for the “unpresidential” presidency, helping to curb the stability and order, with unorthodox and never-before-seen governing approaches to defend the country. While Manning nonetheless represents a different image of transgender groups in a self-discovery of their identities, and she acted out of her sexual orientation to commit treason. Manning and LGBQT community contests the society by telling the truth about themselves, and declassifying sealed documents for the betterment of societies. For such distinguishing individuals, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, or Sean Spicer, they had controversial history of political activities, and Manning is certainly not safe of escaping from the same categorization with these notorious figures. But being discarded from visiting fellowship of Harvard Kennedy School, speaks genuinely about politically motivated agenda to disassociate “traitor” from well-known figures in American politics.
Seeing Manning’s sentence commuted by Barack Obama was a derogatory image to the U.S military and the entire intelligence community, when an individual who broke the oaths she had taken and many laws to abet a sustained assault and innumerable strikes on the U.S foreign policy by hostile foreign governments, shattering years of hard works to construct a consistently reliable and dynamic multilateral international relations. Expecting to receive leniency would be bad enough for such individual who intentionally commit a heinous crime to sabotage her country, abruptly disturb the harmonious relation with allies, and diminish the degree of reliability and trustworthy of the U.S. The betrayal initially conveys that Russian espionage gained a victory, or at least having advantages over the U.S intelligence agencies since the Cold War, while Chinese spies lurking around in the U.S system, continuously engage in counterintelligence espionage activities by stealing classified U.S technological secrets. Despite the later allegations that her actions put American soldiers on the field and other assets in harms, the chief investigator for the Pentagon in the Manning case admitted at her sentencing hearing in 2013 that the agency found that there was no physical evidence of anyone having ever been killed as a result of being named in the documents that she leaked. Giving up state secrets for public revelation can facilitate enemies valuable information, although Manning was not found guilty of aiding the enemy.
Why wouldn’t Manning go through specialized whistleblowing channel coordinated and managed by the U.S Congress, instead of providing classified documents Assange’s Wikileaks? Manning, a government-intelligence analyst was considered to be low-level analyst, who would not have the understanding of consequences. Risking her military career and her life to contribute her final decision with public responsibility to unveil the truth does not sound convincingly rational and truthfully acceptable. It is uncertain whether Manning could live long to be a trustworthy person, it seems the public needs to actualize and eschew the simplistic justification of whistleblowing, by comprehending the right balance between government secrecy and civil liberties. From the low-level analyst, Manning can neither be underestimated nor overestimated, and the already polarized contemporary American society will draw a speculation of her patriotism and trustworthy, disregarding the fact she is a trans woman.
At a certain point in the trial, Manning’s defense team had introduced a debatable argument based on the private’s “gender identity disorder”. It has to be conceded that Manning’s working environment was chaotic and belligerently odious enough, including access codes to top-secret systems lying around on sticky notes, and that once Manning had emailed her superior with a picture of herself in drag, it should have been realized something was afoot. Meanwhile, every other colleagues working with Manning managed not to fall in her footsteps of sending classified information to WikiLeaks, however, and there was something very eccentric in pro-gay rights activists suggesting that Manning’s orientation was the reason why he had acted out in this way. It used to be conservative institutions like the military that worried about homosexuals being “unstable” in order to keep them out. It doesn’t sound coherently rational and plausible justification to defend the leak. An individual born with no natural inclination to share has self-emerged to reveal classified documents as an approach to protest her problematic sexual orientation and civil liberties. Is the leak supposed to be a metaphorical demonstration succeeded by LGBQT communities and Manning to present their radicalism and show an appalling signal that members of LGBQT communities are already part of the fabric of mainstream society?
In this very context, one may ask who betrays whom. From the perspectives of polarized American society, both Manning and the U.S Government are considered to be “traitors”, despite for their acts aim for good deeds, pursuit of something mighty, noble, and inadvertently controversial. It is the paradoxical anomaly of our social understandings of the moral dilemma, when one chose to keep these state secrets which were assumably ugly, mendacious and terrible truths being hidden and remained absolutely discreet for the sake of national security, while the other one decided to expose all dirty state secrets for public acknowledgement, and the public should be deserving to know the truth. Therefore, the intricacy of betrayal much left us clueless about this unhinged calamity of who to trust, and what is right and wrong.
In the complex societies, where each individual cannot become expert in all the institutional contexts in which they must operate, trust is essential for people to negotiate the various realms, either in political institutions or other critically important institutions, in which they operate. Trust is conceptually built to foster a consistent relationship and efficient collaboration, for the benefits of one another. People must feel secure in the trust networks they establish in order to survive and prosper, and for society itself to advance. Manning, Assange and Snowden may share common interests of exposing the obnoxiously insufficient methods of withholding secrecy and opposing the driving principles of governing approaches of institutions. They may portray themselves as cyber-libertarians or cyber-anarchists, who appreciate individuals to embrace the consequences of having public responsibilities of truth telling, to abruptly disseminate the tyrannical transformation of institutions. They believe in outspoken manifestation of institutional actors, such as individuals and non-government affiliated associations, to exercise more accountabilities over institutions, with the mechanism of transparency. Though institutions that are non-functional cannot assure the stability of a state and chaos is a visibly significant attribute provoked by theses degraded institutions. Assange still defines himself a conflict theorist who believes in institution as the necessary evil, that must be safeguarded and subject to oversight by the public with enforced transparency. People require institutions for order and stability, yet are perpetually threatened by the tyrannical inclinations of such institutions. Assange believes the people can only gain the upper hand in the struggle by preventing/exposing institutional secrets. On the other hand, Assange realizes the fundamental need of secrecy, and praises the secrecy:
“Secrecy is important for many things but shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses, which leads us to the question of who decides and who is responsible. It shouldn’t really be that people are thinking about, Should something be secret? I would rather it be thought, Who has a responsibility to keep certain things secret? And, who has a responsibility to bring matters to the public? And those responsibilities fall on different players. And it is our responsibility to bring matters to the public.”
In spite of the social complexities, Assange believes institutions have innate root of easily becoming corrupt and the inevitability of corruptibility is unpredictable, when they are not under explicit and restrictive observation. Thus, Assange, Manning and Snowden may share a belief of eradicating secrecy to diminish the corruption, with assumption that secrecy is categorically labelled as precondition for government’s unjust and corruptible behaviors. They exhibit ideologies which soundingly declare them be righteous individuals to regulate governments and tyrannical corporations. From a man with no country being self-imprisoned in Ecuadorian Embassy in London, defected “traitor” hiding in Russia, to a trans woman posed on Vogue magazine, they distinguish themselves as libertarians by indicating antagonism to institutions, equivalently closer to becoming the nomads of the digital age. Whether they are anarchists, traitors, or heroes, it is up to the citizens to decide what they should be perceived.
