Saving Private Manning?

The incarnation of evil may look like a silly, slappable 22-year-old. Bradley Manning, a soldier employed in army intelligence services, is currently incarcerated in an American military prison in Kuwait. According to his superiors, he posted online images of an air strike on civilians in Iraq along with 150,000 secret documents from the State Department — copied and transferred from the U.S. Army offices on a fake Lady Gaga CD.

But that’s not all. He is also, according to the Department of Defense, a “person of interest” in the case of the 71,000 secret documents on the war in Afghanistan posted to WikiLeaks. It’s not that I want to stand in for the court martial that has to determine his fate, but if he did do it, I’d ask for leniency.

Up to now, I haven’t seen anything new in this entire mess. The fact is that a Stinger missile, a present from the U.S. to the anti-Russian mujahedeen in the 80s, could have been recently used against an American helicopter by the Taliban. The news doesn’t bode well for NATO in Afghanistan, in view of the fact that it was these heat-seeking toys that got the better of the Soviet forces. For the rest, the flood of confidential dispatches reveals, impressionistically, the unease and disappointment of Western forces overtaken by endemic corruption and betrayed by Pakistani allies, whom we’ve known for a long time to be quietly supporting the Taliban via their secret services. This leak, by its very existence, demonstrates the depression and the cynical gloom of the most powerful army in the world in the hands of a conflict with no apparent solution.