August 8, 2010
Early Struggles of Soldier Charged in Leak Case
By GINGER THOMPSON
Then he joined the Army, where, friends said, his social life was defined by the need to conceal his sexuality under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and he wasted brainpower fetching coffee for officers.
But it was around two years ago, when Pfc. Bradley Manning came here to visit a man he had fallen in love with, that he finally seemed to have found a place where he fit in, part of a social circle that included politically motivated computer hackers and his boyfriend, a self-described drag queen. So when his military career seemed headed nowhere good, Private Manning, 22, turned increasingly to those friends for moral support.
And now some of those friends say they wonder whether his desperation for acceptance — or delusions of grandeur — may have led him to disclose the largest trove of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers.
“I would always try to make clear to Brad that he had a promising future ahead of him,” said Daniel J. Clark, one of those
Blond and barely grown up, Private Manning worked as an intelligence analyst and was based east of
WikiLeaks has defended the disclosure, saying transparency is essential to democracy. The Pentagon has denounced the leaks, saying they put American soldiers and their Afghan allies in grave danger.
And while that dispute rages on, with the Pentagon having recently demanded that WikiLeaks remove all secret documents from the Internet and hand over any undisclosed materials in its files, Private Manning is being held in solitary confinement at Quantico, Va., under suicide watch.
Private Manning’s military-appointed lawyer, Maj. Thomas F. Hurley, declined an interview request.
Much remains unknown about his journey there from Crescent,
“I’ve been isolated so long,” Private Manning wrote in May to Mr. Lamo, who turned the chat logs over to the authorities and the news media. “But events kept forcing me to figure out ways to survive.”
Survival was something Private Manning began learning as a young child in Crescent. His father, Brian Manning, was also a soldier and spent a lot of time away from home, former neighbors recalled. His mother, Susan Manning, struggled to cope with the culture shock of having moved to the
One neighbor, Jacqueline Radford, recalled that when students at Private Manning’s elementary school went on field trips, she sent additional food or money to make sure he had something to eat.
“I’ve always tried to be supportive of him because of his home life,” Ms. Radford said. “I know it was bad, to where he was left to his own, had to fend for himself.”
At school, Bradley Manning was clearly different from most of his peers. He preferred hacking computer games rather than playing them, former neighbors said. And they said he seemed opinionated beyond his years about politics, religion, and even about keeping religion out of politics.
In his Bible Belt hometown that he once mockingly wrote in an e-mail had “more pews than people,” Private Manning refused to recite the parts of the Pledge of Allegiance that referred to God or do homework assignments that involved the Scriptures. And if a teacher challenged his views, former classmates said, he was quick to push back.
“He would get upset, slam books on the desk if people wouldn’t listen to him or understand his point of view,” said Chera Moore, who attended elementary and junior high school with him. “He would get really mad, and the teacher would say, ‘O.K., Bradley, get out.’ ”
It was something he would hear a lot throughout his life.
After Private Manning’s parents divorced, he moved with his mother to Haverfordwest,
Former students at his school there, Tasker Milward, remembered Private Manning being teased for all sort of reasons. His American accent. His love of Dr Pepper. The amount of time he spent huddled before a computer.
And then, students began to suspect he was gay.
Sometimes, former classmates said, he reacted to the teasing by idly boasting about stealing other students’ girlfriends. At other times, he openly flirted with boys. Often, with only the slightest provocation, he would launch into fits of rage.
“It was probably the worst experience anybody could go through,” said Rowan John, a former classmate who was openly gay in high school. “Being different like me, or Bradley, in the middle of nowhere is like going back in time to the Dark Ages.”
But life ahead did not immediately brighten for Private Manning. After his troubled high school years, his mother sent him back to
He was hired and quickly fired from a small software company, where his employer, Kord Campbell, recalled him as clean-cut and highly intelligent with an almost innate sense for programming, as well as the personality of a bull in a china shop. Then his father found out he was gay and kicked him out of the house, friends said. Mr. Clark, the Cambridge friend, said Private Manning told him he lived out of his car briefly while he worked in a series of minimum-wage retail jobs.
He enlisted in the Army in 2007, to try to give his life some direction and to help to pay for college, friends said.
He was granted a security clearance and trained as an intelligence analyst at
Before being deployed to
Friends said Private Manning found the atmosphere here to be everything the Army was not: openly accepting of his geeky side, his liberal political opinions, his relationship with Mr. Watkins and his ambition to do something that would get attention.
Although hacking has come to mean a lot of different things, at its core, those who do it say, is the philosophy that information should be free and accessible to all. And Private Manning had access to some of the most secret information on the planet.
Meanwhile, his military career was anything but stellar. He had been reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer. He wrote in e-mails that he felt “regularly ignored” by his superiors “except when I had something essential, then it was back to ‘Bring me coffee, then sweep the floor.’ ”
And it seems the more isolated he felt in the military — he wore custom dog tags that said “Humanist,” and friends said he kept a toy fairy wand on his desk in
According to Wired magazine, Private Manning told Mr. Watkins last January that he had gotten his hands on a secret video showing a military helicopter attack that killed two Reuters photographers and one Iraqi civilian.
In a computer chat with Mr. Lamo, Private Manning said he gave the video to WikiLeaks in February. Then, after WikiLeaks released it in April, Private Manning hounded Mr. Watkins about whether there had been any public reaction. “That was one of his major concerns once he’d done this,” Mr. Watkins told Wired. “Was it really going to make a difference?”
In his computer chats with Mr. Lamo, Private Manning described how he downloaded the video and lip-synched to Lady Gaga as he copied hundreds of thousand of diplomatic cables.
“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack,” he boasted. But even as he professed a perhaps inflated sense of purpose, he called himself “emotionally fractured” and a “wreck” and said he was “self-medicating like crazy.”
And as he faces the possibility of a lifetime in prison, some of Private Manning’s remarks now seem somewhat prophetic.
“I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed so much,” he wrote, “if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press.”
Ben Fenwick contributed reporting from Oklahoma City, and Ravi Somaiya from Haverfordwest, Wales. Toby Lyles contributed research.
Astrid Riecken/European Pressphoto Agency
Demonstrators in
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
Donations can be sent to the
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment