I’ve been following the saga of Wikileaks over the past few days. The secretive website’s founder, Julian Assange, has been on the run from the Pentagon:
American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East governments and leaders.
Assange is like the kid in school who found the popular girl’s secret diary where she talks shit about the people she pretends to be friends with.
The person who’s believed to have turned over these cables was a 22-year-old Army Intelligence Analyst named Bradley Manning. Manning was arrested last week after admitting to the leak in a series of online chats. Manning also took credit for leaking the video that Wikileaks unveiled in April.
There will be a lot of debate about whether Manning should be considered a whistleblower or a traitor. In leaking the video, he was clearly trying to expose a coverup (Reuters had been unsuccessful in getting the footage showing U.S. troops killing one of their photographers). But with the cables, it’s not clear if Manning was trying to expose any particular wrongdoing or if he was just bent on undermining American foreign policy. Yet even if that distinction matters to some of us, it certainly won’t matter to the Obama Administration and the Pentagon.
While the true nature of what he revealed remains a big unknown, what isn’t a mystery is how this young Army analyst became disillusioned to the point of doing this. In his lengthy online chats with the man who eventually turned him in – a former hacker named Adrian Lamo – he pointed to one specific incident:
(02:31:02 PM) Manning: i think the thing that got me the most… that made me rethink the world more than anything
(02:35:46 PM) Manning: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police… for printing “anti-Iraqi literature”… the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs… it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki… i had an interpreter read it for me… and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet… i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees…
(02:35:46 PM) Lamo : I’m not here right now
(02:36:27 PM) Manning: everything started slipping after that… i saw things differently
(02:37:37 PM) Manning: i had always questioned the things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where i was a *part* of something… i was actively involved in something that i was completely against…
Even as someone who thought the war in Iraq was ill-advised from the very beginning, and who fully expected an outcome where our occupation would eventually begin imitating the tyranny we’d set out to replace, I still find it fascinating to see this young man running into that glaring contradiction between our ideals and our actions. I have no idea yet how history will eventually judge Manning, but I understand how he ended up doing what he did.
If these cables are released, what will come next? Would it cause the unraveling of key alliances to the point that our national security would be threatened? Or does it merely expose embarrassing things that would only affect a narrow set of people and interests? Either way, the diary of the popular girl may be posted online soon.
Manning talks too much. He was outed because he talked about it to a hacker.
This post filled in the why for me. If true, he’s a hero, but a very stupid kid for talking about it.
Manning sounds like a narcissistic, spite-filled prick. I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, but what he is did is wrong. There is no sense of responsibility about this. He doesn’t know the people who were communicating or the issues they were discussing.
I hope they throw him in a dark hole and forget about him.
Is it just me, or does the world seem more Orwellian all the time? At least he wasn’t quietly offed. But a job like that would be enough to drive one crazy. There are those of us who spent years in a bureaucracy whose primary existence is to protect their own budget (read: management jobs) as opposed to delivering quality public services, and that treats its staff as if they were mindless drones. It’s quite unpleasant. With the drastic increase in federal jobs it’s no wonder sales of anti-depressants are skyrocketing.
Soma anyone?
Correcting “countrygirl” @3:
That’s Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
Well, at least I have the government term “allies” defined for me.
I do not want my tax money going to pay for Technostasi tactics.
Would I want my government encouraging another government to spy on us?
I think that is a big NO.
We still get the oil right?
Right?
@4 – I know that, and I should have clarified but there are similarities between the experiences of the characters in 1984 and Brave New World. The irony is that there really is a drug called Soma! It’s the trade name for the muscle relaxant Carisoprodol.
I’ve always been mixed on these issues. As a student of military history, I understand and respect that intelligence officers are should not be given unfettered discretion to decide what, and what could not, be released.
On the other hand, I remember well the Nixon administration’s viscous fight against Daniel Ellsburg relating to the release of the Pentagon Papers, and their threats of dire consequences to American security if they were to be published. It turns out that it only made some politicians and CIA types look bad, and brought a new level of understanding of our S.E. Asia foreign policy.
Likewise, I remember well the Nixon administration’s promise that our foreign affairs would suffer irreperable damage if the contents of their conversations within the Oval Office were disclosed as a result of the Watergate investigations. It turns out, not so much – the foreign leaders all presumed that they were being recorded, and the U.S. government would leak the contents whenever it suited a particular President’s purposes.
And I was all in favor of the release of the Abu Grahib photos. I thought they would show the world we weren’t afraid to investigate and prosecute our own people for misconduct. Instead, those photos fueled the insurgency to levels beyond anything else we could have done.
So… I’m still thinking about this one.
# 6: If you will recall, the entire cost of the Iraq war will be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues. That was the promise.
At the time, I recalled a passage in Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”. She recounted how the Prussians had forced the French to pay reparations after they lost that war. Prior to WWI influential Germans advocating war with France promised that the French could again be made to pay the cost of the war, along with any lost business profits during what they expected to be a brief war, as well as a tidy profit on the side. It didn’t work out that way for them then.
As for me, I’m still waiting for those oil revenues to pay for the Iraq war.
@8
You’re hitting upon a few points that made this a tricky post for me to write.
I generally believe that transparency is always good, but that does not guarantee that the downstream effect of the truth being revealed won’t lead to people whose interests are threatened to have a negative impact on our security.
Article about Wikileaks in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/repor.....chadourian