by Chase Madar
And yet the mainstream reception of this wealth of new knowledge has been surly and resentful. The government’s response to each new wave of leaks has been a syncopated alternation between shrieks of angry panic and soothing deflationary assessments of the “damage” done to US interests. (For “US interests” read: the delicate collective ego of the foreign policy elite, whose performance in the past decade has been so lethally sub-par.) A typical alternation has been Hillary Clinton’s thundering denunciation of the leaked diplomatic cables as “an assault on the international community” followed by written State Department reports—confidential of course—that the national interest has not been damaged. (Manning’s lawyer has already subpoenaed such reports, one by the White House, the other by Foggy Bottom.) As we have already seen, in the case of Joe Biden, sometimes it is the same official who both blasts and retracts within in the same twenty-four-hour span. (Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also went from accusing WikiLeaks of having “blood on their hands” to a coolly dismissive assessment months later, to much less media fanfare.)
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 conservativ
e 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.
4
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 pr
evious 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.
