Review: README.txt by Chelsea Manning

Readme.txt

I remember back in the days when Bradley Manning had become famous for outing secrets of the abuse of power by powers that be. However, some time later, it was Chelsea Manning who was being named. In those days, I had no idea of trans issues and was sort of confused that why is Bradley being called Chelsea and what’s with this ‘transition’? How can a man transition into a woman by growing long hair? Identities are complex and had no idea about transitioning and other related topics.

Nevertheless, README.txt is an important chronicle of how Bradley grows up in a broken household, struggles to find a footing in life, and often disdains authority. His experiences of longing for belonging and growing up in a conservative America and then experiencing homelessness are touching and makes one understand the struggles he had to go through. Somehow he ends up joining the U.S. Forces after walking into their recruitment camp. But his struggles don’t end there. He tells you how, as a trans person, he constantly faced harrassment. He was good with computers from a very young age, and that’s what propelled him to be in Intelligence in Iraq. However, the journey wasn’t as straightforward.

The interesting bits of the story for most readers would be where he starts uploading classified war material onto Wikileaks, including the infamous Collateral Damage video from Iraq. He writes about the lax information security practices which exist, like the ability to copy data just by plugging in a USB, or writing data to DVDs which could just be carried over to one’s personal barracks. He was however outed as someone who was uploading these secrets by Adrian Lamo, the disgraced hacker who was contacted by Bradley to garner support and advice for making these acts of the U.S. in Iraq more visible to the world. Lamo told the agencies about this and Bradley was arrested. Bradley’s arrest is painful to read to put it mildly. He writes about this cage in Kuwait where he is put in solitary.

After years of struggle and intentional bureaucratic wrangling, he is sentenced. However, Obama, the same guy who doubled down on dissenters and leakers, pardons Bradley (now Chelsea), probably in an effort to burnish his own image, apparently fearful how he would be remembered. Chelsea however is not bereft of biases against Trump and conservatives. He clubs his own sufferings and then goes on an unintelligent tirade that all minorities of colour, gender, religion are being persecuted.

It’s an important book to be read to understand how authoritarian U.S. works when something doesn’t suit it.

Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Permanent Record

I was quite surprised that Edward Snowden wrote this book. Because he had categorically stated, when he had exposed spying by American agencies like NSA, CIA etc., that he wanted the focus on the various programs of surveillance and spying and not on him. He had purposefully kept himself out of spotlight by giving very few interviews. The writing of this book may have been motivated by financial reasons because Snowden’s assets had been frozen by the US authorities.

Snowden is not only intelligent but also courageous. He exposed the evil ways in which NSA and the likes went unhindered in their assault on freedom of regular citizens like you and I.

This book provides details of Snowden growing up and being a computer geek right childhood due to his dad. And then he decides not to continue his education beyond high school. However he did get a job as a security guard and due to lax intake requirements back then and the overwhelming open positions, he was taken in later in a technical position. Snowden exposes not only the various different programs used by the government to spy, but also how embassies worldwide have become only spots for surveillance and nothing more. He writes how he went to Switzerland and Japan to strengthen the data collection practices. He also is unabashedly critical of the main stream media (not as much as Greenwald though).

Towards the end, Snowden recounts his escape from Hong Kong and how, while at Moscow airport, is interrogated by the Russian agents and asked to cooperate with them so they could take care of him. Ultimately he refused and stayed there for many months. Finally, because he was attracting too much attention at the airport, he was given permit to exit the Moscow airport. He has lived in Russia since then.

‘Permanent Record’ is a must read book. It should be made mandatory in schools and colleges and I wish it becomes a manifesto of sorts for our freedom and tyranny of governments and technology.

Review: The Divider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

The Divider

It has become fashionable to criticize Trump and get away with it. Most of the book covers about Trump (and Putin and Xi / China) have a blazing red or blood red cover. This one, for a change, has a more classy white with a sliver of black. This book is hefty, and will take a good amount of time for one to cover, because it is so detailed as to literally have statements in double-quotes on almost every page.

When Trump won in 2016, I was quite happy and still sort of support him because he was an outsider in the sense of being a non-politician. Politicians have milked the system for too long for their own benefits, and hence an outsider, an entrepreneur at that, was a good thing. Of course Trump has an abrasive personality and he did not tone it down when he became the most powerful man on earth. I first saw Trump in the Apprentice show back in 2000s. I loved his style and his signature line “you are fired”. I remember reading in New Yorker in 2015 how paid actors were asked to appear at a Trump rally and the author was sort of happy that they (or whoever) had exposed it. Am sure New Yorker was stunned at the election results.

The book covers the entire period of Trump in White House and does manage to show that there was lot of infighting and chaos behind the scenes. To top it, Trump’s habit of tweeting to the world and then his team getting to know of his decision did not help one bit. But he surely did take lot of strong decisions and rankled up the leftist ecosystem who had led the country astray with their stupid policies. The most powerful nation cannot stop illegal immigrants from crossing over the border? Trump promised the wall, but of course could not complete it because of obvious lack of support in the House.

However, the focus of this book and its authors (they wrote for NYT itself should be a clear indicator) is to show that Trump and his White House never did even one thing correctly. No wonder I don’t take these kinds of books too seriously lest they cloud my thinking. Obama and his administration lied about how Osama bin Laden was killed and then even supplanted their fake theory in Zero Dark Thirty. Whereas Trump got Baghdadi and Soleimani killed, yet never got any credit in NYT or WaPo. Am not getting into the merits or demerits of killing Soleimani, but just bringing forth the point that when you read only NYT and WaPo, you will never read one thing positive about Trump or Republicans. That Trump ordered the pull out from Afghanistan did not merit praise, that he did not start any new military operations anywhere did not merit praise, that he cornered China did not merit praise, that he did as best as could to combat Covid pandemic and the economic fallout did not merit praise.

So with that in mind, you should definitely read this book for understanding how Trump operated and his antics upset many leaders like Merkel and Trudeau.