Wages of Rebellion (30 page)

Assange saw WikiLeaks’s primary role as giving a voice to the victims of US wars and proxy wars by using leaked documents to tell their stories. The release of the Afghan and Iraq “War Logs,” Assange said, disclosed the extent of civilian death and suffering as well as the plethora of lies told by the Pentagon and the state to conceal the human toll. He added that the logs also unmasked the bankruptcy of the traditional press and its obsequious service as war propagandists.

“There were 90,000 records in the Afghan War Logs,” Assange said. “We had to look at different angles in the material to add up the number of civilians who have been killed. We studied the records. We ranked events different ways. I wondered if we could find out the largest number of civilians killed in a single event. It turned out that this occurred during Operation Medusa, led by Canadian forces in September 2006. The US-backed local government was quite corrupt. The Taliban was, in effect, the political opposition and had a lot of support. The locals rose up against the government. Most of the young men in the area, from a political perspective, were Taliban. There was a government crackdown that encountered strong resistance. ISAF [the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force] carried out a big sweep. It went house to house. Then an American soldier was killed. They called in an AC-130 gunship. This is a C-130 cargo plane refitted with cannons on the side. It circled overhead and rained down shells. The War Logs say 181 ‘enemy’ were killed. The logs also say there were no wounded or captured. It was a significant massacre. This event, the day when the largest number of people were killed in Afghanistan, has never been properly investigated by the old media.”

Operation Medusa, which was carried out twenty miles west of Kandahar, took the lives of four Canadian soldiers and involved some 2,000 NATO and Afghan troops. It was one of the largest military operations by the ISAF in the Kandahar region.

Assange searched for accounts by reporters who were on the scene. What he discovered appalled him. An embedded Canadian reporter, Graeme Smith of the
Toronto Globe and Mail
, used these words on a Canadian military website to describe his experiences during Operation Medusa: “one of the most intense experiences of my life.” Smith wrote about traveling with a Canadian platoon that called themselves the “Nomads.” “They’d even made up these little patches for their uniforms that said ‘Nomads’ on them,” he remembered. “The Nomads took me in and they sort of made me one of them.” He said he spent two weeks with the “Nomads,” used a bucket to wash himself and his clothes, and slept in his flak jacket. Smith talked about being “under fire together” and said that “they gave me a little ‘Nomads’ patch that I attached to my flak jacket.”

Assange’s point is correct. In every conflict I covered as a war correspondent, the press of the nation at war was an enthusiastic part of the machine—cheerleaders for slaughter and tireless mythmakers for the nation and the military. The few renegades within the press who refuse to wave the flag and lionize the troops become pariahs in newsrooms and find themselves attacked—like Assange and Manning—by the state.

There is no free press without a willingness to defy law and expose the abuses and lies carried out by the powerful. The Pentagon Papers, released to the
New York Times
in 1971, as well as the
Times’
Pulitzer-winning 2005 exposure of the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the National Security Agency, made public information that had been classified as “top secret”—a classification more restricted than the lower-level “secret” designation of the documents released by WikiLeaks.
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But as the traditional press atrophies with dizzying speed—crippled by Barack Obama’s use of the Espionage Act seven times since 2009 to target whistle-blowers, including Edward Snowden—our last hope lies with rebels such as Manning, Assange, Hammond, and Snowden.
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WikiLeaks released after-action reports authored by US diplomats and the US military. The cables invariably put a pro-unit or pro-US spin on events. The reality is usually much worse. Those counted as dead enemy combatants are often civilians. Military units use after-action reports to justify or hide inappropriate behavior. And despite the heated rhetoric of the state about American lives being endangered
by WikiLeaks exposures, there has been no evidence that any action of WikiLeaks has cost lives. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in a 2010 letter to Senator Carl Levin, conceded this point: “The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security. However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure.”
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The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Le Monde
, and
Der Spiegel
printed redacted copies of some of the WikiLeaks files, but they have underreported the prosecution of Manning and entrapment of Assange. Do these news organizations believe that if the state shuts down organizations such as WikiLeaks and imprisons Manning and Assange, traditional news outlets will be left alone? Can’t they connect the dots between the prosecutions of government whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, the monitoring of communications, and the persecution of Manning, Assange, and Snowden? Haven’t they realized that this is a war by a global corporate elite not against an organization or an individual but against liberty, the freedom of the press, and democracy itself?

“The national security state can try to reduce our activity,” Assange said. “It can close the noose a little tighter. But there are three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the military, everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it so you know who is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage people from engaging in this behavior. But the opposite is also true. When that behavior is successful, it is an example. It encourages others. This is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.

“The medium-term perspective is very good,” he declared. “The education of young people takes place on the Internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them having been educated on the Internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the Internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means that these organizations will see their capacity to control information diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”

The long term, however, may not be as sanguine. Assange wrote a book with three coauthors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann—called
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet
. It warns that we are “galloping into a new transnational dystopia.” As Assange says in the book, “We are living under martial law as far as our communications are concerned. We just can’t see the tanks—but they are there. To that degree, the internet, which was supposed to be a civilian space, has become a militarized space.”
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The Internet has become not only a tool to educate, they write, but the mechanism to cement into place a “Postmodern Surveillance Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.”
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It is only through encryption that we can protect ourselves, Assange and his coauthors argue, and it is only by breaking through the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite that we can expose power. What they fear, however, is the possibility that the corporate state will eventually effectively harness the power of the internet to shut down dissent.

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
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And yet, Assange continues to resist. His gloomy vision of a future when all privacy will be eradicated is in stark contrast to the utopian rebellions in the past that promised a new heaven and a new earth. He is acutely aware that his chances of escaping from the clutches of the security apparatus he can see out the windows of the embassy are very
slim. Washington almost certainly has a sealed grand jury indictment prepared against him.

C
helsea Manning, like Assange, did not have a stable childhood. Her difficulties with alcoholic parents, the questioning of her sexuality, and her small stature—she is slight and five feet two inches tall—all combined with her intelligence and mole-like retreat into computers to make her an object of frequent ridicule. She joined the Army in a bid to get enough money to go to college. The hypermasculine culture of the military, where hazing is frequent and some of the soldiers and Marines targeted for physical and verbal abuse in foreign deployment commit suicide, saw Manning mistreated from the moment she enlisted.

“He was a runt, so pick on him,” remembers a soldier who spoke to
The Guardian
but did not want to give his name. “He’s crazy, so pick on him. He’s a faggot. Pick on him. The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. He was targeted by bullies. He was targeted by the drill sergeants. Basically he was targeted by anybody who was within arm’s reach.

“There were three guys that had him up front and cornered, and they were picking on him and he was yelling and screaming back,” remembered this soldier from Memphis. “And I’m yelling at the guys, ‘Get the hell out of here, back off,’ and everything. I start to pull Manning off. The other guys were taking care of the ones that were picking on him and stuff, and I got Manning off to the side there, and yeah, he’d pissed himself. That wasn’t the only time he did that.”
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I was in the small courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland to hear the sentencing by Army Colonel Judge Denise Lind of then-Private First Class Bradley Manning to thirty-five years in prison. Manning’s sentence once again confirmed the inversion of our moral and legal order, the capitulation of the press, and the misuse of the law to prevent any oversight or investigation of official abuses of power, including war crimes.

The sentencing of Manning marked the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political
prisoners or will be forced, like Snowden, to flee into exile. State power, the sentence showed us, will be unaccountable. And those who do not accept unlimited state power—always the road to tyranny—will be persecuted.

Two burly guards who towered over Manning hustled her out of a military courtroom at Fort Meade after the two-minute sentencing. I listened to half a dozen of Manning’s supporters shout: “We’ll keep fighting for you, Bradley! You’re our hero!”

Manning, if we had a functioning judiciary, would have been a witness for the prosecution against the war criminals she helped expose. She would not have been headed, bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

But the government effectively shut down Manning’s defense team. The Army private was not permitted to argue that she had a moral and legal obligation under international law to defy military orders and to make public the war crimes she had uncovered. Because the documents that detailed the crimes, torture, and killing that Manning revealed were classified, they were barred from discussion in court, and so the fundamental issue of war crimes was effectively removed from the trial. Manning was forbidden to challenge the government’s unverified assertion that she had harmed national security. Lead defense attorney David E. Coombs said during pretrial proceedings that the judge’s refusal to permit information on the lack of actual damage from the leaks would “eliminate a viable defense, and cut defense off at the knees.”
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And that is what happened.

Manning was also barred from presenting to the court her motives for giving WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, and videos. The issues of her motives and the potential harm to national security could be raised only at the time of sentencing, but by then it was too late.

Coombs opened the trial by pleading with the judge for leniency based on Manning’s youth and sincerity. Coombs was permitted by Lind to present only circumstantial evidence concerning Manning’s motives or state of mind. He could argue, for example, that Manning did not know al-Qaeda might see the information she leaked. Coombs
was also permitted to argue, as he did, that Manning was selective in her leak, intending no harm to national interests. But these were minor concessions by the court to the defense. Manning’s most impassioned pleas for freedom of information, expressed in email exchanges with the confidential government informant Lamo, were never permitted to be heard in court.
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