by Chase Madar
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.
Were American air strikes on Iran in the waning days of Bush-Cheney averted by a timely leak? The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program swiftly made its way public; its findings—that Iran was very far from acquiring nuclear weapons—were a shocking reversal of previous reports. Admiral William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, took the unusual step of immediately declassifying this NIE on Iran in December, 2007; a decision to which the White House, fearing an inevitable leak, assented. This quasi-leak, whose content was given emphatic backing by top military, diplomatic and intelligence officials, further stated that “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” This was Fallon making good on his candid earlier utterance that “we won’t be doing Iran on my watch”—candor that cost him his job.
In his memoirs, George W. Bush writes that this unexpected assessment “tied my hands on the military side.” It’s impossible to prove that this quasi-leak was decisive in preventing American and/or Israeli air strikes (or worse) on Iran. But it certainly did set back the neoconservative efforts to make war on Tehran, with much disappointment manifested in the National Review and editorial section of the Wall Street Journal.
It was Ray McGovern, a retired CIA senior analyst, who brought the above two leaks to my attention. McGovern knows something about secrets, intelligence and public service: he served in Army intelligence in Vietnam, then went on to give daily intelligence briefings to President Reagan and the first Bush.
McGovern has written that he wished he had had the courage to leak some of the Pentagon’s honest internal evaluations of the Vietnam War’s countless failings and evils—back then, he tells me, the Fourth Estate actually picked up stories like that, and it couldhave given the antiwar movement a boost. (Today McGovern works
with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington; he’s also a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.) On February 15, 2011, McGovern attended a speech given by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Eager to disassociate himself from what he called “the obsequious adulation of a person responsible for so much death, suffering and destruction,” McGovern stood up in the midst of her opening remarks, and turned his back to her, his Veterans for Peace t-shirt combining with his silence to make a powerful statement. It did not go unnoticed. Madame Secretary’s security retinue grabbed McGovern, dragged him out of the auditorium, beating him black and blue. “So this is America! So this is America!” he yelled. Clinton resumed her speech, a lofty defense of internet freedom—abroad, of course, not at home.
Ray is an unpretentious guy from the Bronx; a self-professed “Vatican II Catholic;” a polyglot intellectual proficient in five languages. We talked about Brad Manning’s alleged act—which McGovern admires greatly—its likely impact on US foreign policy, and Thomas Aquinas.“In section 158 of the Summa Theologica, Aquinas complains that Latin has no word for the virtue of anger. There’s anger as a vice, iracundia. So Aquinas went back to Chrysostom to revive the concept of righteous anger at injustice and evil. Because he who isn’t angry has an ‘unreasoned patience’, sows the seeds of vice. I’m trying to be virtuously angry. Being Irish gives you a leg up!
“Bradley Manning had the strength to be angry. Are all of the cables he released covered by whistleblower protection laws? Of course not, but what was he going to do, go over each and every one in his bed with a flashlight? Moral philosophy teaches that there are supervening values that dwarf the other stuff, that it’s transcendently important to stop war and torture. That’s what I think Manning understood, these basic principles.
“But in America today we have far too much passive acceptance of injustice. We need more righteous anger.”
McGovern’s gloomy diagnosis is, alas, born out by hard data. We Americans can pride ourselves all we want on our anti-authority posturing, but a 2006 poll from the International Social Survey Programme of national attitudes towards individualism and authority tells a very different story.
In 2006, the ISSP asked the question “In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?” At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences—far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement “People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong.”
Perhaps the most distressing part of the whole saga of these leaks is that, given how easy it was to bring these public records to light, and how many soldiers and diplomats had access to them, not a single person had the courage to do the deed—until, allegedly, a certain private from Crescent, Oklahoma. This paucity of public-spirited citizens speaks poorly of American rebelliousness. After all, what country can remain free if its citizens no longer have any “issues with authority”?
If any lesson can be drawn from the Manning affair, it’s that leaks can make a great difference if there is organized political muscle to put them to good use. Information on its own is futile; as useless as those other false hopes of the global center-left, international law and its sidekick, the human rights industry, all of which have their uses, but are insufficient to stop wars and end torture. This is not to denigrate the achievement of the person who gave us this magnificent gift of knowledge about world affairs. If the disclosures have not changed US statecraft—yet—the fault lies not in the cables, but in the pathetic lack of political organization among those individuals who don’t “have a position” in Halliburton stock—the 99%, if you will.
Michael Moore has named Bradley Manning a patron saint of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon, an icon and martyr for the cause of justice and freedom. The “Free Bradley” signs at Occupy events all over the country are often sneered at as proof of the incipient movement’s indiscipline and lack of realism. They are, in fact, a sign of the group’s robust ideals and healthy distance from the neoliberal/neoconservative mainstream of American news media.
For now, the disclosures and their great potential hangs unresolved. Will the leaks kindle more uprisings in authoritarian nations? Will the Haitian diaspora be able to use the diplomatic cables to rally opposition to imperial meddling? Will Americans unlearn some of their deference and docility and stand up to the foreign policy elite that has brought carnage and destruction to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, that has supported dictators in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and bankrolled ethnic cleansing in Palestine? Will American stand against a foreign policy that has served their own needs and interests so disastrously? The growing number of young returned veterans at Occupy Wall Street events is a sign that their fellow soldier and patriot’s earnest hopes for debate, discussion and reform may yet be validated.
But even if these leaks lead to nothing, the Promethean act of bringing knowledge to mere civilians without a security clearance is still taboo enough to provoke the severest punishment.
5
THE TORTURE OF BRADLEY MANNING
(2:01:14 PM) bradass87: but im pretty desperate for some non-isolation
No feature of the Manning affair has been more controversial than the young soldier’s nine months under strict solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Corps Base. As we have seen, even the State Department’s top spokesperson, a mouthpiece of perfect blandness, lost his job after a spontaneous eruption damning Manning’s treatment, and foreign governments have brought pressure to bear, sending pointed letters of concern to Washington.
Adrian Lamo, shortly after informing on Manning, assured an audience of hackers and digital activists in New York that his dupe would be treated decently; after all, “We don’t torture our own citizens.” Lamo was apparently trying to distinguish Manning’s likely treatment from that endured by hundreds of captured foreigners in the course of our Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as it was known in-house during the Bush-Cheney Administration.
Lamo’s reassurance, based perhaps in guilt-ridden wishfulness, has proven grotesquely wrong. Twenty-three hours of solitary a day; a ban even on push-ups and sit-ups in the cell; the confiscation even of reading glasses; enforced nudity at night; the unrelenting repetitive mental stress of having to respond every five waking minutes to the guards’ query, “Are you OK?” If this were done to a US soldier held captive in North Korea or Iran, no American pundit would hesitate to call this torture. How could this treatment not drive anyone mad?
Being alone in a small cell for years or even months does a body great harm. Not surprisingly, medical research into the effects of solitary confinement finds that the treatment inflicts lasting severe damage. “Solitary confinement can have serious psychological, psychiatric and sometimes physiological effects on many prison inmates,” writes Dr. Peter Scharff Smith, head of research at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. “A long list of possible symptoms from insomnia and confusion to hallucinations and outright insanity has been documented.” The suicide rate for isolated inmates, according to another psychiatric expert on mental health in prisons, is substantially higher than among those living communally in prison.
In the footsteps of medical science, international law is ever less hesitant to classify solitary confinement as torture. The European Court of Human Rights has allowed the practice in the case of Kurdish terrorist Abdullah Öcalan, but after finding a marked mental deterioration in that prisoner recommended that the Turkish government integrate him into a communal setting. The United States has ratified the international Convention Against Torture, whose acting body, the Committee Against Torture, has recommended that long-term solitary be wholly abolished. The German
Bundestag’s human rights committee was not breaking new ground when it condemned Manning’s treatment as torture.
But what could possibly inspire the American government to torture one of its own citizens? Most of those who have answered this question have approached the problem from the context of America’s post-9/11 GWOT. Andy Worthington, the most dogged and incisive journalistic tracker of the Guantánamo prison, has asked if Bradley Manning is being treated like an enemy combatant. Lisa Hajjar, a trenchant academic analyst of Washington’s weaponization of international law, has described the treatment of Manning as a slide down the “slippery slope,” from torturing enemy combatants to inflicting the same punishment on Americans, just as torture opponents predicted would happen.
It is certainly tempting to see the isolation torture of Bradley Manning as toxic spillover from the Global War on Terror. What else could explain an advanced industrial democracy thus abusing one of its own citizens?
There is undoubtedly some truth to this story—that after a decade, the “excesses” of the War on Terror have seeped into our domestic justice systems. Yet this account is, by itself, incomplete. In fact this narrative is perhaps undeservedly reassuring. For this story assumes that our domestic criminal justice system was already uncontaminated, and had hitherto run smoothly and fairly, at least more or less. This narrative of corruption assumes that Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantánamo are flagrant offenses against “American values,” vivid exceptions to our legal and penal norms. It assumes that nine months pretrial detention in solitary confinement is simply unheard-of in the United States. In short, this story assumes the legalized torture of Bradley Manning to be exceptional, an atrocity. We must reject these assumptions: they are wrong both in their particulars and in their overall image of America’s justice system.
