Although I served more than four decades in the secret shadows of the national security system, this was hardly an exclusive domain. The bloated U.S. intelligence infrastructure produces millions of classified documents every year and certifies several million civilians, service members, and contractors to receive confidential, secret, and top-secret documents. The Department of State even adds such categories as Limdis, Exdis, and Nodis to their sensitive cables, which translates to limited distribution, exclusive distribution, and no distribution, respectively. The CIA uses red and blue borders to create the same level of caution for its clandestine reports.
In many cases, the added layers of classification aren’t designed to protect sensitive matters that would jeopardize national security. More often, security caveats are designed to avoid embarrassment, making sure that no one learns, for example, that the CIA once proposed creating a pornographic film starring Bing Crosby as part of a scheme intended to embarrass an Indonesian head of state. Nevertheless, if I had used personal email during my tenure at CIA, as Hillary Clinton did as secretary of state, I would currently be out on bail . . . or worse.
Unfortunately, the American people seem to have become fully inured to the government’s aggressive and self-aggrandizing pursuit of power, privilege, and prerogatives. The U.S. national security establishment has established layers of secrecy and a grid of constant surveillance, while the citizenry has become increasingly obedient and compliant. There is little protest or public outcry when the United States massacres civilians abroad or when it inadvertently bombs a wedding procession or a hospital in Afghanistan. There was little public outrage following the disclosures that reasons for going to war in Iraq were cooked up, that U.S. soldiers committed perverse and sadistic crimes at Abu Ghraib; that CIA officials used torture and abuse; that tapes providing evidence of CIA torture were intentionally destroyed; and that secret U.S. prisons and extraordinary renditions violated international norms and regulations. Not even the disclosures of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, which fully documented the excesses and improprieties of the U.S. government and military, shocked the American people into demanding that their government comply with the law.
As Andrew Bacevich warns, the revelations of Manning and Snowden have “confronted Washington with something far more worrisome” than “al-Qaeda, Iran’s nuclear program, and the rise of China.”2 Bacevich argues that their leaks undermine the authority that the White House has amassed during the Terror Wars. Unless Americans insist that diplomacy, dialogue, and substantive debate precede acts of military aggression, it will remain easy for the United States to deploy military coercion and violence in response to crises.
If the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Yemen could not serve as a catalyst for a massive American protest movement, then it is unreasonable to expect that the disclosures from Snowden and Manning could do so. On the one hand, Americans are quick to ignore or forget the criminality and false premises of the U.S. wars waged against Iraq and Vietnam; on the other hand, the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media is typically supportive of the government’s position on national security. Meanwhile, the authors of the Justice Department’s torture memoranda, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, hold significant positions at the University of California’s law school in Berkeley and the federal appeals court in California, respectively.
The CIA has now long pursued a double standard in order to protect its reputation. It allows its employees to defend policies such as human torture while trying to censor those authors who are critical of such policies. The agency endorsed the publication of a memoir by a clandestine operative who destroyed the torture tapes and denied that torture and abuse took place.3 It subverts democracy when those who have access to official secrets are allowed to violate laws with impunity and without accountability, and to publish “official history” that obfuscates illegalities without facing scrutiny or criticism.
Several years ago, a major documentary film, The Gatekeepers, arrived from Israel. The film, starring former Israeli spy-masters as whistleblowers, challenged Israel’s ruthless tactics against Palestinians. The Gatekeepers had far-ranging impact because it featured whistleblowers from the intelligence establishment—the keepers of the secrets—who were willing to speak out against Israel.
Imagine a comparable film in the United States that featured former directors of the CIA who exposed CIA involvement in a military coup in Chile in the 1970s; support for the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s; manipulation of intelligence that exaggerated the Soviet threat prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union; willingness to provide phony intelligence to the White House to justify a catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003; and the details of secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions to Vice President Dick Cheney’s “Dark Side.”
WHISTLEBLOWERS. DISSIDENTS. CONTRARIANS.
The terms are used synonymously by pundits and the public, and I’ve been all three at one time or another in order to expose improprieties and illegalities in the secret government, and to inform the American public of policies that compromise the freedom and security of U.S. citizens and weaken U.S. standing in the global community.
I have never liked the terms contrarian or dissident. I’ve always believed that my criticism should be conventional wisdom. The term whistleblower is more complex because it often raises questions of patriotism or sedition. Chelsea Manning received commutation from her 35-year prison sentence for revealing so-called secrets that documented the terror and violence of the baseless U.S. war in Iraq. Members of the Bush administration who launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are considered honorable members of our society, although their acts involved the corruption of intelligence; caused the death of thousands of U.S. soldiers and foreign civilians; terrorized civilian populations; perpetrated the criminal use of torture and abuse; sanctioned use of secret prisons and extraordinary rendition; and caused the destabilization of the region that has set the stage for strategic advances by Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Edward Snowden, if he had remained in the United States, would have faced an even longer prison sentence because he revealed the massive NSA surveillance program that was illegal and immoral, and that violated the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal seizures and searches. Manning and Snowden admit to breaking U.S. laws, but their actions were never as serious as the law-breaking, including massive violations of privacy, that they exposed.
The debate over whether Snowden was a traitor is fatuous. As a result of Snowden’s revelations, we learned that the National Security Agency logged domestic phone calls and emails for years, recorded the metadata of correspondence between Americans, and, in some cases, exploited the content of emails. The case against Private Manning was similarly fatuous. Manning provided evidence of the U.S. cover-up of torture by our Iraqi allies; a U.S. Army helicopter opening fire on a group of civilians, including two Reuters journalists; and the use of an air strike to cover up the execution of civilians. Some of these acts were war crimes.
There is no more compelling evidence of the unconscionable behavior of U.S. personnel in Iraq than the callous dialogue between the crew members of the helicopter regarding the civilian deaths and particularly the firing on those Iraqis who came to recover the dead bodies of Iraqi civilians. Manning’s documents exposed this behavior, but her efforts were ridiculed by former secretary of defense Robert Gates, who described it as examining war by “looking through a straw.”
To make matters worse, American journalists have criticized their colleagues (Julian Assange