Sept 19, 2020
By Dray Breezy
- Childhood
- Military Service
- Top Secret Clearance
- First Leak
- Collateral Murder
- The Birth of Chelsea Manning
- Arrest and Incarceration
- Gender Transition
- Negative Feedback Loop
Childhood
Bradley Edward Manning was born December 17,1987 in Crescent, Oklahoma. Manning was raised as a boy and generally thought he was gay. Manning’s parents divorced in 2000, when he was 13. Manning then moved to Wales. In Wales, Manning first began to explore his queerness, using dye and makeup to feminize his image. However the majority of the time Manning spent as a caretaker, his Mother suffered from substance abuse issues. Chelsea and her older sister bore the brunt of the adult responsibilities, including paying bills and grocery shopping. He moved back to U.S in 2005 to live with his father and work at a software company. Although Bradley was very intelligent, the trauma of his childhood and the stigma of being LGBTQ seemed to wear heavily upon him. The software coding job didn’t work out. He worked odd jobs and suffered from homelessness until he joins the army in 2007. A lot of the pressure to enlist came from Bradley’s father who had also served in the military. Chelsea expressed a desire to “math the problems away” which I’ve noticed in several high profile cases of transgenderism, specifically Chelsea Manning and Caitlyn Jenner. They exhibit a strong desire to overcompensate for their gender dysphoria by choosing a hyper masculine career. Chelsea also had a strong healthy desire to serve and help her country.
Military service
Unfortunately Manning couldn’t hide her queerness that well and was tortured throughout basic training , so much so that she had to go through basic training twice. Let me be clear, Manning’s entire career in the military has been turbulent. There was never a time where she was the model serviceperson. From day 1 she had entered into a negative feedback loop with authority that she just couldn’t break. You know what it’s like when a teacher or boss just makes up their mind that you suck and there’s nothing you can do to prove them wrong?
Top Secret Clearance
She finishes basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in April 2008 and attends intelligence school at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Receives top-secret security clearance and is assigned to Fort Drum in New York. According to the NY Times, she met a Brandeis student named Tyler Watkins online and they began dating. She started driving to visit Watkins in the Boston area, where she became a regular at Pika, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology co-op, and visited Boston University’s Builds, a hub of the local hacking community. At the Pika gatherings, she found friends that approached coding the same way she did: as outlet, pastime and calling.” Before she could build a strong community there, she was deployed to Iraq October 2009 and stationed in Baghdad.
Chelsea Manning’s job was very specific. His role was to sift through “SigActs”- significant actions which were the written reports, diplomatic accounts and correspondence, photos, videos, of all the conflict and firefights of the Iraq war. She spent 8 hours a day, 6 days a week in a hot, dark, wooden room sifting through this information. Slowly Manning realized the Iraq War wasn’t as black and white as American media had portrayed. Manning started to realize that maybe America was fighting a pointless war and the thousands of American deaths were part of a larger senseless negative feedback loop.
First leak
As the internal tensions increased for Manning, he was granted a brief reprieve in the form of a two week leave. Before he left, he downloaded almost every SigAct report from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These were hundreds of thousands of logs. The actual crime took place when she smuggled that information out on a CD-rom disk labeled Lady Gaga. She uploaded these files unto her personal laptop and hopped on a plane to the U.S. Manning was unsure of what to do with the data so he just waited. During this time Manning publicly cross dressed for the first time. She went by the name Brianna. October and November pass and, she found herself “increasingly dismayed by a lack of public awareness about what seemed to be a futile, ceaselessly bloody war.” She states in the NY times article, “There were two worlds, The world in America, and the world I was seeing [in Iraq]”. Manning originally attempted to send the files to The NY Times or The Washington Post but they were bullshitting. Part of the credibility of any story is knowing your source and Chelsea did not want to be known. On Feb. 3, 2010, Manning signed onto her laptop and, using a secure file-transfer protocol, sent the files to WikiLeaks. But to her surprise, nothing happened. Wikileaks never even acknowledged receiving the data.
Manning returned back to work and of course began acting paranoid as fuck. Because Manning had suffered from troubled behavior throughout her stint in the military, nothing seemed amiss to higher ups. On a personal note I will interject that I believe Manning’s security clearance should have been revoked far earlier, she had proven herself too much of a liability. But the military is dumb. During this time Manning began to chat on a encrypted chat server with someone, whom many believe to be Julian Assange. She sent him new files that would blow the lid off of American intelligence.
Collateral Murder
Published by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” the three-year-old video, captured by a camera mounted on an American helicopter, showed two gunships approaching a group of men in an area where there had been reports of small-arms fire. The helicopter crew repeatedly requests permission to engage — “Let us shoot!” a voice is heard saying — before receiving it and opening fire. In total, at least a dozen people were killed in the 2007 strike, including several civilians and two staff members of the Reuters news agency. Manning says she knew that Reuters, under the Freedom of Information Act, had asked the United States government for a copy of the video but never received it. This was symptomatic, she said, of the worst impulses of a government obsessed with blanket classification. At this point in time the government still was unsure of who was leaking the data.
The Birth of Chelsea Manning
Simultaneously Chelsea Manning was being born. In April, Manning emailed her superior with a photo of Brianna. She was experiencing a number of crisis relate to her gender dysphoria which were severely impacting her ability to do her job. Her superior ignored that emailed and increased her workload from 6 days a week to 7 days. That’ll help.
In May 2010, Manning contacted hacker Adrian Lamo. She told him that she was responsible for the leaked war logs and Lamo snitched on Manning like a little bitch. She was arrested promptly.
Arrest and Incarceration
Starting July 2010 Manning was held for 9 months in Quantico, Virginia. At Quantico, Manning spent 23 hours a day in a 6-by-8-foot cell, much of it on Prevention of Injury, or P.O.I., status, in conditions that a United Nations special investigatory later said could qualify as torture. She was required to give constant verbal confirmation during the day that she was O.K., starting at 5am. She wasn’t allowed to have pillows or sheets. She was forced to stand for much of the time. (After the investigation, the military ordered that Quantico’s whole pretrial confinement area be shut down.)
After 1000 days of pretrial incarceration, Manning pleaded guilty to 10 of the lesser counts. She was convicted of espionage and theft and sentenced to 35 years. The day after the sentence, Edward pubicly came out as Chelsea. Crazily enough, Chelsea sought treatment for gender dysphoria while imprisoned. The DOD refused request, but the ACLU filed lawsuit on her behalf. Once again Manning is trapped in a negative feedback loop where the more she asserts herself, the more the state represses her and tries to break her. In early September 2016, Manning embarked on a hunger strike to protest what she called the “constant and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials. Manning tries to kill herself twice during this time, but guards spotted her before she lost consciousness. We see a smaller negative feedback loop in which prison officials put a prisoner in conditions in which anyone would become suicidal and then use that to justify those conditions. Similar to how republicans rant and rave about how government is bad and then get elected and try their hardest to prove it.
Gender Transition
A week later, Manning was returned to general population. She was consumed with anger, distress and fear. She also states she was most likely suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder — from the trauma of Iraq and Quantico. 10 days in the hunger strike, military officials agreed finally approve the transition.
After this exhausting victory, Chelsea had resolved that she would spend the rest of her youth imprisoned. However in January 2017, in the last week of his presidency, Barack Obama commuted the bulk of Manning’s 35 year sentence. After hearing of her experiences in military prison, Obama essentially deemed “time served”. She was released from prison May 17,2017 after serving 7 years. She ran for U.S senate in Maryland 2018 but lost the primary. Chelsea has spent her 3 years out of prison telling her story and constantly mentioning what she calls a negative feedback loop in regards to power.
Negative Feedback Loop
This concept of the feedback loop really struck me because it’s so applicable to how toxic power structures are in this country. We can start with the military industrial complex. We have so many jobs and livelihoods wrapped up in war, contractors, military personnel, diplomats, construction, big gas/oil, all of these players that have learned to profit from eternal conflict. For these players, war=money. Therefore anyone trying to stop war is looked at at trying to stop their money. What exactly did Chelsea do that qualifies her to be considered a traitor? I’ve seen the video that was released, it’s horrible and it is most definitely criminal negligence on behalf of the American government. I also deeply believe that George Bush and Dick Cheney misled us into an unjust war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We wouldn’t have known this war was unjust had we not had leaks and whistleblowers. How can someone pointing out injustice be viewed as a traitor? Don’t we deserve to know our politicians are lying to us? America is not perfect and we need people to hold the powerful accountable for the decisions they make.
Another example of a negative feedback loop is our prison industrial complex, specifically in regards to black lives. America has criminalized the existence of black people for centuries through formal and informal black codes, literally criminalizing or ability to gather/organize/read/learn/exist. What happens when you tell a group of people for centuries that they are savage animals? Some of them start to believe you, and they start to behave uncivilized. Those victims become what their oppressors tell them they are, becoming the stereotype for the Laura Ingrahms and Rush Limbaughs which further fuels the media’s narrative and predisposition to criminalize blackness. We lock black people in destructive prisons on bs crimes, with actual violent criminals which data shows only creates MORE violent criminals. Our prisons are not rehabilitative, they are punitive and entirely focused on breaking people down. Not to mention the prison industrial complex employs about a half a million people. Manning speaks on this in regards to censorship and prison gaurds.This negative feedback loop feeds on itself, and who profits? The media and people that profit off racism and meanwhile the black community is being destroyed through no fault of our own.
A less potent example of a negative feedback loop is our relationship with social media. When you argue about video games or politics on facebook what does their algorithm do? It shows you more content about video games and politics. Many of us SJW get stuck in these feedback loops on social media because the more we engage with trolls, the more trolls we get. Just look at Talib Kweli’s or Chelsea Handler’s timeline to see this in perpetuity. These negative feedback loops divide us and allow the power that be to use us against our will.
There are so many more examples of these toxic feedback loops in American society that purely restrict our ability to live freely. While I do believe that Chelsea Manning’s actions should have faced consequences, I don’t believe that her actions warranted torture. There are still republicans that believe she should have been killed!! We the taxpayers fund these wars, we should know exactly what’s going on in these foreign lands. There is obviously information that should be classified for national security but what does it say about the country we live in where people are punished for showing us the truth? Smarter people know that these feedback loops have to be broken, Barack Obama broke the loop with Chelsea, BLM is breaking the loop of racism through police brutality. There are so many systems of oppression that continue to exist, how can we break all these loops to ensure justice and liberty for all?