The Passion of Bradley Manning Read online

  If there’s one thing to learn from the last ten years, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money. And though information is powerless on its own, it is still a necessary precondition for any democratic state to function. Thanks to the whistleblowing revelations attributed to Bradley Manning, we have a far clearer picture of what our own country is doing. If Manning is responsible for the WikiLeaks revelations, then for his gift to the republic, purchased at great price, he deserves not prison, but a Presidential Medal of Freedom, an apology from the government that has persecuted him and the heartfelt gratitude of the citizens of his country.

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  THE LIFE OF BRADLEY MANNING

  (03:31:33 PM) bradass87: I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy.

  Forward Operating Base Hammer was a tough deployment. Even with the espresso bar, the workout room, high-speed internet in all the tents, the musical combos that came together and apart again when the soldiers were deployed elsewhere; even with a visit from Washington Redskin cheerleaders over Thanksgiving 2007, or any of the college squads who visited for MWR (Morale Welfare and Recreation), FOB Hammer was a tough deployment. Built in early 2007 for the “Surge” of additional US troops into an exploding Iraq, the base is forty miles east of Baghdad in the middle of the Mada’in Qada desert. There is not a hut or hamlet in sight. The isolation is no accident: the base was sited deep into nowhere to minimize the bootprint that a garrison of foreign troops would leave on Iraqi hearts and minds.

  It’s a desolate place. “The base was in the middle of the desert. There was sand everywhere, we had dust storms quite often, I don’t know, once a month or so while I was there,” said Jimmy Rodriguez to The Guardian. “Just a bleak place, everything was brown over there.” Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republic and since his return to civilian life has been working at a boxing gym in New York while apprenticing as a carpenter. Rodriguez’s impression of FOB Hammer is widely shared. “There was a fog that would come in almost every morning that was pollution from nearby,” says Jacob Sullivan, who served as a biological and chemical weapons expert with the Second Battalion Special Brigade, redeploying home with the rank of Private First Class. Sullivan comes from Phoenix, Arizona and is now back there again, a full-time university student with entrepreneurial aspirations. “[The fog] smelled sour and nasty, and would just wave through and linger, and create an eerie atmosphere.”

  The tedium of landscape is by all accounts a pretty good metaphor for the monotony of a deployment at FOB Hammer. “Life on base for many of the FOBbits—that’s what they’re called—was really very boring, with nothing to do but work, eat and sleep, and the work was twelve, fourteen hour shifts with the same people, day after day,” says Peter Van Buren, a State Department Official who was posted at the base from October 2009 to May 2010. “There were a lot of Groundhog Day jokes.” Van Buren’s in northern Virginia now, working in human resources at Foggy Bottom; before this post he had logged two decades in the Foreign Service, with stints in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK and Hong Kong. During his time in Iraq he saw a lot more of the country than most of the people at Hammer. “I got outside the wire several times a week, but a lot of the FOBbits never left the base at all during their whole deployment. They got flown into Baghdad under cover of night, and a year later got flown out, also at night. For many soldiers, the base was all they ever saw of Iraq.”

  It bears repeating: a deployment at FOB Hammer was no great adventure. “Morale I think was generally really low for everyone that was there that I talked to,” says Rodriguez. “All the soldiers, they didn’t like it, nobody had a purpose out there.”

  The harsh climate doesn’t help any. Temperatures can hit 100 degrees even in springtime, said another soldier, “but I’d prefer the heat over the peanut butter that forms when it rains… I grow three inches in height when it rains here.” These are the observations of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who served at FOB Hammer from October 2009 till late June 2010. Manning is brainy, and he kind of knows it. (“I don’t think 99% of the people I work with would make such observations.”) He also has a habit of thinking for himself, which can be a liability in the military. During his deployment, which lasted from October 2009 till late June 2010, Manning spent many long shifts at a computer terminal inside the base’s SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), where access is granted only to those with security clearance. Like many of his fellow FOBbits, Manning was, by his own admission, pretty miserable for much of his deployment.

  Today, Bradley Manning’s name is notorious, cursed and exalted. In America, elite politicians have called for his execution, and former ACLU bigwigs have eagerly admonished us “to be tough on the people in the government who are like Manning.” Fierce defenders have also stepped forward, among them veterans, peace activists, writers and intellectuals—a sprinkling of solidarity groups have sprouted up across the nation—across the world, in fact. The months of extreme solitary confinement inflicted on Manning made the State Department’s head public relations spokesperson, normally a bland font of official euphemism, erupt in a diatribe against the punishment, which led swiftly to his resignation. Abroad, Pfc. Manning has inspired passionate defenses on the floor of the German Bundestag, earned enthusiastic plaudits from the staid Council of Europe and won a major British newspaper’s readership vote for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize—and by a wide margin. Bradley Manning has been denounced as an immature, treasonous, pathological headcase who embodies why gays and lesbians should never be allowed in the military. (Manning is gay, and according to as yet unauthenticated instant-message chatlogs, he was seeking to commence male-to-female gender transition at the time of his arrest.) Manning has also been praised as a whistleblower, a patriot and a hero who sacrificed his freedom for the honor of his military, the good of his country and the world’s enlightenment—a young lion of dissent against state secrecy and imperial violence.

  But before he allegedly exfiltrated the Iraq War Logs (including the gruesome “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunsight video), the Afghan War logs, and 251,287 State Department cables from the SCIF at Hammer and passed them all to WikiLeaks; before he become a hate-figure and a public enemy; before he became an icon, a cause and an international hero, Bradley Manning too came from somewhere.

  Crescent, Oklahoma is the kind of place that lazy metropolitan journalists often respond to with Gertrude Stein’s shopworn laugh-line that “there is no there there.” Of course, Oklahoma is dense with historical there-ness, being both terminus of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears and origin of the great Dust Bowl exodus. As journalist Denver Nicks was the first to point out, Bradley Manning isn’t even the first gay whistleblower of stature to pass through this small town: before him there was Karen Silkwood, the trade unionist who worked at the now-defunct Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant, also in Crescent. After taking note of safety failures at the plant, she died in a mysterious car crash while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times on the night of November 13, 1974. This small town of 1,400 people has a rocksolid claim to be the queer whistleblower capital of the world. The red dirt of Oklahoma has bred hardy rebels, from Woody Guthrie to Ralph Ellison to Clara Luper.

  Not to mention Angie Debo, the whistleblowing historian from Marshall (pop. 354) whose 1940 masterpiece, And Still the Waters Run, chronicles how local whites stole vast portions of the state from the Indians. Her book named plenty of locally prominent names, had its initial publishing contract canceled and got the author blacklisted from teaching in Oklahoma universities. Debo, who came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon in 1899 at the age of nine and died in Marshall in 1988, has since become a revered local hero whose work is now quoted in gubernatorial inauguration speeches.

  More prosaically, Crescent is a bedroom community about an hour’s drive north of Oklahoma City. Although the camera crew of PBS “Frontline” made a point of shooting the town’s
main street right at dawn, with long and lurid shadows over empty parking spaces, Crescent is far from a ghost town.

  Bradley Manning (born in 1987) grew up with his parents and big sister on a few acres three miles outside the town center. A two-story house—Brad has his own bedroom—and a “hobby farm” with a couple horses, a cow, pigs and chickens; as described by his older sister to the Washington Post, it sounds positively idyllic. His parents, Brian Manning and Susan (née Fox) Manning, met and soon married in her native Wales where Brian Manning was deployed at the Cawdor Barracks with the US Navy in the 1970s. What precisely he was doing in the military he’s not allowed to say, but he had a security clearance and learned enough about computers to later land work as an IT manager with the Hertz rental car agency in Oklahoma City, a job that made him good money and took him around the world.

  Young Bradley took after his father, a tech whiz from an early age, always playing with his father’s hand-me-down computers. In fact he was a bit of a prodigy, reading (by his own recollection) at age three, doing multiplication and division by age four. According to family members, Manning was doing C++ programming by age eight and had designed his first website at the age of ten. Bradley took the grand prize three years running at the Crescent science fair, beating out students several grades ahead. With a few other classmates, he represented the town at “academic bowl” competitions all over the state. While other boys might be content to play video games, young Bradley liked to hack them and tweak the coding.

  Bradley Manning definitely has a mind of his own. Despite being raised Catholic, the boy refused to utter the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance, a startling act of freethinking for an elementary school student anywhere in the United States, let alone a small town that is heavily Evangelical. As Rick McCombs, currently the principal in Crescent, told reporter Denver Nicks, “You would say something, and he would have an opinion which was a little unusual for a middle school kid. This young man actually kind of thought on his own.” Sometimes he took it upon himself to correct teachers. “Well Bradley, little munchkin that he is, he would stand up for what he believes,” remembers Mary Egleston, a family friend and former substitute teacher in Crescent. Bradley was precociously high-minded, arguing even in elementary school that the US had a right to assert its military power overseas to protect its interests, according to hometown friend Jordan Davis. As Davis told the Washington Post, even the video game “Call to Power II” soon led young Manning to a serious conversation about the powers of technology to achieve democracy. “He was basically really into America,” Davis told one reporter; “He wanted to serve his country.” When Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001, Bradley Manning’s friends turned to him as a source of wisdom and judgment. An independent mind joined to a deep sense of patriotic obligation is a constant in Bradley Manning’s life, even as his concept of what it meant to serve his country matured with age and experience.

  Bradley Manning was a child who enjoyed knowing things; he read the encyclopedia for fun. Manning learned to be a quiet child—not anti-social, but quiet. It probably didn’t make Bradley’s life at school any easier that he, like his father, was on the small side and grew to be 5’2”. The boy got his share of bullying and abuse. And there was something else. As he later confided to a stranger over instant messaging in 2010:

  (11:33:46 AM) bradass87: i didnt like getting beat up or called gay [didn’t really know what gay meant, but knew it was something bad]

  (11:34:06 AM) bradass87: so i joined sports teams, and started becoming an athlete

  At age 13, Bradley Manning told his two closest friends that he’s gay, a difficult conversation for any teenager virtually anywhere in the United States. Still, these are no different from the troubles that other young people face and overcome, hopefully with the help of a supportive family.

  It is not clear that Manning ever got such support from his family. Today, his parents are in the supremely unenviable position of having their childrearing dug up and held up to the light by a curious public. How many mothers and fathers could survive this without looking at least a little like monsters? And yet this is essential to the story of Bradley Manning. The locals of Crescent have had unkind things to tell reporters about Brian Manning—that he was demeaning, “a dick”, verbally and physically abusive, that his son was “more afraid of his father than normal.” Manning’s mother was an alcoholic through much of Bradley’s childhood; she told the Washington Post that she started the morning with vodka in her tea and finished the day with rum in her Coke. Despite living miles from town, she never learned to drive a car, and leaned heavily on her young son to write out checks to pay bills. (Her ex-husband describes her today as semi-literate.) Neither parent attended parent-teacher conferences at Bradley’s school, and when their son was the first Crescent student to win a statewide academic trophy in Oklahoma City, his parents were absent from the audience. And then they divorced. How they arrived at this domestic cataclysm is best told by Bradley himself from these (as yet unauthenticated) instant messages from mid-2010.

  (11:34:19 AM) bradass87: around this time (middle school)… my parents divorced

  (11:36:34 AM) bradass87: my father in a drunken stupor got angry with me because i was doing some noisy homework while he was watching TV… he went into his bedroom, pulled out a shotgun, and chased me out of the house… the door was deadbolted, so i couldn’t get out before he caught up with me… so my mother (also wasted) threw a lamp over his head… and i proceeded to fight him, breaking his nose, and made it out of the house… my father let off one or two shots, causing damage, but injuring nobody, except for the belt lashing i got for “making him shoot up the house”

  (11:36:59 AM) bradass87: i went to school the next day, and my teachers noticed the wounds, and got social workers involved

  (11:37:11 AM) bradass87: he immediately stopped drinking, and my mother filed for divorce

  (11:37:29 AM) bradass87: after the divorce, my mother attempted suicide…

  (11:38:23 AM) bradass87: after taking care of her for awhile, and gaining custody of me, my mother took me to her hometown, haverfordwest, wales… to live and go to school

  In Wales, Bradley found himself more an outsider than ever: still small, still nerdy, but now a foreigner with a funny accent and all the more easily bullied and ostracized. (His mother remembers Bradley going on a group camping trip only to awake in the morning to find that all the other campers had pulled up stakes and ditched him overnight.) But the outspoken independence of mind had not changed. “He always had this sense that ‘I’m going to right a big wrong,’” says Welsh school friend Tom Dyer. “He was like that at school. If something went wrong, he would speak up about it if he didn’t agree with something. He would even have altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right.” By sixteen, he achieved the British equivalent of a high-school diploma. With a few of his mates—Manning had a small circle of friends, all into computers—he tried his hand at an internet startup venture. Like the great majority of such endeavors, it went nowhere. He cared for his mother, who, ailing from a series of strokes, leaned on her son more heavily than ever. Manning was not happy. Lonely and despondent, the seventeen-year-old surprised his father in the summer of 2005 by calling him up and asking if he might have room for his son at his new home, with his new family—Brian Manning had remarried— back in Oklahoma.

  Brian Manning found a job for his computer whiz son at Zoto, a software company in Tulsa. His boss, Zoto cofounder Kord Campbell, told the Post that he was wowed by young Manning’s skills, and by his adult intellect. With the Iraq War becoming more unpopular by the day, international politics were a topic of conversation everywhere in America, and Bradley had a point of view. “Here I was, a grown man, and he could run circles around me” talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, Campbell told the Post. “He didn’t like that people were being killed, particularly the citizens, innocent people. I remember us specificall
y talking about how we were having a hard time getting information on how many people were being killed.” Campbell seems to have gone above and beyond to help his young employee along, even taking time to teach Bradley how to drive. But though Bradley had the computer skills, the teenager did not have the emotional stability to hold down an adult nine-to-five job. Campbell recalls Bradley zoning out and going catatonic on the job, and with reluctance, he had to let the boy go. (Manning’s version is a little different; he later told a friend that “it was company funding and lack of manpower that killed my job at zoto… Flickr creamed us because my boss was a marketing retard;” he also claimed to have proposed an engine that would convert uploaded videos and stream them through Flash, i.e. YouTube before it was a reality, but that his boss didn’t heed his young intern’s advice.)

  At home, tensions grew, and he fought with his father and stepmother about money, his smoking, his attitude, his sexuality. After one particularly energetic row, she called the police. The next day, Manning left, later telling a reporter at a rally against Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in Syracuse, New York that he was thrown out of the house for being gay; his father denied that his son’s sexual orientation had anything to do with it. An unemployed adult child made to leave home after friction with a stepparent: it’s a scene that plays out every day in every state of the union.