Manning's leaks led to change for better

Demonstrators at the White House protest Bradley Manning's conviction for giving files to WikiLeaks. Demonstrators at the White House protest Bradley Manning's conviction for giving files to WikiLeaks. Photo: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images Photo: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Manning's leaks led to change for better 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

(08-22) 18:08 PDT San Francisco -- On July 12, 2007, two U.S. Apache helicopters hovered above a district of Baghdad and rained down 30mm rounds on a group of men standing on the street.

Two worked for the Reuters news service: Saeed Chmagh, a 40-year-old driver, camera assistant and father of four, and Namir Noor-Eldeen, a talented 22-year-old photojournalist. Both were killed, as were at least 10 others that day. Two children were also seriously wounded as the soldiers opened fire on a minivan attempting to pick up the wounded.

The onboard communications suggested the men took pleasure in their work: "Light 'em all up." "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards." "Nice." "Oh yeah, look at that right through the windshield." "Haha!" "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."

We know about this "delightful bloodlust" because of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who provided encrypted video of the events to WikiLeaks. On Wednesday, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for passing that and hundreds of thousands of other classified military documents to the organization. (On Thursday, Manning announced that she will live as a woman going forward, go by the name Chelsea and hopes to begin hormone therapy soon.)

None of the soldiers who killed innocent civilians that day were so much as reprimanded.

I'm no longer outraged by this, it's been clear for too long that this is how things would end. I'm saddened by this. It says something awful about the skew of our national priorities and the tilt of our moral compass.

Punishment too harsh

I won't argue that Manning didn't break the law. I'll only argue that a sentence of 35 years is an incredibly harsh punishment for a troubled young adult whose every utterance and action makes clear that her motivation was to draw attention to the slipping principles of this nation. Her job required reading secret military reports each day that underscored how the terror of 9/11 allowed our military to rationalize unprovoked attacks, humiliation and torture, and steep collateral damage.

In her request for a pardon, Manning said: "Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

"In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture," she continued. "We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror."

The thing that gets lost in the sideshows of the Manning debate - hand wringing over the shadowy nature of WikiLeaks, the questionable behavior of its founder Julian Assange, the shifting rules of whistle-blower journalism in the digital age, and Manning's transgenderism - is that those leaks had merit. They revealed critical things about the world and, in the end, changed it for the better.

So here at least, on the day after Manning's sentencing, let's take a moment to remember that.

Notable revelations

The Bradley Manning Support Network lists a series of notable WikiLeaks revelations originating with Manning, on top of the killing of the Reuters employees. Among the highlights:

-- The Iraq War Logs revealed the existence of "Frago 242," an order to not investigate allegations of abuse by the Iraqi government, effectively enabling the U.S. to turn over captives to a torture squad. The Bradley Manning Support Network argues it was a direct violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. The Guardian called it a "license to torture."

-- The Guantanamo Files showed that the "United States has imprisoned hundreds of men for years without trial based on a difficult and strikingly subjective evaluation of who they were, what they had done in the past and what they might do in the future," the New York Times wrote.

-- The Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that the U.S. government counted 109,000 deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, including more than 66,000 non-combatants. That figure included 15,000 previously undisclosed civilian deaths, the Guardian reported.

McClatchy highlighted another horrifying revelation: "A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi."

That particular cable "likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war," Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon.com in fall 2011, a conclusion others have drawn as well.

May have stopped war

Put simpler: Manning may have helped stop a war, one of the longest in America's history.

While considering the disturbing glimpses into our government's behavior offered by Manning's leaks and their effects in the real world, it's also worth remembering that the publication of those 250,000 some diplomatic cables had limited negative impacts.

"Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest."

What lefty, civil libertarian, peace-monger would come to that conclusion? Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

"The truth is, the public has benefited tremendously as a result of Manning's disclosures to WikiLeaks," wrote Rainey Reitman, a founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network. "Over the last three years, the disclosures have helped shape an international discussion about America's foreign policy. They showed Americans the true face of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. ... They contributed to democratic movements in the Middle East, and helped spur a movement in defense of free speech online."