Book Review: README.txt, by Chelsea Manning – New York Times

Though many of the facts here were previously known through extensive news reporting over more than a decade, Mannings memoir fills in some blanks and, most important, adds a searing personal element. The writing in README.txt is vivid, as its narrative moves from an Oklahoma childhood to community college in Maryland to an unpredictable decision to enlist brought about partly by dire financial need which eventually brought her to the Middle East. She describes the Army base east of Baghdad where she was first stationed in late 2009, with its constant acrid smell, as bleak and beige and above all boring.

Manning conjures, too, a different kind of torture: her court-martial, during much of which she was convinced she would be locked up for life. Lawyers might have reached a plea deal if Manning had been willing to admit to malicious intent but she resisted the pressure to make what she called a moral compromise. She disputed, all along, that aiding the enemy was either the intention or the result of her actions, and she refers to the former defense secretary Robert Gatess view, stated at a news conference, that the leaked information did no significant harm to U.S. foreign policy.

Although Mannings tale is troubling to read, it manages to be uplifting as well. In addition to describing the abuse she was so often subjected to, she writes of small but touching acts of kindness, as when one prison barber knowing how much she detested the ritual buzz-cutting of her hair because it meant she was being treated as a man asked if he could shape her eyebrows. From then on, hed thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was. That she and her advocates managed to get the U.S. military to agree to her gender-transitioning in prison, including providing hormone therapy, is remarkable; her sense of accomplishment in becoming her true self gives the memoir something of a redemptive ending.

Was she right to blow the whistle? Thats a debate that rages around the leaks of classified material by Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, Thomas Drake and others. Accusations of treason will never cease, nor will the claims, however dubious, that theres a better way to follow ones conscience either by advocating for change, legally and conscientiously, from the inside, or by leaving an organization to become an activist. No one who has followed those cases, however, can argue that the punishments have not been harsh. Reality Winner, who leaked a single classified report, was sent away for years as President Trump (himself no scrupulous handler of classified information, we now know) found the scapegoat for leaking to the press that he wanted. It seemed a fulfillment of what the F.B.I. director James B. Comey had earlier promised him: a head on a pike to make the point that leaking is unacceptable.

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Book Review: README.txt, by Chelsea Manning - New York Times