Traitor?

There's a lot of people using the word "traitor" in conjunction with Pte Bradley Manning, and "anti-American" in conjunction with both Wikileaks and it's public face and founder Jullian Assange. This post is about whether that's fair or not; it's about the motivations of whistleblowers.

Pte Bradley Manning; the person widely believed to have leaked diplomatic cables to Wikileaks is being held in solitary confinement by the US military. It is believed he is being pressured into confessing that Jullian Assange conspired with him to "steal" the documents, in a rather obvious effort to twist US laws and provide an excuse to extradite Jullian Assange, who will no doubt be tried in secret where the verdict has been decided before Pte Manning has confessed.

There's a reason credible courts don't accept "confessions" obtained under torture conditions as evidence; people will say whatever they think will stop the pain. You torture me I'll happily tell you I'm a genetic cross breed of a mountain goat, house spider, Irn Bru can and muppet, not only that but I'm both King and Queen and evil twin sister thrice removed on my great aunt's nephews side and fourteenth in line to take ownership of a colony on Jupiter. Yes I went a bit surreal there to make a point. When regimes like Iran trot out people to confess on TV, we all know they're saying what their torturers have told them to say, and they're doing so as convincingly as possible to avoid being taken back for another session. In other words, we see through it as the charade it is.

Stepping back from the Pte Manning / Jullian Assange / Wikileaks specifics, we'll look in general at why people blow the whistle. I see two obvious reasons for blowing the whistle on an employers actions. There may be more or any combination of reasons for it.

• Revenge
• Exposing the crimes of their employers

When you sign a contract as en employee you're bound by rules, terms and conditions. Often those rules are written by lawyers and have you wrapped up in confidentiality clauses. No written contract will expect you to cover for crimes, although the pressure from within will imply it. When you go public, it breaks that confidentiality agreement. Whether the whisleblower has broken the terms of their contract or not I'd imagine comes down to whether or not there's a clause that explicitly forbids whistleblowing.

The world is made up of disgruntled employees and ex-employees, the military are not unique in this, nor is it country specific. Some of those people will seek to have their revenge by making public some real wrongdoing to get their previous employers into trouble on various fronts, while others will make some fake wrongdoing public in an attempt to cause trouble for their ex-employers. Sometimes that's hard to tell the difference unless there's evidence, and if there is evidence you can bet your ass that the company in question will seek to silence it by claiming anything from "copyright infringement" to "state secrets" in a vain attempt to keep the public from seeing it and judging for themselves, not to mention smearing the person who exposed it as "deranged" "troubled" "delusional" "traitorous" etc.

Sometimes employees see things their company is doing that goes against the values they stand for and feel the need to stand up for what is right, in an attempt to shine a light on those actions so that the pressure from the public makes them stop, and those who instigated them held accountable for their actions. They know they will pay a very high price for doing so, but it's an act of conscience. In regular circles their names would be blackened around that industry so they wouldn't find other employment in their trained field easily. By law companies can't punish employees for whistleblowing, but they can shun them, find all sorts of little ways to bully. harass and find things to blame on them. The goal is to make it a hostile environment so that the "traitor" gives up and leaves the conspirators to their conspiracy.

Morality is a vastly different thing to different people, what some see as immoral others see as a cost of doing business. People have lines in the sand at all sorts of places, of things they will do or not do. The US constitution, it's values and ideas are very good. It's rights to various things like freedom of speech, freedom from persecution, freedom of religious worship etc are broadly the same in many countries, even if we do not have a written document to supposedly guarantee them.

In the US, the people believe in that ideal, in their hearts the US that exists is the one based on the values of the constitution. They are rightly proud of those values, and feel it's a service to the world to help bring those values to other countries. So what does someone in the employment of the government do when he or she sees a systematic disregard and contempt for those values in a day to day operations and goals? They believe in the values of the US, the US that the mainstream media are spinning as reality, but they see the real truth underneath.

If they expose that truth are they traitors or patriots? They are traitors to the department of government they are employed by, but they are patriotic to the wider US. Part of those values include standing up for what's right, it also includes protecting your country, even from the actions of some within it. While the US military torture prisoners, or move them from country to country to escape US legal oversight to enable more torture it taints the reputation of the US around the world.

By exposing it, if the attention stops the practice, it then helps protect the US's image and moral authority around the world. In some cases the bosses don't know abuses are going on, so it being exposed lets them deal with it. In other cases the bosses have a practice of "plausible deniability" to ensure that they don't find out, where exposing it forces them to deal with it.

Just exposing the crime as a former or current insider does not make you a traitor; the term "traitor" is a political one. It's about betraying your country and it's interests. By exposing the crimes of some parts of your government is certainly does betray the interests of that country, not necessarily the country itself. Remember the values the US stand for?

Keep in mind that many "democratic" countries preach "innocent until proven guilty". Just as the various leaks show us; our officials are well practised hypocrites. We have the PR of "protecting journalism from governments who'd silence them" at the same time as pressuring every organisation who has any connection to Wikileaks to cut them off.

Can someone be both a traitor and a patriot on the same issue? While governments have two track policies and goals, it's a natural outcome. While the publicly stated policy does not match the real policy this is a natural position for whistleblowers who expose it to find themselves in.

For those who consider Pte Bradley Manning a traitor for leaking documents to Wikileaks I ask this: what would you do? Would you "follow orders" regardless of what those orders are, or how objectionable they are? By "orders" I mean the whole gambit of contracts, verbal instructions, atmosphere of the staff around you etc.

At the end of WWII high ranking Nazi's were tried in Nuremberg. They also claimed they were "only following orders". The court didn't buy it. With the Nazi's you could at least make the excuse that it was a totalitarian regime who executed people for various things, so "following orders" was an essential part of hopefully living through the war. Our "democratic" countries have no such excuses, we take the moral high ground that people are duty bound to speak out, and are valued when they do. At least that's the PR. The US even passed a bill to protect whistleblowers while twisting the laws to convict both Jullian Assange and Pte Bradley Manning in a secret US military court. The bill is written in such a way as to exempt Wikileaks from that protection. Is anyone surprised?

While the values such as "innocent until proven guilty" are being ignored, and both Jullian Assange and Pte Bradley Manning are being condemned as guilty despite no charges yet having been brought, nor any court rendering a verdict. The mainstream media also word their reports to assume or imply guilt.

I have no idea if Pte Bradley Manning is the one who leaked these documents known and mirrored around the world as "Cablegate". I have no idea of the motivations of whoever did leak them. As I've said on numerous occasions, the people are not their government. I am of the opinion that whoever leaked those documents should be thanked for doing so. It strikes me as someone with some ethics, who saw a deep rooted pattern that was unethical and decided to do the right thing. For this, Sgt Bradley Manning is being kept in solitary confinement for 23hrs per day and is facing a lengthy and bleak future behind bars. Welcome to the land of the free.