README.txt

by Chelsea Manning

the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government, so if it’s in the interest of public affairs to declassify something, we will. In other words, he seemed to say, the classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe, it exists to control the media.

This was a job, one to be done effectively, but at the end of the day, it was mostly about protecting one another and keeping one another alive while the politicians peacocked.

“We don’t negotiate with protesters—but we sure as hell negotiate with mobs.”

It didn’t matter how many episodes of Metalocalypse I binge-watched, I was still in Iraq, and I was still part of an apparatus that was dehumanizing people at every moment.

The intel community draws in people who tend to be different in some way or another, and at least in our group, this meant a slightly larger population of (closeted, isolated) queer people, and women, who I’d estimate made up something like 60 percent of my office, as opposed to just 14 percent in the military at large.

Tracking this group made it clear to me that our engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan had surprisingly little to do with those actual countries. 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.

By the time I enlisted, the idea of a strict chain of command in the intelligence community had—in practice if not on paper—largely been abandoned. Instead of the rigid insistence on hierarchy that existed elsewhere in the military, intel was a relatively flat environment.

The misidentification of targets is one of the most difficult, deep, tangled aspects of war.

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.

And it also means we learned to feel that inflicting mass punishment on others is normal. If one person attacks us, the whole fucking community can go to hell.

I wanted to scream. People on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan could see the locations of U.S. military bases and convoy routes. They didn’t need to look at documents online. Yet the government was so afraid of these disclosures—afraid of the global public learning true information about how our conduct abroad stood in stark contrast to our own stated principles.

The scariest thing to the prison administrators was when we all worked together. It meant they were losing control.