Free The Passion of Bradley Manning by Chase Madar Page A

security liability. “Secret programs stifled public debate on the decisions that shaped our response to the September 11 attacks,” notes a report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. “The classification system must be reformed if we are to preserve the critical role that transparent government plays in a functioning democracy.” At the operational level of national security, routinized secrecy also prevents the access of law-enforcement agencies to sought-after information. Coleen Rowley, a longtime FBI special agent and attorney who was one of Time magazine’s three persons of the year in 2002, has even editorialized that an outlet like WikiLeaks might have averted the 9/11 attacks by providing FBI and other law enforcement agents with a forum to share urgent information still classified by our baroque security bureaucracy.
    There is, not surprisingly, a dawning consensus among the elite that the federal government’s classification regime has become less a sensible precaution than a mania. “Depending on who you ask, overclassification is either very widespread or extremely widespread,” says Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “Everybody from the director of national intelligence to President Obama has acknowledged the problem.” And the Obama administration has even taken some small steps to remedy the problem: his first year in office, office he issued an executive order that created the National Declassification Center to deal with the backlog of over 400 million classified documents; a year later the President signed the Reducing OverClassification Act passed in late 2010.
    But the effect of these measures has been minimal. Although the Department of Defense has scrapped 82 classification guides, this is only 4% of the 1,878 total. The 77 million classified documents tabulated for 2010 is a 40% increase over the year before—though government officials say this is because of tighter reporting guidelines. J. William Leonard, director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2007, has said that federal agencies need to start sanctioning officials who over-classify in order to prevent secrecy from becoming the default option for bureaucrats lacking any incentive to make documents publicly available. One thing is certain: until a new ethic of transparency is spliced into the DNA of every federal agency, overclassification will continue to distort and stifle public debate on vital issues of war and statecraft.

    The government has also sought to restrict the release of information through censorship of former officials and the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers.
    Government censorship has enjoyed a robust revival since the autumn of 2001. Veteran FBI agent Ali Soufan was surprised to find that information he had read into the public record at Congressional hearings, including facts readily available in the official 9/11 report, was now deemed a threat to national security and expunged from his memoir. As Scott Shane of the New York Times noted, the government’s censorship “amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the September 11 attacks and their aftermath.” This is not an isolated case. Peter Van Buren, the Foreign Service officer who was a contemporary of Bradley Manning’s at FOB Hammer, found that the publication of his memoir of leading a civilian reconstruction team in Iraq got him stripped of his security clearance and placed on administrative leave—though the official pretext was his linking to a WikiLeak’ed State Department cable on his personal blog. On some occasions, publishers have held fast in the face of government demands for withdrawal of the book, as with Henry Holt’s refusal to suppress Van Buren’s memoir in the face of federal pressure. When the government is more alert, however, it is liable to buy up