Free The Passion of Bradley Manning by Chase Madar Page B

an entire print run of a newly published book, as it did in 2010 with former Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer’s memoir of his half-year in Afghanistan as a Defense Intelligence Agency officer. Of course more than 200 review copies are still at large, and many of the redactions to the first edition were of facts easily found online. “Exactly the wrong way to censor information,” says Steven Aftergood.
    As for the prosecution of insiders who expose government wrongdoing, it has reached a new vindictive intensity in the Obama administration. Although candidate Obama campaigned as the whistleblower’s loyal friend and protector, he has presided over more leaks prosecutions under the Espionage Act of 1917—a use that the statute’s authors never intended—than all his predecessors combined. The most perverse of these has been the aggressive prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who informed a reporter at the Baltimore Sun of the colossal waste, fraud and illegality of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. The government accused him of ten felonies with a maximum penalty of 35 years, only to withdraw all the gravest charges just days before the trial. The prosecution settled for a plea bargain, with Drake copping to a misdemeanor based on his possession at home of a confidential email which the government had retroactively classified after it was discovered. (“I’ve never seen a more deliberate and willful example of government officials improperly classifying a document,” said J. William Leonard, former head of the ISOO.) Judge Richard D. Bennett, appointed to the federal bench by George W. Bush, blasted the prosecution for putting defendant Drake through “four years of hell” and coming up with an indictment that ultimately “doesn’t pass the smell test.” (Prosecutor William Welch II had also seen his corruption case against former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens collapse, an overreach also excoriated by a federal judge, but there is apparently no consequence for overzealous prosecutions in our Department of Justice.)
    Since 9/11, the national security apparatus was disbursed nearunlimited funding, resulting in an elephantiasis-like expansion of state apparatuses intended to ensure the control of information. One might easily assume that, given these expensive and often zealous efforts, Washington must now command a hermetically sealed information security regime. One would be wrong. Despite this spasmodic gesturing at secrecy, Washington, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, “leaks like a sieve and always has.” There are two ways that Washington regularly sluices classified information: intentionally and unintentionally.
    First, the intentional sort. Leaks, far from being an unspeakable taboo in Washington, are an accepted and thoroughly routine medium of communication between elite officials and their preferred journalists. As pundit Glenn Greenwald frequently points out, in any given week “unnamed sources” will reveal to the media such matters as the role of Russia’s security services in bombing an embassy in neighboring Georgia; the violent misdeeds of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency; the progress of the military campaign against the Libyan government—all sensitive matters relating to ongoing wars or relations with great powers or critical allies. Yet such leaks of material classed as top secret—a higher classification than anything allegedly released by Pfc. Manning—never register as security risks or even as leaks—they are business as usual: another Washington Post story citing “unnamed officials”; another Sy Hersh piece in the New Yorker ; the latest Bob Woodward book. Such leaking is never denied; in fact it’s a source of bonhomous hilarity between elite media and officialdom. In a revealing conversation with the website Politico ,