As Allegra Kirkland details on our page, President Barack Obama has commuted the prison sentence of Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning, who will now get out of Leavenworth in May of this year rather than in 2045. I want to make two observations about the case. The first is that we are a nation of law, and that is a very good thing, but that we have done very bad — even evil — things and it has taken dissenters willing to break the law in order to awaken us to a higher morality. I am thinking of the Abolitionists who died and went to jail to protest slavery and the draft resisters against the Vietnam War. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers, might well have gone to jail if not for Richard Nixon’s malfeasance.
As a junior intelligence analyst in Iraq, Manning became aware of some of the crimes we were committing there and in Afghanistan. Her leaks included American troops killing civilians, including women and children, and then calling in an airstrike to destroy evidence; the video of an American Apache helicopter gunship shooting civilians, including two Reuters reporters; American military authorities failing to investigate reports of torture and murder by Iraqi police; and a “black unit” in Afghanistan tasked to perform extrajudicial assassinations of Taliban sympathizers that killed as many as 373 civilians. Manning’s leaks also revealed American surveillance—contrary to the original UN charter—of the UN’s top leadership. She said she made these revelations to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy.”
By the time Manning went to trial in 2013 — after being held under despicable conditions for three years — Americans, including the current administration, were well aware that America had made a grievous error by invading Iraq. What Manning revealed was acknowledged to be wrongful acts. One might have expected the military to soft-pedal the case and to let Manning off for time already served, yet the military threw the book at her. They accused her of aiding the enemy, a charge that could had led to death. The judge eventually settled on a lesser charge of violating the highly questionable Espionage Act, and sentenced Manning to a jaw-dropping 35 years.
The second point I want to make concerns Manning’s defense. At the trial, her defense emphasized that she was going through a serious mental crisis at the time highlighted by confusion about her gender identity. Lawyers adopt strategies that they think will get their clients off. But if Manning was confused at the time she leaked the documents, it was not apparent from what she said at the time, and if she was in a crisis about her gender identity, it had the effect of allowing her to see the other side in a brutal war that America should never have been fighting. Manning was a hero like Ellsberg or the abolitionists. If she was nutty at the time she acted, it was a nuttiness that is preferable to normality.
Obama is to be commended for commuting Manning’s sentence, but he should not have had to do so. The country owes Manning, who tried to commit suicide twice while in captivity, thanks. Here’s hoping that she can recover fully from the experience of the last six years.
[ed.note: The original version of this post referred to Chelsea Manning as ‘he’ for events which occurred prior to August 2013 and ‘she’ after. We have changed the text to refer to Maning as ‘she’ in all cases, which follows TPM editorial practice.]
