If the 24-year-old Army private from Crescent, Oklahoma, did supply Wikileaks with its choicest material—the Iraq War logs, the Afghan War logs, and the State Department cables—then he surely deserves some important national honor instead of the military prison cell where he presently awaits court martial.

Charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and with aiding the enemy, Bradley Manning faces life in prison. He has put his sanity and his freedom on the line so that Americans might know what their government has done—and is doing—all over the world. Knowing what our government is doing abroad is not a special privilege for statesmen, spies and insider journalists, it is the right and responsibility of all citizens. Manning has blown the whistle on criminal violations of American military and international law. He has exposed our government’s pathological over-classification of important public documents.

There are at least five reasons why Manning, if he did what the government accuses him of doing, deserves that medal.

1. For Giving Our Foreign Policy Elite the Public Supervision It So Badly Needs

In the past ten years, American statecraft has moved from one catastrophe to another, laying waste to other nations while never failing to damage its own national interests. One lauded study finds that the past decade’s wars have resulted in the deaths of at least 174,000 civilians, 31,741 Allied military personnel (including 8,351 US soldiers and military contractors) and have cost the US treasury upwards of $3.7 trillion.¹

Although downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option, the website Wikileaks has at least brought public scrutiny to bear on our self-destructive statesmen and -women. No one should be more grateful for these revelations than Americans, whose government has deceived us with such horrible consequences.

Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on willful distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions. But what if someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the necessary government documents, which would have made so much self-evident in the months before the war began?

Thanks to Manning’s alleged disclosures, we have a sense of what transpired in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have a far clearer image of how Washington operates in the world. Thanks to those revelations we now know just how our government leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War. We now know how Washington pressured the German government to block the prosecution of CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man, Khaled El-Masri, while he was on vacation.² We know how our State Department lobbied hard to prevent a minimum wage increase in Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest nation.³

It is all to our benefit that more whistleblowers make themselves heard. A foreign policy based on secrets and spin has manifestly failed us. In a democracy, statecraft cannot function if it is shrouded in secrecy. For bringing us the truth, for breaking the seal on that self-protective policy of secrecy, Bradley Manning deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

2. For Exposing the Pathological Over-Classification of America’s Public Documents

“Secrecy is for losers,” as the late Senator and United Nations Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say.⁴ If this is indeed the case, it would be hard to find a bigger loser than the US government. When Moynihan, a conservative Democrat who served as Nixon’s UN envoy, wrote those words in 1991, the US was classifying upwards of six million documents a year. Today that figure has risen by an order of magnitude, with Washington classifying some ninety-two million documents in 2011.⁵

Government secrecy, especially in the domain of foreign affairs, has become pathological. In June 2011, the National Security Agency declassified documents from 1809, while the Department of Defense⁶ declassified the Pentagon Papers, publicly available in book form these last four decades. Our government is only now finishing its declassification of documents relating to World War I.

This would be ridiculous if it weren’t tragic. Ask the historians. Barton J. Bernstein, professor emeritus of history at Stanford University and a founder of its international relations program, describes the government’s classification of foreign-policy documents as “bizarre, arbitrary, and nonsensical.” George Herring, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky and author of the encyclopedic From Colony to Superpower: A History of US Foreign Policy, has chronicled how his delight at being appointed to a CIA advisory panel on declassification turned to disgust once he realized that he was being used as window dressing by an agency with no intention of opening its records, no matter how important or how old, to public scrutiny.⁷

The people of a democratic state ignore such signs at their risk. If a society like ours doesn’t know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a wandering amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it will end up tomorrow. Right now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania, and dementia its end point. This is not just the diagnosis made by groups like the ACLU and Wikileaks; J. William Leonard, career federal civil servant and director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2007, has recently called for sanctions against officials who gratuitously classify government documents.⁸

President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” policy for his administration while singing the praises of whistleblowers. Instead, he has launched the fiercest campaign against whistleblowers the republic has ever seen, and dragged our foreign policy deeper into the shadows. Challenging the classification of each tightly guarded document is impossible. No organization has the resources to fight this fight, nor would they be likely to win right now. Absent a radical change in our government’s diplomatic and military bureaucracies, massive over-classification will only continue.

If we hope to know what our government is so busily doing all over the world, massive leaks from insider whistleblowers are, like it or not, the only recourse. Our whistleblower protection laws urgently need to catch up to this state of affairs, and though we are hardly there yet, Bradley Manning helped take us part of the way. He did what Barack Obama swore he would do

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