[June 13th marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a controversial moment made possible by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ellsberg and other whistleblowers, leading up to a weekend post on one of the true heroes of the Trump era.]
On the
particularly fraught and particularly vital role of wartime whistleblowers.
The
whistleblowers about whom I’ve written so far this week fall into two broad
categories, categories which I’d say encompass the vast majority of folks who
take such actions: whistleblowers who outed governmental secrets (as with Daniel
Ellsberg and Edward Snowden) and those who took action against powerful corporations
(as with Karen Silkwood and Jeffrey Wigand). There are plenty of similarities between
both types (not least because the government and such corporations so often
align, not only in those specific cases and industries but in their interests
and efforts overall), and also some key differences (including the respective
questions of legality and forms of criminal charges that come with each type of
whistleblowing). But there’s also a third type, one that somewhat parallels the
governmental whistleblowers but brings with it its own distinct questions, not
just of legality but of the fraught relationship between patriotism and
morality: whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning
who bring to light military, wartime secrets and lies.
Manning was
assigned to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analyst when she began
leaking classified information in early 2010, both to
Wikileaks and to her online acquaintance Adrian
Lamo (subsequently found dead under
somewhat mysterious circumstances); that information included videos of
military actions, hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, and Army reports
that came to be known as the “Iraq War Logs”
and the “Afghan War Diary.” Leaking this sensitive and classified material
would likely have been treated as a crime had anyone done it, but because
Manning was part of the US military in a war zone at the time, her actions
carried yet another layer of weight. That extra level was illustrated by the
most serious of the 22 charges leveled against Manning by the Army’s Criminal
Investigation Command after her May
2010 arrest: aiding the enemy, a charge synonymous to treason and which
could thus result in a death sentence. Manning was acquitted on that charge but
convicted
on the others (10 of which she had already pled guilty to), leading to a
35-year sentence at Leavenworth’s U.S. Disciplinary Barracks (a sentence commuted
by President Obama in January 2017, after which Manning was released; she
subsequently spent
another year in jail, between March 2019 and March 2020, for contempt after
refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange).
There’s no doubt
that leaking classified information during and about a war is its own form of
whistleblowing, and one that can’t simply be paralleled to the other forms I’ve
discussed; I’m not suggesting that Manning should have been convicted of aiding
the enemy (indeed I don’t believe she should have), but the very existence of the
question reflects this distinction, as does the fact that her arrest, trial,
and imprisonment were at the hands of the military rather than the criminal
justice system. But at the same time, those distinctions themselves make
precisely clear why figures like Manning play a vital role in our collective histories:
because wars lend themselves so easily and fully to ideas of shared and
absolute patriotism, of “supporting the troops” and “politics stopping at the
water’s edge” and the rest of it, it is that much easier for illegal
actions to take place without
awareness (much less consequence). What Manning did, in the face of those
longstanding and ongoing realities, wasn’t just tremendously brave (although it
certainly was); it was a vital embodiment of the necessity of whistleblowing if
every aspect of our society, including if not especially our military, is to
function with transparency and integrity.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other whistleblowers you’d highlight?
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