After almost a year of silence, Chelsea Manning is back in the media. This time, she’s writing her own coverage from prison. In a New York Times op-ed published yesterday, Manning explains the process by which she came to question our military’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The former military analyst, now serving a 35-year sentence, was convicted last year of giving classified information to Wikileaks .
Chelsea Manning’s editorial is mostly an argument against the way that media coverage of the military’s actions overseas is handled, with some extra disclosures about particular incidents that Manning believes should have been reported on more fully.
As Manning says in the article:
“The existing program forces journalists to compete against one another for ‘special access’ to vital matters of foreign and domestic policy. Too often, this creates reporting that flatters senior decision makers. A result is that the American public’s access to the facts is gutted, which leaves them with no way to evaluate the conduct of American officials.”
While the editorial does range fairly widely across a couple of related topics, Chelsea Manning remains carefully non-partisan. Her argument addresses individual policies within the military, not the legislative oversight or the decision-making that led to the U.S.’s involvement in Iraq in the first place.
Manning claims that she is breaking her silence now because of the rising unrest in Iraq . Manning links this to the military policies she criticizes, although she does not establish any arguments for a direct cause/effect relationship in her article.
A State Department spokesperson has called the insurrection a “proxy war” between the Iranian government and Saudi royalty. If this is true and not a by-product of the media manipulation that Manning alleges in her article, then it is not clear how addressing Manning’s concerns would have prevented the current situation.
The unrest in Iraq has recently evolved into an organized insurrection seeking to establish ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Inquisitr has reported on those developments , the claims of the Iraqi government , and U.S. lawmakers’ reactions to the violence during the last week. Since those reports, various sources have reported that the insurrection has been affecting the cost of oil and disrupting the stock market . Vox has a map showing the locations of Iraqi oil fields and the number of them currently controlled by ISIS insurgents.
If what Manning writes is true, then the public may never know for sure how the military’s efforts to control their own media coverage have contributed to this current crisis. Even if she is wrong and the military literally could not have done anything to prevent or mitigate the circumstances of the current unrest, the public can never know that for sure if the policies that Manning writes about were enforced in the way she claims.
That, more than anything, is the important take-away from Chelsea Manning’s editorial.
[Image via Reuters ]