The Passion of Bradley Manning (8 page)

An unlikely hero? No doubt. In the as-yet unauthenticated chatlogs, Manning recognizes that status as a gay, soon-to-be transgender atheist unsuits him thoroughly to be a poster-child for the cause of transparent government: “[I']m way way way too easy to marginalize[.]”

And yet that is just what he has become all over the world: a poster child for the cause of honest dealing, patriotic dissent, and the right to know what one's government is doing. He is a global icon and source of inspiration. Bradley Manning solidarity groups are all over the world. A Germany radical group has been vandalizing the national railroads, calling for the pullout of German troops from Afghanistan—and for the release of Bradley Manning. (WikiLeaks, by the way, has condemned these acts of sabotage.) Larbi Sadiki, a Tunisian-born sociologist who teaches in the UK, tells me that Manning will surely be remembered as a great man of conscience, a liberator of valuable knowledge. “I don't want to exaggerate his importance, but the story of the Tunisian revolution really cannot be told without his contribution of those State Department cables.” Tony Jean-Thenor, leader of a Haitian grassroots community group in South Florida, says that “Manning will never die anymore; he'll be alive for generations for what he did to help not only Haitians but oppressed people all over the world. History will exonerate him.”

Brig regulations bar anyone who didn't have some prior relationship with Manning from coming to visit him in person: the scribblers and camera crews have been kept at bay. Manning's lawyer has apparently advised his client to keep his mouth shut before the court martial, in the interests of strategic prudence. The UN special rapporteur continues to be denied unsupervised access, as required by the Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994. Even so, Bradley Manning has never been more connected to the world. According to his lawyer, Manning gets hundreds of letters from all over the world every week, for which the prisoner is most grateful.

No account of Bradley Manning can omit an account of his alleged leaks: their context, their content and their reception.

(1:11:54
PM
) bradass87:
and… its important that it gets out… i feel, for some bizarre reason

(1:12:02
PM
) bradass87:
it might actually change something

The Afghan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs, the Guantánamo files, the State Department Cables: this is what the fuss is all about, why Manning is viewed as a tragic patriot and hero by some, by others as a traitor. My quick perusal of Manning's alleged disclosures will start with a study of the context of the leaks: the measures that Washington does and does not take to control information, and whether these steps actually secure information or are merely theatrical. Second, we will survey the leaks themselves, their content and their meaning. Finally, I will examine the reception of the leaks, both in the United States and abroad. At every step it will become apparent that the logic of secrecy and security in twenty-first-century United States is anything but straightforward.

I. The Context

Washington expends enormous effort to control the information it generates—through hair-trigger classification of official documents, the censorship of government employees and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers. At the very same time, Washington condones any number of leaks from elite officials who make no secret of their illegal disclosures. As for the national security state's data security apparatus, though expanding and costly, it is dysfunctional: incontinent and constantly sloshing classified material. This conflicting set of policies and impulses can be described as paradoxical, and though paradox, at the level of pure ideas, can be charming, at the level of giant bureaucracies the term denotes chaos. In fact the bizarre combination of lackadaisical security, punitive response and official hypocrisy make the nation's information security regime a macrocosm of the Manning affair itself.

First, Washington's habit of classifying public documents goes well beyond the protection of legitimate state secrets like nuclear launch codes. Instead, the federal agencies tend to mark every last public record even tangentially related to military and diplomatic policy as a state secret of some degree of confidentiality. Because the total of such documents is so astronomically high, no precise figure exists. According to the Information Security Oversight Office, the federal agency tasked with maintaining information security, officials classified nearly seventy-seven million documents in 2010.

What are the consequences to public discourse of such rampant overclassification? The question is not new. James Madison wrote, “a popular government, without popular information, is but a prelude to a tragedy or farce, or perhaps both.” And though the nation's fourth president could not have envisioned the modern administrative state or an American military presence in over a hundred foreign nations we can also be sure that Madison would never have foreseen that documents from his own presidency would, over two hundred years later, still be locked away as state secrets. And yet it was only in the middle of 2011 that the National Security Agency got around to declassifying a cache of military documents dating to 1809, the first year of Madison's presidency. Declassification seems to occur at a geological tempo: the CIA still keeps documents from the First World War classified, and only in 2010 released records from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Diplomatic historians, who serve as an indispensable repository of national memory, complain bitterly about the gratuitous, reflexive and often apparently irrational classification and redaction of public records. Others have criticized the current regime of overclassification, which leads inevitably to a kind of self-willed societal dementia, as a national security liability. “Secret programs stifled public debate on the decisions that shaped our response to the September 11 attacks,” notes a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. “The classification system must be reformed if we are to preserve the critical role that transparent government plays in a functioning democracy.” At the operational level of national security, routinized secrecy also prevents the access of law-enforcement agencies to sought-after information. Coleen Rowley, a longtime FBI special agent and attorney who was one of
Time
magazine's three persons of the year in 2002, has even editorialized that an outlet like WikiLeaks might have averted the 9/11 attacks by providing FBI and other law enforcement agents with a forum to share urgent information still classified by our baroque security bureaucracy.

There is, not surprisingly, a dawning consensus among the elite that the federal government's classification regime has become less a sensible precaution than a mania. “Depending on who you ask, overclassification is either very widespread or extremely widespread,” says Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Everybody from the director of national intelligence to President Obama has acknowledged the problem.” And the Obama administration has even taken some small steps to remedy the problem: his first year in office, office he issued an executive order that created the National Declassification Center to deal with the backlog of over 400 million classified documents; a year later the President signed the Reducing OverClassification Act passed in late 2010.

But the effect of these measures has been minimal. Although the Department of Defense has scrapped 82 classification guides, this is only 4% of the 1,878 total. The 77 million classified documents tabulated for 2010 is a 40% increase over the year before—though government officials say this is because of tighter reporting guidelines. J. William Leonard, director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2007, has said that federal agencies need to start sanctioning officials who over-classify in order to prevent secrecy from becoming the default option for bureaucrats lacking any incentive to make documents publicly available. One thing is certain: until a new ethic of transparency is spliced into the DNA of every federal agency, overclassification will continue to distort and stifle public debate on vital issues of war and statecraft.

The government has also sought to restrict the release of information through censorship of former officials and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers.

Government censorship has enjoyed a robust revival since the autumn of 2001. Veteran FBI agent Ali Soufan was surprised to find that information he had read into the public record at Congressional hearings, including facts readily available in the official 9/11 report, was now deemed a threat to national security and expunged from his memoir. As Scott Shane of the
New York Times
noted, the government's censorship “amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.” This is not an isolated case. Peter Van Buren, the Foreign Service officer who was a contemporary of Bradley Manning's at FOB Hammer, found that the publication of his memoir of leading a civilian reconstruction team in Iraq got him stripped of his security clearance and placed on administrative leave—though the official pretext was his linking to a WikiLeak'ed State Department cable on his personal blog. On some occasions, publishers have held fast in the face of government demands for withdrawal of the book, as with Henry Holt's refusal to suppress Van Buren's memoir in the face of federal pressure. When the government is more alert, however, it is liable to buy up an entire print run of a newly published book, as it did in 2010 with former Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer's memoir of his half-year in Afghanistan as a Defense Intelligence Agency officer. Of course more than 200 review copies are still at large, and many of the redactions to the first edition were of facts easily found online. “Exactly the wrong way to censor information,” says Steven Aftergood.

As for the prosecution of insiders who expose government wrongdoing, it has reached a new vindictive intensity in the Obama administration. Although candidate Obama campaigned as the whistleblower's loyal friend and protector, he has presided over more leaks prosecutions under the Espionage Act of 1917—a use that the statute's authors never intended—than all his predecessors combined. The most perverse of these has been the aggressive prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who informed a reporter at the Baltimore
Sun
of the colossal waste, fraud and illegality of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. The government accused him of ten felonies with a maximum penalty of 35 years, only to withdraw all the gravest charges just days before the trial. The prosecution settled for a plea bargain, with Drake copping to a misdemeanor based on his possession at home of a confidential email which the government had retroactively classified
after
it was discovered. (“I've never seen a more deliberate and willful example of government officials improperly classifying a document,” said J. William Leonard, former head of the ISOO.) Judge Richard D. Bennett, appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, blasted the prosecution for putting defendant Drake through “four years of hell” and coming up with an indictment that ultimately “doesn't pass the smell test.” (Prosecutor William Welch II had also seen his corruption case against former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens collapse, an overreach also excoriated by a federal judge, but there is apparently no consequence for overzealous prosecutions in our Department of Justice.)

Since 9/11, the national security apparatus was disbursed nearunlimited funding, resulting in an elephantiasis-like expansion of state apparatuses intended to ensure the control of information. One might easily assume that, given these expensive and often zealous efforts, Washington must now command a hermetically sealed information security regime. One would be wrong. Despite this spasmodic gesturing at secrecy, Washington, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, “leaks like a sieve and always has.” There are two ways that Washington regularly sluices classified information: intentionally and unintentionally.

First, the intentional sort. Leaks, far from being an unspeakable taboo in Washington, are an accepted and thoroughly routine medium of communication between elite officials and their preferred journalists. As pundit Glenn Greenwald frequently points out, in any given week “unnamed sources” will reveal to the media such matters as the role of Russia's security services in bombing an embassy in neighboring Georgia; the violent misdeeds of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency; the progress of the military campaign against the Libyan government—all sensitive matters relating to ongoing wars or relations with great powers or critical allies. Yet such leaks of material classed as top secret—a higher classification than anything allegedly released by Pfc. Manning—never register as security risks or even as leaks—they are business as usual: another
Washington Post
story citing “unnamed officials”; another Sy Hersh piece in the
New Yorker
; the latest Bob Woodward book. Such leaking is never denied; in fact it's a source of bonhomous hilarity between elite media and officialdom. In a revealing conversation with the website
Politico
, Obama's chief of staff Richard Daley discussed his predecessor Rahm Emanuel's propensity to leak.

The government's winking half-disclosure of certain actions and protocols—for instance, the use of CIA drones to assassinate American citizen al-Awlaki—can be almost virtuosic in the way it takes credit for controversial policy while refusing any accountability. Though the faux-secrecy surrounding the Awlaki assassination did raise some eyebrows, Washington's embedded media corps generally finds the official coyness on such matters to be not problematic but adorable.