On Manning: Why so lonely in Leavenworth?
A couple days ago in an article discussing the developing legal defense of the traitor Bradley Manning an important point was raised by Josh Gerstein, the point I personally find to be the most compelling of the entire episode:
…the hearing also produced equally compelling evidence of the larger issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Manning’s alleged misdeeds: the systematic breakdown in security that enabled a low-ranking enlisted man to abscond with a staggering quantity of classified Pentagon and State Department documents.
As I’ve said before, the reality of running an organization the size and magnitude of the U.S. military is that you’re going to get bad apples. It’s inevitable. Most of us know these as “the 10%”, that not so illustrious group our Drill Instructor and SNCOs warned us about. If you fall in those groups it’s the weak link you find yourself wasting so much of your time with. That motley lot of shit bags and degenerates who slip through the cracks.
No amount of TS/SCI box checking by the Office of Personnel Management will catch them all. As always our last, and only true, line of defense is the committed professionals of the NCO and Officer Corps. Bradley Manning is what happens when those people don’t do their job. That sucks to hear but it’s the hard, ugly truth.
Gerstein goes on to recount many of the ugly facts most glaring to those of us who have or still handle classified material for a living:
Despite a series of violent outbursts and other indications he was in serious mental distress, Manning’s security clearance wasn’t suspended until he was arrested in May of last year. Some soldiers had long thought he was a threat to himself and others. At least one believed Manning had lunged for a weapon during a fight with another soldier.
Yet Manning was allowed to spend about six months in a purportedly secure intelligence center in eastern Iraq with routine access to classified information — the same center where he sometimes sat at his computer or curled up on the floor, unresponsive to other soldiers.
And the fact that a junior soldier was downloading 700,000 reports, most of them classified, didn’t seem to set off any alarms. Nor were there any questions at the time about why an analyst in Iraq needed vast numbers of military reports from Afghanistan, diplomatic cables about Iceland or assessments of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
Security was so lax that anyone with access to the classified network could burn reams of “secret” data to a CD and simply walk out the door.
Those of us who have worked with SIPR and JWICS in responsible environments well understand that a largely unsupervised and demonstrably unstable junior enlisted man having access to either terminal with a media device which can transfer data is the sort of thing that people lose stripes over. In the instances where it’s repeated, flagrant and eventually leading to the largest disclosure of classified documents during wartime in U.S. history I’m left to wonder: where are the rest of the Courts-Martial? Where is the accountability?
I can imagine much of this is the result in the rush to “decompartmentalize” information. The scary revelations that things like 9/11 could have been averted if the CIA, FBI and local law enforcement had only been taking to each other prompted a total reassessment of how information is sequestered. I certainly remember passing hours upon hours reading Intellipedia on SIPR for no other reason than I found it interesting and I could. Did I need classified profiles of the Pakistani General Staff? No. Did I need to be reading about specific former Soviet assets in Kabul who were on the “go to” list for DIA? No. But I could and I did. I imagine many of these things on how and why we cordon off information will be worked out over the next decade. Most pressing for people like me, though, is the question of why we aren’t holding leadership responsible for these critical national security breaches.
Merry Christmas.
Category: Military issues, Shitbags
A lot of the information he had access to needed to be open for those who really had a need to know to do their jobs…however, I know that there was too much access allowed for those who really had no need to know.
I’m not sure how to reduce it and still allow those who were doing their jobs to still have the access they needed.
I know I often worked 16 hour days and needed access to alot of stuff because some officers were NOT doing what they should have been doing.
As a supervisor (NCO) I did check on my folks to make sure of 2 things- 1. they were doing what needed to be done. 2. they were keeping stuff secure. If they left a safe or computer open, I’d change the combo and password.
re #1
I wish I had an easy answer for what the right combination of access is but I don’t. It’s incredibly hard. Assessing unknown unknowns is a fool’s errand. What I do know is that creating a culture of accountability starts with real consequences for failure.
Thing is, I’ve always wondered if Manning intentionally acted like a fuck-up in order to KEEP attention from himself. In other words, if he was known to be the slacker they say he was, he just kept up the ruse in order to be left alone, to NOT call unwarranted attention to himself.
I’ve suspected that Manning wasn’t operating alone, that perhaps he was already planning to compromise all this material, and that there is a real chance he was in contact with Assange or someone like him or close to him BEFORE he went overseas.
Folks in the intel/analysis business rarely go rogue after they’ve been on the job. In almost every case, they had the intent to be a spy, compromise classified data, etc, BEFORE hand, and calmly and collectedly worked their way into the position over time.
Just food for thought. Maybe it DID play out as the military and Manning are saying, but I’m not yet convinced it’s that simple. I think that the whole idea of a failure of command security and the chain of custody is too simple, to convenient here.
V/R
here’s the problem, in the desert, EVERYBODY has access to classified material. Maps, intel reports etc. Why because unlike other militaries where only the top know what the fuck is going on, we tend to want everyone to know the Plan (capitalization is important here) It comes from the efficacy of the 101st and 82nd in WWII and the 187th Infantry in Korea, 173rd and LRRPs in Vietnam. In short LGOPs (little Groups of Paratroopers). small units causing incredible pain to the enemy. The strength of the US army has never been in massive formations (Maclellen proved that) it has always been at the lowest levels of leadership. This is why not some, but ALL US soldiers should be above reproach. Manning was not a General, but in the Information Age, what he has done is comparable to what Benedict Arnold *tried* to do. Had West Point fallen (it was a fort guarding a rather ingenious trap for all ships trying to get up the Hudson) the Revolution would have failed. In this day in age Information is our weapon and our shield. Propaganda is both our friend and enemy, if we use it or allow us to be used against us. never mind that Manning was hurting people. How many informants ended up dead? How many civilians even casually mentioned in a report disappeared? the sad fact is we may never know. Just like we’ll never know how many people died in Iraq because of the militias. How many faceless people like the headless guy we found in the spagetti factory. We gave him a nickname, but never fished him out. He just disolved from the bacteria, and no one ever knew who he was. . . I think about that kind of thing a lot when people say he did no damage. I think about the three weeks i spent in my room terrified that people would know I was there on 12jul07. I think of the three weeks I spent in terror that I would be judged for being a part of a “massacre” I think of… Read more »
First of all Manning is a private not a surrounded by Germans in WWII. He was a admin turd living on the FOB. The army trains to the next levels of responsibilities within the squad or platoon not to judge diplomatic cables or make the mission look bad cause you don’t agree with it or going through some gender crisis. There are so many levels the chain missed the boat on this soldier I couldn’t even mention them all. The under lining fact is not everyone is cut out for the service. The NCO corps has to be able to make decisions or recommendations to weed people like Manning out. Since politics always play a role in military today more than ever with gays, women, and minorities. The leadership is always looking over it’s shoulders before making a decision.
Reading NSOM’s post helps me understand some of the questions the defense was asking at the 32. I mean, part of the defense’s job is to build a case in mitigation, to convince the judge (if they go judge alone, as I suspect they will) to reduce the amount of punishment he hands out.
In many cases, the best mitigation is some combination of “he’s a good troop overall” (here are his brave deeds in combat, here are the leaders to talk about how good he is) and “he’s already learned his lesson” (here’s his apology, and here are the deeds he’s done since then to make up for it).
But in “purely military” offenses – like AWOL and desertion, and this thing – that’s often not possible; the offenders tend to be pretty lousy Soldiers overall. So you sometimes see a little “blame the command” —
“Yes, he did it, but if his leadership hadn’t been so bad/evil/abusive/neglectful/what have you he wouldn’t have run wild or run away…greater villains are going unpunished and he is just the fall guy…” Subtext: if you give him a giant sentence you’re endorsing his lousy leadership, encouraging the higher offenders to go unpunished, and practically taking part in a cover-up.
Whether they’ll really go that route in trial, I don’t know, but it does make a kind of sense.
He should get a pretty massive sentence. But we also should have already heard about the hearings for his NCO support chain and chain of command. If he’d had anything like adequate supervision, this would not have happened.
His CoC failed but so did those who provided him with intel he had no NTK for. I pissed a lot of people off when I ran the TOC in the ‘Stan but once I provided the NTK they backed up and gave me what I wanted/requested. Those idiots should have been asking the 5 W’s. Who, What, When, Where, and Why. If he couldn’t provide solid answers they should have worked up the CoC to get them involved early on. This is the CoC’s fault but they are not the only ones to blame.