Bradley Manning part of generation without loyalty

A month ago, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, herself a winner of the peace prize, joined the campaign, arguing that through his revelations Manning had not only ended the Iraq War (wrong) but also prevented US military intervention in Syria (implausible). She then compared him with Aung San Suu Kyi and the Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo who "were each awarded the prize in recent years while imprisoned by their home countries".

So much rhetorical overblow now surrounds the man who shared the US's secrets with WikiLeaks and hence the whole world, and much more will gust around us when he is finally sentenced, that it becomes difficult to concentrate on what the issues raised by his actions and his punishment actually are. Is it - pace Corrigan Maguire - about America's murderous wars? Is it about (as The New York Times charged) "a national security apparatus that has metastasised into a vast and largely unchecked exercise of government secrecy"? Does the Manning trial represent (as a leading writer in The Guardian charged) "not so much the beginning of a slippery slope for a democratic nation as a headlong plummet"?

We will encounter far more of these arguments than those at the other pole - limited to the US, it seems - who believe Manning is a treacherous and unstable symbol of a lack of discipline in US society. Those making such arguments may have been disappointed that Manning was found not guilty of the most serious charge - aiding the enemy.

It won't be a surprise to readers that, having described the extremities, this columnist argues why they should be avoided. And in the first instance, I would suggest that some of Manning's revelations - notably the video from a US Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 in which two Reuters journalists died - entirely fit the description of things that the public and the world needed to know. No organisation would have released that video voluntarily; only a whistleblower would have done it. Had Manning simply done what most whistleblowers do and made public those things he could not bear the public not to know, his position in the pantheon of doers of good would be easily agreed. However, he did something else. The same New York Times editorial cited earlier made almost comical reference to the fact that "Private Manning's original leaks seemed careless in some ways, including names and details of American operations that The (New York) Times and other organisations did not publish".

"Seemed careless in some ways" doesn't really quite cover the release of 700,000 classified US documents to WikiLeaks to do with whatever it wanted. There was no conceivable way in which Manning could have read even a proportion of those communications, let alone evaluated whether or not the whistle needed to be blown on them or used his non-existent expertise to decide if publication would be harmful. Handing all this over to someone with the sense of responsibility displayed by Julian Assange was like giving the keys to the drinks cupboard to a 13-year-old and going away for a long weekend.

And here one is obliged to point out again the problem of asymmetry. There are no Taliban Mannings, no Chinese Bradleys. It is a response more to the tone of his supporters rather than to their arguments to point out that a Russian Bradley Manning would have had a very bad time indeed.

A betrayer of his colleagues and of his commitments, perhaps, but Manning is not a traitor. Animated in the first instance by conscience (or something like conscience), he did not seek to escape the law, nor did he work for some other power. In that sense his actions should be seen as classic civil disobedience rather than whistleblowing.

For his supporters, this characterisation raises an awkward problem when it comes to his prosecution. If it is all right for Manning to act in this way should his conscience so dictate, would it also be acceptable for someone you don't agree with to act in a similar fashion?

If, say, a right-wing activist in the British Home Office gave an anti-migrant website the criminal records of all immigrants, would you regard that as justifiable? Or if an anti-abortion campaigner in Britain's National Health Service handed over lists of all those who had undergone more than one abortion?

When you think about those examples and then expand the principle to cover the entirety of government and official secrecy, then you can see why Manning had to be prosecuted and will have to serve time in prison. If Private First Class Bradley Manning can get away with breaching all the agreements he made when he became a soldier, why shouldn't everyone else?

I would like to see as small a sentence as can adequately make that point. Not least because a large amount of the material released by Manning did not really need to be classified.

A further effective admission of unnecessary secrecy was made yesterday when the US administration made public an earlier order to the communications company Verizon to hand over citizens' phone records. Probably rightly, it decided that it had more to fear from suspicions of what it was up to than from its actions being known.

There is one other point that democratic governments - and their peoples - have to consider when they think about secrets. Many leaving university this northern summer were nine years old on 9/11 and missed the Cold War altogether by three years. The sense of collective jeopardy that binds societies to ideas of blind duty and necessary sublimation is dissipating. At the same time this generation has lived their entire lives in the information cornucopia of the internet age. Their loyalty can never be assumed because they will take every case as their consciences (and their generational fashion) finds it. This is part maddening and part wonderful. It sends marvellous kids out around the globe to help people, but throws up Assanges, hacktivists and Snowdens whose understanding of the world is one-hundredth as sophisticated as they think it is. Put very bluntly, it is hard to know what you can trust such a generation with, because their loyalty has to be earned anew at every twist in the public road.

For myself, I think that part of the answer is to make as much open and transparent as we possibly can. I think it about government and I increasingly think it about citizens. And if it puts us at a temporary disadvantage when dealing with the Putins, then in the longer run I think we'll gain from i