On the weekend the Guardian headlined an investigative report on the personal history of Bradley Manning. The question the Guardian raises as the imperative behind its ‘investigation’ is: ‘Why did the US army ignore warnings from officers that Manning was unstable?’ ‘Unstable’ apparently refers to Manning’s mental state before he was sent to Iraq and plugged himself into SIPRNet. The implication of the Guardian’s question seems to be that if the US military had weeded out this nutjob early enough, they would have saved themselves a whole lot of trouble. The Guardian’s reporting is frankly shoddy, poorly written, sensationalised and generally very strange, and for all its claims to be investigative, seems to contain a lot of information already publicly available.

Manning’s history is spottily told by the Guardian, and relies on odd bits of information, neighbourhood gossip, and so on. What is already known, despite the Guardian’s breathless tones, is that Manning’s parents divorced when he was thirteen and his mother was drinking heavily, for reasons that are unclear, but were most likely connected with her marriage and subsequent relocation to the US from her native Wales, and her husband’s frequent absences from home. Given that people generally don’t drink heavily and consistently when life is hunky dory, we can probably assume that life in the Manning household was unhappy, stressful and had been for a long time. After his parents divorce Manning moved with his mother, back to the country of her birth. At his new school in a new country Manning was friendless and badly bullied, or as the Guardian quaintly puts it, ‘teased’. He also began to understand that he was gay. At age seventeen, and having come out, Manning went back to the US to live with his father and his new wife and her son. A couple of years later, says the Guardian, Manning’s step-mother called the police saying Manning was ‘out of control’. For the next year Manning was homeless, either couch-surfing or living in his car. It was at this point that he began to think about joining the armed forces. He thought the army would be a route to university, a way of climbing out a hopeless situation.

‘He was far from typical soldier material,’ says the Guardian. ‘He was smart, gay, physically weak and politically astute.’ On the other hand one could say that Manning looks exactly like ‘soldier material’, like standard US army fodder, a poor white kid from a broken and unhappy home with an absent father and a dislocated mother drinking heavily to cope with her unhappiness. He was miserable, homeless, broke, lonely, and with zero prospects (in the way that only poor Americans can have no prospects). As Manning later said in his email conversation with the strange Adrian Lamo, ‘Events kept forcing me to figure out ways to survive … [I was] smart enough to know what’s going on, but helpless to do anything … no-one took any notice of me’.

But within a month of joining up Manning had been sent to the discharge unit. That is, he was bombing out of basic training and the army wanted him out. As he had in school Manning found himself being repeatedly bullied, only this time not by unsympathetic Welsh kids to whom an Oklahoman teenager was as weird as someone from outer space, but bullied by professionals, and bullied so badly that on several occasions, says the Guardian he ‘wet himself’, that is, involuntarily urinated out of fear.

Anyway, with the US military being short of cannon-fodder for its Iraq adventure, Manning was passed fit for active service in mid-2008, and posted to the US while waiting to be deployed to Iraq as an intelligence analyst. While back in the US Manning formed his first serious relationship, and found himself with a circle of friends, some of who moved in hacker circles. But in late 2009, the 21-year-old Manning was trucked off to Iraq, to Forward Operating Base Hammer. The Guardian says that FOB Hammer is located near the Iranian border. In fact, it’s 40 miles east of Baghdad, and 70 miles west of the border, out in the middle of the desert. To say that FOB Hammer was a shit-hole is probably to unfairly malign places of defecation. Hammer had an endemic culture of bullying. Everyone at FOB Hammer was terminally bored and for entertainment, soldiers downloaded porn, played video games and watched classified military footage on SIPRNet, including drone attacks and footage of civilian beings gunned down by Apaches. Passwords for SIPRNet were freely available to anyone who wanted one.

The Guardian through its crap report, written in the furtive tones of a neighbourhood gossip who claims to be doing a public service, draws a picture of Bradley Manning as an unpredictable young man with unspecified psychiatric problems, too ‘unstable’ to be in the military and prone to violent and irrational outbursts. Three weeks before his arrest and two weeks before he first contacted Adrian Lamo, the Guardian says that Manning allegedly punched a senior officer, a woman, in the face. No context is given for this behaviour (you have to work out for yourself the timeline) and without context it just becomes another incident that confirms Manning’s wacko nature. In fact all of Manning’s history, the context of his life, a life in which so many disastrous choices were made for him, is ignored by the Guardian, or treated as titillating information that confirms his ‘instability’. On the basis, it seems to me, of the same report that states that to be stable enough to get through US army basic training one needs to be skilled in high-grade bullying, and mentally distressed enough to think that downloading war porn is an OK way to pass the time.

So the answer to the Guardian’s non-question ‘Why did the US army ignore warnings from officers that Manning was unstable?’ is that Manning wasn’t ‘unstable’ at all in the sense that the Guardian article implies – but unable to cope with bullying so severe that he pissed himself, and drastically misjudged what being in the military would actually be like. Manning has a history of profound loss, of years of bullying wherever he turned, of feeling that he was let down by pretty much everyone who had ever been significant in his life, his parents, his lover, friends, schools, colleagues, the army and finally his country. Manning has been subject to all sorts of strange descriptions of his mental state, even from those sympathetic to his cause, and perhaps it is just too hard to understand what life must be like for him, what his life was like when he wiped those Lady GaGa CD’s and started downloading files from SIPRNet.

The publicity around Manning’s detention has generated some improvement in his conditions. A lot of people have shown a good deal of courage in standing up for Manning, speaking out when it would be very convenient not to. The Guardian’s latest report, shoddy, gossipy, mealy-mouthed, and about as investigative as Who Weekly, comes as something of a surprise from a newspaper that while not always free from tabloid prose and priorities has at least had the intelligence and ethical courage to publish the cables that Wikileaks released, and give them prominence and analysis that few other media outlets would be prepared to do. Why on earth they led their weekend edition with this transparently material is anybody’s guess. It doesn’t help Manning, doesn’t help anyone’s understanding of his case or the issues surrounding his actions, and in effect damns him with faint praise. It’s weird stuff, and whether someone just fell asleep at the wheel or whether something else is going on in the politics of the Guardian’s offices is unclear, but it’s not a good look.