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the classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe, it exists to control the media.
Do we become monsters in response to monstrosity?
People believe their thoughts, at least, are private, but they’re not. Browser history, for instance, can tell a lot about someone’s private inclinations. Humans are absurdly predictable, and any step a person takes outside their pattern, or even just our knowing what is important within that pattern, can potentially become a tool for coercion.
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the moral arc of the universe doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice. That instead, there is a constant and active struggle. And regardless of my changing understanding of how history happens, for the first time I truly understood that the fundamental promises of this society—liberty and justice for all—are just words, unless they are supported by meaningful values and concrete actions.
“Queers, don’t be quiet, Stonewall was a riot.” There was all this history that no one had ever taught me, that didn’t fit neatly into the liberal-establishment version of gay rights.
Seeing other people feeling just as hurt as I did restored my sense of being recognized as fully human.
I suddenly thought of the insurgency and counterinsurgency tactics I spent all day studying. Peaceful protest got the Iraqis nowhere.
Occupying dense Baghdad was a bit like occupying Brooklyn and Queens. Residents didn’t like us being there, but they had to get their children off to school, go to work, see their friends. I watched little kids in tidy uniforms play soccer in parks only a mile or so from active helicopter fire. They could see and hear the battle zone, but they were still little kids, just having fun. I imagine they knew it wasn’t ideal, but it was normal.
American freedom—the thing we’re exporting to the Middle East—is defined by the ability to buy things.
This is exactly what they exported to Chile during the cold war
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Our energy seemed entirely focused on patting ourselves on the back for bringing “democracy” to the region, even though there were increasing signs of a long-term political spiral.
Anything that gave us an extra edge became so valuable, so important, it rose above the importance of the Iraqis I thought we were supposed to protect
The “bad guys” were only reacting to what we did. When we went into a neighborhood and shook it down, flushing people out and leaving death and destruction in our wake, we caused the whole area to unravel.
Our involvement was about a bigger picture. It was about trying to project American hegemony to other powers in the region. You could look at the accumulation of death, after years, on all sides, and think that this war was unwinnable. Or you could consider whether pouring enormous resources into a never-ending war was actually the point.
Instead of being upset at the random death of an onlooker, my fellow soldiers were elated: Thank goodness OUR people weren’t killed. And hey, look, even our vehicle was minimally damaged! The dead and injured Iraqis, who had nothing to do with this battle, weren’t even spoken about as collateral damage. They were talked about as human armor for us. It’s a good thing those civilians were in the way, they said—except they casually used a slur to refer to Iraqis. We should just surround our vehicle convoys with them all the time.
The decision to bring those files to America and upload them was one decision among many others. I made life-and-death decisions every day. I always had the responsibility of other people’s lives in my hands. This felt, in some sense, like just another choice, where I was weighing the costs and benefits and deciding that this was the best way to save lives.
I didn’t want hope. I wanted to sink deeper into my profound sense of alienation and precariousness.
Two U.S. helicopters approach a group of Iraqis. You can hear the American soldiers say that the group is shooting at them, though the visual evidence contradicts that. What they’ve mistaken for an RPG is in fact a Reuters photographer’s camera lens, poking around the corner of a building, photographing the scene. The lead helicopter begins shooting at what the soldiers think to be a threat. They hit the Iraqis, nine of whom will die. “Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one person says. One man, wounded, starts trying to crawl away. A soldier says, “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”
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I didn’t have an overarching ideological agenda, but I had a clear objective: I wanted to complicate the retrofitted, sanitized version of the war that was spreading like wildfire back home, where any questioning of a clear narrative was perceived as disloyal.
Some people, including Assange, were more interested in making a splash than in presenting a complex situation in all its subtleties.
The officer told me to just go back to work, as if the preservation of innocent people’s freedom was outside my line of duty, not the entire reason we were supposedly there.
Every weekday morning, the marines woke me up at five sharp (on weekends, I got to sleep until seven). I was not allowed to sleep—or even lean on anything—until after nightfall, at eight. The guards ordered me to stand up if they saw me sitting down.
I wasn’t allowed to exercise in my cell. If the marines saw me doing push-ups or sit-ups, they’d force me to stop.
Moderates and centrists predictably argued for the status quo: I had exposed important information, but I should have done it differently; I had divulged too much, and done it improperly.
I’d become a cause, one that was more important to them than my fate as a flesh-and-blood person. There was the me who I was and wished to be—and there was the Private Manning that the world was imagining and reading about: a figurehead, a placeholder, a symbol. I feared that I’d be associated with views I didn’t actually have.
If I was going to be imprisoned for the rest of my life, it was important that people understand the nuance of why I did what I did, and the long tradition of direct action that I believed my actions were part of.
I started to develop a broader sense of the federal, state, and military legal systems. It was no real surprise to learn that the law is often unrelated to—and often quite at odds with—commonly held notions of justice. But the logistics and bureaucratic machinery of the system fascinated me. The admissibility or inadmissibility of important evidence in court, for one thing, floored me. I came to understand that the question of guilt mattered less than the ability of one party to prove something with some inspired procedural maneuver.
The Obama administration’s crackdown on media sources was more extreme than that of any previous administration.
I hated mitigation. It felt like conceding, like admitting that I had done something traitorous, when I thought of what I had done as my democratic and ethical obligation.
I hate that my gender had to be brought up in court. While it’s true that I felt overwhelmed by keeping my gender secret, there simply was not a causal relationship between that issue and my decision, and I worried that the argument we were forced to make gave ammunition to those who want to pathologize trans people, to suggest that being trans is itself a sickness or derangement. The truth of the matter was that, despite all the stresses that probably contributed in certain ways, I acted as I did because of what I saw, because of the values I hold.
I wanted so desperately to transition, but had never imagined doing it in front of the whole world. Before my arrest, I had been considering trying a stealth-mode transition after I left the army. Not a big-deal coming out, just quietly doing it, and then going about my life as a woman. That option was taken from me.
Judge Lind declared, “The overriding interest of protecting national security information from disclosure outweighs any danger of miscarriage of justice.”
The government argued that what I did was dump information, but in fact it was a selective disclosure. There was a lot that I saw and had access to that I didn’t reveal, and will never reveal.
some people started to call me La Jefa—the boss. They started addressing me using feminine pronouns—a sign of real respect. It was not lost on me that I was respected as a woman only after I had engaged in some archetypically masculine bullshit.
the prison administration didn’t mind us fighting. They worked to entrench hostility and segregation, and didn’t want us to recognize ourselves as a class with common interests. The scariest thing to the prison administrators was when we all worked together. It meant they were losing control.
I began to think about how I would dress when I got out: utility belts and dresses, combat boots, so I could signal that I would fight my own battles.
In some ways, military prison was the only place I ever fit in. This was a group of people who understood the institutions that had both shaped and ruined me. It was a system I was good at. I found solidarity there. Most of my friends preferred reading to watching television.
Despite my distaste for corporate capitalism, I understood the utility of certain concepts, and imagined myself building not just my own identity but a brand. It would be a radical brand, to be sure, that stood for transparency and against prejudice and government cover-ups. I wanted my mission and message to be clear, reliable, and consistent. The HBR’s case studies on social media strategies turned out to be an unparalleled resource.
To drag out the process this long felt like another form of deliberate torture. The denial of gender-affirming care posed an existential threat to me, and they didn’t care. The government might have been legally compelled to help me, but knowing how badly I wanted this, needed this, gave them the opportunity to punish me one more time.
I was a celebrity, and had been made, without consultation, a symbol and figurehead for all kinds of ideas.
What I did during my enlistment was an act of rebellion, of resistance, and of civil disobedience. These form a deep and important tradition in our history, of forcing progress
The documents I made public expose how little we knew about what was being done in our name for so many years.
