Yesterday, former acting CIA Director Michael Morrell resigned his position at Harvard to protest the school’s Institute of Politics’ fellowship offer to former Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning, who as PFC Bradley Manning, was troubled by actions of military personnel in Afghanistan and thus passed along secret military information to WikiLeaks. Late word has come down that Harvard has rescinded that disputed fellowship offer. I think the school belatedly made the right decision.
If Harvard is looking to have a transgender fellow for its Institute of Politics, surely the number of transgender individuals is such that Harvard can look a little harder and do better than to hire someone who gave confidential military information to WikiLeaks. If Harvard is looking to have a Fellow with ground-level knowledge of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are literally thousands of former Marine and Army squad leaders who led troops and interacted with the native population in both peace and war – black, white, male, female, liberal, conservative, gay, straight, etc. It’s a population large enough that if Harvard looks hard enough, it can pretty much find exactly what it wants ideologically without resorting to someone who gave away secrets. Plus, they could offer a more granular level of knowledge of what it’s like to be front-line soldier. Former Private First Class Manning manned a computer at an operations center; it’s relevant, but it’s not front-line knowledge.
I understand PFC Manning’s deep concerns about some ways in which the war was being conducted. But that’s why there’s an Inspector General in each Army division. There was a legal way to raise a red flag and it would have been well within PFC Manning’s rights and responsibility to do so. But PFC Manning chose a path that was illegal and potentially dangerous for fellow American servicemembers. And that’s just not okay with Director Morrell and the vast majority of American soldiers.
-1TF