The Passion of Bradley Manning (9 page)
Even beyond these intentional leaks, it turns out that the security apparatus itself is anything but an airtight vessel. The institutional landscape of the secrecy regime is in chaos. With the federal budget ballooning for the sixteen national security agencies, it is not clear who is responsible for what, and whether any institution has any overarching authority at all. National security journalist Dana Priest of the
Washington Post
has found that many of the high officials had no idea even what many of the initials of their sister-agencies stood for. (The Director of National Intelligence, a newfangled cabinet-level position, is supposed to supervise all intelligence agencies but in real life he or she does not, leading its third director, retired admiral Dennis Blair to quit in May, 2010.) This quasi-anarchic network of bureaucracies, with no centralized oversight, not only leaks; it hemorrhages information. Rick Wallace, a researcher at Tiversa, a data protection firm in Pennsylvania, and a private citizen who holds no security clearance, showed Priest some of the classified items he had found on the internet: a 2010 top secret Intelligence Summary of Afghanistan; TSA documents detailing the places on an airplane that are not usually searched, classified records from every wing of the Department of Homeland Security. How is this possible? For one, 850,000 individuals hold a top-secret security clearance today, begging the question of how “secret” such broadly accessible information really is to begin with. And as Priest points out, “the managers of Top Secret America, who range in age from forty-five to sixty-five years old [â¦] may not be conversant with the simplest technologies of the information era.” File-sharing software like Gnutella that many officials do not understandâbut is often installed on their laptops by their childrenâroutinely makes top-secret material available to anyone who is looking. Despite astronomical expendituresâthe annual cost of securing “national security” information according to William Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight office, is $10 billionâthe information security apparatus of the United States government is a leaky mess.
The purpose of this is not to spread alarms about vital secrets being lostâgiven how rampant the current hair-trigger classification scheme works, this is hardly likely. It is rather to point out that current classification regime is a tragic, bloated farceâthe SCIF at FOB Hammer writ enormous, and expensive. It is entirely reasonable to question what purpose these intelligence agencies serve. Despite the colossal resources and focus on the Arab world, these agencies failed completely to see the “Arab Spring” coming just as the CIA failed to see the sudden collapse of the Warsaw Pact and then Soviet Union two decades earlier.
We might add that the security of information in the military is also a thoroughly leaky system. Evan Knappenberger is, like Manning, a graduate of the Army's Fort Huachuca intelligence training school who later served in Iraq. According to him, the lax to nonexistent information security that Pfc. Manning found at FOB Hammer is no outlier.
Army security is like a Band-Aid on a sunken chest wound. I remember when I was training, before I had my clearance even, they were talking about diplomatic cables. It was a big scandal at Fort Huachuca (Arizona), with all these kids from analyst school. Somebody said (in the cables) Saddam wanted to negotiate and was willing to agree to peace terms before we invaded, and Bush said no. And this wasn't very widely known. Somehow it came across on a cable at Fort Huachuca, and everybody at the fort knew about it.
It's interesting the access we had. I did the briefing for a two-star general every morning for a year. So I had secret and top-secret information readily available. The funny thing is, [Western Washington State College]'s password system they have here on all these computers is better security than the Army had on their secret computers.
There are 2 million people, many of them not US citizens, with access to SIPRNet [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, the Department of Defense's largest network for the exchange of classified information and messages]. There are 1,400 government agencies with SIPR websites. It's not that secret.
Knappenberger also alleges that the US military had made SIPRNet accessible to the Iraqi military, in full knowledge that the body contained many actors engaged in covert hostilities against occupying forces. (Knappenberger has praised Pfc. Bradley Manning's alleged deeds as principled and entirely beneficial, pointing out that American civilians very much need to know what their wars are all about.) The conclusion is clear: the nation's information security regime is only FOB Hammer's SCIF writ large, an expensive non-secure apparatus containing millions of non-secrets, erratically punctuated with bizarre and unreasonable punishments for whistleblowers who don't break the law properly.
It seems to have been easy to get and disseminate the WikiLeaks caches. What is truly worrisome, then, is that no one until Private Manning saw fit to disclose these public documents, so many of which have been vital to the public discourseâparticularly in the United States. We will now turn to the leaks themselves.
II. The Content
Given the international furor over Bradley Manning's pretrial torture, his heroic (if polarizing) personal story, the distinctly Stieg Larsson/Mission Impossible flavor of the whole WikiLeaks enterprise, not to mention the unrelated legal travails of Julian Assange in both Sweden and Great Britain, the leaks themselves have almost been swallowed up by the story
of
the leaks. To winch the leaks from their own self-referential morass, we will briefly survey the four major caches that have added so much to the world's understanding of twenty-first century statecraft.
On July 25, 2010, the
New York Times
,
Der Spiegel
and
The Guardian
began reporting on, and releasing, some 92,000 confidential field reports from the Afghan War, all dating between January 2004 and December 2009. The War Diary made some 75,000 documents available, with some 15,000 retained by WikiLeaks for closer review and redaction, lest they put Afghan civilians named in the logs at risk. The field-log panorama offered by these documents reveal a brutal pacification campaign with only a distant resemblance to the philanthropic nation-building described in the press releases of the International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF).
A few highlights:
| ⢠| The activities of Task Force 373, an elite corps not integrated into ISAF, and their mission to kill or capture those named on their Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL). In other words, a hit list. In the course of dispatching those listed, Task Force 373 has killed civilians, among them seven children in the rubble of a school targeted as an insurgent hideout on June 17, 2007. |
| ⢠| The potted history of Combat Outpost Keating, isolated in Nuristan Province in northeastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. The logs record that local Afghans who worked with the soldiers were often brutally murdered, and that the insurgents (Taliban or otherwise) had firm control over the area by 2009. In October of that year, at least 175 armed insurgents assaulted the outpost in a nine-hour firefight that killed eight US soldiers and wounded dozens, with Afghan casualties less scrupulously recorded. The author of the report editorializes that the story of Combat Outpost Keating is the Afghan war in microcosm. |
| ⢠| One hundred forty-four incidents in which coalition forces killed civilians, including twenty-one instances of British troops attacking civilians. |
| ⢠| The widespread suspicion, voiced in some 180 field logs though never proven, that Pakistan's intelligence agency is in cahoots with the Taliban, providing them a cross-border haven as well as material support. |
Although the mosaic of these field reports offers no focal point as horrifically mediagenic as the Collateral Murder video, their cumulative impact is stark. (The documents relating to the Granai massacre, which according to the Afghan government killed some 150 people, were deleted from WikiLeaks' data hoard by a disgruntled former deputy of Julian Assange.) The Afghanistan war described in these suppressed records is a pacification campaign replete with civilian deaths and friendly fire, all perched unsteadily on the shakiest geostrategic footing. As of this writing, President Karzai is begging ISAF to cease its night raids into Afghan villages while Pakistan has closed its supply routes in retaliation for American troops shooting dead 24 Pakistani troops on Pakistan's side of the border on November 26, 2011.
The Iraq War Logs were released on October 22, 2010, in partnership with
Der Spiegel
,
Le Monde
, Al Jazeera,
The Guardian
, the
New York Times
, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Iraq Body Count Project. These 391,832 documents, each a “Significant Action” field log, provide a synoptic image of the war from 2004 through 2009; together they are the largest leak of military documents to date. Among the highlights:
| ⢠| The Collateral Murder video, a gunsight view of Apache helicopters opening fire on a small group of Iraqis, most of them unarmed civilians and two of them Reuters News Agency employees, on the streets of a Baghdad suburb April 2007. |
| ⢠| An estimate of civilian deaths, whose existence the Pentagon had repeatedly denied. The figure is put at 109,000, among whom 66,081 are civilians, which includes “hundreds” of civilians killed at US military checkpoints. The Iraq Body Count project used these records to add 15,000 new deaths to its tally, reaching a total of some 150,000, of which 80% were civilians. |
| ⢠| Documentation of a house raid by US forces in which American soldiers summarily executed one man, four women, two children and three infants. The cable includes an excerpt from a letter of inquiry by the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions. A US airstrike was launched to destroy the house, but “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.” This leak received wide media attention in Iraq and was a major factor behind the Iraqi government's insistence that US forces only be allowed to stay if they lose immunity to the domestic law of Iraq. |
| ⢠| Widespread torture by Iraqi authorities, including sexual torture, cutting off fingers, acid burns and fatal beatings. The leaks also reveal the existence of “Fragmentary Order 242,” an order for the US military to ignore acts of Iraqi torture despite the public admonition of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace that it was the duty of every occupying American troop to prevent such behavior wherever they saw it. |
At the beginning of the Obama presidency, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, whose officials still gamely call it a “detention facility,” was proof of Bush-Cheney illegalities. Three years later, Gitmo is a normalized feature of American national security policy, one that Democratic voters try very hard to ignore. But the “Guantánamo Files” that WikiLeaks released on April 25, 2011 through the
Washington Post
and the British Daily
Telegraph
made it harder for the world to wish this military prison away. The 759 “detainee assessment” dossiers, spanning 2002 to 2009 and covering all but twenty prisoners, shine a searching, revealing light into a legal black hole.
Some background: though Cheney claimed that the Gitmo prisoners were the “worst of the worst,” by the end of 2008, the Bush Administration had already released nearly 600 of the inmates for lack of any evidence that they were a threat. (As the US military purchased Afghanistan-based terrorists for a generous bounty, local militias were less than scrupulous about whom they rounded up; the documents show that some half of the 212 Afghan prisoners sent to Gitmo were either Shanghaied by local armed groups or forced into fighting by other local groups.) Of the 171 prisoners that remain at Guantánamoâeach at a cost of $800,000 per yearâeighty-nine have been cleared for release while a few dozen have been marked for indefinite detention. The evidence collected against this group is deemed credible by the military authorities, but was extracted by torture, an embarrassment to the US government in any court proceeding.
The Gitmo files bring much into focus: tenuous relationships with other intelligence services; delicate geopolitical dances; the sloppily indiscriminate round-up of prisonersâand most of all, the individual prisoners. The story of Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese first thought to be an al-Qaeda courier, but kept at Gitmo for seven years apparently to learn the ins and outs of his employer, seen by Washington as insufficiently pro-American in its broadcasts. The story of Abdul Badr Mannon, a Pakistani journalist handed over by Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, whom the US interrogators later came to believe was rounded up because he was uncovering ties between Muslim radicals and the Pakistani state. (The files specify that a prisoner's links to the ISI should be just as troublesome as a tie to al-Qaeda.) In age the prisoners ranged from fourteen-year-old Naqib Ullah, to an eighty-nine-year-old, Mohammed Sadiq, already in his dotage, health failing.