The Insider

For the first time since his detention in May 2010, yesterday Bradley Manning, the US military intelligence analyst in Baghdad accused of leaking government documents that ended up published in Wikileaks, spoke before a judge. This is part of the pre-trial hearings in which he faces two kinds of charges. The most important of the lesser ones is sharing classified material (written and video-taped documents). He might plead guilty of “wrongfully storing classified information”, which entails a 16-year prison term. The most important of the serious charges include helping the enemy, given that some of the material made public was found in the residence in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed, and apparently was being used by Al-Qaeda to plan another attack against the US. It is not yet sure whether this charges will be actually pressed, given that they are more difficult to prove. In any case, if found guilty of the latter he could receive a life-long prison term.

Of the above, the press largely focused on the narrative Manning made of his imprisonment conditions: a very small cell, without natural light, deprived of his glasses and clothing, and constantly waken up at the middle of the night because his guard could not see his face. This, again, raises the question of detainees’ conditions in many jails not just in the US, but around the world. From the point of view of governments, sometimes this harsh treatment can be more or less understood. Dangerous criminals must be isolated, given the risk that if they communicate with other prison inmates they could continue planning criminal activities or organize some kind of rescue or revenge operation. As well, some of the guards, mostly if jails are in war-zone regions, are under heavy psychological stress, reason for which they might lose the capacity to judge appropriately on their own conduct over the prisoners. Furthermore, people in jail represent a very valuable source of information which can help to better plan offensive actions or to set up more timely defensive operations. On the other hand, regardless of their criminal record, prisoners must receive a dignified treatment and not be subject to situations that very closely resemble torture.

As well, this case is related to issues on access to and diffusion of government information. In the particular case of military data, the issue is different, as it is national-security related data and, by definition, is not public. Its mere release, perhaps aggravated by the fact that the information was trusted to Mannning for his analysis, making him co-responsible for its management and use, represents a violation of the law. But, as has been pointed out by defendants of Manning, to make the jump from there to saying that he (knowingly or not) aided the enemy is another thing. However, the public availability of certain kinds of information can be threatening to the security of certain people (for example, the deployment record of soldiers in the battlefield). Two questions remain here. What was his real purpose in making that information public? And an unanswerable counterfactual: Would Al-Qaeda have been able to obtain similar information (or advance its plans against the US) if it was not leaked by Manning? But now that the information is available, it can be treated as a rare case of wide transparency in military affairs, something that not even in the strongest democracies happens frequently.

A somewhat different perspective must be used for the non-military information shared by Manning to Wikileaks: the diplomatic cables. Some (maybe most) of those documents were accounts of meetings or reports between American Embassies and the Department of State, making not too much sense or being too interesting outside the context of daily bureaucratic functions. In some countries this kind formal communications among governmental agencies is not always public, given that they might include officials’ personal views on public policies it is not until a final decision is made that such information can be made public. Furthermore, this release has a very particular element: it includes judgments and positions not only on policies in general, but of those conducted by other governments. And from time to time these judgments are on sensitive issues of bilateral cooperation programs, whose release can compromise years of trust-building between partners. During late 2010 and early 2011, the US government had to conduct almost worldwide contention-diplomacy efforts to try to mitigate the negative effect of those communications. For sure, this would have not happened without Manning, who published documents which, in this case, he stole as they were not trusted to him for use during his work. But, on the other hand, this further advanced a large degree of transparency that otherwise would not have had existed. However, just as it is not correct to give inhuman treatment to prisoners, it is also wrong to promote transparency breaking the law. In addition, of all the motives in his head, it does not seem likely that Manning was thinking of “government transparency” when he gave those documents to Wikileaks.