[THS] !!!! Rowley & Parry: Wikileak Case Echoes Pentagon Papers

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25737.htm

Wikileak Case Echoes Pentagon Papers

By Coleen Rowley and Robert Parry

June 16, 2010 "Consortium News" -- Almost four decades after Defense Department
insider Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers – thus exposing the lies that led
the United States into the Vietnam War – another courageous “national security
leaker” has stepped forward and now is facing retaliation similar to what the U.S.
government tried to inflict on Ellsberg.

Army Intelligence Specialist Bradley Manning is alleged to have turned over a large
volume of classified material about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to Wikileaks.org,
including the recently posted U.S. military video showing American helicopters
gunning down two Reuters journalists and about 10 other Iraqi men in 2007. Two
children were also injured.

The 22-year-old Manning was turned in by a convicted computer hacker named
Adrian Lamo, who befriended Manning over the Internet and then betrayed him,
supposedly out of concern that disclosure of the classified material might put U.S.
military personnel in danger. Manning is now in U.S. military custody in Kuwait
awaiting charges.

Though there are historic parallels between the actions of Manning today and those
of Ellsberg in 1971, a major difference is the attitude of the mainstream U.S. news
media, which then fought to publish Ellsberg’s secret history but now is behaving
more like what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the “fawning corporate media”
or FCM.

In the Ellsberg case, the first Pentagon Papers article was published by the New York
Times – and when President Richard Nixon blocked the Times from printing other
stories – the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers picked up the torch and kept
publishing articles based on Ellsberg’s material until Nixon’s obstruction was made
meaningless, and ultimately was repudiated by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Today, the major response of the Times, Post and other tribunes of the FCM has
been to write articles disparaging Manning, while treating Lamo as something of a
patriotic hero.

The Washington Post depicted Manning as a troubled soldier, “slight” of build, a loser
who “had just gone through a breakup,” who had been “demoted a rank in the Army
after striking a fellow soldier,” and who “felt he had no future.”

The Post even trivialized Manning’s motive for leaking the material, suggesting that
he was driven by his despair, thinking “that by sharing classified information about
his government’s foreign policy, he might ‘actually change something.’”

Lamo also was quoted, speculating on what prompted Manning’s actions. "I think it
was a confluence of things -- being a thin, nerdy, geeky type in an Army culture of
machismo, of seeing injustice," Lamo told the Post.

Saving Lives?

Meanwhile, the New York Times put Lamo’s motives in the most favorable light.

“Mr. Lamo said he had contacted the Army about Specialist Manning’s instant
messages because he was worried that disclosure of the information would put
people’s lives in danger,” the Times reported. “He said that Army investigators were
particularly concerned about one sensitive piece of information that Specialist
Manning possessed that Mr. Lamo would not discuss in more detail.”

The Times quoted Lamo as saying: “I thought to myself, ‘What if somebody dies
because this information is leaked?’ ”

According to the Times, Lamo elaborated on his moral dilemma in a Twitter message.
“I outed Brad Manning as an alleged leaker out of duty,” Lamo said. “I would never
(and have never) outed an Ordinary Decent Criminal. There’s a difference.”

In other words, the Times and the Post – two heroes of the Ellsberg case – seemed
more interested in making the case against Manning (and sticking up for his
betrayer) than in taking the side of a whistleblower who had put his future and his
freedom on the line to inform the American people how the Iraq (and Afghan) wars
are being fought.

There has been little suggestion by either the Post or the Times that Manning had
done a patriotic service by helping to expose wartime wrongdoing.

The FCM also has shown little interest in the U.S. government’s apparent attempts to
hunt down Julian Assange, the Australian-born founder of Wikileaks.org which
decrypted the video of the Iraq helicopter attack and posted it on the Internet under
the title, “Collateral Murder.”

The Pentagon (undoubtedly with the help of the CIA and the National Security
Agency) is reportedly conducting a manhunt for Assange, who is known to travel
around the globe staying at the homes of friends and doing what he can to evade
government notice.

The U.S. military has argued that videos like the Baghdad helicopter attack and
photographs of American troops mistreating Iraqi and Afghan detainees must be kept
secret to avoid enflaming local populations and putting U.S. soldiers in greater
danger. President Barack Obama adopted that argument last year in overturning a
court-ordered release of a new batch of photos showing U.S. soldiers committing
abuses.

However, there is nothing classically classifiable about the helicopter videos or the
other photographic evidence that has leaked out, such as the sordid pictures of
naked Iraqi men being humiliated at Abu Ghraib prison. Under U.S. law, the
government’s classification powers are not to be used to conceal evidence of crimes.

‘Most Dangerous Man’

Yet, except for the changed role of the big newspapers, history does appear to be
repeating itself, with the emergence of another “Most Dangerous Man,” the
appellation that Nixon’s aide Henry Kissinger gave to Ellsberg during the Pentagon
Papers case.

If you haven’t, you need to quickly watch the Academy Award-nominated
documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the
Pentagon Papers, to brush up on your history. You’ll quickly understand how
Manning’s recent arrest and the Pentagon’s hunt to neutralize Assange jibe with the
story of the copying and publishing of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.

It should also be kept in mind that Ellsberg wasn’t the only “dangerous man” who
helped undo the culture of secrecy surrounding the Nixon presidency. When Nixon
responded to the Ellsberg case by organizing a special “plumbers” unit, which then
spied on the Democrats at their Watergate headquarters, other whistleblowers, like
“Deep Throat” (FBI official Mark Felt), helped journalists expose the wrongdoing.

Poor Nixon, in his vain attempt to keep control and power, he just had to keep
expanding his “enemy list.”

A very similar crisis of conscience exists now. Power politics, and especially the politics
of war, corrupt policymakers who deal with intelligence and security issues – and that
leads to secrecy expanding exponentially to cover up bloody mistakes and shocking
crimes.

For eight years, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney ran a highly politicized
administration that took these inherent problems to new heights. And Obama, for
many reasons, has thus far chosen to “look forward, not backward,” and has thus
fallen way short of his singular campaign promise of CHANGE.

Despite his assurances of greater government openness, Obama has surely not given
support to government whistleblowers. Quite the opposite, Obama has expanded on
Bush’s methods, such as claims of the “state secrets” defense to block court
challenges to government actions.

The Obama Administration has even instituted criminal prosecution of government
employees who blew the whistle on prior unlawful actions of the Bush regime by
daring to reveal, for instance, that Bush’s NSA was warrantlessly monitoring American
citizens.

The final step in the U.S. government's continuing foray to the “dark side” has been
Obama’s signing off on the proposed targeted assassination of an American citizen –
who had been linked to support for Islamic terrorism – without any judicial due
process.

Imperial President

Another major similarity between the Ellsberg era and today is that the United States
is again witnessing the accrual of excessive “War Presidency” powers by the
Executive Branch to the detriment and weakening of the legislative and judicial
branches, not to mention significant damage to the legitimate function of the Fourth
Estate, the press.

Crude attempts to avoid accountability (as well as the constitutional checks and
balances) by shredding documents and other evidence to prevent judicial
accountability even seem to have succeeded.  For instance, CIA officials learned the
lessons of the Abu Ghraib photographic evidence by brazenly destroying 92
videotapes of terrorism suspects being interrogated with waterboarding and other
brutal methods.

While no legal action has as yet been taken against the CIA officials involved,
government whistleblowers and even journalists who helped expose Bush-era
wrongdoing may not be so lucky. The Obama Administration is said to be threatening
to not only prosecute government whistleblowers but to jail a New York Times
reporter for not giving up his sources for stories that revealed Bush’s illegal
warrantless monitoring.

No wonder many news executives privately admit that in the current environment,
they would never have the guts to publish something like the “Pentagon Papers”
even though the Supreme Court upheld their prior brave actions in a landmark
decision bolstering freedom of the press.

The current crippling of the U.S. domestic press makes it impossible for a singular
Ellsberg-type insider to rely on the press as a last resort to get important information
to the public. (Ellsberg had first taken his documents to members of Congress
responsible for Executive Branch oversight, but they didn’t act.)

Given the fracturing and weakening of the U.S. press – its transformation into the
FCM – a government “whistleblower” is more often like a tree falling in the forest with
no one to hear it. (Witness the BP disaster in the Gulf and the prior unheeded
warnings of whistleblowers who warned of safety problems and potential spills.)

No ‘Right Way’

Having been one of the very few government officials publicly identified in a positive
way for “whistleblowing,” Coleen Rowley has often been asked if there’s a “right way”
to do it and also “what should and can a loyal and patriotic government employee
who has sworn to uphold the Constitution do after witnessing such fraud, waste,
abuse, illegality, or a serious public safety issue?”

The hard truth is that there are no good answers. There is no effective whistleblower
protection in attempting to disclose within the chain of command and/or to warn
one’s Inspector General. (Even some of the IGs who stood up and tried to investigate
have been retaliated against or stifled.)

There is no protection as well for the Office of Special Counsel. (Indeed Bush’s former
Director of the Office of Special Counsel himself has faced accusations of ethical
breaches.)

In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no protection under the First
Amendment for government employees making disclosures even if they are privy to
and blow the whistle on outright illegal activity. [Garcetti v Ceballos—more here.]

The government insider who witnesses fraud, waste, abuse, illegality or a risk of
serious public safety faces certain retaliation or firing if he attempts to disclose
internally. Moreover, his/her warnings will undoubtedly be swept under the rug.

It’s easy therefore to argue that less-compromised international press outlets and
Web sites, like Wikileaks.org, may offer a better hope for getting out the truth. As
Wikileaks.org’s founder Julian Assange has said about the possibility of more news
sites releasing sensitive information: “Courage is contagious.”

If the story of the Pentagon Papers is again playing out, the attempt to ounish
Manning and neutralize Wikileaks.org could be of similar magnitude to the effort
employed against Ellsberg and the newspapers that received his photocopied
documents. (The criminal case against Ellsberg ultimately collapsed after the
disclosure of Nixon's illegal spying operations.)

There is one possible answer, however. Every decent reporter and journalist as well
as every honest government employee and citizen who cares about democracy and
freedom of the press could unite to do the Paul Revere thing and sound the alarm.

The little bit of integrity and conscience left in the mainstream media needs to be
immediately reminded of the Nixon-Watergate-Pentagon Papers history and
awakened to the dangerous consequences that otherwise flow from “war
empowered” Presidents, from their well-oiled military machine and covert intelligence
apparatus.

The Fourth Estate needs to go back to work battling the undue secrecy and covert
perception management which will ultimately be used against them all and the U.S.
citizenry. (Those who would have you believe that what you don’t know can’t hurt
you must like the BP oil executives downplaying their oil spill.)

It’s quite possible that the future of accountable government is teetering on the brink
with the arrest of the 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist and the fugitive
manhunt for the WikiLeaks founder. History does repeat itself, but not necessarily
with the same positive ending. This time, it could go either way.

The choice now is whether to move toward more militarism (and the secrecy that
protects it) or toward more openness and honesty – and possibly a more democratic
future.

Coleen Rowley is a former FBI Agent. She holds a law degree, and served in
Minneapolis as "Chief Division Counsel," a position which included oversight of
Freedom of Information, as well as providing regular legal and ethics training to FBI
Agents. In 2002, Coleen brought some of the pre 9/11 lapses to light and testified to
the Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the endemic problems facing the FBI
and the intelligence community. Rowley's memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in
connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee's Inquiry led to a two-year-long
Department of Justice Inspector General investigation. Today, as a private citizen,
she is active in civil liberties, and peace and justice issues.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated
Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of
George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered
at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the
Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.