All you need to know about the role of the elite media and the Iraq war is that during the Vietnam War, The New Yorker was a leading voice against the war. The young journalist Jonathan Schell made his reputation telling privileged Americans why they should oppose the war. His New Yorker commentaries were famous for their moral clarity.
This time around The New Yorker supported the Iraq War and Schell was nowhere in sight. But he still rings clear as a bell. I was sitting in my car yesterday when I found his piece in the Nation from last November on the heroic Bradley Manning. Schell takes the side of Manning and Julian Assange, too. There’s no weaseling or prevarication: Manning is a hero, and the country has lost its “moral bearings.”
A few days ago I tried to explain Manning’s motivation after Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, another mainstreamer without a compass, made Manning out to be a lost soul. Schell does a much better job than I did. The piece was titled “What We Learned From Wikileaks.” I know it’s old; it doesn’t matter. I excerpt a lot of it below.
Manning’s breaking point had come when he witnessed the arrest by the Iraqi police of fifteen people for printing “anti-Iraqi literature.” He looked the documents over and found them to consist merely of “a scholarly critique” of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. He reported the finding to his American superior, who dismissed it and told him to busy himself looking for more people to detain.
As an intelligence officer with access to secret reports, Manning knew well what happened to detainees in Iraqi custody. They were commonly tortured.
[The piece then contains a description of horrifying torture, including the use of electricity on genitals and feet, and rape.]
..No intervention was attempted by the United States in such cases. The military’s Fragmentary Order 242, known as FRAGO 242, dictated that if coalition forces were not involved, no further action was to be taken… [more chilling details] At this time in Iraq, executed victims were being found in the streets with electric-drill holes in their bodies.
American forces were thus routinely handing over Iraqi suspects to Iraqi forces who routinely tortured them, and then nothing further was done….
Faced with this particular and general knowledge, Manning felt “helpless,” he told [Adrian] Lamo. “That was a point where I was…actively involved in something that I was completely against.” In sum, Manning found himself in the classic, excruciating dilemma of the decent person enmeshed in an abhorrent system, not as a victim but as a perpetrator. By following the rules, he would be an accomplice of torture. Only by breaking them could he extricate himself.
…Among the flood of Afghan war documents [release by Wikileaks] there happens to be a report on one more instance of a man who, finding himself threatened with participation in the evil-doing of a malignant system, opted to withdraw. In Balkh province, a little more than a year ago, the report disclosed, Afghan police officers were beating and otherwise abusing civilians for their lack of cooperation. The police commander then sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl. When a civilian protested, the report stated, “The district commander ordered his bodyguard to open fire on the AC [Afghan civilian]. The bodyguard refused, at which time the district commander shot [the bodyguard] in front of the AC.” At the time these documents came out, the official reaction to them, echoed widely in the media, was that they disclosed “nothing new.” But let us pause to absorb this story. A police officer, unwilling, at the risk of his own life, to be a murderer, is himself murdered by his superior. He gives his life to spare the other person, possibly a stranger. It is the highest sacrifice that can be made.
The man’s identity is unrecorded. His story is met with a yawn. But perhaps one day, when there is peace in Afghanistan, a monument will be erected in his honor there and schoolchildren will be taught his name. Perhaps here in the United States, when the country has found its moral bearings again, there will be recognition of the integrity and bravery of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. For now, the war- and torture-system rolls on, and it’s all found to be “nothing new.”
