Nation of They
by zunguzungu
In The Nation a week ago, Rainey Reitman wrote that
The Manning hearing, one of the most important court cases in our lifetime…will show much about the United States’s tolerance for whistleblowers who show the country in an unflattering light. Are we a nation that tolerates criticism and values transparency? Or are we willing to crack down on whistleblowers of conscience? Unfortunately, the military is taking steps to block access by the media and the public to portions of the proceedings, robbing the world of details of this critically important trial.
I’m interested in the way the rhetoric slips from “the United States” and “the military” there, which seems both a symptom of the problem and a failure to address exactly why it is that we have this problem, why it is that we are so “unfortunate” as to be denied access, as a public, to the truth of what is happening with Bradley Manning* during his Article 32 hearing. This is not something that is just happening, by the random happenstance of fate. This is happening because Bradley Manning does not live in a democracy. He lives in the U.S. Army. The same is true when the “Manning hearing” gets called a “court case,” which it is not: we forget that while the United States is a democracy, the U.S. military is something different.
To state only the obvious: a civilian is not supposed to be treated the way Bradley Manning has been and will be treated, because a civilian is supposed to have a particular set of constitutional rights which a soldier lacks. A civilian trial operates according to rules and procedures that were defined in the 18th century by the particular set of concerns which motivated and legitimized the American republic’s secession from the British Empire. Because of what the people who wrote the Bill of Rights were trying to achieve, and because of how the 5th through 8th amendments have been interpreted and redefined ever since, a civilian trial will work one way. And because the military operates by the purest logic of efficacious necessity (as that has been enshrined in the Uniform Code of Miltiary Conduct), a military trial – a court “martial” – will work very differently. Military due process is not nothing, of course, but it’s also not what we tend to take for granted as justice: a soldier will not have the same rights as a civilian, by design, and Bradley Manning’s trial will not look very much like the kind of trial we, as Americans, like to expect, again, by design.
I don’t say any of this to justify what is being done to Bradley Manning, of course; I’m as appalled as anyone. But let’s look clearly at why it’s being done: the terms through which the military operates – where winning the war means giving up “normal” rights and concerns – make what is happening to him the very opposite of a scandal. It is normal for one person’s rights to be subordinated to some larger social imperative, however defined. This is what the military is, does, and must be. And when we have always tolerated (usually venerated) this non-democratic space at the heart of our democracy, a permanent state of exception to the right of things like trial by jury, this is what will happen as a result. Soldiers don’t live in a democracy; soldiers live in a military dictatorship, one ruled by martial law (in the most literal sense possible).
(Parenthetically, I wonder how much this has to do with why “supporting the troops” is such a powerful moral imperative, even beyond the obvious jingoism. We secretly know that soldiers experience terrible things, are warped and changed and scarred by the experience, and are then discarded from a society that at least took responsibility for them (however paternalistically and non-democratically) and are then left to fend for themselves as individuals in a society that will not. We know they get a raw deal. But rather than change the system we enjoy — which is unthinkable — we deal with the vague nagging, by a substitute of sentimental feeling, which costs nothing and even makes us feel good about ourself; the continuity of an unjust system is fine, as long as I feel bad about the injustice of it, etc).
In any case, the real reason I make this rather simple point because this rhetorical figure – “what nation are we?” – is misleading, in that it takes for granted the singularity of the figure. We have always been two nations when it comes to the military (or poor people, black people, or native peoples, or women, or immigrants without papers, or children, or the insane, etc), and what we should be most concerned about is not the question of who “we” are, but the way the borders which distinguish certain kinds of “we” from certain other kinds of “they” are changing. We have rights; they tend not to. And so the problem is not that someone decided to treat him a certain way; Bradley Manning had already become a “they” with respect to the American constitution a long time ago. The problem is that the nation of they is growing and the nation of we is shrinking.
See also: On the Manning Art. 32, Court Secrecy & Nat. Sec. Cases, who has the careful details on what Manning’s legal process is going to look like, and why.
* But see Why does the media still refer to “Bradley” Manning? The Curious Silence Around a Transgender Hero also Open secrets and bad feelings: Armistice Day, three days late, from the pansy left
Is it accurate to call Manning a whistleblower? Or would the word saboteur be more appropriate, since he didn’t blow a whistle with any specificity?
In same ways, it might, though only if we strip away the moralizing and remember “sabotage” as what it once was: a strike tactic by labor unions. See this part of Carbon Democracy, for example. Only after the term became militarized, ironically, did it start to have the self-evidently wrong-bad-evil connotation it has now.
Sure, I didn’t intend to imply any moralizing by the user of the word saboteur. I’ve just never completely understood why he’s often considered a whistleblower.
Hm. He’s certainly not a whistleblower in the sense of someone who provided evidence in support of a specific accusation against a specific group of people, no. But “saboteur” seems even farther from the mark. Fond as I am of the original meaning of sabotage, it was a labor action intended to temporarily stop a process. Manning wasn’t trying to shut the military down, not even for a day. His motives seem closer to those of a whistleblower in that sense: he saw bad things happening and he wanted them to stop, and he thought revealing them to the public would achieve that end.
Does a whistleblower stop being a whistleblower if they blow too many whistles at once? Or if, in the process of revealing the information they consider incriminating, they reveal a bunch of other information at the same time?
Moving from motive to effect, Manning’s leaks did not succeed as sabotage. They did not shut down the military, they did not force a broad slowdown. But they did have some success as whistleblowing: they did bring attention to certain crimes, and one suspects that they have made it more difficult to continue committing similar crimes. (Probably “more difficult” on the scale of “make sure Capt. X doesn’t hear about it, and write it out of the AAR” rather than on the scale of “no, that’s impossible.” But still.)
“Does a whistleblower stop being a whistleblower if they blow too many whistles at once? Or if, in the process of revealing the information they consider incriminating, they reveal a bunch of other information at the same time?”
That’s the question. I don’t know. I don’t think its an unimportant question, though. When I hear quotes like this -
“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” he wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
- I get the impression that his goal was a lot more vague, chaotic and destructive than that which we usually associate with whistleblowers. You say some good has come of the leaks and that may be so, but I’m not yet comfortable using words like “hero” and “whistleblower” to describe him.
All very good points, except for the parts where you refer to the U.S. as a democracy, which it is not. The distinction you make between military and civilian courts is still, nevertheless, very true and important.
True. I guess the point I would make is that we can expect [edit: or we can demand and fight for] the US to be a democracy and for civilians to have a particular set of rights because there is at least a coherent argument that it should be — the letter of the Bill of Rights does say certain things on the matter — whereas to expect a soldier to have a public trial is to misunderstand even what a soldier is *supposed* to be.
I’d agree that we can expect a certain set of rights, per the Bill of Rights. We can fight all we want for the US to be a democracy, but it cannot be one, unless it ceases to be the US–at absolute best a republic. I wasn’t even making a political point (such as, we’re not nearly so democratic as we ought to be/think we are), though those objections are of course even more important.
I do wonder, do the Bill of Rights a priori not apply to soldiers? It seems to me that, properly speaking, the Uniform Code of Military Conduct should not have been able to conflict with the Bill of Rights. That it clearly does is obviously a big problem. I’d suggest that we’ve internalized the idea that soldiers are and ought to be different, so we’ve long since accepted the logic of unfair proceedings.
[...] Nation of They « zunguzungu (Parenthetically, I wonder how much this has to do with why “supporting the troops” is such a powerful moral imperative, even beyond the obvious jingoism. We secretly know that soldiers experience terrible things, are warped and changed and scarred by the experience, and are then discarded from a society that at least took responsibility for them (however paternalistically and non-democratically) and are then left to fend for themselves as individuals in a society that will not. We know they get a raw deal. But rather than change the system we enjoy — which is unthinkable — we deal with the vague nagging, by a substitute of sentimental feeling, which costs nothing and even makes us feel good about ourself; the continuity of an unjust system is fine, as long as I feel bad about the injustice of it, etc). [...]
I understand that you are as appalled by Bradley Manning’s treatment as anyone and that you’re simply pointing out that it’s a symptom of the different standards we apply to soldiers as opposed to civilians. But I think there is a very different double standard at work here.
If we make a historical comparison with a similar case – that of former Marine and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers (the classified documents about the Vietnam War) – we can see that Manning’s treatment is unprecedented.
None of the documents that Manning allegedly leaked were classified as Top Secret, unlike the Pentagon Papers, thereby making Ellsberg’s breach of security protocols a far more serious one than Manning’s and yet at no point did his treatment at the hands of the press or establishment compare to the horrors that Manning has suffered. I’m not saying it was a picnic for Ellsberg, he definitely had a tough time of it, but he wasn’t held for over a year without charge in conditions that prompted the UN to request a visit by their special rapporteur on torture.
Even if one concedes (which I certainly don’t) that a soldier can’t expect the same democratic protections enjoyed by civilians (protections that we expect soldiers to lay down their lives for, by the way), there is nothing in the military code that excuses the way Manning has been severely mistreated, his human rights severely violated.
It is fair to say (and it has been pointed out on numerous occasions) that Manning would’ve been better off committing war crimes than he has been merely revealing them. For example, not one of the personnel involved in the Collateral Murder incident – which by any standards, including those applied at Nuremberg, is a war crime – has been brought up on charges. Despicable.
The double standard operating here isn’t one that distinguishes the rights of soldiers from civilians, but one that distinguishes the rights of one soldier – the one who actually stood up for the truth – from all the others.
Maybe you haven’t seen this: Why does the medai still refer to “Bradley” Manning?
Maybe you haven’t seen this: Why does the medai still refer to “Bradley” Manning?
This is a rarity, but I think the comments section on that link is more insightful than the article itself. Gender politics are possibly the least interesting thing about Manning!
[...] laws under the UCMJ, and a military ethos and code of conduct against it, and for good reason. As Aaron Bady eloquently stated: This is happening because Bradley Manning does not live in a democracy. He lives [...]