[governance] The American Conservative: How State Secrecy Leads to War
Riaz K Tayob
riaz.tayob at gmail.com
Wed Jun 12 17:46:30 EDT 2013
How State Secrecy Leads to War
Why Bradley Manning has done more for American security than Seal Team
Six (Via TomDispatch
<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-state-secrecy-leads-to-war/www.tomdispatch.com>.)
By Chase Madar
<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/chase-madar> . June 11,
2013
<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-state-secrecy-leads-to-war/>
* <http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-state-secrecy-leads-to-war/?print=1>
* <http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-state-secrecy-leads-to-war/?email=1>
* <http://www.instapaper.com/hello2?url=http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-state-secrecy-leads-to-war/&title=How+State+Secrecy+Leads+to+War&description=And+why+Bradley+Manning+has+done+more+for+American+security+than+Seal+Team+Six.>
Source
Source <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bradley_Manning_US_Army.jpg>
The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' source inside the U.S.
Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/features/2013/06/bradley-manning-on-trial.html> a
member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden.
The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to
tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to
WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden's laptop. That will, in turn, be
offered as proof not that bin Laden had internet access like two billion
other earthlings, but that Manning has "aided the enemy," a capital offense.
Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the
/jihadi/ super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a
five-foot-two-inch gay man facing 22 charges in military court and
accused of the biggest security breach in U.S. history.
But let's be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence
analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to
WikiLeaks, has done far more for U.S. national security than SEAL Team 6.
The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not
operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of
triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to
incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats. This was
true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do
remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general.
(The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha
bombing <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings> in
Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden's organization, though white-shoe
<http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/29/spains_election_and_us_foreign_policy_after_2012> foreign
policy magazines and think tanks
<http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/scr_05.pdf> routinely get this
wrong, "al-Qaeda" being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.)
Al-Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the
greatest threat to the United States. In fact, if you measure national
security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest
threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own
clueless foreign policy.
*The Wages of Cluelessness Is Death*
Look at the numbers. The attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 3,000
people, a large-scale atrocity by any definition. Still, roughly double
<http://icasualties.org/> that number of American military personnel
have been killed in Washington's invasion and occupation of Iraq and its
no-end-in-sight war in Afghanistan. Add in private military contractors
who have died
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Contractors> in
both war zones, along with recently discharged veterans who have
committed suicide
<http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/19/veterans-outreach-increases/2001571/>,
and the figure triples. The number of seriously wounded in both wars is
cautiously estimated
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/25/iraq-afghanistan-war-wounded_n_2017338.html> at
50,000. And if you dare to add in as well the number of Iraqis
<http://web.mit.edu/cis/pdf/Human_Cost_of_War.pdf>, Afghans
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/aug/10/afghanistan-civilian-casualties-statistics>,
and foreign coalition personnel <http://icasualties.org/> killed in both
wars, the death toll reaches at least a hundred 9/11s and probably more.
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1781680698/ref=nosim/?tag=theamericonse-20>Did
these people die to make America safer? Don't insult our intelligence.
Virtually no one thinks the Iraq War has made the U.S. more secure,
though many believe the war created new threats
<http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-26-iraq-report_x.htm>.
After all, the Iraq we liberated is now in danger of collapsing
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/why-iraq-is-on-the-precipice-of-civil-war/276562/> into
another bitter, bloody civil war, is a close ally
<http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2011/07/07/as_iraq_iran_ties_expand_so_do_worries_of_arab_allies_united_states/> of
Iran, and sells
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/middleeast/china-reaps-biggest-benefits-of-iraq-oil-boom.html> the
preponderance of its oil to China. Over the years, the drain
<http://costsofwar.org/> on the U.S. treasury for all of this will be at
least several trillion dollars. As for Afghanistan, after the disruption
of al-Qaeda camps, accomplished 10 years ago, it is difficult to see how
the ongoing pacification campaign there and the CIA drone war across the
border in Pakistan's tribal areas have enhanced the security of the U.S.
in any significant way. Both wars of occupation were ghastly strategic
choices that have killed hundreds of thousands, wounded many more, sent
millions into exile
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174892/michael_schwartz_the_iraqi_brain_drain>,
and destabilized what Washington, in good times, used to call "the arc
of instability."
Why have our strategic choices been so disastrous? In large part because
they have been militantly clueless. Starved of important information,
both the media and public opinion were putty
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/9301/jim_lobe_nuclear_drumbeat> in the
hands the Bush administration and its neocon followers as they dreamt up
and then put into action their geopolitical fantasies. It has since
become fashion for politicians who supported the war to blame the Iraq
debacle on "bad intelligence." But as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar
reminds us
<http://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/still-peddling-iraq-war-myths-ten-years-later-8227>,
the carefully cherry-picked "Intel" about Saddam Hussein's WMD program
was really never the issue. After all, the CIA's classified intelligence
estimate on Iraq argued that, even if that country's ruler Saddam
Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction (which he didn't), he would
never use them and was therefore not a threat.
Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003,
was one of the few people with access to that CIA report who bothered to
take the time to read it. Initially keen on the idea of invading Iraq,
he changed his mind and voted against the invasion.
What if the entire nation had had access to that highly classified
document? What if bloggers, veterans' groups, clergy, journalists,
educators, and other opinion leaders had been able to see the full
intelligence estimate, not just the morsels cherry-picked by Cheney and
his mates? Even then, of course, there was enough information around to
convince millions of people
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/feb/15/politics.politicalnews> across
the globe of the folly of such an invasion, but what if some insider had
really laid out the whole truth, not just the cherry-picked pseudofacts
in those months and the games being played by other insiders to fool
Congress and the American people into a war of choice and design in the
Middle East? As we now know, whatever potentially helpful information
there was remained conveniently beyond our sight until a military and
humanitarian disaster was unleashed.
Any private-sector employee who screwed up this badly would be fired on
the spot, or at the very least put under full-scale supervision. And
this was the gift of Bradley Manning: thanks to his trove of
declassified documents our incompetent foreign policy elites finally
have the supervision <http://wikileaks.org/> they manifestly need.
Not surprisingly, foreign policy elites don't much enjoy being
supervised. Like orthopedic surgeons, police departments, and every
other professional group under the sun, the military brass and their
junior partners in the diplomatic corps feel deeply that they should be
exempt from public oversight. Every volley of revealed documents from
WikiLeaks has stimulated the same outraged response
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175282/engelhardt_whose_hands_whose_blood> from
that crew: near-total secrecy is essential to the delicate arts of
diplomacy and war.
Let us humor our foreign policy elites (who have feelings too), despite
their abysmal 10-year resumé of charred rubble and mangled limbs. There
may be a time and a place for secrecy, even duplicity, in statecraft.
But history shows that a heavy blood-price is often attached to
diplomats saying one thing in public and meaning something else in
private. In the late 1940s, for instance, the United States publicly
declared that the Korean peninsula was not viewed by Washington as a
vital interest, emboldening the North to invade the South and begin the
Korean War. Our government infamously escalated the Vietnam War behind a
smokescreen of official secrecy, distortion, and lies. Saddam Hussein
rolled into Kuwait after U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie told
<http://news.antiwar.com/2011/01/02/glaspie-memo-leaked-us-dealings-with-iraq-ahead-of-1990-invasion-of-kuwait-detailed/> the
Ba'athist strongman that he could do what he pleased on his southern
border and still bask in the good graces of Washington. This is not a
record of success.
So what's wrong with diplomats doing more of their business in the
daylight---a very old idea not cooked up at Julian Assange's kitchen
table five years ago? Check out the mainstream political science
literature on international relations and you'll find rigorous,
respectable, borderline-boring studies touting the virtues of relative
transparency in statecraft---as, for example, in making
<http://www3.nd.edu/%7Edlindley/handouts/COE.htm> the post-Napoleonic
Concert of Europe such a durable peace deal. On the other hand, when
nation-states get coy about their commitments to other states or to
their own citizenry, violent disaster is often in the offing.
*Dystopian Secrecy
*
Foreign policy elites regularly swear that the WikiLeaks example, if
allowed to stand, puts us on a perilous path towards "total
transparency." Wrong again. In fact, without the help of WikiLeaks and
others, there is no question that the U.S. national security state, as
the most recent phone and Internet revelations indicate, is moving
towards something remarkably like total state secrecy. The
classification of documents has gone through the roof. Washington
classified a staggering 92 million public records
<http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/letter-president-obama-security-classification-reform-steering-committee> in
2011, up from 77 million the year before and from 14 million in 2003.
(By way of comparison, the various troves of documents Manning leaked
add up to less than 1% of what Washington classifies annually---not
exactly the definition of "total transparency".)
Meanwhile, the declassification of ancient secrets within the national
security state moves at a near-geological tempo. The National Security
Agency, for example, only finished declassifying documents
<http://gawker.com/5810354/national-security-agency-declassifies-200+year+old-book> from
the Madison presidency (1809-1817) in 2011. No less indicative of
Washington's course, the prosecution of governmental whistleblowers in
the Obama years has burned with a particularly vindictive fury, fueled
by both political parties and Congress as well as the White House.
Our government secrecy fetishists invest their security clearances (held
by an elite coterie of 4.8 million
<http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2012/07/cleared_population/> people) and
the information security (InfoSec) regime they continue to elaborate
with all sorts of protective powers over life and limb. But what gets
people killed, no matter how much our pols and pundits strain to deny
it, aren't InfoSec breaches or media leaks, but foolish and clueless
strategic choices. Putting the blame on leaks is a nice way to pass the
buck, but at the risk of stating the obvious, what has killed 1,605
<http://icasualties.org/oef/> U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since 2009 is
the war in Afghanistan---not Bradley Manning or any of the other five
leakers whom Obama has prosecuted
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/peter_van_buren_silent_state> under
the Espionage Act of 1917. Leaks and whistleblowers should not be made
scapegoats for bad strategic choices, which would have been a whole lot
less bad had they been informed by all the relevant facts.
Pardon my utopian extremism, but knowing what your government is doing
really isn't such a bad thing and it has to do with aiding the
(American) public, not the enemy. Knowing what your government is doing
is not some special privilege that the government generously bestows on
us when we're good and obedient citizens, it's an obligation that goes
to the heart of the matter in a free country. After all, it should be
ordinary citizens like us who make the ultimate decision about whether
war X is worth fighting or not, worth escalating or not, worth ending or
not.
When such momentous public decisions are made and the public doesn't
have---isn't allowed to have---a clue, you end up in a fantasy land of
aggressive actions that, over the past dozen years, have gotten hundreds
of thousands killed and left us in a far more dangerous world. These are
the wages of dystopian government secrecy.
Despite endless panic and hysteria on the subject from both major
parties, the White House, and Congress, leaks have been good for us.
They're how we came to learn much about the Vietnam War, much about the
Watergate scandal, and most recently, far more
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order> about
state surveillance of our phone calls and email. Bradley Manning's leaks
in particular have already yielded real, tangible benefits, most vividly
their small but significant role
<http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/18/tunisia.wikileaks/index.html> in
sparking the rebellion that ejected a dictator in Tunisia and the way
they indirectly expedited
<http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/25/world/la-fg-iraq-haditha-20120125>our
military exit from Iraq. Manning's leaked reports of U.S. atrocities in
Iraq, displayed in newspapers globally, made it politically impossible
for the Iraqi authorities to perpetuate domestic legal immunity for
America troops, Washington's bedrock condition for a much-desired
continuing presence there. If it weren't for Manning's leaks, the U.S.
might still be in Iraq, killing and being killed for no legitimate
reason, and that is the very opposite of national security.
*Knowledge is Not Evil*
Thanks to Bradley Manning, our disaster-prone elites have gotten a dose
of the adult supervision they so clearly require. Instead of charging
him with aiding the enemy, the Obama administration ought to send him a
get-out-of-jail-free card and a basket of fruit. If we're going to stop
the self-inflicted wars that continue to hemorrhage blood and money, we
need to get a clue, fast. Should we ever bother to learn from the
uncensored truth of our foreign policy failures, which have destroyed so
many more lives than the late bin Laden could ever have hoped, we at
least stand a chance of not repeating them.
I am not trying to soft-pedal or sanitize Manning's magnificent act of
civil disobedience. The young private humiliated the U.S. Army by
displaying for all to see their complete lack of real information
security. Manning has revealed the diplomatic corps to be hard at work
shilling
<http://www.thenation.com/article/161057/wikileaks-haiti-let-them-live-3-day> for
garment manufacturers in Haiti, for Big Pharma in Europe
<http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/10/wikileaks-cables-show-how-big-pharma-shapes-foreign-policy/43264/>,
and under signed orders from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to
collect
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/press_box/2010/11/wikileaks_hillary_clinton_and_the_smoking_gun.single.html> biometric
data and credit card numbers from their foreign counterparts. Most
important, Manning brought us face to face with two disastrous wars,
forcing Americans to share <http://www.collateralmurder.com/> a burden
of knowledge previously shouldered only by our soldiers, whom we love to
call heroes from a very safe distance.
Did Manning violate provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice?
He certainly did, and a crushing sentence of possibly decades in
military prison is surely on its way. Military law is marvelously
elastic when it comes to rape and sexual assault
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/opinion/dont-trust-the-pentagon-to-end-rape.html> and
perfectly easygoing about the slaughter
<http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/0124/Marine-demoted-to-private-to-end-Haditha-trial.-Did-military-justice-work> of
foreign civilians, but it puts on a stern face for the unspeakable act
of declassifying documents. But the young private's act of civil
defiance was in fact a first step in reversing the pathologies that have
made our foreign policy a string of self-inflicted homicidal disasters.
By letting us in on more than a half million "secrets," Bradley Manning
has done far more for American national security than SEAL Team 6 ever did.
/Chase Madar is an attorney and the author of /The Passion of Bradley
Manning: The Story Behind the WikiLeaks Whistleblower
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1781680698/ref=nosim/?tag=theamericonse-20>/.
A //TomDispatch regular/
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175654/chase_madar_the_school-security_america_doesn>/,
he writes for the /London Review of Books/, /Le Monde Diplomatique/, the
/American Conservative/, and CounterPunch/. /He is covering the Manning
trial daily for the /Nation/ magazine/
<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/chase-madar>/. Follow TomDispatch on
Twitter and join us on Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch>. Copyright 2013 Chase Madar
/
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