I have to start somewhere so I thought perhaps I would begin with the big news of the day, the secret diplomatic documents released by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks which are thought to have been provided to the site by the US soldier Bradley Manning.
I have not yet come to a conclusion about this event, or Manning's purported actions, or the nature of Wikileaks in general. I do, however, think that this event is very interesting for several reasons. I should warn the reader that the same observations which make the case interesting are also likely to make some of my thoughts potentially inflammatory. We do, however, live in a time when simple statements of fact can be controversial.
Manning's purported actions and those of WikiLeaks are being described alternately as a form of civil disobedience in the face of unlawful arrests and torture in Iraq, a suggestion made most notably perhaps by Daniel Ellsberg (who is himself famous for leaking the top secret Pentagon Papers in 1971) during his interview on Democracy Now, and as acts of terrorism amounting to a direct assault upon American security, for example by Republican Representative Peter King.
Aside from the possibility of moral outrage in the face of American soldiers being used in order to deliver innocent Iraqi citizens into the hands of Iraqi torturers, there has also been speculation that Manning is gay and that his actions are partially a response to the failure to repeal the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy.
In Manning's own comments we can discern something of the very anarchistic drive towards transparency which may inspire WikiLeaks itself. Manning, in an online chat with the hacker who eventually turned him in, stated that he would cause "world wide anarchy" and that "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public. Everywhere there's a US post, there's a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed." There is, of course, a sense in which those who fear transparency most likely do so because secrecy has shielded wrong doing. One might also note that the extensive secrecy provided, for example, to the C.I.A. effectively puts it out of reach of the checks and balances which limit the actions of most other branches of government. As the famous historian Chalmers Johnson has pointed out in his book Nemesis, secrecy may precisely be the greatest threat to the American constitution we currently face "..the inevitable result (of growing American militarism following World War II) was a continual transfer of powers to the presidency exactly as Madison had predicted, the use of executive secrecy to freeze out Congress and the judiciary, the loss of congressional mastery over the budget, and the rise of two new, extraconstitutional centers of power that are today out of control - the Department of Defense and the fifteen intelligence organizations, the best known of which is the Central Intelligence Agency." However, it is hard to ignore the reality of foreign policy and military strategy both of which use secrecy as a fundamental tool. But it is possible to be in favor of whistle blowing when it comes to the over-extension of military power (as would be the case if the military went against the United States Constitution by failing to abide by federally ratified treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions which forbid torture of foreign combatants) but not to be opposed to secrecy in general.
I would like to suggest that the nature of the WikiLeaks scandal shares some interesting resemblances to terrorism, but certainly not the resemblances that Representative King had in mind when labeling WikiLeaks a terrorist organization. Following the September 11th attacks upon the US, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida described terrorism against the United States as akin to an autoimmune disease in which a body's own defenses begin attacking the very thing they were meant to protect.
In the case of September 11th the analogy works fairly well. The Taliban in Afghanistan developed out of Islamic schools founded in Afghanistan by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as a means of supporting and funding the Afghanistan war against the invasion of the country by the Soviet Union in 1979. Osama bin Laden himself was a veteran of the American supported Afghan war against the Soviet Union and he recruited for Al-Qaeda extensively through the schools America helped set up and from the ranks of Afghan veterans. It is not just, then, that terrorist attacks against the US may be motivated in response to American foreign policy but also that the terrorist organizations who perpetrate them arise from US funded foreign projects. This same point has been made by Chalmers Johnson whose Blowback Trilogy is dedicated to mapping the danger posed by what the C.I.A. calls blowback which Johnson defines as "retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public." Talk of autoimmunity simply adds the twist of identifying the origin of the money or training for the retaliation in the very type of covert activity in reaction to which blowback is born.
If we run with the image of autoimmunity what we are struck by is the fact that, despite the claims that the information being released on WikiLeaks endangers foreign policy, very few people are claiming that any of it is false or fabricated. If the information is dangerous it is precisely because it is true. Thus, in being made public, US policy becomes a danger to itself. Beyond this, if we buy either of the possible motivations proposed for Manning's purported actions, the leaking of secret diplomatic reports has occurred due to actions on the part of the American military which have created a lack of unity within the military itself. Either the use or support of illegal torture OR discrimination based upon sexual orientation caused the US military to turn on itself.
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