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CHAPTER 1
Pathologizing and Prosecuting a (Gender) Traitor
(In) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
— Chelsea Manning, pardoning request to President Obama, August 2013
On June 6, 2010, Wired, an online technology website that hosts blogs on topics ranging from business, science, and transportation to security, posted an article that announced the arrest of a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Private First Class Manning, in the investigation of a video leaked to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The video depicts a ruthless U.S. Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad in 2007, which killed several unarmed Iraqi civilians, among them two war correspondents working for Reuters. The video, known as "Collateral Murder," had garnered significant media attention upon its release by WikiLeaks in April 2010 raising questions about U.S. war crimes and causing an upheaval in U.S. foreign relations. Reuters had unsuccessfully requested the release of the video footage under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. A statement issued by the Department of Defense shortly after Private Manning's arrest on June 7, 2010, stated: "United States Division-Center is currently conducting a joint investigation of Specialist Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Md., who is deployed with Second Brigade 10th Mountain Division, in Baghdad, Iraq. He was placed in pretrial confinement for allegedly releasing classified information and is currently confined in Kuwait. The Department of Defense takes the management of classified information very seriously because it affects our national security, the lives of our soldiers, and our operations abroad." No one could have predicted at that point that Private Manning would soon become implicated in the biggest leak of government secrets in U.S. history, comprising more than seven hundred thousand U.S. intelligence documents. WikiLeaks and its alleged source became one of the most prominent news stories of the decade.
In July 2010 WikiLeaks first released a set of classified U.S. military documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan revealing details of civilian victims and alleged ties between Pakistani intelligence and the Taliban. These leaks were followed by the Iraq War logs in October 2010, containing four hundred thousand classified U.S. documents on the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009. Among other things, these logs chronicled the torture conducted by Iraqi forces with the silent approval of U.S. troops, checkpoint shootings of Iraqi civilians, and missile strikes accidentally targeting children. Last, in November 2010 WikiLeaks published a trove of State Department documents, colloquially referred to as "Cable Gate," revealing the secret dealings of behind-the-scenes international diplomacy, exposing blunt commentary from world leaders, and recounting U.S. pressure tactics overseas. These materials painted a highly embarrassing portrait of U.S. might and imperialist foreign policy.
While WikiLeaks insisted on the anonymity of its source, it was an exchange between Manning and ex-hacker Adrian Lamo that ultimately led to her arrest in June 2010. In an online chat room she wrote: "I'm sure you're pretty busy [but] if you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8-plus months, what would you do?" Lamo began logging their chats and notified the authorities. Lamo would later say that he was afraid Manning's leaking could put American lives at risk. Manning stood trial in June 2013 for twenty-two violations of military law, eight of which fell under Article 104, "Aiding the Enemy," of the Espionage Act — a 1917 statute against sharing information with unauthorized sources, which became a key decree used by the Obama administration in what some viewed as a larger "war on whistleblowers." Although Manning was found not guilty of the aiding the enemy charge on July 30, 2013, she was convicted of twenty other charges, including six under the Espionage Act and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.
From her arrest in 2010, the media attention surrounding Manning's case was driven by a quest for potential motives, focused on her difficult childhood, alleged mental instabilities, a narcissistic personality, and her experiences of being bullied when she identified as a gay man. In particular, Manning's announcement shortly after her sentencing in August 2013, in which she revealed her transgender identity and desire to transition, ignited an unprecedented public debate about the correct use of pronouns for trans-identified individuals and questions of gender self-determination. At its worst, the media whirl following her announcement contributed to the longstanding stigmatization and pathologizing of transgender identities as dangerous, deceptive, and terrorist. As Stryker and Currah have pointed out in their introduction to the inaugural issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, "It is virtually impossible, in the wake of the Manning case, to ignore transgender issues or not to have opinions about them." Manning's case also brought to the fore questions about unrestrained government surveillance and secrecy, the Obama administration's aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers, the humane treatment of detainees, and whether the military systematically fails to provide support to minority and LGBT soldiers.
This chapter illustrates that mainstream media's portrayal of Manning as "emotionally fractured" and plagued by "delusions of grandeur" provided a rationale for the state's extralegal — if not illegal — treatment of Manning by tying her alleged sexual orientation and gender nonconformity to mental instabilities that threatened state interests. More specifically, I argue that Manning's initial emasculation and feminization as a gay man in mainstream media reporting and the media's subsequent focus on her diagnosis with "gender identity disorder" perpetuates the military's traditional role as a heteropatriarchal institution —"a dominance inherently built on a gender binary system that presumes heterosexuality as a social norm" and that fundamentally privileges white hegemonic maleness. Manning's leaking of classified information, which revealed the ugly operations of U.S. imperial expansionism, and her inability to embody and perform heterosexuality and hegemonic masculinity rendered her an alien enemy who both betrayed and failed to "properly" enact whiteness. Manning's case shows how discourses of sexuality, gender, and race are constitutive of one another; specifically, Manning's whiteness must be understood through the logic of gender, which is in part contingent upon her ability to embody and perform heteromasculinity. Thus, the othering of Manning through her treatment as an alien enemy is also entangled with a process of racialization, demonstrating that white supremacy and heteropatriarchy remain vital logics for the building of U.S. empire.
The Traitor Is a "Sissy," a "Fag," and "Mentally Unstable"
While Stryker and Aizura contend in their introduction to the second edition of the Transgender Studies Reader, "with the pop cultural cachet of transgender phenomena seeming to increase with every new episode of RuPaul's Drag Race," the story of Chelsea Manning appeared on the media landscape at an unprecedented moment for trans visibility. The media's fascination with transgender phenomena, however, is not new. In 1952 Christine Jorgensen was the first transgender person to receive significant media coverage for her successful gender-affirmation surgery. As Stryker notes in Transgender History, the media particularly focused on the fact that Jorgensen was an "ex-GI" who had been drafted into the army after high school, suggesting deep-rooted anxieties about masculinity and sexuality: "If a macho archetype such as 'the soldier' could be transformed into a 'blond bombshell,' what did that mean for the average man?" Not surprisingly, fears about the undermining of heteromasculine militarism would also resurface in Manning's case. Some sixty years after Jorgensen's story made headlines, the dominant themes emerging from Manning's news accounts depicted similar anxieties about sexuality and gender. Manning was mainly pathologized for her gender nonconformity and her inability to "properly" perform heteronormative whiteness. I begin with a comprehensive analysis of the news media coverage surrounding Manning before I engage in close readings of court documents and legal discourses pertaining to her pretrial confinement and court proceedings.
In Absentia
First, it is noteworthy that the time period between Manning's arrest in June 2010 and her pretrial in December 2012 was marked by a glaring lack of media attention and coverage. Despite Manning's detainment on May 27, 2010, in Kuwait, major news outlets did not report on her arrest until June 7, 2010. While WikiLeaks published the Afghanistan and Iraq logs followed by a large trove of State Department cables throughout the second half of 2010, silence mostly surrounded Manning's case and whereabouts. If one wanted to keep up with Manning's numerous pretrial and motion hearings, also known as Article 32 hearings, which began in December 2011 one had to find alternative news outlets. Only a handful of independent journalists regularly attended, transcribed, and commented on her hearings. Among those were Occupy Wall Street organizer Alexa O'Brien and Kevin Gosztola from the blog Firedoglake. These independent journalists were Manning supporters, as they considered her exposure of war crimes ethically conscious and heroic acts.
Later on in November and December 2012 when Manning's defense filed an Article 13 motion against unlawful pretrial punishment at the Marine Corps Brig at Quantico, Virginia, Margaret Sullivan, then the public editor for the New York Times, saw herself forced to call out her own paper for failing to send a reporter to cover Manning's compelling testimony over her harsh treatment:
It was part of a fascinating few days in the history of the Manning story — resonating with implications for free speech, national security and the American military at war — but you wouldn't have known much about it if your only source of information was the New York Times. ... As a matter of news judgment, giving so little coverage to the hearing is simply weird. This is a compelling story, and an important one. ... Beyond the story itself, the Times, which considers itself the paper of record, had an obligation to be there — to bear witness — because, in a very real sense, Private Manning was one of its most important sources of the past decade.
Sullivan's allusion to the seeming paradox of a glaring absence of coverage concerning Manning's pretrial hearings while the Times had simultaneously been one of the lead publishers of the WikiLeaks documents in question allows for several interpretations. One explanation for the lack of the newsworthiness of Manning's story may be found in the fact that with the continuous decline of print media and newspaper revenues, newsrooms have been facing drastic cuts to their budgets, and staff shortages are making it more difficult if not impossible to send their own reporters to cover a broad array of events. Thus, if the calculation was that "the Times did not think the hearing itself demanded coverage" since hours of pretrial hearings do not necessarily yield front-page news, it was certainly much cheaper to depend on wire-service articles from the Associated Press or Reuters if the event was to be covered at all. The initial lack of Manning's coverage, therefore, points to some of the larger impacts of the political economy of the media, where downsized newsrooms severely undermine the ability of both traditional print and electronic news media to still function as a watchdog and as the Fourth Estate that monitors political processes and informs the public.
Whistleblower or Traitor
Once Manning was revealed as the alleged leaker of U.S. government documents, right-wing news outlets were quick to denounce and vilify her as a traitor. Only the British left-leaning newspaper the Guardian took a more sympathetic stance toward Manning's actions and critiqued her questionable treatment at Quantico early on. National newspapers shied away from taking specific sides on whether Manning was a whistleblower or a traitor and engaged mostly in factual, juridical recounting. An op-ed in the New York Times argued that Edward Snowden, with his revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance practices and the PRISM program in 2013, was "not nearly as reckless as Bradley Manning, ... who seemed not to know or care what secret documents he was exposing" and that there was "an unavoidable appearance of self-aggrandizement as well." Fox News described her as a "rogue GI," and Mike Huckabee argued that "anything less than execution is too kind." On the O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly referred to "vile" WikiLeaks and asked Geraldo Rivera, "What did this weasel plead guilty to?" only to recount, "For those of you who don't remember Bradley Manning. He was in Iraq. He's some kind of gay, militant guy and I guess that was his beef; that he wasn't treated the way he wanted to be treated, but he leaked the information of Afghans helping the U.S. military and that got them killed." O'Reilly further asserted that "You make an example out of this guy; that's what you do." Similarly, Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks sources "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family." These comments illustrate how the portrayal of Manning's actions as harming not only her fellow U.S. soldiers but also Afghani families reasserted and solidified a protective and patriarchal role that the United States ascribes to itself in an ever-recurring media narrative of justifying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as liberating Middle Easterners — especially brown women from their "oppressive" counterparts — in the name of freedom and democracy.
Contrary to the media discourses cited above, Manning herself revealed a grave concern over dubious U.S. military actions in Iraq in her chat logs with Adrian Lamo and subsequently in her pretrial statement to court on February 28, 2013. Manning claimed that she wanted people to see the truth and hoped that by revealing the gruesomeness of war, she could "spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general." Manning displayed great frustration and disgust about U.S. military actions in Iraq that condoned, for example, the arrest of fifteen Iraqis by the Iraqi federal police for allegedly printing "anti-Iraqi literature," which turned out to be nothing more than a benign political critique of Iraq's then–prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Referring specifically to the "Collateral Murder" video and its "war porn content," Manning was particularly disturbed by the dehumanizing treatment of Iraqi civilians at the hands of the U.S. aerial weapons team crew: "I wanted the American public to know that not everyone in Iraq and Afghanistan are targets that needed to be neutralized, but rather people who were struggling to live in the pressure-cooker environment of what we call asymmetric warfare."
"WikiLeaks Suspect Manning: A Troubled Home Life"
Most prevalent across a variety of different news outlets was a focus on Manning's alleged "erratic behavior" and emotional problems, which ignored the possibility that Manning might have been motivated by a larger conscience. Initially, an emphasis on Manning's past struggles with her sexuality was frequently mentioned as being important to her decision to leak classified information. Manning, the daughter of a former naval intelligence operator, had developed an interest in science and programming early on. Born in Oklahoma, Manning had come out to her friends as gay at thirteen and was repeatedly teased during her high school years. After her father kicked her out of the house, she spent a few years adrift working across the Midwest. Manning joined the U.S. Army in 2007, which offered a new life and a way to pay for college. Manning's tiny physique at five feet, two inches, certainly made her an atypical soldier. In boot camp, she was persistently bullied and suffered anxiety attacks. Enlisting in the army also meant that Manning had to remain closeted due to the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, which prevented gay and lesbian soldiers from serving openly. Nonetheless, she attended a 2008 gay rights demonstration in Syracuse, New York.
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Excerpted from "Terrorizing Gender"
by .
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