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NY Times Op-Ed, Sept. 15 2017
Chelsea Manning Has a Lot to Teach. Harvard Doesn’t Agree.
By TREVOR TIMM
On Wednesday, Harvard’s Kennedy School announced that Chelsea Manning,
the former Army intelligence analyst and whistle-blower, would be a
visiting fellow this fall. The reaction was swift: A day later, Michael
Morell, a former acting director of the C.I.A. and also a visiting
fellow at the school, resigned from his own fellowship in protest. His
resignation was quickly followed by the current director of the C.I.A.,
Mike Pompeo, canceling a speech scheduled at the school. In a statement,
Mr. Pompeo unilaterally declared Ms. Manning a “traitor.”
On Friday morning, the school folded, disinviting Ms. Manning in a
cowardly act that does immense disservice to its students and the public
debate around government secrecy.
It’s remarkable that one of the country’s premier educational
institutions would bow to C.I.A. pressure and reject a person who has
arguably done more to contribute to the public’s understanding of world
diplomacy than anyone else in modern times. In early 2010, Ms. Manning
leaked a trove of hundreds of thousands of State Department and Defense
Department documents, an archive that opened an unparalleled window into
American foreign policy. Its documents have been referenced by major
news organizations so many times that it’s impossible to count them.
The important revelations in the Manning documents — originally leaked
to WikiLeaks and published in conjunction with The New York Times and
other newspapers — are also too numerous to name, but they include the
fact that the United States had killed far more people in Iraq than the
government had admitted publicly, that United States soldiers turned a
blind eye to torture by Iraqi soldiers and that the United States
covered up the killing of civilians by American soldiers.
Ms. Manning was convicted of violating the Espionage Act and other
offenses in 2013, and was sentenced to 35 years in prison. (My
organization helped raise money for her legal defense.) In January,
President Barack Obama, in one of his last acts in office, commuted her
sentence. Altogether, she spent seven years in prison — more time behind
bars than any other leaker in American history. She was also subject to
deplorable treatment while in custody that the United Nations special
rapporteur on torture said at the time constituted cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment and that more than 250 law professors said amounted
to unconstitutional torture. Whatever your opinion on the value of her
disclosures, it should be clear to everyone that Ms. Manning was unduly
punished for her supposed crime, and she deserves the opportunity to
re-enter the public debate without worrying about the C.I.A. bullying
private institutions to disavow her at every turn.
Mr. Morrell, in his resignation letter, quoted unnamed officials
claiming Ms. Manning “put the lives of U.S. soldiers at risk,” without
citing any specific examples. This is a common charge against her, and
an unfounded one: The evidence of “damage” from Ms. Manning’s leaks has
been grossly exaggerated from the start. During her trial, the
government could not point to anyone, soldier or otherwise, who was
physically harmed by WikiLeaks’ publications. Even at the time of the
leaks, State Department officials were privately admitting that
administration officials were exaggerating the harm the leaks caused to
bolster their case.
Harvard’s decision to rescind Ms. Manning’s invitation is about more
than academic spinelessness. In his statement defending the decision,
Douglas W. Elmendorf, the dean of the Kennedy School, said, “I think we
should weigh, for each potential visitor, what members of the Kennedy
School community could learn from that person’s visit against the extent
to which that person’s conduct fulfills the values of public service to
which we aspire.”
If that’s the Kennedy School’s new policy, let’s take a look. Mr.
Morell, for example, has steadfastly refused to admit that the C.I.A.
engaged in torture, even in the face of the Senate’s damning torture
report released in 2014. When asked about the agency’s decision to
conduct forced “rectal feeding” on a detainee, he refused to answer
whether that amounted to torture. Mr. Morell has also been an outspoken
cheerleader for indiscriminate C.I.A. drone strikes that have killed at
least hundreds of civilians. He most recently made headlines when he
told Charlie Rose the United States should be “killing Russians and
Iranians” — two countries the United States is not at war with — in Syria.
Other 2017 visiting fellows include Sean Spicer, President Trump’s first
press secretary, who was accused of lying to the public on almost a
daily basis by reporters, and the former Trump campaign manager Corey
Lewandowski, who was arrested for committing battery against a
journalist during the 2016 campaign.
What Mr. Elmendorf and the Kennedy School are saying, essentially, is
that no issue or action is off topic for visiting fellows except,
apparently, giving information to journalists and informing the public
about what its government is doing behind closed doors.
Excessive government secrecy, the worship of “national security” above
all else and the C.I.A.’s disrupting presence overseas are exactly the
sorts of issues that the Kennedy School should be questioning and
challenging, given the myriad C.I.A. and Pentagon scandals and our
country’s constant state of war since Sept. 11. Chelsea Manning’s act of
whistle-blowing was a powerful, influential and important contribution
to that debate.
Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) is the executive director of Freedom of the
Press Foundation.
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