Loner Sought a Refuge, and Ended Up in War

By JOHN M. BRODER and GINGER THOMPSON NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — Feeling outcast and alone in Iraq, Bradley Manning, then a 22-year-old Army private, turned to the Internet for solace in early 2010, wanting to share with the world what he saw as the unconscionable horrors of war, an act that resulted in what military prosecutors called one of the greatest betrayals in the nation’s history.       

Within months, he was arrested for making public, through the WikiLeaks organization, the greatest cache of secret government information since the Pentagon Papers. He was called a traitor by his government; confined to a tiny cell 23 hours a day at the Marine base at Quantico, Va., and the Army brig at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.; and finally court-martialed in Maryland.

As prosecutors accused Private Manning of being a self-promoting “anarchist” who was nothing like the tortured man of principle portrayed by his lawyers, supporters around the world celebrated him as a martyr for free speech. But the heated language on both sides tended to overshadow the human story at the center of the case.

That story involved the child of a severed home, a teenager bullied for his conflicted sexuality whose father, a conservative retired soldier, and mother, a Welsh woman who never adjusted to life in Oklahoma, bounced their child back and forth between places where he never fit in.

Private Manning was a misfit as well in the Army, which he joined in the hope of gaining technical skills and an education, and which eventually sent him to Contingency Operating Station Hammer, a remote post east of Baghdad, where he had access to some of the nation’s deepest military and diplomatic secrets. In early 2010, he covertly downloaded gun-camera videos, battle logs and tens of thousands of State Department cables onto flash drives while lip-syncing the words to Lady Gaga songs.

He anonymously made contact with WikiLeaks to spill his secrets, hoping, as he told the military court that convicted him on Tuesday, to “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” Whatever his motives or inner conflicts, Private Manning knew he was violating the law and military regulations.

According to a new documentary about WikiLeaks and the Manning case, “We Steal Secrets,” by the filmmaker Alex Gibney, Private Manning thought that in Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, he had an ally.

“Manning invested more in that relationship,” Mr. Gibney said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. Seeking a more sympathetic ear, Mr. Gibney said, Private Manning confessed his deed, and his multiple personal torments, to Adrian Lamo, an accomplished computer hacker he had met in a chat room online. Mr. Lamo drew him out, and then turned him in to the authorities.

“He was a naïve idealist. He was not a spy,” said Mr. Gibney, whose film portrays Private Manning sympathetically. “He didn’t get any money for this. He didn’t go to a foreign government. Remember, he did plead guilty to actually leaking to WikiLeaks, but he wouldn’t plead guilty to being a spy, because he didn’t think he was one, and I don’t, either.”

In his conversations with Mr. Lamo, who shared his computer chats with Wired.com, Private Manning said he had been ignored and isolated at work. “I just wanted to be nice, and live a normal life,” Private Manning wrote. But he said he had seen things that troubled him that he felt helpless to do anything about.

According to the chat logs, he was first dismayed by the detention of 15 people in Iraq for printing criticism of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. “After that,” he wrote, “I saw things differently.”

In a long statement to the military court this year, he said he was also disturbed by footage shot by an Apache helicopter of an attack on a street in Baghdad in July 2007 that killed two Reuters journalists and several other men. He called the footage one in a series of “war porn-type videos” he had seen that sickened him. The video was among the material he provided to WikiLeaks, which distributed it widely without identifying its source.

While larger questions about government secrecy and the role of the news media in the Internet age swirl around the case, the roots of Private Manning’s behavior may spring as much from his troubled youth as from his political views.

He spent much of his childhood alone, playing video games or huddled in front of a computer when he was living with his mother in Haverfordwest, Wales. He was teased relentlessly there for his foreign ways and began to act out in school.

After several outbursts, his mother sent him back to Oklahoma, where he worked briefly at a computer software store. But several angry clashes with his father — which some friends attributed to his father’s disapproval of his sexual identity — landed him on the streets, living in his car.

Eventually, he made his way into the Army, which seized on his computer skills and trained him as an intelligence analyst. While stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., friends said in interviews, Private Manning met a student from Brandeis University named Tyler Watkins, and fell in love. Some of Mr. Watkins’s friends were part of a burgeoning hacker community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That community, friends said, embraced the young Army private: his geeky fascination with computers, his liberal political opinions and his sexual orientation.

While he seemed to thrive in that world, his military career was tarnished by violent outbursts. While serving on a base east of Baghdad, he was reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer, and he complained in e-mails of being “regularly ignored by his superiors” unless they needed him to fetch more coffee.

Private Manning rebelled quietly, friends said, wearing a dog tag that said “Humanist” and keeping a toy fairy wand on his desk. Then, surreptitiously, beginning in late 2009 or early 2010, he began downloading thousands of government documents. He considered leaking them to The New York Times, The Washington Post or Politico, but decided to contact WikiLeaks in February 2010, several months into his deployment.

In what proved a fateful mistake, Mr. Manning then turned to Mr. Lamo, who had been convicted of hacking into several large companies, including The Times.

“I can’t believe what I’m confessing to you,” Mr. Manning wrote to Mr. Lamo, after explaining that he had given WikiLeaks some 260,000 diplomatic cables. He wrote that he had exploited a classified data system ripe for the plucking: “weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis.”

Mr. Lamo drew Mr. Manning out, asking him what kinds of scandals he thought the leaks might provoke, and for proof that Manning had done what he said. Then, saying he was “backed into a corner ethically,” Mr. Lamo turned him in.

Mr. Manning has reacted stoically to the conditions of his imprisonment, much of it in solitary confinement, although others, including his legal team and Amnesty International, have loudly protested his treatment. In one of his chats with Mr. Lamo, he contemplated a life behind bars, which could be especially difficult for him because of his struggles with his gender identity.

“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life,” he wrote to Mr. Lamo, “or being executed so much, if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy.”

John M. Broder reported from Washington, and Ginger Thompson from New York.

The Most Pivotal Figure in the Senate Today

By ALBERT R. HUNT | BLOOMBERG VIEW

Washington being Washington, the hottest relationship in town does not revolve around sex or even the next presidential election; it is the political courtship of old antagonists, Barack Obama and John McCain.

Political relationships, especially those involving the president, are the sustenance of the American capital. Sometimes they are poisonous: President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy, as captured in the latest volume of Robert A. Caro’s biography of L.B.J. At other times, they are lopsided, as when President Bill Clinton dominated Newt Gingrich under the guise of working together. And every now and then, there are adversarial yet symbiotic relationships that, on balance, get things done: President Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill in the 1980s, for example.

The association between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain is different. But it may be Washington’s most important in many years.

Mr. McCain, 76, whose political resiliency is rivaled only by such luminaries as Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, is the most pivotal figure in the Senate today. He often is more central than the Senate party leaders, Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, and Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, or the self-styled new power broker, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

When Mr. McCain is with the president — on immigration and in brokering the recent deal to secure Senate approval of stalled Obama nominees — they can usually trump the political right. When he is against him — sabotaging Mr. Obama’s plan last year to nominate Susan E. Rice as secretary of state — the White House rarely prevails.

Their previous strains predated 2008, when they vied for the presidency. Mr. Obama saw his Republican rival as an embittered, compromised maverick who treated him as an undeserving upstart. After he lost that election, Mr. McCain saw Mr. Obama as naïve, aloof and surrounded by too many sycophants.

In 2011, there was a move to détente after Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot. That, however, was “a false start,” Mr. McCain recalled in an interview last week.

This time, political convenience broke the ice. A re-elected president soon realized that without the support of a small core of Senate Republicans, any agenda was doomed. Mr. McCain, who moved right to fend off a Tea Party primary challenge in 2010, was itching to reclaim his maverick persona and wage a two-pronged battle: against the isolationists and the political right of his own party and against the national-security left wing in the Democratic camp.

Since the January inauguration, Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain have met a dozen times. In half of those occasions, they were either alone or with only a few other principals. Although the discussions were usually about immigration policy, they invariably ranged more broadly.

There are huge tests ahead, especially the battles this autumn over the federal budget and raising the debt ceiling. Mr. McCain, the defense hawk, despises the across-the-board cuts to defense and discretionary domestic spending required under the set of cuts known as sequestration and wants to help forge a compromise replacement involving more taxes and cuts in entitlements.

The odds are against that happening; most House Republicans are more eager for an economy-threatening standoff than for an accord. The only slim hope is a deal, led by the White House and a small group of McCainites.

Mr. McCain also wants to help Mr. Obama fulfill his promise to close the detainee camp for terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He says political conditions are much different than they were four years ago when there was a similar effort.

“The difference between 2009 and 2013 is the administration now has a plan,” he says.

Last month, the five-term senator traveled to Guantánamo with the Senate intelligence committee chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, and the White House chief of staff, Denis McDonough.

Mr. McDonough, whom Mr. McCain knew as a midlevel aide to Tom Daschle when Mr. Daschle was the Democratic Senate leader, is a glue that binds the Republican and the administration. He and Mr. McCain talk as often as five times a day. In addition, the Republican senator has a great fondness for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a good working relationship with Secretary of State John Kerry and is a fan of Samantha Power, the U.N. ambassador-designate.

He is also an unrelenting critic of most of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy. He sees the president as indecisive or soft on Syria, Egypt and Afghanistan. He has a long-running feud with Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

He has no regrets about torching Ms. Rice’s appointment as secretary of state and continues to suggest that she dissembled on the terrorist attack last year against a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. When she was tapped to head Mr. Obama’s National Security Council, Mr. McCain wrote a Twitter post saying that he would make “every effort” to work with her. She contacted him, they had a cordial meeting, and he asked her to discuss Syria with one of his confidants, the retired general Jack Keane. Ms. Rice met with General Keane: “I can’t ask for anything more,” Mr. McCain says.

He is as eager to take on the isolationists led by Senator Rand Paul within his party. In an April speech at the Center for a New American Security, he focused criticism on his fellow Republicans. He has disdain for much of the movement right and little regard for Mr. McConnell.

In the interview in his Capitol hideaway office last week, the never combat-shy Mr. McCain seemed to revel in his reclaimed persona and his multifront battles. He suggests, however, that his style is changing.

“The biggest mistake I used to make was getting personal,” he says, declaring that his role model now is Ted Kennedy, the late Democratic senator, who was a friend.

One prominent Democrat, who knows both Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain well, is certain the senator genuinely wishes to work with the president. Noting that for all the assistance of Mr. McDonough or even Mr. Biden, at this level, interactions ultimately depend on principal-to-principal connections, and the politician, who declined to be identified, worries that Mr. Obama does not do relationships well.

Asked about that, Mr. McCain paused, then acknowledged that the president is not a “schmoozer” like his predecessors Mr. Clinton or Mr. Reagan.

“He’s willing to compromise but sometimes not sure he knows exactly how to do it,” Mr. McCain says. “We can help.”

Russia

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July 21, 2013

Russia’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

By HARVEY FIERSTEIN

RUSSIA’S president, Vladimir V. Putin, has declared war on homosexuals. So far, the world has mostly been silent.

On July 3, Mr. Putin signed a law banning the adoption of Russian-born children not only to gay couples but also to any couple or single parent living in any country where marriage equality exists in any form.

A few days earlier, just six months before Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Games, Mr. Putin signed a law allowing police officers to arrest tourists and foreign nationals they suspect of being homosexual, lesbian or “pro-gay” and detain them for up to 14 days. Contrary towhat the International Olympic Committee says, the law could mean that any Olympic athlete, trainer, reporter, family member or fan who is gay — or suspected of being gay, or just accused of being gay — can go to jail.

Earlier in June, Mr. Putin signed yet another antigay bill, classifying “homosexual propaganda” as pornography. The law is broad and vague, so that any teacher who tells students that homosexuality is not evil, any parents who tell their child that homosexuality is normal, or anyone who makes pro-gay statements deemed accessible to someone underage is now subject to arrest and fines. Even a judge, lawyer or lawmaker cannot publicly argue for tolerance without the threat of punishment.

Finally, it is rumored that Mr. Putin is about to sign an edict that would remove children from their own families if the parents are either gay or lesbian or suspected of being gay or lesbian. The police would have the authority to remove children from adoptive homes as well as from their own biological parents.

Not surprisingly, some gay and lesbian families are already beginning to plan their escapes from Russia.

Why is Mr. Putin so determined to criminalize homosexuality? He has defended his actions by saying that the Russian birthrate is diminishing and that Russian families as a whole are in danger of decline. That may be. But if that is truly his concern, he should be embracing gay and lesbian couples who, in my world, are breeding like proverbial bunnies. These days I rarely meet a gay couple who aren’t raising children.

And if Mr. Putin thinks he is protecting heterosexual marriage by denying us the same unions, he hasn’t kept up with the research. Studies from San Diego State University compared homosexual civil unions and heterosexual marriages in Vermont and found that the same-sex relationships demonstrate higher levels of satisfaction, sexual fulfillment and happiness. (Vermont legalized same-sex marriages in 2009, after the study was completed.)

Mr. Putin also says that his adoption ban was enacted to protect children from pedophiles. Once again the research does not support the homophobic rhetoric. About 90 percent of pedophiles are heterosexual men.

Mr. Putin’s true motives lie elsewhere. Historically this kind of scapegoating is used by politicians to solidify their bases and draw attention away from their failing policies, and no doubt this is what’s happening in Russia. Counting on the natural backlash against the success of marriage equality around the world and recruiting support from conservative religious organizations, Mr. Putin has sallied forth into this battle, figuring that the only opposition he will face will come from the left, his favorite boogeyman.

Mr. Putin’s campaign against lesbian, gay and bisexual people is one of distraction, a strategy of demonizing a minority for political gain taken straight from the Nazi playbook. Can we allow this war against human rights to go unanswered? Although Mr. Putin may think he can control his creation, history proves he cannot: his condemnations are permission to commit violence against gays and lesbians. Last week a young gay man was murdered in the city of Volgograd. He was beaten, his body violated with beer bottles, his clothing set on fire, his head crushed with a rock. This is most likely just the beginning.

Nevertheless, the rest of the world remains almost completely ignorant of Mr. Putin’s agenda. His adoption restrictions have received some attention, but it has been largely limited to people involved in international adoptions.

This must change. With Russia about to hold the Winter Games in Sochi, the country is open to pressure. American and world leaders must speak out against Mr. Putin’s attacks and the violence they foster. The Olympic Committee must demand the retraction of these laws under threat of boycott.

In 1936 the world attended the Olympics in Germany. Few participants said a word about Hitler’s campaign against the Jews. Supporters of that decision point proudly to the triumph of Jesse Owens, while I point with dread to the Holocaust and world war. There is a price for tolerating intolerance.

Harvey Fierstein is an actor and playwright.

Just how low can the Republican party go?

Michael Cohen London Guardian

The GOP has become the heartless party of cutting food aid to the poor, abortion bans and denying people health coverageA sign at the 2012 Republican national convention in Tampa. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

What is the single most consequential political development of the past five years? Some might say the election (and re-election) of Barack Obama; others might point to the passage of the most important piece of social policy (Obamacare) since the 1960s; some might even say the drawing down of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in reality, it is the rapid descent of the Republican party into madness.

Never before in American history have we seen a political party so completely dominated and controlled by its extremist wing; and never before have we seen a political party that brings together the attributes of nihilism, heartlessness, radicalism and naked partisanship quite like the modern GOP. In a two-party system like America's, the result is unprecedented dysfunction.

Whether it was the promiscuous use of the filibuster and other blocking techniques in the Senate to stop President Obama's agenda; the manufactured fiscal crises highlighted by the disastrous debt limit showdown of 2011; or the unceasing efforts to undermine the economic recovery by blocking any and all measures to stimulate the economy, President Obama's first term was dominated by the Republican's unbridled obstructionism and disinterest in actually governing the country. That anything was accomplished is nothing short of a miracle.

But after the results of the 2012 election one might have expected the Republican fever to break and some level of sanity and good sense restored to the party of Lincoln.

Think again.

If anything, the first half of 2013 has seen the GOP continue its journey towards "peak awful". Go back to the beginning of the year. As millions of Americans were celebrating New Year's Eve, the Republicans were careening the country off the fiscal cliff because of their insistence that no rich person should ever pay a cent in higher taxes. The budgetary mania continued through the sequestration and refusal to compromise with President Obama even after he put the liberal sacred cow of Social Security on the table. Along the way Republicans foiled modest efforts at gun control, ginned up made-up scandals involving the IRS and the death of four Americans in Benghazi and couldn't actually be bothered with the difficult task of proposing public policy legislation. And after three years of complaining incessantly that Senate Democrats haven't passed a budget, key Republicans have spent the last 100 days obstructing the budget process.

But in the past few weeks things have actually gone from terrible to unimaginable. There's the GOP "Ebenezer Scrooge" Farm Bill, which would have cut food stamps by $20.5bn, causing nearly 2 million poor Americans to lose food assistance. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Republican House also passed an amendment to the bill that would force food stamp recipients to work in return for benefits, but provided no actual funds for job training. In fact, it even barred states from spending more money on employment and training. So if you're a poor person and you lose your job, you lose the government benefits that allow you to feed you family. This piece of monstrous legislative cruelty was supported by all but six House Republicans. Thankfully the larger bill failed, but Republican heartlessness has hardly been dimmed.

Across red state America, Republican legislators are doubling down on new abortion restrictions like those soon to become law in Wisconsin that would force women who want a constitutionally protected abortion to have, in some cases, a wand inserted into their vagina so they can see the fetus they are about to abort. In Ohio, the state recently enacted new anti-abortion laws that not only divert federal funds away from Planned Parenthood to anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers" where women are fed a witches brew of mistruths about the health risks of abortion.

Perhaps the worst case is in Texas, where a proposed law would ban any abortion after 20 weeks and allow precious few exceptions for the health of the mother or the condition of the fetus. So imagine if a woman goes in to see her doctor in the 21st week of her pregnancy and discovers that her baby is afflicted with a genetic anomaly. This is not a hypothetical since procedures like an amniocentesis are performed in the later stages of pregnancy and can detect such disorders. Under the Texas law, a woman would be forced to carry that baby to term. This is akin to state-sanctioned torture. And even if the woman's health were partially, but not severely at risk, abortions would be forbidden. Amazingly, this ban is actually more generous than the recent post-20 week abortion ban passed in the House of Representatives, which would have no exceptions except in the case of the life of the woman.

Texas legislators and Governor Rick Perry have defended these bans as part of their fierce regard and respect for human life. Unfortunately, that pro-life agenda is all too rarely applied to non-fetuses. For example, Texas also has one of the paltriest welfare programs in the US (recipients get less than $300 a month). The state has also consistently refused to take federal money to expand health insurance for children and Texas has joined two dozen other red states in refusing to take federal money to expand Medicaid for its poorest citizens.

The GOP's efforts to reject Medicaid expansion (which is a crucial part of Obamacare) are perhaps the best example of the Republican party's achievement of "peak awful". Even though under the provisions of the law the federal government would be picking up the tab for the first five years of the program and even though Republican governors like Rick Scott in Florida, Rick Snyder in Michigan and John Kasich in Ohio support the expansion, GOP legislators are balking. They plead fiscal rectitude as the root of their opposition (a fallacious claim) but in reality the opposition is yet another example of Republican psychosis about Obamacare. The decision to reject Medicaid money will not only increase the economic anxiety of potential recipients, it will harm mental health and literally cost lives. But such "humane" arguments have done little to shake GOP intransigence.

Indeed, Republicans on the national level are now doing everything in their power to ensure Obamacare fails. Just this past week, key GOP senators, after discovering that the Obama administration was working with major sports leagues to encourage people to sign up for coverage, wrote a stern letter threatening the leagues for partnering with the White House on a law that was passed along partisan lines and is "controversial". Hmm, wonder how that happened?

Now let's put aside for a second that Obamacare was passed by Congress and upheld by the US supreme court. Even if Republicans remain unhappy with the legislation it is the law of the land and its proper implementation is the responsibility of the federal government. But the GOP goal is not to make sure even what they believe to be a terribly flawed law works; it's to make sure it fails so that Democrats will be blamed and Republicans will reap the political benefit. That millions of Americans will be harmed and will suffer because of this narrow political agenda seems to be of little concern.

Then again, none of this should be a surprise to even sentient observers of American politics. In the narrow pursuit of political gain, Republicans have adopted an agenda that is quite simply, inhumane and cruel. Even if one is charitable and defends it on the ground of adherence to an ideological agenda of smaller, less intrusive government (except in the case of lady parts) it can't be defended. If one's ideological predisposition means denying food assistance to people who are laid off from their job or forcing a woman to carry a dead fetus to term or preventing individuals from getting health care coverage, then you have a monstrous ideology.

This is not meant as an indictment of all Republicans because it's very likely that many rank and file Republicans don't share these predispositions (though clearly some do). Rather it's an indictment of a once proud political party that is plumbing the depths of radicalism and nihilism and doesn't yet appear to have hit rock bottom.