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Harvard dean rescinds Obama pooper pumper Bradley Manning's visiting fellow invitation, calling it a 'mistake'
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Sep 18, 2017, 10:48:03 PM9/18/17
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/09/14/former-cia-
directors-shun-harvard-after-the-school-invites-chelsea-manning-to-
campus/?utm_term=.3d1853fd0312
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government rescinded a visiting fellowship
offered to Chelsea Manning, the former military intelligence analyst who
spent seven years in prison for leaking classified government secrets,
after the university faced forceful backlash from CIA Director Mike Pompeo
among others.
“I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a
mistake, for which I accept responsibility,” Douglas W. Elmendorf, the
school’s dean, wrote in a 700-word statement released shortly after
midnight Friday.
Manning was one of four visiting fellows announced two days earlier by the
Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. As part of the program, visiting
fellows appear on Harvard’s campus for speaking engagements and events,
interacting with undergraduate students on “topical issues of today,” the
school’s initial announcement explained.
Elmendorf decided to withdraw the invitation after realizing that “many
people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific,” though the school
had not intended to “honor [Manning] in any way or to endorse any of her
words or deeds.”
She is still welcome to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak at the
school’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the dean said.
“I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have
heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our
original invitation,” Elmendorf added.
Manning’s website generates an automatic response to media requests and
indicates she’s not giving interviews.
On Twitter, however, she accused the school of suppressing “marginalized
voices” and caving to pressure from the CIA.
The dean’s decision came only hours after Pompeo withdrew from a planned
appearance at the Kennedy School and chastised the institution for calling
attention to Manning. In a biting letter to the event’s organizers,
Pompeo, who earned a law degree from Harvard, branded Manning an “American
traitor” whose actions and ethos contradicted the intelligence agency’s
most basic and sacred values.
“Harvard’s actions,” Pompeo added, “implicitly tell its students that you
too can be a fellow at Harvard and a felon under United States law. … I
believe it is shameful for Harvard to place its stamp of approval upon her
treasonous actions.”
Pompeo’s blustery withdrawal from Thursday’s event joined a chorus of
denunciation from national security experts, military veterans and others.
Earlier Thursday, in a stern letter of his own, Michael Morell, a former
CIA leader who spent more than three decades at the agency, resigned from
Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He had been
a fellow there since September 2013. The school’s invitation to Manning,
Morell said, all but endorsed her decision to break the law.
“I have an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to
stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national
security information,” wrote Morell, 59, who twice served as the CIA’s
acting director and retired in 2013 as the agency’s second-in-command.
Pompeo praised Morell’s decision to resign, writing in his letter that
Harvard “traded a respected individual who served his country with dignity
for one who served it with disgrace.”
The dean’s decision came only hours after Pompeo withdrew from a planned
appearance at the Kennedy School and chastised the institution for calling
attention to Manning. In a biting letter to the event’s organizers,
Pompeo, who earned a law degree from Harvard, branded Manning an “American
traitor” whose actions and ethos contradicted the intelligence agency’s
most basic and sacred values.
“Harvard’s actions,” Pompeo added, “implicitly tell its students that you
too can be a fellow at Harvard and a felon under United States law. … I
believe it is shameful for Harvard to place its stamp of approval upon her
treasonous actions.”
Pompeo’s blustery withdrawal from Thursday’s event joined a chorus of
denunciation from national security experts, military veterans and others.
Earlier Thursday, in a stern letter of his own, Michael Morell, a former
CIA leader who spent more than three decades at the agency, resigned from
Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He had been
a fellow there since September 2013. The school’s invitation to Manning,
Morell said, all but endorsed her decision to break the law.
“I have an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to
stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national
security information,” wrote Morell, 59, who twice served as the CIA’s
acting director and retired in 2013 as the agency’s second-in-command.
Pompeo praised Morell’s decision to resign, writing in his letter that
Harvard “traded a respected individual who served his country with dignity
for one who served it with disgrace.”
Manning, 29, is transgender. As an Army private first class named Bradley
Manning, she was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 35 years in
prison for providing thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, which
Pompeo and Morell characterized as “an adversarial foreign intelligence
service.”
Supporters of the site’s founder, Julian Assange, consider him a champion
for transparency whose public disclosures of sensitive information are in
protest of government overreach.
On Thursday, Assange assailed Pompeo’s withdrawal from his Harvard
appearance.
President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s prison sentence before leaving
office, and she was freed in May from the military’s supermax prison at
Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Since then, Manning has been a prominent voice for
LGBT rights and routinely writes about “the social, technological and
economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence,” as Harvard’s
fellowship announcement noted.
Manning has said “a responsibility to the public” compelled her to leak
government secrets. But her harshest critics describe those actions as
traitorous, having put deployed U.S. troops at risk. President Trump and
lawmakers from both political parties have questioned Obama’s decision to
commute her prison sentence, which he called disproportionate when
measured against the punishment meted out to other whistleblowers.
Like the Obama administration, Trump’s White House has struggled to
curtail information leaks. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster issued
a memo this month to leaders throughout the federal government, imploring
them to conduct an hour-long training session next week. Pompeo, in
particular, has prioritized this matter, calling it a leading reason for
his decision to have the agency’s Counterintelligence Mission Center
report directly to him.
[At CIA, a watchful eye on Mike Pompeo, the president’s ardent ally]
The Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy announced a broad range of
visiting fellows for the 2017-2018 academic year, including Sean Spicer,
President Trump’s short-lived White House press secretary, and Corey
Lewandowski, who was fired as Trump’s campaign manager several months
before the election.
Manning noted their participation shortly after Elmendorf, the dean, said
he was withdrawing her invitation to serve as a visiting fellow.
In selecting Manning for a fellowship, Elmendorf said, Kennedy School
officials felt they were keeping with the program’s guiding objective,
which is to expose students to individuals whose words or actions
influence world events — “even if they do not share our values and even if
their actions or words are abhorrent to some members of our community,” he
noted.
“We do this not to endorse those actions or legitimize those words, but
because engaging with people with fundamentally different worldviews can
help us to become better public leaders,” he wrote. “Because controversy
pervades many questions in politics and public policy, some speakers are
controversial. While we do not shy away from that controversy, we insist
that all speakers take questions, and these questions are often hard and
challenging ones.
“Hearing a very wide range of views, regardless of what members of our
community think about the people offering those views, is fundamental to
the learning process at the Kennedy School.”
He added that “I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what
members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s
visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the
values of public service to which we aspire. This balance is not always
easy to determine, and reasonable people can disagree about where to
strike the balance for specific people. Any determination should start
with the presumption that more speech is better than less.
“In retrospect, though, I think my assessment of that balance for Chelsea
Manning was wrong.”
Harvard fellow and former congressman Jason Chaffetz said the dean’s
decision to revoke Manning’s invitation was “the right call.”
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who was in the same class
of fellows with Manning, expressed the same sentiment. Speaking on Fox
News’ “Fox and Friends” Friday, he said that while there is a need for an
open and honest discussion of ideas, “it is quite another to take someone
who has been a traitor to his country… and invite them to be part of the
process.”
The school’s initial announcement suggested Manning’s advocacy on LGBT
issues would be a focal point during her campus visit, and that
discussions with students might center on the social challenges associated
with being transgender in the military.
At Trump’s direction, the Pentagon is studying how to implement his ban on
transgender men and women in the armed forces. In their letters, Pompeo
and Morell specifically sought to distance themselves from any suggestion
their decisions were motivated by Manning’s choice to become a woman or
publicly discuss her crimes.
“But it is my right,” Morell added, “indeed my duty, to argue that the
School’s decision is wholly inappropriate and to protest it by resigning
from the Kennedy School — in order to make the point that leaking
classified information is disgraceful and damaging to our nation.”
directors-shun-harvard-after-the-school-invites-chelsea-manning-to-
campus/?utm_term=.3d1853fd0312
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government rescinded a visiting fellowship
offered to Chelsea Manning, the former military intelligence analyst who
spent seven years in prison for leaking classified government secrets,
after the university faced forceful backlash from CIA Director Mike Pompeo
among others.
“I now think that designating Chelsea Manning as a Visiting Fellow was a
mistake, for which I accept responsibility,” Douglas W. Elmendorf, the
school’s dean, wrote in a 700-word statement released shortly after
midnight Friday.
Manning was one of four visiting fellows announced two days earlier by the
Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. As part of the program, visiting
fellows appear on Harvard’s campus for speaking engagements and events,
interacting with undergraduate students on “topical issues of today,” the
school’s initial announcement explained.
Elmendorf decided to withdraw the invitation after realizing that “many
people view a Visiting Fellow title as an honorific,” though the school
had not intended to “honor [Manning] in any way or to endorse any of her
words or deeds.”
She is still welcome to spend a day at the Kennedy School and speak at the
school’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, the dean said.
“I apologize to her and to the many concerned people from whom I have
heard today for not recognizing upfront the full implications of our
original invitation,” Elmendorf added.
Manning’s website generates an automatic response to media requests and
indicates she’s not giving interviews.
On Twitter, however, she accused the school of suppressing “marginalized
voices” and caving to pressure from the CIA.
The dean’s decision came only hours after Pompeo withdrew from a planned
appearance at the Kennedy School and chastised the institution for calling
attention to Manning. In a biting letter to the event’s organizers,
Pompeo, who earned a law degree from Harvard, branded Manning an “American
traitor” whose actions and ethos contradicted the intelligence agency’s
most basic and sacred values.
“Harvard’s actions,” Pompeo added, “implicitly tell its students that you
too can be a fellow at Harvard and a felon under United States law. … I
believe it is shameful for Harvard to place its stamp of approval upon her
treasonous actions.”
Pompeo’s blustery withdrawal from Thursday’s event joined a chorus of
denunciation from national security experts, military veterans and others.
Earlier Thursday, in a stern letter of his own, Michael Morell, a former
CIA leader who spent more than three decades at the agency, resigned from
Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He had been
a fellow there since September 2013. The school’s invitation to Manning,
Morell said, all but endorsed her decision to break the law.
“I have an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to
stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national
security information,” wrote Morell, 59, who twice served as the CIA’s
acting director and retired in 2013 as the agency’s second-in-command.
Pompeo praised Morell’s decision to resign, writing in his letter that
Harvard “traded a respected individual who served his country with dignity
for one who served it with disgrace.”
The dean’s decision came only hours after Pompeo withdrew from a planned
appearance at the Kennedy School and chastised the institution for calling
attention to Manning. In a biting letter to the event’s organizers,
Pompeo, who earned a law degree from Harvard, branded Manning an “American
traitor” whose actions and ethos contradicted the intelligence agency’s
most basic and sacred values.
“Harvard’s actions,” Pompeo added, “implicitly tell its students that you
too can be a fellow at Harvard and a felon under United States law. … I
believe it is shameful for Harvard to place its stamp of approval upon her
treasonous actions.”
Pompeo’s blustery withdrawal from Thursday’s event joined a chorus of
denunciation from national security experts, military veterans and others.
Earlier Thursday, in a stern letter of his own, Michael Morell, a former
CIA leader who spent more than three decades at the agency, resigned from
Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He had been
a fellow there since September 2013. The school’s invitation to Manning,
Morell said, all but endorsed her decision to break the law.
“I have an obligation to my conscience — and I believe to the country — to
stand up against any efforts to justify leaks of sensitive national
security information,” wrote Morell, 59, who twice served as the CIA’s
acting director and retired in 2013 as the agency’s second-in-command.
Pompeo praised Morell’s decision to resign, writing in his letter that
Harvard “traded a respected individual who served his country with dignity
for one who served it with disgrace.”
Manning, 29, is transgender. As an Army private first class named Bradley
Manning, she was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 35 years in
prison for providing thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, which
Pompeo and Morell characterized as “an adversarial foreign intelligence
service.”
Supporters of the site’s founder, Julian Assange, consider him a champion
for transparency whose public disclosures of sensitive information are in
protest of government overreach.
On Thursday, Assange assailed Pompeo’s withdrawal from his Harvard
appearance.
President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s prison sentence before leaving
office, and she was freed in May from the military’s supermax prison at
Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Since then, Manning has been a prominent voice for
LGBT rights and routinely writes about “the social, technological and
economic ramifications of Artificial Intelligence,” as Harvard’s
fellowship announcement noted.
Manning has said “a responsibility to the public” compelled her to leak
government secrets. But her harshest critics describe those actions as
traitorous, having put deployed U.S. troops at risk. President Trump and
lawmakers from both political parties have questioned Obama’s decision to
commute her prison sentence, which he called disproportionate when
measured against the punishment meted out to other whistleblowers.
Like the Obama administration, Trump’s White House has struggled to
curtail information leaks. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster issued
a memo this month to leaders throughout the federal government, imploring
them to conduct an hour-long training session next week. Pompeo, in
particular, has prioritized this matter, calling it a leading reason for
his decision to have the agency’s Counterintelligence Mission Center
report directly to him.
[At CIA, a watchful eye on Mike Pompeo, the president’s ardent ally]
The Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy announced a broad range of
visiting fellows for the 2017-2018 academic year, including Sean Spicer,
President Trump’s short-lived White House press secretary, and Corey
Lewandowski, who was fired as Trump’s campaign manager several months
before the election.
Manning noted their participation shortly after Elmendorf, the dean, said
he was withdrawing her invitation to serve as a visiting fellow.
In selecting Manning for a fellowship, Elmendorf said, Kennedy School
officials felt they were keeping with the program’s guiding objective,
which is to expose students to individuals whose words or actions
influence world events — “even if they do not share our values and even if
their actions or words are abhorrent to some members of our community,” he
noted.
“We do this not to endorse those actions or legitimize those words, but
because engaging with people with fundamentally different worldviews can
help us to become better public leaders,” he wrote. “Because controversy
pervades many questions in politics and public policy, some speakers are
controversial. While we do not shy away from that controversy, we insist
that all speakers take questions, and these questions are often hard and
challenging ones.
“Hearing a very wide range of views, regardless of what members of our
community think about the people offering those views, is fundamental to
the learning process at the Kennedy School.”
He added that “I think we should weigh, for each potential visitor, what
members of the Kennedy School community could learn from that person’s
visit against the extent to which that person’s conduct fulfills the
values of public service to which we aspire. This balance is not always
easy to determine, and reasonable people can disagree about where to
strike the balance for specific people. Any determination should start
with the presumption that more speech is better than less.
“In retrospect, though, I think my assessment of that balance for Chelsea
Manning was wrong.”
Harvard fellow and former congressman Jason Chaffetz said the dean’s
decision to revoke Manning’s invitation was “the right call.”
Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who was in the same class
of fellows with Manning, expressed the same sentiment. Speaking on Fox
News’ “Fox and Friends” Friday, he said that while there is a need for an
open and honest discussion of ideas, “it is quite another to take someone
who has been a traitor to his country… and invite them to be part of the
process.”
The school’s initial announcement suggested Manning’s advocacy on LGBT
issues would be a focal point during her campus visit, and that
discussions with students might center on the social challenges associated
with being transgender in the military.
At Trump’s direction, the Pentagon is studying how to implement his ban on
transgender men and women in the armed forces. In their letters, Pompeo
and Morell specifically sought to distance themselves from any suggestion
their decisions were motivated by Manning’s choice to become a woman or
publicly discuss her crimes.
“But it is my right,” Morell added, “indeed my duty, to argue that the
School’s decision is wholly inappropriate and to protest it by resigning
from the Kennedy School — in order to make the point that leaking
classified information is disgraceful and damaging to our nation.”
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