The Passion of Bradley Manning (10 page)

Defense lawyers representing various prisoners may still not admit any of the dossiers' content as evidence. These documents, though available from any uncensored internet signal, laughably remain an official state secret.

Thanks to WikiLeaks and to the journalists who have sifted through these vital documents—particularly Carol Rosenberg of McClatchy/ Knight Ridder, dean of the Gitmo correspondents, and relentless blogger and author Andy Worthington—we now have a far clearer picture of what is now an enduring American institution. (We will return to Guantánamo in Chapter Four.) We can only hope that WikiLeaks will next expose the inner workings of Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, Gitmo's larger “evil twin” holding 2,400 prisoners, some 400 of whom were recommended for release by General Petraeus himself before his move to the CIA. As of this writing, those 400 prisoners have not been freed.

WikiLeaks began releasing 251,287 US State Department cables on November 28, 2010, in collaboration with
El País
,
Der Spiegel
,
The Guardian
, the
New York Times
and other media outlets whose staff redacted the documents to minimize any risk to individuals named in the files. Of the total, 15,652 are “secret,” 101,748 are “confidential” and the rest—more than half—unclassified. On September 1, 2011, WikiLeaks made the whole cache available and under the coordination of the organization, the database of cables was “crowdsourced” to accelerate the sifting of the dump. Almost oceanic in volume and geographical scope—274 embassies—the cables are too vast to explore in any depth here. Many summaries and highlights have already been compiled, but we will quickly survey the diplomatic cables to highlight some critical zones of interest.

Many of the cables are candid letters back to Washington about local conditions: sobering dispatches from Italy's efforts against organized crime in Calabria and Sicily; an account of a Dagestani wedding in the Russian Caucasus that is a minor masterpiece of travel writing. But many of the leaked cables have more than entertainment value and have been eagerly seized on by the peoples of various nations who see the US embassy as a reliable source of information. In the Dominican Republic, the national government has shed dozens of highly compensated but not particularly useful “vice-ministers” after leaked criticism in a US cable; the Guyanese press has also thanked WikiLeaks for helping to expose governmental corruption.

The most famous instance of this is in Tunisia, where the leaked assessments of the US ambassador—candidly unflattering accounts of the corruption and greed of the ruling Ben Ali clan and hangers-on—added fuel to the fire of discontent that led Tunisians to overthrow their longstanding authoritarian government.

Other cables are less flattering to the United States and show Washington willing to trample a great many values in pursuit of idiosyncratically defined security goals in both counter-terror policy and in various American wars.

The cables reveal how the US government exerted heavy pressure to suppress a German criminal investigation into the CIA kidnapping of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent Germany citizen mistakenly identified as a terror suspect who was abducted and then rendered to Afghanistan for extensive torture. The cables also reveal similar US arm-twisting to thwart a Spanish investigation into a similar case.

The United States has endeavored mightily to have its multiplying wars be designated “just wars” or at least not denounced as unjust. The manner in which Washington seeks this end is not by careful consideration of the use of military force but by forceful lobbying at the Vatican, whose verdict on all matters of “just war” carries immense political clout worldwide. The leaks reveal much worldly retail politicking done by both the Holy See and the US ambassador, and rather less in the way of disinterested
caritas
.

The most worthwhile cables, as well as the most sordid, describe America's support for various authoritarian and semi-democratic client states in the Middle East. We learn, for instance, that the Crown Prince of Bahrain studied military science at Fort Leavenworth—where Bradley Manning has been incarcerated since April 2011. We also learn that Egypt—second-largest recipient of American foreign aid in the past three decades—has sent its notoriously torture-using security forces to Quantico, Virginia for interrogation training at FBI headquarters. Needless to say, training for an authoritarian government's security forces reveals Washington's “freedom agenda” for the Middle East to be so much drivel.

The leaks also provide a window into military and diplomatic relations with Israel, for decades the top recipient of US foreign aid. The cables reveal the diplomatic efforts to keep quiet the provision of “Bunker Buster” bombs to Israel, lest they trigger speculation about a strike on Iran; the regular briefing of US diplomats as to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which Israel intended to “keep functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis”; the unedifying sight of Michael Posner, formerly head of Human Rights First and now Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Labor, helping the Israeli government downplay the atrocities they committed in their 2008–2009 assault on Gaza.

Leaks transferred to the
Nation
magazine and
Haïti Liberté
revealed that when the Haitian government moved to raise the hourly minimum wage from 22 cents to 61 cents, the US State Department, in close concert with Hanes, Fruit of the Loom and Levi-Strauss, strong-armed the Haitians into carving out an exemption for the multinational textile makers. Haiti is the poorest nation in the Americas and one third of its people are, in the artful term favored by the Third-World development industry, “food insecure.”

Another recurring theme is the pressure exerted by large pharmaceutical firms on US foreign policy. With emerging markets providing the largest growth area for pharmaceutical sales, Big Pharma is desperate to export the favorable intellectual property regulatory framework that ensures monopolistic sales with no cheaply made competitors, guaranteeing high prices and high profits. The push to adopt an American-style regulatory framework to the benefit of Big Pharma comes up in cables from Poland, France, India and elsewhere. According to James Love, director of the advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International, “All the things the US is doing is whatever benefits a handful of companies like Pfizer, Abbott, Merck, and so on. The US basically pushes for anything they want.”

A cache of cables reveal the jockeying among foreign ministries to facilitate the exploitation of natural resources within the Arctic circle. As the ice cap melts, instead of taking concerted action to halt global warming there is an apparent scrum to clinch access to the region's vast gas and oil reserves. According to Ben Ayliffe of Greenpeace, “Instead of seeing the melting of the Arctic ice cap as a spur to action on climate change, the leaders of the Arctic nations are instead investing in military hardware to fight for the oil beneath it. They're preparing to fight to extract the very fossil fuels that caused the melting in the first place. It's like pouring gasoline on fire.”

In all cases, it is difficult to discern how the State Department's actions, though perhaps effective as corporate lobbying, actually serve the interests of the American people, the great majority of whom are not owners of preferred stock in Merck or hangers-on of the Mubarak family. It is also difficult to approve of the directive, signed both by Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, that US diplomats collect DNA samples, fingerprints and biometric information, credit card numbers, passport and frequent flyer IDs from other diplomats at the United Nations.

III. The Reception of the Leaks

The gift of WikiLeaks has not been well received in the United States. Yet no country stands as much to gain from Bradley Manning's alleged disclosures as the United States. With the lessons of a lost decade of foreign policy, a massive body count and a huge hole in the US treasury, it stands to reason a better-informed public might prevent such future disasters. Bringing statecraft back into the light could only be an improvement, offering enormous benefits to a suddenly cash-strapped nation unable to afford more lavish adventures abroad, a nation whose haggard, stop-loss military is running on vapors.

And yet the mainstream reception of this wealth of new knowledge has been surly and resentful. The government's response to each new wave of leaks has been a syncopated alternation between shrieks of angry panic and soothing deflationary assessments of the “damage” done to US interests. (For “US interests” read: the delicate collective ego of the foreign policy elite, whose performance in the past decade has been so lethally sub-par.) A typical alternation has been Hillary Clinton's thundering denunciation of the leaked diplomatic cables as “an assault on the international community” followed by written State Department reports—confidential of course—that the national interest has not been damaged. (Manning's lawyer has already subpoenaed such reports, one by the White House, the other by Foggy Bottom.) As we have already seen, in the case of Joe Biden, sometimes it is the same official who both blasts and retracts within in the same twenty-four-hour span. (Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates also went from accusing WikiLeaks of having “blood on their hands” to a coolly dismissive assessment months later, to much less media fanfare.)