The Passion of Bradley Manning (11 page)

Reactions outside the government have scarcely been much different, another example of how deeply embedded America's elite media has become. On the right, as we have seen, the response has been simple: Kill them! (An exception has been the libertarians and “paleoconservatives” who gravitate around Ron Paul.) On the left—well, there is no left to speak of in the United States, apart from the sprinkling of intellectuals and media professionals—Daniel Ellsberg, Roseanne Barr, Jack Shafer, Jesse Ventura, Glenn Greenwald, Dennis Kucinich, Michael Moore—who have spoken out in favor of Pfc. Manning. In the hegemonic center of the American media, moderately liberal on gays, guns and God but rightwing on everything else, the reception of the leaks has closely followed the government's script.

A vivid example is the sudden outpouring of concern among military and media for Afghan civilians upon the release of the Afghan War Logs. Because WikiLeaks did not redact the names of all of the local informants and collaborators working with ISAF forces, it was alleged that every named Afghan was at imminent risk of a Taliban assassination. (The Taliban obliged by making such a threat.) The threat to American soldiers was also played up.

What to make of this sudden geyser of concern? Media coverage of the Af-Pak War has entailed a near denial of other civilian casualties, with even the comparatively humanist
New York Times
routinely “forgetting” to write up the Af-Pak civilian casualties to drone strikes. Even the deaths of American forces are weirdly downplayed. (August 2011 was the deadliest month yet for American forces in Afghanistan, a milestone that went virtually unremarked.)

Whether or not this newfound concern is genuine (or thoroughly ersatz), the Department of Defense confessed to a McClatchy reporter in December 2010 that there was no evidence of a single Afghan informant being harmed in a reprisal, an assertion the DoD spokesperson echoed at a press conference days later. But why dwell on the vulgar certainty of real casualties when you can keen and wail for the civilian deaths that might be caused someday, hypothetically, by WikiLeaks?

This is only the first case of the government hypochondriacally groaning about the damage done by Manning's alleged leaks. Another fine example is the State Department's confidential list of vital strategic interests, the public release of which, we were warned, was soon going to trigger a Tom Clancy-style apocalypse. Pundits made a meal of this “terrorist to-do list,” more proof that Julian Assange and Bradley Manning were nihilists bent on global mayhem. Brian Lehrer and George Packer, two liberal New Yorkers, clucked and scolded on Lehrer's radio show at the anti-American recklessness of WikiLeaks' rash deed. Of course the dreadful list turns out to be a damp squib of a let-down—informing us not only that the Congo is rich in mineral wealth, but that the Strait of Gibraltar is—get the smelling salts—a vital shipping lane. The rest of the document, apparently tabulated by a reasonably capable undergraduate intern, is of a similar Wikipedia banality. Have we in America become so infantilized that tidbits of basic geography must now be state secrets? Maybe better to leave that question unanswered.

The greatest Michael Bay-produced
ragnarok
was supposed to come when WikiLeaks released the whole cache of its State Department cables on September 1, 2011. (Due to a security glitch for which Julian Assange, a disgruntled former comrade and
Guardian
journalist David Leigh are responsible, the entire load of 250,000 “Cablegate” documents had become available in a far corner of the web, so WikiLeaks decided to go ahead and advertise their full availability.) Suddenly all 250,000 documents were available, and in unredacted form! The State Department promised that hundreds of native informants—advocates, other diplomats, even human rights workers—would be at risk of imminent persecution. “Irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous,” said Foggy Bottom's head flack. Once again, pundits clicked their tongues and waxed wroth—though not with quite the same gusto as before.

By now some in the media had wearied of the monotonous two-step and were looking askance at the predictions of diplomatic meltdown and savage reprisal. Some enterprising reporters with Associated Press tracked down several of the informants named in the cables to solicit their opinion. Federica Ferrari Bravo had met with US diplomats in Italy seven years before; a source so sensitive that US officials were instructed not to utter her name. According to the AP, she was baffled to learn that her identity was secret at all. “I don't think I said anything that would put me at risk,” the Italian diplomat confessed. Former Malaysian diplomat Shazryl Eskay Abdullah was astonished that an “unofficial lunch meeting” years ago with a US official had been reported at all, but didn't think it mattered.

Not a single death has been traced to Pfc. Manning's (alleged) leaks. Yes, the identity of an Australian secret agent was revealed, at no peril to his person. Yes, two American ambassadors, to Ecuador and to Mexico, were recalled after impolitic statements were made public. (Then again, America's relationship with these two nations has become rocky as the region's self-confidence grows.) The real diplomatic shakeup has been, on the surface, quite minor—a small price to pay for this treasury of knowledge.

An Anglican minister in Baghdad bemoaned the leak of a State Department cable about the handful of remaining Jews in Baghdad. By bringing attention to this nearly vanished subculture, doesn't WikiLeaks know they will hasten their persecution? It was quickly pointed out by one foreign service officer on his personal blog that the prelate decrying the publicity had been a very eager source for a
Time
magazine article on the same subject not three years before. We have not heard since of the horrible damage done by the Cablegate release.

Throughout the disclosures, American journalists have eagerly projected all manner of strange motives both to WikiLeaks and to Pfc. Manning. (We have already seen how the private's alleged deeds has been chalked up to sexual reasons, personal reasons, emotional reasons, everything but the actual political reasons he clearly lays out to his baffled interlocutor in the incriminating chatlogs.)

It is often asserted by both government and their preferred media, without evidence, that WikiLeaks is “anti-American.” Even Dana Priest and William Arkin, authors of the excellent
Top Secret America
, succumb to this received idea and casually impugn WikiLeaks' motives. To be sure, the group's choice to transcribe the (admittedly blood-curdling) banter of the Apache gunships in redneck phrasing complete with dropped consonants was gratuitous, and detracted from the video's effect. But then this hauteur is shared by most US intellectuals as well—hardly a sign of hating the USA. If it is “anti-American” to see the invasion of Iraq as a disaster and view the ongoing adventure in Afghanistan in a negative light, then a solid majority of the United States must also be suffering from anti-Americanism. The charge of “anti-Americanism” is less an accurate description of WikiLeaks than another worrisome sign of surging xenophobia in the United States which, over ten years after 9/11, has not yet crested. (And some of WikiLeaks' exposures dovetail snugly with conservative American outlooks: the “Climate Gate” emails showing scientists spinning their data provided ammunition to those hostile to the concept of global warming.)

Another imputation to WikiLeaks is that the endeavor is “utopian,” which for America's mainstream punditry is the ultimate put-down. This mudslinging also fails to stick. Although the goal of “total transparency” has been carelessly attributed to Assange and WikiLeaks by
The New Yorker
and other publications, one looks in vain through the group's published statements for utopian demands of “total transparency” or anything like it. In a nation where the government generates some 77 million classified documents a year, and where government secrecy and distortion played no small part in a disastrous war that has not quite ended, one might more accurately describe the WikiLeaks endeavor as a fundamentally defensive and pragmatic effort to bring essential matters of government into the light. Instead, American pundits have worried ominously about the threat of too much transparency—a bit like worrying that the restoration of Reagan-era income tax rates might lead to gulag communism.

Bradley Manning has been very clear about the principles behind his alleged disclosure: it's important that the public should know what its government is doing. Because the WikiLeaks team has said more about their own motives, they have not quite been as consistent. One thing is clear: their goals are, for better or worse, not radical, utopian or even “left wing” in the conventional sense of the term. The WikiLeaks mission statement quotes Madison and
The Federalist Papers
, while Assange's buzzword of “populist intelligence” fits squarely within classical republican political theory. Compared to the more genuinely radical groups that exploded throughout the 1970s, WikiLeaks is quite blandly establishmentarian: they want more governmental opennenss, not class struggle or revolutionary violence. They are, essentially, eighteenth-century liberals who are good with computers.

Outside the United States, the reaction to WikiLeaks has been quite different—less alarmist, less panicked, less surly. Not just left or libertarian intellectuals but even heads of state and Establishment diplomats have praised both WikiLeaks and Manning. Luiz Inazio “Lula” da Silva praised the anti-secrecy organization and mocked the official panic surrounding its leaks. In November, 2011, 54 center-left members of the European Parliament signed a letter condemning the treatment of Bradley Manning—but only vaguely supportive of the private's alleged disclosures. Dick Marty, a conservative Swiss politician and former prosecutor who serves as a rapporteur for the Council of Europe is much bolder in his praise of Manning in his investigation into Europe's enabling role in the CIA's “special rendition” program. In the report, Marty not only condemns the growing “cult of secrecy,” he demands greater public scrutiny of Europe's security services, and singles out Pfc. Bradley Manning for praise as a whistleblower, acknowledging WikiLeaks' role in exposing the rendition program. Will Julian Assange soon join Pfc. Manning as a victim of these barely supervised security services?

The case of Pfc. Manning is of course hardly the first time a messenger has been shot, a whistleblower scapegoated, a light-bringer demonized. What impact do leaks really have? Knowledge is power, so the saying goes, but ignorance turns out have its own special force as well, and a public's incuriosity can be as strong as its will-to-knowledge. The value of any fact is only that which the public is willing to give it: information does nothing on its own. Have leaks ever really ended wars or brought down governments? What will the real consequences of Bradley Manning's alleged leaks be? In the next chapter we turn to the tangled and tragic relations between whistleblowers and their public.

03:24:10
PM
) bradass87:
we're human… and we're killing ourselves… and no-one seems to see that… and it bothers me

(03:24:26
PM
) bradass87:
apathy

(03:25:28
PM
) bradass87:
apathy is far worse than the active participation

(05:54:42
PM
) bradass87:
apathy is its own 3rd dimension… i have special graph for that… =P

Pfc. Bradley Manning's alleged leaks have fueled thousands of stories in the world's major newspapers; they have stripped the spin and lies off the official versions of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War; they have shined a light into the pseudo-legal prison camp of Guantánamo. The leaked diplomatic cables have provided a partial view of how the world's greatest power conducts its affairs, and candid accounts of how many nations run themselves.

What impact have these leaks had? Have they rolled back the invasion of Iraq or the occupation of Afghanistan? Have they led to the “worldwide discussion, debates, reforms” that Bradley Manning hoped for? Have they changed foreign policy? What role, for that matter, do leaks of death squads and free-fire zones ever play in ending wars and shaping statecraft?

Though the WikiLeaks revelations are the largest such revelations yet, this is far from the first time state secrets have come to light. Leaks have done much to advance knowledge throughout history. The chapter on taxation in Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
relies entirely on a survey of European fiscal practices that the French crown intended for elite administrative use only. Roger Casement's exposés of King Leopold's Congo, of the British-owned rubber plantations of the Amazon, made him a Victorian hero—until his gunrunning for Irish independence got him hanged. Rupert Murdoch's grandfather made his name and began his press empire by leaking the Gallipoli cables. The exposure of the My Lai massacre came after a see-no-evil military investigation found nothing. (The whitewash, by the way, was led by a young Army major named Colin Powell.)

Many leaks, even of top-secret skullduggery, even of atrocity, have made only the slightest dent in whatever vast imperial project they were meant to expose. Even when the My Lai massacre came to light—over 500 Vietnamese villagers, including women, children, the elderly, methodically slaughtered by American troops—thanks to former helicopter door-gunner Ron Ridenhour and reporter Sy Hersh, failed utterly to halt the war, which lasted another seven years. It didn't even hold the US soldiers to account, with the commanding officer suffering only a mild wrist-slap and a few weeks in the brig.

It turns out the impact of whistleblowing is often minimal. When Iranian students stormed the US embassy in 1979, they seized reams of secret files related to the CIA's activities throughout the whole Middle East. After laboriously pasting together many shredded pages and translating the lot into Farsi, they began to release the multivolume edition of
Documents from the US Espionage Den
. Here at last were top-secret accounts of back room American fiddling with the internal affairs and foreign ministries of the entire Middle East region, not to mention CIA involvement in enormous petroleum deals and projects.

After the mandatory panic and utterances about this grave blow to American national security from which the world would never recover, the world yawned and Washington continued its business in the Middle East, without Iran in its pocket but otherwise unchastened. In the past thirty years, the Carter Doctrine—that the Persian Gulf is of vital strategic interest to the United States and must, like the Caribbean, remain under American military control—has only grown more aggressive, while American meddling in the Middle East has intensified. Plainly, the Iranian students' game-changing revelations barely rattled Washington's imperial designs in the region.

What of the Pentagon Papers? Given their talismanic place in the folklore of the peace movement, surely this superleak dealt a deathblow against America's warmaking in Southeast Asia? The virtue of exposing the Pentagon Papers can hardly be doubted: the Department of Defense's in-house history of the Vietnam War conclusively gave the lie to upbeat official statements about that long and thoroughly gratuitous war. But the story of this mega-leak's real impact on the war—and on the press, and on the law, and on society in general—is anything but straightforward.

When the Pentagon Papers first began their appearance in the
New York Times
, President Nixon was delighted. As the papers only covered events under the previous two administrations, here was a chance to make Jack Kennedy look bad—what could be better for Dick Nixon? It was only after Henry Kissinger persuaded his boss that tolerating the leaks made him look like a weakling that Nixon's bumbling staff cocked their blunderbuss at the
Times
, and it blew up in their face. The Supreme Court of the United States held, in an ambiguous ruling whose holding is still debated, that the government could not bar the
Times
from publishing these top-secret leaks. Nixon's Solicitor General who had argued the government's case later repudiated the whole effort to ban the Papers' publication. Point, press.

Next the government took woozy aim at Ellsberg, reviving the Espionage Act of 1917 with the then-novel use of punishing a domestic leaker. Nixon's stooges broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office hoping to find dirt on the man. (Ellsberg, a model Marine who had graduated first in his class at Quantico's officer training school, deferred grad school at Harvard to stay on active duty, and had come under enemy fire in Vietnam, was not an easy guy to smear.) The burglars famously didn't find anything, but they eventually got caught. Once the Ellsberg trial had begun, Team Nixon attempted to bribe the judge, offering him the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—should he be interested. The judge, in his clueless vanity, only realized weeks later that he was being suborned. He hastily declared a mistrial with prejudice, leaving Ellsberg, who had always freely admitted to leaking the top-secret documents, a free man. Let it not be forgotten that the only legal difference between Daniel Ellsberg's confessed leak and Manning's alleged deed is that the Pentagon Papers were uniformly designated “top secret,” a higher classification than anything from the WikLeaks disclosures. Ellsberg was never acquitted.

A great story, but in the end, the Pentagon Papers did nothing to halt or even slow the Vietnam War. A paperback edition of highlights from the papers sold over a million, but no doubt few actually read it. The mess did, however, hasten Nixon's self-immolation.

The litany is long of colossal game-changing bombshells that made inaudible thuds on impact. During France's vicious post-colonial war in Algeria, Henri Alleg's famous 1958 exposé of his torture by colonial authorities sold 60,000 copies in a single day. Other such testimonies were plentiful. But as Alexander Cockburn points out, “torture duly became more pervasive, and the war more savage, under the supervision of a nominally socialist French government.”

Much more recently, the anonymous leak of US Ambassador to Afghanistan John G. Eikenberry's cable to the White House argued forcefully and expertly (the now ex-ambassador is a retired Army general) against troop escalation and for the scrapping of the DoD's counterinsurgency strategy. The document was leaked in November 2009 and published in the
New York Times
two months later. Despite Eikenberry's impeccable credentials, and despite swiftly tanking public support for the war, the cable halted neither Obama's Afghan surge nor the intensified drone strikes. And 2009–11 have been the bloodiest three years yet for American forces in Afghanistan.

We might ask—in our despair—why we ever think, like Bradley Manning, that new information will spur “worldwide debates, discussions and reforms”? Of course, secret information can result in a happy ending, and it often does—at the movies. Some critical bit of intelligence is a common McGuffin in suspense movies and pulp thrillers. Villains have suppressed some important piece of knowledge and this is causing grave harm; the protagonist after many struggles retrieves the intelligence, brings it to light, and the system rights itself in the nick of time, often thanks to the press. This plot is pure escapist fantasy, and a conservative one at that as it reaffirms faith in the normal political system and its institutions, whose essential goodness always wins out over some “abuse” or “rogue element.”

It's easy to see why this plot line is so popular with screenwriters, journalists, and intellectuals generally. Intellectuals have so much invested in the power of information and knowledge, and we almost always overstate the importance of it as an engine-driver of history or motivator of human actions. The just-add-knowledge-and-stir model of political action was favored by liberals of the Enlightenment and the liberals of today, from the Encyclopedists and James Madison to Bertrand Russell and Pfc. Bradley Manning. But isn't this faith misplaced?

In his confessional chatlogs, Manning delivers his credo: “I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” But who actually wants to see the truth? Who really wants knowledge? It turns out that ignorance is not just a matter of information supply, but of demand. Ignorance is much more than an absence of knowledge, a pristine vacancy suitable for structures of knowledge to be built through “education.” In fact, ignorance is more often than not something rock-solid, opaque, and very often, willful.

It can't be stressed enough that willful ignorance is not the exclusive province of working-class people or of those without formal schooling. From 2000–2008 this sort of blockheadedness found its personification in the President of the United States, a scion of multigenerational privilege.

We might then pessimistically think that the joke is on the whistleblowers, the Enlightenment true believers, all those naïve types who would “speak truth to power.” Of what use has the truth ever been in politics? When Secretary of State Colin Powell testified at the General Assembly that he had incontrovertible proof of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, his whole dishonorable speech collapsed around him only hours later, when key assertions were revealed as a shoddy internet cut-and-paste job, giving the whole
casus belli
a nightmarish
Alice in Wonderland
quality. Of course the quick and definitive unmasking of official lies did nothing to halt the war juggernaut: the government, the major media, and ultimately millions of Americans had too much invested in war—politically, financially, psychologically—to reverse course.

The consequences of knowledge can be nil; they can also be perverse. The dangerous knowledge brought to light by social reformers often has unexpected consequences. The upshot of Upton Sinclair's exposé of hazardous working conditions in the meatpacking industry wasn't worker safety laws, but sanitary measures designed to protect middle-class consumers. The results of Jacob Riis' muckraking photographs of working-class New Yorkers was punitive legislation to better “motivate” the slum-dwellers, like shuttering the police precinct bunkhouses that had served as informal homeless shelters. Governments and their embedded media outlets have managed to spin some of the WikiLeaks revelations in directions that astonish. Even as every world newspaper seized on the Guantánamo files to show the incompetent harshness of the prison camp—including the quite conservative British
Daily Telegraph
—the
New York Times
emphasized just how dangerous the inmates were—even though nearly three out of four has been released.

“What does end wars?” asks Alexander Cockburn. “One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the US war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met.”

Despair over truth's impotence is not fully warranted. Information may not be sufficient, but it is necessary, and when harnessed to political will, it can change the world. After all, Daniel Ellsberg's earlier, though far less famous, 1968 leak of a top-secret report to the president may well have forestalled a catastrophic widening of the war, at least until Nixon and Kissinger carpet-bombed Cambodia. Therein, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Earle Wheeler requested an additional 206,000 US troops for Vietnam, which would have entailed calling up the reserves and widening the war into Laos, Cambodia; the report also contemplated the use of “small tactical” nuclear weapons not just in North Vietnam but in the south as well. Ellsberg handed the document to Robert F. Kennedy, who rallied Senate opposition to the escalation; someone else had passed the plans to the
New York Times
. President Johnson did not request the troop increase.