Samuel Freeman

EDINBURG, Aug. 8 - The U.S. intelligence establishment, Obama administration, advocates of an increasing national security police state, and proponents of the Afghanistan war of imperial aggression have taken some “hits” in the past couple of weeks. 

First, the Washington Post ran an embarrassing and very detailed three-part series on U.S. intelligence agencies. Then Wikileaks dumped about 75,000 documents on the Afghanistan war into the public domain, with another roughly 15,000 still being reviewed for possible future release.

The Post series did not expose any secret, classified, or even any actually “new” information. The significance of the Post series is bringing to the public’s attention what has been widely known within the intelligence establishment, and by students of the U.S. intelligence system. Even people within the intelligence establishment have spoken and written about the Byzantine structure of our intelligence establishment.

The series identified numerous important problems, with the sheer size and unwieldiness of the establishment in particular. There are over 1,270 government organizations and over 1,930 private companies working on various intelligence projects.

We should be especially concerned about those 1,930 private companies. First, they are under limited control of the U.S. government. As we see with “contractors” (meaning mercenaries) in Iraq, these companies can and do engage in illegal and murderous activities. Because they work for the government, they enjoy a certain impunity from their misdeeds even when similar actions by a U.S. intelligence officer reasonably would result in prison time.

Second, just as mercenary military forces, these mercenary enterprises perform intelligence work for pay. That is, they work for the highest bidder. At least a quarter million of the over 850,000 people who have top secret security clearances work for these companies. There is no guarantee they will not do as any mercenary organization does, and sell whatever they have to what ever higher bidder comes along.

Some may scoff at this. But, even within the ranks of U.S. intelligence organizations, there have been spies for the Soviet Union (Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen) and Israel (Jonathan Pollard). There is every reason to believe those working for private companies would be even more willing to sell secrets they can access.

Third, these mercenary companies are extremely expensive. Their employees often make far more than U.S. intelligence officers doing essentially the same work. Consequently, we could lower our intelligence budget simply by bringing these operations back “in house” as they primarily were before the “Reagan Revolution” infected the nation with the “privatization” curse, which has cost the U.S. tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars. The work performed almost always is more expensive and less efficient than programs run directly by the government with government employees.

Our intelligence agencies often get a bad rap. Partly, this is because of the illegal, brutal and even murderous activities of some intelligence agencies, the CIA and FBI in particular. However, these organizations engage in illegal break-ins, planting evidence, framing innocent victims, wire taps, assassinations, torture, and drug running because these activities serve the interests of the politicians and government officials who control them.

The FBI’s illegal activities can be traced directly back not only to former Director J. Edgar Hoover, but to multiple presidents. The same goes for all of the CIA’s brutal and deadly activities. Far too often, the intelligence establishment is used as the president’s secret police.

With over 850,000 people having top secret clearance, it should come as no surprise someone with a top secret clearance, for whatever reason, would leak classified documents to the public. We only can imagine what gets sold to foreign rivals.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the roughly 75,000 documents released is how little actually new information they contained. Basically, their value is affirming and substantiating public perception the war is going badly, and has been badly managed and fought in almost every respect.

There are incidence reports of civilians being killed, especially from aerial attacks. Although the military now is being more cautious and working harder to prevent civilian casualties, just last week, an unmanned drone attacked a building, killing at least 45 people, mostly women and children.

Documents indicate a strong relationship between civilians being killed and Afghans joining the resistance movement. It is not that they support the Taliban, which appears to be widely hated; it is the desire to drive what Afghans (too often correctly) see as a murdering invader from their land.

The administration’s response to the leaked documents has been disingenuous. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs correctly stated the vast majority of the information in the leaked documents was not new and, largely, publicly known. Gibbs then whined the documents released covered the time before Obama took office, and does not account for the changes resulting from Obama’s “surge.” Like the 45 civilians just killed in another of Obama’s many drone attacks? The truth is, as the vast majority of Americans either know or sense, things are not improving in Afghanistan, Obama the Great notwithstanding.

As Gibbs tried to down play the documents’ significance, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, proclaimed the leaked documents will harm national security. Here we have the typical political intellectually dishonest attempt to have it both ways.

This canard conjures up Nixon’s claims of “incalculable damage to national security” by printing the (itl)Pentagon Papers(itl). When Nixon and crew got into Federal court, no one was able to identify one single piece of information in the Pentagon Papers that damaged national security in any way.

Publishing the Pentagon Papers did not damage national security. But it did damage public support for the war. It confirmed, again, what the American people knew or sensed. They had been lied to from day one about the war, about the reasons for the war, the prospects of victory, the prosecution of the war--everything. Sound familiar? Iraq? Afghanistan?

The Wikileaks documents do not reveal a pattern of lying, but do expose the fundamental dishonesty of the government’s public relations campaign to hold American support for the war.

One of the most interesting revelations, and most ignored by the press, is the Afghan resistance’s use of shoulder fired surface to air missiles. These missiles, provided in large quantities by the U.S., were instrumental in the Mujahideen’s defeat of Soviet imperialism. I had wondered many times why the Afghans were not using them against U.S. aircraft. They were. The U.S. government just was not admitting to it. 

The very faithful in-bed press has reacted very predictably to both the Washington Post series, and to the Wikileaks. First, both revelations have been given limited coverage. Though neither exposed any actual secrets, both should have been BIG news stories, just as the release of the Pentagon Papers was a big story. Of course, that one was made larger by government attempts to block publication.

Journalism professor Jay Rosen explains why these two events have received minimal press coverage. “We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect—not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we CANNOT FIX and therefore prefer to forget.” That, and, forgetting it serves state interests.

But what is the reason for the convoluted explanation offered by reporters to why the U.S. had not acknowledged surface to air missiles were being used against U.S. and NATO aircraft? One reporter said the government had not released this information because the U.S. did not want the Taliban to know it had a highly effective and potentially “game changing” weapon.

Really? Does this clown actually think the Taliban, some of whom were in the Mujahideen do not know that, and would not know that unless the U.S. government pointed it out to them?

The press also focused on the propriety of Wikileaks releasing the documents, especially without prior notification of the government. The national security issues are minimal. There are two real problems for the Obama administration. First, national security police states are driven by secrecy--keep as much secret from the public as possible. George W. Bush brought classification of information and secrecy to new heights. Second, while Obama has been more “transparent”, the war managers want and must keep as much of the truth about Afghanistan from the American people as possible.

Finally came the obligatory speculation as to why someone would leak these documents. Interestingly, leaking is something the national security police state brings upon itself. With its obsession for secrecy and classification, especially information embarrassing to the national security police state, it becomes easy to assume all classified material is classified simply to hide embarrassing information from public view, and that none of it has real national security implications.

While that was true for the Pentagon Papers, and generally is true for the Wikileak documents, such an assumption is manifestly false. Having this information in the public sphere is worthwhile and hopefully will spur the end to this war. However, if the U.S. government wants to minimize the risk of genuinely harmful information being leaked, it should ensure only information genuinely deserving of classification actually is classified, and it remains classified only so long as there is legitimate reason.

Legitimate usage of classification will build respect for the classification process and reduce people’s sense hidden information should be made public.

Samuel Freeman is a political science professor based in the Rio Grande Valley. His Left Is Right column appears exclusively in the Guardian.

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