The Passion of Bradley Manning (4 page)

At the end of his trials at Fort Leonard Wood, Bradley Manning moved one step closer to the SCIF at FOB Hammer.

With desperate optimism, Manning told a friend (according to the
Washington Post
) that he was sure that intelligence training in Fort Huachuca would be better. “I'm going to be with people more like me.” And he did enjoy intelligence training. He was mildly reprimanded for broadcasting information about the base that might be considered sensitive on YouTube. But he still got a top-secret security clearance, and in August 2008 joined the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum in far-upstate New York. Another step closer to the SCIF.

At Fort Drum, Private Manning was a paradox the military was scarcely able to digest. On the one hand, he was wholly committed to his work as a soldier. He was doing “computations and analytical work,” he told a friend, and preparing weekly intelligence briefings for the commander. He saw his role in the military as a protector of human life, and it was a mission he believed in: “I feel a great responsibility and duty to people. […] I'm more concerned about making sure that everyone, soldiers, marines, contractor [sic], even the local nationals, get home to their families.” It was more than a task; it was a calling, a life. He fervently believed in the power of intellectual development to help him carry out his duties to his fellow soldier, to his fellow human.

What we know about Manning's time at Fort Drum comes largely from a series of instant-message chats he held over several months with a Chicago youth named Zach Antolak who posts her thoughts in drag as Zinnia Jones on YouTube. Manning reached out to and told her—she is a sympathetic listener—about himself. Revealing conversations with a total stranger who becomes a virtual friend; it is a practice common among Bradley's generation, and it later brought him to grief.

Manning spent his weekend leave in Boston; he found a steady Brandeis undergraduate boyfriend and a social niche among the idealistic wing of the IT crowd, young people who believed in the emancipatory potential of digital technology and communications. Manning demonstrated against the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy designed to keep gays closeted in the military. He found a world of hip young people, where being gay and brainy is perfectly natural, perfectly normal.

But away from the libertarian paradise of Boston's undergraduate scene, Bradley Manning did not fit in with quotidian military life at Fort Drum. He couldn't get along with roommates, one of whom he thought was homophobic, another racist. He was written up for tossing chairs around in a fit of rage. He was written up for yelling at his superiors. He was required to get mental health counseling. Was Manning aware of the clash between his ideal of patriotic service and the reality of actual military life? Sometimes he was:

Eventually Manning's vision of the American military as a global protector of freedom came under strain. As one of his Boston friends told the
Washington Post
, Manning “expressed a feeling to me like how messed up the situation is [in Iraq]. He said things like, ‘If more people knew what was going on over there, they would not support the war.”

According to his superiors at Fort Drum, Manning was not working out as a soldier. Adkins and a major discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq. However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed to FOB Hammer in Iraq as an intelligence analyst.

Upon arrival at FOB Hammer, Bradley Manning was happy: finally, he saw a chance to use his training and skills to keep people out of harm's way in the middle of a shooting war. In the SCIF where Manning did his tasks, a large windowless warehouse full of computers and desks and power cords, there were moments of intense and earnest teamwork. Much of the time, though, the SCIF is a big room full of bored soldiers working twelve to fourteen hour shifts, day after day.

There was entertainment available in the system. According to former FOBbit Jimmy Rodriguez, “This stuff was all in a folder. It had a generic name on it so no one would look into it. A mix of games, sex and violence. They loved to watch these clips of Apaches gunning down people and whatnot. It was definitely entertainment.” The whole base environment was heavily mediatised, with a live-feed projection from a drone flying over Iraq up on a big screen in the Op Center. “It was mesmeric,” says Van Buren. “We called it ‘war porn,' though I never saw actual shooting on screen.”

At first Manning thrived in his new setting. He privately informed his supervisor that he was gay, according to a Boston friend, and the supervisor told him it didn't matter as long as the soldier did his job well. Though still freely posting LGBT-supportive messages on his Facebook page, Manning was discreet about his sexual orientation on base. It really wasn't clear that anyone cared. “From my time on the base, I'm not sure how important that gay or straight was to any of the soldiers,” says Van Buren. “What people are really worried about is whether their fellow soldier is reliable, and can do their job.”

Manning had access to SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, used by the Defense Department and the State Department to transfer classified data, and to JWICS, the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. In November he was promoted to the rank of specialist, when he began to learn the true meaning of success in his line of work.

We know this because by November, Manning had made internet contact with an American “gender counselor”: the soldier was considering gender transition. As momentous and potentially wrenching as this decision can be, it was not what troubled Manning. As the therapist told
New York Magazine
, what was upsetting the young intel analyst was his work: specifically, a targeting mission in Basra that turned ugly. “Two groups of locals were converging in this one area. Manning was trying to figure out why they were meeting,” said the counselor to
New York
journalist Steve Fishman. From the SCIF, Manning advised an Army unit to move in quickly; it did. “Ultimately, some guy loosely connected to the group got killed,” said the counselor, and Manning felt deeply complicit in the bloodshed.

Manning's real Damascene moment came when he investigated the arrest of Iraqi civilian protesters for an act of faultless good citizenship. He later confided the whole story to someone he believed to be a friend:

(02:31:02
PM
) bradass87:
i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything

(02:35:46
PM
) bradass87:
was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn't cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM's cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn't want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…

(02:36:27
PM
) bradass87:
everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently

(02:37:37
PM
) bradass87:
i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…

The arrest of nonviolent civilians was of particular concern because torture, as Manning well knew, remained a common practice among the Iraqi authorities even six years into the American occupation. (The gruesome facts of Iraqi torture were amply documented by the US military in documents that were later released by WikiLeaks.) True, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Peter Pace had in December 2005 publicly contradicted Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by declaring that it was the duty of every US soldier in Iraq to stop torture if he or she saw it happening. (Pace's tenure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was not renewed for a second term.) But when it came to actually enforcing this rule, the whole chain of command in Iraq turned out to be remarkably easygoing. Pace's mandate was hollowed out anyway by Rumsfeld's own secret legal directives in the form of Fragmentary Order 242, which set forth a specific policy of noninterference in Iraqi torture. Deployment to the war zone taught Manning that military occupation is, by its very nature, less protective than predatory.

Gunsight videos of Iraqis getting blown away by AH-64 Apache gunships were ambient “entertainment” inside the SCIF. Like so many others, Manning watched one such video shot from over half a mile above the outskirts of Baghdad on July 12, 2007. In the video, a group of civilians mingling with insurgents is fired upon by a gunship. Wounded Iraqis crawling away are shot dead. A van comes by to retrieve the wounded, and the helicopter opens fire on it too. The van turns out to be full of children. Throughout the gunsight video, pilot and crew are cracking wise, nervously, gleefully, callously. “Look at all those dead guys.” “Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” When the thirty-nine minute video is over, at least eleven people have been killed, most of them unarmed civilians. Two of the civilians killed turn out to be Reuters News Agency employees; the company files a FOIA request to find out about the death but is stonewalled.
Washington Post
reporter David Finkel gets a copy of the video and writes about it in his book
The Good Soldiers
—which Manning will read—but he is unable or unwilling to release the video. This is just one incident in a war that has, by conservative estimates, killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

Bradley Manning did not see this video as entertainment. He dug deeper.

(03:10:32
PM
) bradass87:
at first glance… it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter… no big deal… about two dozen more where that came from right… but something struck me as odd with the van thing… and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer's directory… so i looked into it… eventually tracked down the date, and then the exact GPS co-ord… and i was like… ok, so thats what happened… cool… then i went to the regular internet… and it was still on my mind… so i typed into goog… the date, and the location… and then i see this
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html

Manning's dreams of using his skills to safeguard human life died hard. He decided to do something about it.

(03:07:01
PM
) bradass87:
i just… couldnt let these things stay inside of the system… and inside of my head…

(03:07:26
PM
) bradass87:
i recognized the value of some things…