Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaking of the Pentagon papers saved the lives of more American soldiers than any number of Medal of Honor heroes could have done, has returned to the front pages lately. It sent me back to his valuable book, Secrets, from which this comes:
No one else was going to tell me ever again that I (or anyone else) “had” to kill someone, that I had no choice, that I had a right or a duty to do it that someone else had decided for me.This new principle, as I already thought of it, didn’t answer all questions about whether one should ever use violence or when, the questions I’d been wrestling with ever since I’d met Janaki and began reading Gandhian and Christian pacifists, but it did answer some. For example about whether unquestioningly to accept being drafted. That wouldn’t face me again, but it might face my son Robert. I would tell my kids, I thought, that no one could make it all right for them to carry a gun or shoot anyone just by telling them they had to. That would have to be their choice, their entire responsibility.
If I ever did it again — as I now told myself — it would be because I chose to do it or chose to follow such orders as the right thing to do, not just because someone gave me an order. I would also examine very critically my own reason for it. I would have to have better reasons, which stood up better under a skeptical look, than I had in Vietnam. [Ed. note: Ellsberg had commanded a Marine infantry company in Vietnam.] Responsibility for killing or being ready to kill was not something you could delegate to someone else, even a president.
Yesterday the world changed and a new epoch was ushered in with Wikileak’s release of the Afghan War Diary, 2004 – 2010. In case you’ve been vacationing off-planet, Afghan War Diary is a compilation of “raw data” derived from 90,000 leaked ground reports from the war in Afghanistan (approximately 15,000 have been held back for possible redaction before their release). The importance of this event is certainly not that the data uncovers shocking new revelations about how abysmally the war in Afghanistan has been conducted — an epic fail of such proportions is hard to cover up completely no matter how obedient the national media are. The true awesomeness of this development is that, in one brilliant and well-coordinated play, the rules of the game have been changed — forever after — and, not only has the playing field been leveled, it’s been moved out of town — no more home-field advantage.
Part of the genius of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange’s release was his gambit to assure that mainstream media would not obstruct or trivialize the importance of the leak — by giving them the scoop. Wikileaks provided the roughly 91,000 reports dated from January 2004 to December 2009 to three media outlets, The New York Times, the Guardian of London and Der Spiegel of Germany, under agreement to publish their individual coverage simultaneously on Sunday…
The “home team” however seems to be determined to ignore the change in game plan, at least for now. Despite a “heads up” from their loyal friends at The New York Times, the administration’s official flat-footed response was noticeably confused, and confusing. In my opinion, no one did a better job of parsing the White House’ official response than Jay Rosen; here are his reactions posted on NYU’s Pressthink blog:
The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive:
This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to.)
There’s nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm national security?)
Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn’t even try to contact us! (Hold on: you’re hunting the guy down and you’re outraged that he didn’t contact you?)
Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they’re not an objective news source. (So does that mean the documents they published are fake?)
“The period of time covered in these documents… is before the President announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the President ordered a three month policy review and a change in strategy.” (Okay, so now we too know the basis for the President’s decision: and that’s a bad thing?)
A great follow-up (that we’ll never see) from the White House would be a comprehensive analysis of how the “revolutionary Obama” strategy addresses shortcomings in the “lackluster Bush” strategy. For example, to the best of my knowledge, American taxpayers are still underwriting billions of dollars to continue the Sisyphean task of training an Afghan National Police Force.
As Tom Engelhardt put it, recently:
The Pentagon . . . hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police – and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again.
Engelhardt then follows up with the questions that lay bare the Coalition’s utter fecklessness in this endeavor:
“And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisers that money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting. They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.”
“Consider it, then, a modern miracle in reverse that the U.S. has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their war-fighting traditions.”
And if you think the Afghan Police Academy idea is stupid and wasteful, just go read Tom’s entire article describing the US plan to resurrect the Afghan Air Force (as soon as they can learn English) and procure some reconditioned Russian ‘coptors that the Afghans took a shine to in the last war. The timeline for that project? US Air Force personnel: guestimate 2016 – 2018 depending on how well the Afghans take to English, “the official language of the cockpit.” There are 450 US Air Force personnel tasked with this project @ $1 million/year/flight instructor plus, of course, pay and bennies for the Afghan recruits, and let’s not forget procurement and maintenance of the fleet of Russian helicopters — you do the math . . . .
What has changed, recently, was that the new Afghan “police academy” graduates will eventually be dealing with a possible “conflict of interest” with the freshly minted localized militias (that nobody wants to call militias) that Gen. Petraeus is so proud of successfully lobbying for.
Evidently, Catch-22 is alive and well in today’s army . . .
* * *
The Pentagon, for its part, has harrumphed out a hasty announcement that it is launching a “robust probe” of the Wikileaks matter (to differentiate, I suppose, from the “rather lame probes” that it launches in the event of collateral damage leaks). That development is curious in the face of their much ballyhooed apprehension, months ago, of Bradley Manning, an Army information analyst stationed in Iraq (not Afghanistan), charged with leaking classified information to Wikileaks. The Pentagon is acting suspiciously in this, perhaps they know that there are many leaks in their midst, or, maybe they just already know it’s not Manning but it’s good to have a guy in custody.
And the State Department, on the basis of leaked reports that the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI is aiding and abetting the Taliban insurgents, is threatening to take back the $7 billion aid package that it proudly bestowed on Pakistan a few weeks ago, if the ISI doesn’t cut it out. Of course none of this is “news” and Hillary Clinton knew it when she delivered this money bomb on her latest trip. Ah well, it’s taxpayers’ money, there’s more where that came from . . .
* * *
The real importance of this event is so hard to grasp and appreciate fully that it’s going to take some time to digest. If you look hard enough, though, a number of people have noticed and are scratching the surface in credible ways.
The following are excerpts from the first impressions of respected sources on media and the new news ecosystem; taken together, I believe that their comments comprise a cogent analysis of the unprecedented actions taken by Julian Assange and the possible impact that those actions might have on the future of information distribution, transparency and governmental accountability.
From Jay Rosen of NYU’s PressThink blog:
If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says: Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’s first stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples of that. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless news organization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes in one country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant to put it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what so odd about the White House crying, ‘They didn’t even contact us!
Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of news reporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release of information without regard for national interest. In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrial address or central office, neither does Wikileaks.
And I can’t resist including a reader’s comment on Rosen’s article, because it says so much:
we enter an era now where we begin to be conscious of “collective consciousness” and its role as “prime mover” of the “world” and its events …”
analysis of the various parts and components proceeds only fitfully, because we do not yet have a language of whole …
the problem? adjusting to a pre-existing global reality larger than the individual thinking mind can grasp …
consciousness itself, however, has no problem with any of this … it is our limited self-concept that does …
solution? easy. identify with the whole…
inescapable and unavoidable, by the way … not if, but when
Posted by: gregorylent at July 26, 2010 2:56 AM | Permalink
From Alexis Madrigal, senior editor and lead technology writer for TheAtlantic.com:
The rogue, rather mysterious website provided the raw data; the newspapers provided the context, corroboration, analysis, and distribution. ‘Wikileaks was not involved in the news organizations’ research, reporting, analysis and writing,’ Times editors said in an online note. ‘The Times spent about a month mining the data for disclosures and patterns, verifying and cross-checking with other information sources, and preparing the articles that are published today.
The New York Times’ David Carr may have nailed the issue when he tweeted that it was the “asymmetries” that Wikileaks introduces into the equation that have the government spooked. An administration official told Politico, ‘[I]t’s worth noting that Wikileaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.’ But the truth is that we don’t really know what Wikileaks is, or what the organization’s ethics are, or why they’ve become such a stunningly good conduit of classified information.
In the new asymmetrical journalism, it’s not clear who is on what side or what the rules of engagement actually are. But the reason Wikileaks may have just changed the media is that we found out that it doesn’t really matter. Their data is good, and that’s what counts.
From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:
Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world. Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret. But that’s what our National Security State does reflexively: it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing. WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall, enabling modest glimpses into what The Washington Post spent last week describing as Top Secret America. The war on WikiLeaks — which was already in full swing, including, strangely, from some who claim a commitment to transparency — will only intensify now. Anyone who believes that the Government abuses its secrecy powers in order to keep the citizenry in the dark and manipulate public opinion — and who, at this point, doesn’t believe that? – should be squarely on the side of the greater transparency which Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes single-handedly, are providing.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40251.html#ixzz0utLuIynG
And finally, for those who claim this is “old news” and “no big deal,” ponder this from Politico:
Whether WikiLeaks uncovered anything new isn’t actually important — it’s on the front page of every newspaper in the country; the media is now focused on Afghanistan, and that makes it a big deal,” said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on India and Pakistan.
The public is now more skeptical about the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan than they were last week, and that makes it real, said Markey, who was a South Asia analyst during the Bush administration.
Are you surprised at the story below? Of course not. You knew all along that the United States Congress is no more capable of controlling its urges than is Wall Street or Big Oil. Once the NRA carved out its own little exemption, you knew with mathematical certainty that everybody else would try to crowd through the door. And that only the lobbies with the shallowest pockets would be left outside, forced to identify their top five sugar daddies.
The purpose of this legislation was to undo some of the damage done done to free speech by the Supreme Court when it gutted the McCain-Feingold Act in January. But the result is likely to be even greater damage to democracy: one (or several) of the smaller lobbies will certainly protest its exclusion in court, complaining reasonably enough of discrimination based on size and wealth.
And then the Roberts court, snickering up its sleeve, will hurry to protect the little fellow — by declaring unconstitutional the bill currently being debated that attempts, however pitifully, to keep corporations from drowning out the rest of us at election time.
And then it will be a long time, perhaps forever, before Congress bothers to tilt again at this particular windmill.
WASHINGTON — House Democrats agreed to exempt an unspecified number of large, well-known interest groups from proposed new disclosure requirements on political advertising on Thursday, seeking to quell charges they were giving special treatment to the powerful National Rifle Association.The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said that under the last-minute change, “well-established organizations on the right and left” engaging in campaign activity, the NRA among them, would not be required to identify their top donors.
Democratic leaders announced plans for the legislation to come to a vote on Thursday, but that schedule appeared less than firm after rank and file moderates and members of the Congressional Black Caucus raised fresh objections. The leadership arranged afternoon meetings with representatives of both groups, and other changes were possible in the measure.
Under the bill, labor unions, corporations and nonprofit organizations that air political ads or conduct campaign activity would have to disclose their top five donors.
The bill also requires any individual or group paying for independent campaign activities to report any expenditure of at least $10,000 made more than 20 days before an election. Expenditures greater than $1,000 would have to be disclosed within 24 hours in the final 20 days of a campaign.
I have been rereading one of the most instructive government-insider books of our time: Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
For me its overarching lesson is that even when we remember history, we can’t avoid repeating it. We are governed by the hard-wiring in the human brain that led us to be wrong the first time. How else explain that our leaders have felt it necessary to lie us knowingly into the Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan — and that we have let them do it?
I’ll be running excerpts these next few weeks, and at the end will try to tie it all together. In today’s installment, it is the summer of 1964 and Ellsberg has just been named special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John T. McNaughton, a former Harvard law professor:
Once at lunch a State Department official who obviously didn’t know John very well told me that my boss was the most straightforward man in Washington. I told that to John after lunch and assured him, “I defended your reputation. I told him you were the most devious man in town.” John smiled warmly and said, “Thank you.”
I often watched McNaughton with reporters, because he called me into his office whenever he had to give an interview. This was a way of covering himself — it may even have been a requirement in the department — so he could have a witness confirm that he was not the source of any classified or sensitive information in the ensuing story. I watched and marveled. John was great at this.
As he got into areas where he had to be especially untruthful or elusive, his Pekin, Illinois, accent got broader till he sounded like someone discussing corn at a country fair or standing at the rail of a river boat. You looked for hayseed in his cuffs. He simply didn’t mind looking and sounding like a hick in the interests of dissimulation. My future boss in Vietnam, Edward Lansdale, had the same willingness to appear simpleminded when he wanted to be opaque, as he did with most outsiders. In both cases it was very effective.
Reporters would tell me how “open” my boss was, compared with others they ran into, this after I had listened to an hour of whoppers. It became clear to me that journalists had no idea, no clue, even the best of them, just how often and how egregiously they were lied to…
One morning just before eight o’clock John came back from McNamara’s office minutes after he’d gotten a call and dashed out. He said to me, ‘‘A Blue Springs drone has gone down in China. Bob is seeing the press at eight-thirty. We have ten minutes to write six alternative lies for him.” It was the only time I remember the actual word “lies” being used…
Blue Springs was the code name for an espionage program of reconnaissance photographic flights by unmanned drone planes. John threw me a yellow pad, and I pulled up a chair to the opposite side of his desk. We sat across from each other and wrote as fast as we could for ten minutes. There was no time to exchange thoughts, to avoid overlap.
The first ones were obvious, probably the same for each of us. If the Chinese had already announced the incident, one, we had no idea whose plane it was; it wasn’t one of ours. Two, it was a Chinese Nationalist plane. I asked as we scribbled, “Does it have U.S. markings on it?”
“Who knows?” John didn’t look up.
Three, it was an experimental drone, off course. Four, it was taking weather readings when it went off course. I remembered that one from Gary Powers’s U-2, which went down in Russia in 1960. That cover story hadn’t worked so well because the Soviets had captured the pilot live and Khrushchev hadn’t told us at first.
This didn’t have any pilot, but what if the Chinese could display U.S. cameras? I had to think harder for the next couple of stories. McNaughton looked at the clock, ten minutes, grabbed my pad and started to run out, looking down at my six entries. As he was leaving the outer office, I called after him, “Why doesn’t [McNamara] just say ‘No comment’?”
John said over his shoulder, “Bob won’t say ‘No comment’ to the press.” A few minutes later he was back and waved me down to his desk again. He tore off the pages we’d written on and pushed one of the pads back to me. He said, “Bob liked these. He wants four more. We have five minutes.”
We wrote fast again. I had thought of another one while he was away, but the rest took more imagination than before. I can’t remember them. As he tore off the new pages after exactly five minutes, I said, “Look, really, I think he ought to give serious consideration to ‘No comment’ on this one.” I’d been thinking about it while John was out of the office. “The Chinese probably have enough wreckage that they can prove any of these stories are lies. The reporters understand about intelligence gathering, and they’re sick of being lied to. I think they’d rather be told we won’t talk about it.”
In his hurry John listened intently, as always, and he nodded. “I don’t think he’ll do it, but I’ll tell him what you said.” He was gone. It was eight twenty-five.
A little after nine o’clock John came back from the press conference. I asked him how it had gone. He said, “I was amazed. Somebody brought up the Chinese report, and he actually used your line. He said, ‘I have no comment on that,’ and took the next question. I never thought he would.”
“How’d it go over?”
“They actually seemed to like it! They didn’t press him at all.” A few minutes later one of the regular Pentagon reporters dropped into our outer office after leaving McNamara’s conference room. I was standing there, and he said to me, “Listen, tell your boss that that ‘No comment’ in there was very refreshing. I didn’t think McNamara had it in him.”
Actually, what had made that line usable, as I had suspected, was that it pointed toward an area of covert intelligence collection whose secrecy our own reporters would almost surely respect without trying to penetrate further. That wasn’t generally true. You couldn’t say “no comment” when you needed to discourage follow-up questions, which was most of the time. Then there was no substitute for what the uninitiated would call a lie. In those days it almost always worked.
Even within the executive branch, self-discipline in sharing information — lack of a “need to tell” — and a capability for dissimulation in the interests of discretion were fundamental requirements for a great many jobs. There was an abundance of people who, like John and me, could and did meet those requirements adequately. The result was an apparatus of secrecy, built on effective procedures, practices, and career incentives, that permitted the president to arrive at and execute a secret foreign policy, to a degree that went far beyond what even relatively informed outsiders, including journalists and members of Congress, could imagine.
It is a commonplace that “you can’t keep secrets in Washington” or “in a democracy,” that “no matter how sensitive the secret, you’re likely to read it the next day in the New York Times.” These truisms are flatly false. They are in fact cover stories, ways of flattering and misleading journalists and their readers, part of the process of keeping secrets well.
Of course eventually many secrets do get out that wouldn’t in a fully totalitarian society. Bureaucratic rivalries, especially over budget shares, lead to leaks. Moreover, to a certain extent the ability to keep a secret for a given amount of time diminishes with the number of people who know it. As secret keepers like to say, “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
But the fact is that the overwhelming majority of secrets do not leak to the American public. This is true even when the information withheld is well known to an enemy and when it is clearly essential to the functioning of the congressional war power and to any democratic control of foreign policy. The reality unknown to the public and to most members of Congress and the press is that secrets that would be of the greatest import to many of them can be kept from them reliably for decades by the executive branch, even though they are known to thousands of insiders.
Harper’s Magazine provides us with a delightful, or disgusting — depending on one’s frame of mind at this time of the morning — trip down Memory Lane. What follows is the beginning of an article by John Thomas Flynn that was published in the Atlantic Magazine in January 1933.
The beginning portion of the article appears below. Read the rest here.
I also urge you to read the Wikipedia entry on John Thomas Flynn (link in the first paragraph) , the author of this article, who was publicly rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955, when Buckley decided not to publish one of Flynn’s articles for the new National Review. Flynn had attacked militarism as a “job-making boondoggle.”
Déjà vu anyone, from the 1930s, the 1950s or the 2000s?
The Congress which now presides over the dying months of President Hoover’s administration will, let us hope, bring to an end that fatuous adventure in secrecy which has stained the record of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In the very act of its birth the R.F.C. was stricken dumb by the President. Thereafter for five months it passed round hundreds of millions of dollars of public money to banks and railroads without affording either to the public, or even to Congress itself, a grain of information about the identity of the objects of its bounty.After these five months — in July — when Congress supplied it with additional billions, the directors were ordered to make to the House of Representatives monthly reports of the sums laid out and the persons or corporations receiving them. Through a mere misadventure in framing this publicity clause, the loans made by the corporation in those first five months were omitted. For this reason we must now divide the life of the R.F.C. into two episodes. The first, covering the period from February to June, was marked by the most complete secrecy; in the second, from July to date, in obedience to Congress, the directors have been compelled to reveal the destination of their funds.
Here I shall deal with that first secrecy. In that time something more than a billion dollars was authorized in loans. Of this sum, nearly 80 per cent ($853,496,289) was lent to bank and railroad corporations. The railroad loans we have been able to guess at because of the preliminary approval required from the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose proceedings are public. But the bank loans — $642,000,000 of them — have never been revealed to this day.
These vast sums were laid out by a group of directors drawn from those business groups whose performances during the pre-crash years have rendered them objects of suspicion to the American people. The immense sums they dispensed were given to borrowers, many of whom, to put it mildly, have forfeited, justly or unjustly, the confidence of the people. These circumstances alone cast a sinister shadow over the policy of secrecy pursued. But the case is something worse than this. The Administration did not stop at mere concealment, but led the public to the acceptance of utterly false impressions.
Here I propose to reveal some of these hitherto unreported loans — enough, at least, to justify Congress in tearing away the screen altogether and bringing to light this whole story.
Before lifting a corner of the curtain let me insert a word about this dangerous notion that government can be safely conducted in secrecy. There is a school of politicians — in close communion with their business allies — who hold to what is sometimes called the idiot theory of government, because of certain expressions which the President himself has let fall.
There is a belief that the citizens are stupid; that the less they know the better off they will be; that knowledge in their immature minds will frequently produce economic disorder, and that they will be better served if they will entrust their affairs to the strong and able men set over them by Providence and a well-oiled election machine.
The theory ignores a very old truth: that if there are foolish citizens there are also selfish rulers; that the poor judgment of the masses is to be trusted hardly less than the bad ethics of their leaders, and that, in any case, those who supply the funds for governments and the blood for wars have a right to know what is being done with their money and their lives.
For a century this country (and the world) has been learning the solemn lesson that it has nothing to fear so much as the public servant who is unwilling to report to society what he is doing with its funds. In America, at least, we have been warring upon secret diplomacy, secret campaign funds, secret corporation activities, secret utility and railroad managements.
