by Chase Madar
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 discourse—particularly 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 Guantánamo—each at a cost of $800,000 per year—eighty-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 prisoners—and 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.
Defense lawyers representing various prisoners may still not admit any of the dossiers’ content as evidence. These documents, though available from any uncensored internet signal, laughably remain an official state secret.
Thanks to WikiLeaks and to the journalists who have sifted through these vital documents—particularly Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy/ Knight Ridder, dean of the Gitmo correspondents, and relentless blogger and author Andy Worthington—we now have a far clearer picture of what is now an enduring American institution. (We will return to Guantánamo in Chapter Four.) We can only hope that WikiLeaks will next expose the inner workings of Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, Gitmo’s larger “evil twin” holding 2,400 prisoners, some 400 of whom were recommended for release by General Petraeus himself before his move to the CIA. As of this writing, those 400 prisoners have not been freed.
WikiLeaks began releasing 251,287 US State Department cables on November 28, 2010, in collaboration with El País, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, the New York Times and other media outlets whose staff redacted the documents to minimize any risk to individuals named in the files. Of the total, 15,652 are “secret,” 101,748 are “confidential” and the rest—more than half—unclassified. On September 1, 2011, WikiLeaks made the whole cache available and under the coordination of the organization, the database of cables was “crowdsourced” to accelerate the sifting of the dump. Almost oceanic in volume and geographical scope—274 embassies—the cables are too vast to explore in any depth here. Many summaries and highlights have already been compiled, but we will quickly survey the diplomatic cables to highlight some critical zones of interest.
Many of the cables are candid letters back to Washington about local conditions: sobering dispatches from Italy’s efforts against organized crime in Calabria and Sicily; an account of a Dagestani wedding in the Russian Caucasus that is a minor masterpiece of travel writing. But many of the leaked cables have more than entertainment value and have been eagerly seized on by the peoples of various nations who see the US embassy as a reliable source of information. In the Dominican Republic, the national government has shed dozens of highly compensated but not particularly useful “vice-ministers” after leaked criticism in a US cable; the Guyanese press has also thanked WikiLeaks for helping to expose governmental corruption.
The most famous instance of this is in Tunisia, where the leaked assessments of the US ambassador—candidly unflattering accounts of the corruption and greed of the ruling Ben Ali clan and hangers-on—added fuel to the fire of discontent that led Tunisians to overthrow their longstanding authoritarian government.
Other cables are less flattering to the United States and show Washington willing to trample a great many values in pursuit of idiosyncratically defined security goals in both counter-terror policy and in various American wars.
The cables reveal how the US government exerted heavy pressure to suppress a German criminal investigation into the CIA kidnapping of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent Germany citizen mistakenly identified as a terror suspect who was abducted and then rendered to Afghanistan for extensive torture. The cables also reveal similar US arm-twisting to thwart a Spanish investigation into a similar case.
The United States has endeavored mightily to have its multiplying wars be designated “just wars” or at least not denounced as unjust. The manner in which Washington seeks this end is not by careful consideration of the use of military force but by forceful lobbying at the Vatican, whose verdict on all matters of “just war” carries immense political clout worldwide. The leaks reveal much worldly retail politicking done by both the Holy See and the US ambassador, and rather less in the way of disinterested caritas.
The most worthwhile cables, as well as the most sordid, describe America’s support for various authoritarian and semi-democratic client states in the Middle East. We learn, for instance, that the Crown Prince of Bahrain studied military science at Fort Leavenworth—where Bradley Manning has been incarcerated since April 2011. We also learn that Egypt—second-largest recipient of American foreign aid in the past three decades—has sent its notoriously torture-using security forces to Quantico, Virginia for interrogation training at FBI headquarters. Needless to say, training for an authoritarian government’s security forces reveals Washington’s “freedom agenda” for the Middle East to be so much drivel.
The leaks also provide a window into military and diplomatic relations with Israel, for decades the top recipient of US foreign aid. The cables reveal the diplomatic efforts to keep quiet the provision of “Bunker Buster” bombs to Israel, lest they trigger speculation about a strike on Iran; the regular briefing of US diplomats as to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which Israel intended to “keep functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis”; the unedifying sight of Michael Posner, formerly head of Human Rights First and now Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, helping the Israeli government downplay the atrocities they committed in their 2008–2009 assault on Gaza.
Leaks transferred to the Nation magazine and Haïti Liberté revealed that when the Haitian government moved to raise the hourly minimum wage from 22 cents to 61 cents, the US State Department, in close concert with Hanes, Fruit of the Loom and Levi-Strauss, strong-armed the Haitians into carving out an exemption for the multinational textile makers. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Americas and one third of its people are, in the artful term favored by the Third-World development industry, “food insecure.”
Another recurring theme is the pressure exerted by large pharmaceutical firms on US foreign policy. With emerging markets providing the largest growth area for pharmaceutical sales, Big Pharma is desperate to export the favorable intellectual property regulatory framework that ensures monopolistic sales with no cheaply made competitors, guaranteeing high prices and high profits. The push to adopt an American-style regulatory framework to the benefit of Big Pharma comes up in cables from Poland, France, India and elsewhere. According to James Love, director of the advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International, “
All the things the US is doing is whatever benefits a handful of companies like Pfizer, Abbott, Merck, and so on. The US basically pushes for anything they want.”
A cache of cables reveal the jockeying among foreign ministries to facilitate the exploitation of natural resources within the Arctic circle. As the ice cap melts, instead of taking concerted action to halt global warming there is an apparent scrum to clinch access to the region’s vast gas and oil reserves. According to Ben Ayliffe of Greenpeace, “Instead of seeing the melting of the Arctic ice cap as a spur to action on climate change, the leaders of the Arctic nations are instead investing in military hardware to fight for the oil beneath it. They’re preparing to fight to extract the very fossil fuels that caused the melting in the first place. It’s like pouring gasoline on fire.”
In all cases, it is difficult to discern how the State Department’s actions, though perhaps effective as corporate lobbying, actually serve the interests of the American people, the great majority of whom are not owners of preferred stock in Merck or hangers-on of the Mubarak family. It is also difficult to approve of the directive, signed both by Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, that US diplomats collect DNA samples, fingerprints and biometric information, credit card numbers, passport and frequent flyer IDs from other diplomats at the United Nations.
III. The Reception of the Leaks
The gift of WikiLeaks has not been well received in the United States. Yet no country stands as much to gain from Bradley Manning’s alleged disclosures as the United States. With the lessons of a lost decade of foreign policy, a massive body count and a huge hole in the US treasury, it stands to reason a better-informed public might prevent such future disasters. Bringing statecraft back into the light could only be an improvement, offering enormous benefits to a suddenly cash-strapped nation unable to afford more lavish adventures abroad, a nation whose haggard, stop-loss military is running on vapors.
