Longreads Pick
For most of the past year, Manning spent 23 hours a day alone in a 6-by-12-foot jail cell. His case has become a rallying point for free-information activists, who say the leaked information belongs to the American people. They compare the 23-year-old former intelligence analyst to Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers, and decry excessive government secrecy. “What is happening to our government when Bradley Manning is charged with aiding the enemy?” asked Pete Perry, an organizer with the Bradley Manning Support Network. “Who is the enemy? Information? The American people?”
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Published: May 5, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,972 words)
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Longreads Pick
“I’ve got a brother,” she finally says. “He’s a disabled vet from Vietnam. We haven’t heard from him in a while, so I think he might be deceased. I’m a realist.” Bina48’s eyes whir downward. “He was doing great for the first ten years after Vietnam. His wife got pregnant, and she had a baby, and he was doing a little worse, and then she had a second baby and he went kooky. Just crazy.” “In what way did he go crazy?” I ask. I can feel my heart pound. Talking to Bina48 has just become extraordinary. This woman who won’t meet the media is talking with me, compellingly, through her robot doppelgänger, and it is a fluid insight into a remarkable, if painful, family life.
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Published: Mar 8, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,721 words)
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Longreads Pick
From 2009: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan. “…Holbrooke couldn’t stop invoking the war of his youth. From Kabul, he called the journalist Stanley Karnow, an old friend, and put him on the phone with General McChrystal to discuss the lessons of Vietnam. He mentioned Vietnam in staff meetings in Washington, and he brought it up in a speech to American Embassy personnel on my last day in Kabul: ‘Having been in similar circumstances earlier in my career, in another war—as they say, in a distant galaxy and another time—I know what it’s like to be out here in difficult conditions without your family.'”
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Published: Sep 29, 2009
Length: 59 minutes (14,846 words)
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The Pentagon Papers Trial
There were, inevitably, some individuals who spoke up eloquently, providing dramatic courtroom examples of Americana and of the war’s impact upon society. Jan Sirois, a 24-year-old divorced mother of two from a military family, said that the only publication she ever read was Hairdo magazine, a supplement to studies at a beauticians’ school. Her brother had served with the CIA in Vietnam, she revealed; but she insisted upon her ability to disregard his opinion or that of her father, who “has strong feelings on things like secrecy at the top.” Just as she was leaving the courtroom after her second round of individual questioning, she blurted out, “I think a person who has access, if they find something wrong, they have a moral obligation and should let the public know….”
By Sanford J. Ungar, The Atlantic, 1972
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Longreads Pick
Why Afghanistan is not Obama’s Vietnam.
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Published: Jul 28, 2009
Length: 15 minutes (3,943 words)
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