On Tuesday, President Obama commuted the prison sentence of WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning as one of his last acts in office. The decision was quickly derided on the Right for its potential consequences. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called it “a grave mistake that…will encourage further acts of espionage and undermine military discipline.”
This condemnation ignores the vital role that whistleblowers like Manning play in a functioning democracy. While the state has an important interest in protecting its secrets, the public shouldn’t be so quick to condemn insiders like Manning who take calculated risks in leaking government abuse.
First, it’s important to remember the content that Manning leaked. She revealed that the United States government deliberately ignored torture in Iraq, child abuse by Afghani contractors, and the indiscriminate killing of journalists and civilians throughout the War on Terror. She revealed that Guantanamo Bay likely holds many innocent detainees, there is an official tally of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so much more abuse that the public has a clear interest in knowing.
There are legitimate questions around the ethics of how Manning leaked the information. For decades, the accepted norm for whistleblowers has been to pass their information along to journalists, who can then make a third-party determination about whether the content is in the public interest to release and whether any part of it should be omitted. Manning, having been rejected by several media outlets, instead turned to WikiLeaks, a website notorious for dumping state secrets without filter.
Nonetheless, Manning was arrested and convicted for her crimes and will have served seven years when she is released in May. Her years in jail included several months in solitary confinement where she was routinely made to strip naked at night. This treatment, combined with her gender dysphoria, led to two suicide attempts. Plus, when she is released, her felony will remain on her record since her sentence has been commuted, not pardoned. Strangers and potential employers will judge her for the rest of her life. Isn’t that punishment enough?
Plus, it’s not as if the state is blameless when it comes to leaks. As Conor Friedersdorf explains in The Atlantic, some of the greatest abusers of state secrets are government officials:
In practice, the legitimacy of state-secrets laws has been undermined by their frequent abuse. Over-classification is epidemic.
Even the highest-ranking national security officials routinely leak classified information with impunity in order to advance their political and bureaucratic agendas.
Whistleblowers who commit minor or even debatable violations of classification laws are persecuted through their wanton abuse, even when there is no evidence they did any harm.
The classification system often hides egregious wrongdoing from the public.
And elites use our system of state secrets to improperly keep hugely consequential matters, like surveillance policy, beyond the realm of democratic debate.
While a legitimate debate should be had about the methods Manning, Edward Snowden, and anyone else with knowledge of government abuse use to release information, the legitimate role of the whistleblower should not be called into question.
From Watergate to the Pentagon Papers to the NSA’s secret surveillance program, whistleblowers like Manning have made our democracy stronger by making the nation grapple with the important political questions the government would rather we ignore.
Casey Given (@CaseyJGiven) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the executive director of Young Voices. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
