Bradley Manning, Collateral Murder, Truth, and Power

In May, 2010, Private First Class Bradley Manning was arrested for providing vast amount of classified data containing at least 260,000 sensitive diplomatic cables and a video of a helicopter attack by US forces in 2007 to the whistleblower site Wikileaks. After Manning’s arrest, he was imprisoned in a cell at Quantico Marine Corps Base. His treatment there was described as “ridiculous, counter-productive, and stupid,” by State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley in March and has been the subject of domestic and international criticism.1 In The New York Review of Books, Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler published a letter signed by over 300 legal scholars that described Manning’s treatment:

For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present. He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question “Are you OK?” verbally and in the affirmative every five minutes. At night, he is awakened to be asked again “Are you OK?” every time he turns his back to the cell door or covers his head with a blanket so that the guards cannot see his face. During the past week he was forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of his cell, and for the indefinite future must remove his clothes and wear a “smock” under claims of risk to himself that he disputes.2

Criticism of these conditions was sharp and after eleven months Manning was moved to Fort Leavenworth and by all accounts his treatment has drastically improved. He has still not been tried for the leak.

Most of the discussion of Manning’s treatment has related to whether his conditions were “illegal” and/or should be considered torture. While these questions of legality are no doubt interesting, I am more intrigued by the disparity between Manning’s treatment in the nine months between his arrest and his transfer when compared with others accused of distributing secret material. The differences in conduct are striking. There were no such allegations of harsh treatment in the cases of Robert Hannsen, the FBI agent who was convicted of selling secrets to the USSR and Russian Republic in 2001; Lawrence Franklin, who was convicted of passing documents to Israel about US policy towards Iran in 2006; or Scooter Libby, the only representative of the Bush Administration convicted in relation to leaking the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame in 2004.

Why, then, was Manning treated so differently? A definitive answer is probably impossible, but reading Manning’s activism and treatment in the context of the expansion of neoliberal power and changes in resistance repertoire in response allows us to go beyond blaming individual personalities and decisions to understand that way that this case points toward a change in the mechanism of contemporary activism. As a result, this essay seeks to situate the actions of Manning and the US Government in a larger context of truth and power, focusing specifically on the release of Collateral Murder, the video released by Wikileaks and leaked by Manning.

Before digging into this question, it is important to briefly discuss the nature of this inquiry. I am operating from a few presumptions. The first of these is to intentionally read Manning’s actions as activism or resistance, and not treason. The second is that, at least at this time, to recognize that the picture of Manning that we have is severely limited by the Army’s control on information and the fact that media outlets are implicated in Manning’s story in different ways.3 This would be a serious limitation if my goal here was a complete accounting of Manning’s actions and motivations, as well as those of the government, but for this essay, the question of why Manning was treated differently is not taken as a policy matter, to be settled in fifty years when a memo is found at the National Archives. Instead, the question could be better considered as, why is there such a treatment disparity between this case of leaking in protest of a war to a non-state actor and those where the leaks occurred to other states for personal financial gain? Setting aside my personal reservations about Manning’s treatment, what is important for this inquiry is that the leak took place, the fact that it was a leak instead of another form of activism, and the recognized severity of Manning’s treatment after his arrest.

Before I turn to an analysis of Manning’s actions and the governmental response, I would like to describe the context in which Manning’s activism took place. Our traditional view of activism in the United States is of a social movement. The social movement is a particular political form that developed in the West at the end of the 18th Century and has been refined over time, but not replaced. In Charles Tilly’s definition, social movements include a campaign, a particular repertoire, and displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.[4] Social movements, then, were groups of people working together to promote their interests against the established interests of government, and doing this in specific ways.

It is not a coincidence that the social movement form developed alongside liberalism. Liberalism undermined existing relationships of power to create space for new governmental and economic forms. While these often benefited those with access to resources, liberalism also encouraged many individuals to recognize the human potential in those who had been oppressed.[5] The first true social movements, then, were the international abolition movement and the women’s rights movements in individual countries. These are based on liberal ideas of political change embedded within the idea that governments are perfectible and more equitable balancing of interests is possible.

However, we are no longer living in a liberal world. It is better to think of our current environment as neoliberal, as the term is developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault. Bourdieu argues that neoliberalism “is a ‘strong discourse’ – the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum.”[6] This discourse is embedded within a political project that aims, in part “to call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market.” It promotes the utopia of the “lone, but free individual” informed by economic approaches to human behavior.[7] Bourdieu, in “The Essence of Liberalism,” is concerned with the pragmatic implications of the imposition of the neoliberal utopia and does not consider with much detail the way that neoliberalism “has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable.”[8] However, it is exactly the site of this production of truth that is most relevant to this current discussion.

Michel Foucault, in The Birth of Biopolitics, provides a more detailed analysis of the change in the production of truth that we see under neoliberalism.[9] Foucault argues that, in the middle of the 18th Century, the market went from being a site of “jurisdiction” to one of “veridiction,” meaning that it moves from a site of government regulation to one that is viewed for the purpose of evaluating truth.[10] The market is not just a place where one can look for truth, but “the market must be that which reveals something like a truth.”[11] As a site of veridiction, the market produces particular rules about verification and falsification, and the result of the move toward market veridiction is the shift to a new form of governmental reason, which Foucault calls “frugal government.”[12]

Frugal government focuses on limiting the power of government to intervene in private affairs, but with one exception: the necessarily legal maintenance of the market itself. This approach starts from “the natural or original rights that belong to every individual” and then explicates the narrow circumstances in which these can be infringed.[13] This is coupled with an increased focus on “interest” as the negotiable element of politics.[14] Although Foucault is not attempting to make this connection, the focus on interest also explains the particular constitution of social movements as interest-pursuing groups during that period.

In his discussion of American neo-liberalism, Foucault recognizes that the neoliberal innovation is the “absolute generalization, this unlimited generalization of the form of the market.”[15] This is the “economic analysis of the non-economic.”[16] So not only is government limited in its ability to control individual action, but it has also adopted systems of verification from the economic sphere. For the purposes of this essay, this is an important conclusion. I would argue that this generalization extends to modifying the positions of leverage for activists within the American system, which will be explained in more detail below.

Taken together, Bourdieu’s idea of neoliberalism as a strong discourse and Foucault’s of neoliberalism as a change in the production of veracity describe the larger context within which Bradley Manning (and, for that matter, the United States itself), acts. In pursuing the war in Afghanistan, the United States was not held to a standard of truth of intention, but a truth of effectiveness (or, more accurately, efficiency) – a neoliberal truth.

This context explains a few things about the video that became Collateral Murder. The video exists within a collection of truth claims related to the war. As one example, we can balance the claim that the soldiers involved with the attack were also being attacked with the claim that two of those killed were Reuters employees who were not armed. The video appears to show that no one on the ground was armed, but that is a subjective reading and some have defended the actions of the soldiers by saying the cameras carried by the Reuters employees could have looked like guns. Others have claimed the video is incontrovertible proof that the events depicted constitute a war crime. What the video has done is promote doubt in the face of the specific claims being made, much more than providing a compelling counterclaim.

In order to continue fighting this war, the United States needs to maintain support for it and this is done by promoting the “rightness” of its actions. The economic generalization of neoliberalism has shifted the site where “rightness” is evaluated from one of morality to one of efficiency. In order to promote the war in a neoliberal environment, the United States must maintain the claim that the war is being fought economically. By this I do not mean “cheaply,” but “in accordance with the logic of the market,” where actions are considered by their costs and benefits. For war support to continue, the United States must maintain that fighting is worth the cost. One of the vital ways that this is maintained is the argument that US actions are carefully controlled (“frugally controlled,” Foucault might argue) to limit the costs to those not fighting against us – in economic terms, to limit externalities.

Wikileaks was well aware of this when it named the video “Collateral Murder.” “Collateral damage” is the term used in the military for unintended damage caused as the result of military action. The US military, since at least the Persian Gulf War, has very clearly claimed that it is able, though the provision of technology, to limit the amount of collateral damage inflicted on civilians and infrastructure during war. It is clear that such an argument is framed within the economic system of logic and not the moral one, since it involves a calculation of acceptable harms, although this is still couched in the rhetoric of morality.

Bradley Manning’s leaked video, however, directly challenges the efficacy of these efforts by undermining the claim that the benefits of the war are worth the costs. As such it undermines the truth-generating aspect of the war, and therefore the truth claims that form the basis of power for the American empire, and this is specifically where we can see a change in activist tactics, from the liberal ideal of rational persuasion, to a counter-neoliberal approach that acts by destabilizing truth claims that support government action. What is different in the current wars is that they are taking place within the neoliberal regime of veracity. The social relations within which all of these actions occur are governed by neoliberal “realities” and approaches to truth.

Recognizing that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are neoliberal is not simply to blame them on the pursuit of selfish economic gain, whether oil in Iraq or the “$1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits”[17] in Afghanistan or the intentional and abrupt actions to impose property rights and the rule of law, as argued by David Harvey in the context of the “Brenner decrees” in Iraq.[18]

Instead, they serve to entrench and support Bourdieu’s “strong discourse” of neoliberal self-perpetuation. Stated simple, the primary function of neoliberal wars is the perpetuation of neoliberal truth.

Understanding the extent to which we can read the Iraq and Afghanistan actions as neoliberal wars, we need to return to Bradley Manning. Seen from this perspective, Collateral Murder is a direct attack on the veracity of the wars – their truthfulness. Even after they ceased being religiously vital to American governance, the notions of just war, derived from Augustine, have formed the basis of public justifications for American wars.[19] It is important to realize that the United States does not set out to prove to Americans that these conditions of just action have been or will be truly met. Instead, we are asked to believe the claims are true. I would argue that the traditional rationales for just war are reframed in neoliberal discourse. This is not the place for a detailed explanation of the transformation of jus ad bellum and jus in bello requirements for a just war, but we see that one of these has particular resonance with neoliberalism.

One of those requirements, proportionality, asks that the anticipated results of the war be proportionate to the likely harms caused by it and that this be expected before the war. During the war, military action can only be committed where and when the harm to non-combatants is not excessive in the context of the military gain. It would be difficult to read this, within the context of a neoliberal environment, as anything but a call for cost-benefit analysis. Leaders are asked, both before they choose war and in their conduct of it, to ensure that the benefits outweigh the costs.

It is not surprising, then, that so much of the rhetoric of contemporary war stresses the “costs” we have already bourn. From a neoliberal, market-based idea of truth, the fact that we have paid such costs proves the value of what we are undertaking. If it was not so valuable, we would not have paid. In this sense, warmaking under neoliberalism can also become its own strong discourse, where its existence is proof of its value, and therefore of its truth.

This is the point where efforts like Collateral Murder act upon the system of truth. It is important to note that I am not claiming the damage is done through the recognition that political actors are lying. All parties involved understand there will be a certain amount of lying in political action, whether we are discussing rival countries or the relationship of citizens to the politicians leading their government. The damage occurs through the interruption existing systems of truth, and therefore, of support.

The particular threat that Bradley Manning and Collateral Murder present is then, in a sense, existential. If the war effort is built on an appeal to truth and Manning is destablizing that, then his treatment begins to be more understandable. Although Manning’s treatment was not equivalent to that of those accused of terrorism and held in Guantanamo (where physical torture was an inarguable reality), it is possible to think of both Manning and the “terrorists” as sharing a similar position of enmity. Both attempted to undermine the claims of veracity upon which the existing neoliberal order is based.

To understand what happens when this does get undermined, it is useful to remember Gene Sharp’s argument about the nature of power. Sharp’s project, in both academic work and work with activists, is to reinforce the insight that power is a relation of consent, not coercion.[20] This is often difficult to realize when one is subject to power, especially as a threat, but the utility of this approach has been demonstrated around the world, most recently in many of the uprisings of the Arab Spring, which were developed by activists relying of Sharp’s models of action.[21]

Sharp’s perspective is reinforced by the US approach to justifying its wars, which relies on loyalty, instead of conscription or coercion. Rubenstein has shown that this consent is produced by the idea that a war is “right.” One of the repercussions of the change to neoliberal veracity is that “right” becomes difficult to distinguish from “correct” or “true.” The move of the site of veracity to the market is a move away from the notion of moral truth (based, earlier, on the church) to market truth, which is much closer to “accuracy.” This means we can see that the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are built through the consensual support of American citizens, based on their beliefs about the veracity of the project – or, the accuracy of the claims being made.

This is exactly the place upon which Collateral Murder acts. It is a direct challenge to the cost-benefit rationalization of the conflict, which means that it is alleging the basic untruthfulness of the enterprise. It is also, therefore, the best approach to understanding the seemingly uncharacteristic treatment of Bradley Manning. The real danger that Manning poses is not the exposure of information – the release of what was classified – that we see in cases of traditional espionage. Instead, it is the production of doubt. This production of doubt is much more threatening than either the promotion of interest (in the traditional social movement sense, as embodied by the traditional anti-war movement) or the transfer of information from one state to another (as in cases of espionage). Seen from this perspective, the release of Collateral Murder can be viewed as the largest activist threat, and therefore, according to neoliberal rationality, the one necessitating the most severe response. It also, though, points to the possibility of new approaches to activism under neoliberalism aimed not at converting or persuading, but at undermining the particular relationships of systems of power to truth. Manning’s treatment, then, can be seen by activists as perversely hopeful, since it would seem to highlight the extent to which truth-oriented challenges (those focused on destabilizing, not replacing truth-claims) are feared within the neoliberal system.

Works Cited:

Ackerman, Bruce, and Yochai Benkler. “Private Manning’s Humiliation”, April 28, 2011. http://www.nybooks.com.mutex.gmu.edu/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/priva....

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Essence of Neoliberalism.” Le Monde diplomatique, December 1998.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Hansen, Evan, and Kevin Poulsen. “Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs”, December 8, 2010. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/greenwald/#update123110.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869.

Risen, James. “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan.” The New York Times, June 13, 2010, sec. World / Asia Pacific. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html.

Rosenberg, Tina. “Revolution U: What Egypt Learned from the Students who Overthrew Milosevic”, February 16, 2011. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u.

Rubenstein, Richard E. “Why Americans fight: Justifications for asymmetric warfare.” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward terrorism and genocide 2, no. 1 (2009): 51.

Sharp, Gene. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. P. Sargent Publisher, 1973.

Tilly, Charles. Social Movements, 1768-2004. Paradigm Publishers, 2004.

Notes:

[1] Crowley was forced to resign over the comments. See Landler and Shear in the New York Times, Mar. 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/us/politics/14crowley.html

[2] “Private Manning’s Humiliation”, April 28, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com.mutex.gmu.edu/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/priva....

[3] Some of these publications were themselves implicated in the leak situation in different ways. The New York Times and The Washington Post, for instance, used the leaked material they received from Wikileaks in many stories since. They even honored an embargo related to the material negotiated by Wikileaks. Wired was one of the earliest publications to address the Bradley Manning situation, but it was later found that its senior editor, Kevin Poulsen, relied on Adrian Lamo as a source for much of this reporting, without indicating that Lamo was working with the FBI and was instrumental in the FBI’s case against Manning and his arrest. Evan Hansen and Kevin Poulsen, “Putting the Record Straight on the Lamo-Manning Chat Logs”, December 8, 2010, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/greenwald/#update123110.

[4] Social Movements, 1768-2004 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 3-4.

[5] See, for example, liberal thinker J. S. Mill’s defense of women in The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869).

[6] “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Le Monde diplomatique, December 1998.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

[10] Ibid., 31.

[11] Ibid., 32.

[12] Ibid., 37.

[13] Ibid., 39.

[14] Ibid., 46.

[15] Ibid., 243.

[16] Ibid.

[17] James Risen, “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, June 13, 2010, sec. World / Asia Pacific, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html.

[18] A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), 180.

[19] Richard E. Rubenstein, “Why Americans fight: Justifications for asymmetric warfare,” Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward terrorism and genocide 2, no. 1 (2009): 51.

[20] The Politics of Nonviolent Action (P. Sargent Publisher, 1973).

[21] Tina Rosenberg, “Revolution U: What Egypt Learned from the Students who Overthrew Milosevic”, February 16, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u.