Silencing the Whistleblower
U.S. Army Makes Arrest in Wikileaks Probe
By Ryan Stone
Wikileaks.com is a free information site that has recently made a name for itself as an important tool in viewing and understanding the more macabre and Machiavellian side of U.S. diplomacy worldwide. Over the past few years, its sources have leaked everything from CIA reports about the war in Afghanistan to the Army Intelligence’s own statement concerning the need to destroy Wikileaks. After the website’s recent posting of a video showing the murder of two Reuters employees by U.S. Military forces in 2007, it has come closest to fulfilling Time reporter Tracy Schmidt’s prediction that Wikileaks “could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act,” a prediction that the site owners have posted proudly on its home page.
It comes as little surprise, then, that U.S. Intelligence forces have been looking for Wikileaks’ whistleblowers for some time, even going so far as to claim that the site poses “a threat to the U.S. Army” on the basis that it could benefit enemies of the state. It comes as less of a surprise that the investigation into the leaking of sensitive military information has resulted in the arrest of one of the Army’s own, SPC Bradley Manning.
Manning, a twenty-two-year old intelligence analyst stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, admitted last month to a hacker named Adrian Lamo that he had, in fact, leaked the 2007 video showing the civilian deaths of two Reuters reporters by U.S. Forces. He also admitted putting up to 260,000 classified U.S. dispatches on the Wikileaks site, even though only one has ever been made public, as well as information about a U.S. air strike in Garani last year that reportedly killed a hundred civilians, a majority of whom were children. After hearing Manning’s confession, Lamo then met with Army officials and sat down with the FBI at a Starbucks to tell all.
As an intelligence analyst, Manning claimed that he had access to “incredible things, awful things…that belonged in the public domain.” His main concern seemed to have been whether or not he was making a difference in preventing those very things that he was seeing and reading every day. At one point, he had even offered a partnership position to John Young, founder of Cryptome, another major whistleblower site, so that they could work together in exposing sensitive information.
John Young, a public figure, has been approached by the FBI on several occasions concerning Cryptome, a site that has posted everything from the pictures of undercover Secret Service agents to U.S. government projects seeking to create artificial tsunamis for wartime purposes. He, however, declined Manning’s partnership offer, claiming that Manning “was moving too fast.” Young even went so far as to leak his own email exchanges with Manning on Cryptome.
While Manning is being held in Kuwait and awaiting a formal trial, Manning has also admitted that he smuggled most of the information out using CD-RWs and that he would cover up sensitive information on them by posting videos of himself “[lip-syncing] to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history.”