The Nation

Wangs Laundry, a “Western”-themed storefront at Great America theme park. (Rick Perlstein)

Even in a country that suffers from an official cult of optimism, where the dominant response to revelations that the entire nation is being spied upon is “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t have anything to hide,” where racism is supposed to be over because we’ve elected a black president even if the number of death threats against him reportedly dwarf those against previous presidents, it can useful to count victories, to record how far we have come—if only for the sake of our sanity.

A friend of mine recently showed me a page of a book she dug up, an ancient Rand-McNally Grammar School Geography from 1911. With voice-of-God confidence, it defines the various “races.” Indians? “Few of them have ever attained the stage of civilization. Agriculture and the arts are rudimentary, and letters and science are generally wanting.” (There is a regional slur, too: “South of the United States the majority of the population are still of Indian blood.”) Then the “Black or Ethiopan Race”—those words in bold. “The head is long and narrow, with projecting jaws” (projecting jaws?). “Among them are found the lowest savages; some have advanced [advanced!] to barbarism; but no people of the black race ever became civilized without help from some other race.”

Study questions: “Look among your acquaintances for persons who display, in the greatest perfection, one or more of the characteristics of the Caucasian race. What colors of hair and eyes are generally found in the same person? Which is more common, straight or wavy hair? What color of hair is most common. Did you ever see a Chinaman? Describe him…”

Did “you” ever see a Chinaman? If you are reading the book you are are, definitionally, not a Chinaman.

It’s an old book, granted. But not innocent because of that fact: it is, after all, a grammar school book, which means that it shaped the world-pictures of grownups for generations later—for instance, the respondents to a Newsweek poll around the time of the 1963 March on Washington. “I don’t like to touch them,” one said. “It just makes me squeamish.” “It’s the idea of rubbing up against them,” said another. “It won’t rub off, but I don’t feel right either.” Majorities thought black people “laugh a lot,” tend to have less ambition” and “smell different.” When I was a kid my parents had a book in their library called Training You to Train Your Dog (1965). It observed that everyone knew people with dark skin shared an “excitable nature.” QED.: “If this be true, there is no reason why color of coat and pigmentation should not affect dogs as well.”

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

People aren’t like that any more, or mostly. They’re also not like this. Imagine you’re a man applying for a traveling sales job in 1964. This September Ig Publishing will be coming out with a new edition of Vance Packard’s book on privacy, The Naked Society, which came out that year; I’ve written a new introduction. In the book, Packard witnessed the following stunning colloquy between a polygraph operator and said job applicant:

“Ever fired for cause?”

“‘Never.”

“Ever drink to excess?”

“I’ve been loaded a few times, but I guess that’s not ‘excess,’ so I’ll say no.”

[…]

“Have you ever done something that you are really truly ashamed of?” Bill shook his head. My guide whispered, “That question will sometimes smoke out the homosexual.”…

Bill was unharnessed…. The examination seemingly was over, and Bill was looking for his hat. Then Mr. Probe said pleasantly, “Bill, one more question before you leave. There is nothing personal or offensive about this, but because of the kind of business you are going in and the fact you have been in the summer theater work, I think I should ask it. Are you inclined to be a homosexual?”

Bill looked startled. He said, “No.” But the question so unsettled him that he felt compelled to explain his situation. “I have of course been surrounded by them in my work in the theater in the MIdwest, and I’ve been exposed to this a lot in some of the bohemian areas where I’ve liked, and I have been approached. But the answer is no.” Mr. Probe didn’t explain why sexual status had any significant relevance to the job for which Bill was applying.

And that, today, is unimaginable.

Are we out of the woods? Hell to the no. Yesterday I accompanied a group of 10-, 11- and 12-year-old boys to Great America, the theme park halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago. Among the things those kids could have learned that day, in addition to the fact that the Raging Bull roller coaster features a 208-foot first drop and top speed of seventy-three miles per hour but is really not all that scary after all, and that there are places in the world where a single cup of Coca-Cola costs five dollars, is that if they ever see a Chinaman, they can infer that he probably runs a laundry, and doesn’t quite grasp English grammar.

Read all of Tom Tomorrow's toons here. 

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is escorted into a courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, Tuesday, May 21, 2013, before a pretrial military hearing. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ source inside the US Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden’s laptop. That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had Internet access like 2 billion other earthlings, but that Manning has “aided the enemy,” a capital offense.

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the  jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch gay man facing twenty-two charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in US history.

But let’s be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for US national security than SEAL Team 6.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of Al Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just Al Qaeda but all national security threats. This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, Al Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general. (The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha bombing in Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden’s organization, though white-shoe foreign policy magazines and think tanks routinely get this wrong, “Al Qaeda” being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.)

Al Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the greatest threat to the United States. In fact, if you measure national security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own clueless foreign policy.

The Wages of Cluelessness Is Death

Look at the numbers. The attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 3,000 people, a large-scale atrocity by any definition. Still, roughly double that number of American military personnel have been killed in Washington’s invasion and occupation of Iraq and its no-end-in-sight war in Afghanistan. Add in private military contractors who have died in both war zones, along with recently discharged veterans who have committed suicide, and the figure triples. The number of seriously wounded in both wars is cautiously estimated at 50,000. And if you dare to add in as well the number of Iraqis, Afghans and foreign coalition personnel killed in both wars, the death toll reaches at least a hundred 9/11s and probably more.

Did these people die to make America safer? Don’t insult our intelligence. Virtually no one thinks the Iraq War has made the United States more secure, though many believe the war created new threats. After all, the Iraq we liberated is now in danger of collapsing into another bitter, bloody civil war, is a close ally of Iran, and sells the preponderance of its oil to China. Over the years, the drain on the US treasury for all of this will be at least several trillion dollars. As for Afghanistan, after the disruption of Al Qaeda camps, accomplished ten years ago, it is difficult to see how the ongoing pacification campaign there and the CIA drone war across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas have enhanced the security of the United States in any significant way. Both wars of occupation were ghastly strategic choices that have killed hundreds of thousands, wounded many more, sent millions into exile and destabilized what Washington, in good times, used to call “the arc of instability.”

Why have our strategic choices been so disastrous? In large part because they have been militantly clueless. Starved of important information, both the media and public opinion were putty in the hands the Bush administration and its neocon followers as they dreamt up and then put into action their geopolitical fantasies. It has since become fashion for politicians who supported the war to blame the Iraq debacle on “bad intelligence.” But as former CIA analyst Paul Pillar reminds us, the carefully cherry-picked “Intel” about Saddam Hussein’s WMD program was really never the issue. After all, the CIA’s classified intelligence estimate on Iraq argued that, even if that country’s ruler Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction (which he didn’t), he would never use them and was therefore not a threat.

Senator Bob Graham, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003, was one of the few people with access to that CIA report who bothered to take the time to read it. Initially keen on the idea of invading Iraq, he changed his mind and voted against the invasion.

What if the entire nation had had access to that highly classified document? What if bloggers, veterans’ groups, clergy, journalists, educators and other opinion leaders had been able to see the full intelligence estimate, not just the morsels cherry-picked by Cheney and his mates? Even then, of course, there was enough information around to convince millions of people across the globe of the folly of such an invasion, but what if some insider had really laid out the whole truth, not just the cherry-picked pseudofacts in those months and the games being played by other insiders to fool Congress and the American people into a war of choice and design in the Middle East? As we now know, whatever potentially helpful information there was remained conveniently beyond our sight until a military and humanitarian disaster was unleashed.

Any private-sector employee who screwed up this badly would be fired on the spot, or at the very least put under full-scale supervision. And this was the gift of Bradley Manning: thanks to his trove of declassified documents our incompetent foreign policy elites finally have the supervision they manifestly need.

Not surprisingly, foreign policy elites don’t much enjoy being supervised. Like orthopedic surgeons, police departments and every other professional group under the sun, the military brass and their junior partners in the diplomatic corps feel deeply that they should be exempt from public oversight. Every volley of revealed documents from WikiLeaks has stimulated the same outraged response from that crew: near-total secrecy is essential to the delicate arts of diplomacy and war.

Let us humor our foreign policy elites (who have feelings too), despite their abysmal ten-year resumé of charred rubble and mangled limbs. There may be a time and a place for secrecy, even duplicity, in statecraft. But history shows that a heavy blood-price is often attached to diplomats saying one thing in public and meaning something else in private. In the late 1940s, for instance, the United States publicly declared that the Korean peninsula was not viewed by Washington as a vital interest, emboldening the North to invade the South and begin the Korean War. Our government infamously escalated the Vietnam War behind a smokescreen of official secrecy, distortion and lies. Saddam Hussein rolled into Kuwait after US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie toldthe Baathist strongman that he could do what he pleased on his southern border and still bask in the good graces of Washington. This is not a record of success.

So what’s wrong with diplomats’ doing more of their business in the daylight—a very old idea not cooked up at Julian Assange’s kitchen table five years ago? Check out the mainstream political science literature on international relations and you’ll find rigorous, respectable, borderline-boring studies touting the virtues of relative transparency in statecraft—as, for example, in making the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe such a durable peace deal. On the other hand, when nation-states get coy about their commitments to other states or to their own citizenry, violent disaster is often in the offing.

Dystopian Secrecy

Foreign policy elites regularly swear that the WikiLeaks example, if allowed to stand, puts us on a perilous path towards “total transparency.” Wrong again. In fact, without the help of WikiLeaks and others, there is no question that the US national security state, as the most recent phone and Internet revelations indicate, is moving towards something remarkably like total state secrecy. The classification of documents has gone through the roof. Washington classified a staggering 92 million public records in 2011, up from 77 million the year before and from 14 million in 2003. (By way of comparison, the various troves of documents Manning leaked add up to less than 1 percent of what Washington classifies annually—not exactly the definition of “total transparency”.)

Meanwhile, the declassification of ancient secrets within the national security state moves at a near-geological tempo. The National Security Agency, for example, only finished declassifying documents from the Madison presidency (1809–17) in 2011. No less indicative of Washington’s course, the prosecution of governmental whistleblowers in the Obama years has burned with a particularly vindictive fury, fueled by both political parties and Congress as well as the White House.

Our government secrecy fetishists invest their security clearances (held by an elite coterie of 4.8 million people) and the information security (InfoSec) regime they continue to elaborate with all sorts of protective powers over life and limb. But what gets people killed, no matter how much our pols and pundits strain to deny it, aren’t InfoSec breaches or media leaks, but foolish and clueless strategic choices. Putting the blame on leaks is a nice way to pass the buck, but at the risk of stating the obvious, what has killed 1,605 US soldiers in Afghanistan since 2009 is the war in Afghanistan—not Bradley Manning or any of the other five leakers whom Obama has prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Leaks and whistleblowers should not be made scapegoats for bad strategic choices, which would have been a whole lot less bad had they been informed by all the relevant facts.

Pardon my utopian extremism, but knowing what your government is doing really isn’t such a bad thing and it has to do with aiding the (American) public, not the enemy. Knowing what your government is doing is not some special privilege that the government generously bestows on us when we’re good and obedient citizens, it’s an obligation that goes to the heart of the matter in a free country. After all, it should be ordinary citizens like us who make the ultimate decision about whether war X is worth fighting or not, worth escalating or not, worth ending or not.

When such momentous public decisions are made and the public doesn’t have—isn’t allowed to have—a clue, you end up in a fantasy land of aggressive actions that, over the past dozen years, have gotten hundreds of thousands killed and left us in a far more dangerous world. These are the wages of dystopian government secrecy.

Despite endless panic and hysteria on the subject from both major parties, the White House and Congress, leaks have been good for us. They’re how we came to learn much about the Vietnam War, much about the Watergate scandal and, most recently, far more about state surveillance of our phone calls and e-mail. Bradley Manning’s leaks in particular have already yielded real, tangible benefits, most vividly their small but significant role in sparking the rebellion that ejected a dictator in Tunisia and the way they indirectly expedited our military exit from Iraq. Manning’s leaked reports of US atrocities in Iraq, displayed in newspapers globally, made it politically impossible for the Iraqi authorities to perpetuate domestic legal immunity for America troops, Washington’s bedrock condition for a much-desired continuing presence there. If it weren’t for Manning’s leaks, the United States might still be in Iraq, killing and being killed for no legitimate reason, and that is the very opposite of national security.

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

Knowledge is Not Evil

Thanks to Bradley Manning, our disaster-prone elites have gotten a dose of the adult supervision they so clearly require. Instead of charging him with aiding the enemy, the Obama administration ought to send him a get-out-of-jail-free card and a basket of fruit. If we’re going to stop the self-inflicted wars that continue to hemorrhage blood and money, we need to get a clue, fast. Should we ever bother to learn from the uncensored truth of our foreign policy failures, which have destroyed so many more lives than the late bin Laden could ever have hoped, we at least stand a chance of not repeating them.

I am not trying to soft-pedal or sanitize Manning’s magnificent act of civil disobedience. The young private humiliated the US Army by displaying for all to see their complete lack of real information security. Manning has revealed the diplomatic corps to be hard at work shilling for garment manufacturers in Haiti, for Big Pharma in Europe, and under signed orders from then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to collect biometric data and credit card numbers from their foreign counterparts. Most important, Manning brought us face to face with two disastrous wars, forcing Americans to share a burden of knowledge previously shouldered only by our soldiers, whom we love to call heroes from a very safe distance.

Did Manning violate provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice? He certainly did, and a crushing sentence of possibly decades in military prison is surely on its way. Military law is marvelously elastic when it comes to rape and sexual assault and perfectly easygoing about the slaughter of foreign civilians, but it puts on a stern face for the unspeakable act of declassifying documents. But the young private’s act of civil defiance was in fact a first step in reversing the pathologies that have made our foreign policy a string of self-inflicted homicidal disasters. By letting us in on more than a half-million “secrets,” Bradley Manning has done far more for American national security than SEAL Team 6 ever did.

While hunger strikes have put Guantánamo Bay back in the headlines, controversial terrorism trials against Muslim Americans have gone largely unnoticed. Read Victoria Brittain’s report here.

An audience member uses their smart phone to take a picture of President Obama speaking at a fundraiser on May 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The news about the National Security Agency isn’t a molehill, but it’s not a mountain either. When all is said and done, it’s very likely that it will turn out to be a situation where there’s less than meets the eye at first—at least, if what seems to have met the eye this week is a massive, unchecked NSA that sees all and knows all.

Plus, comparing Obama to George W. Bush is wrong. Bush, you will recall, invaded several nations in search of terrorists that didn’t—as in the case of Iraq—actually exist. Except for Obama’s diminishing use of drones, the Obama administration apparently believes that counterterrorism ought to be the work of intelligence and police. From everything we know, the current program at the NSA is approved by the president, legislated and known to Congress and backed by the courts. That doesn’t mean it’s right. But it also doesn’t mean that it’s the Second Coming of Richard Nixon, the Plumbers and illegal domestic spying by the CIA.

Let’s not get all paranoid about this.

And that might start with the leaker himself, Edward Snowden. As a journalist, I’m strongly in favor of leaks, and for that I’m grateful to Snowden and to The Guardian team, including Glenn Greenwald, who helped Snowden tell his story. As a civil libertarian, I’m encouraged that Snowden’s leaked documents might start a real debate over secrecy, spying and the intelligence community’s extraordinary anti-terrorist powers. But it’s also possible that Snowden, a computer nerd who backed Ron Paul in 2012, is a little paranoid, too. It’s true that he’s facing possible deportation, arrest and prosecution for what he’s acknowledged that he’s done. But when he says that the CIA might “pay off the Triads” to kidnap him in Hong Kong, that’s a little paranoid.

Too many Americans, of course, have reacted to the NSA story with a shrug and the comment that they “have nothing to hide.” And perhaps most of them believe that, but the fact is that nearly all of us do indeed have something to hide, even it’s no more than personal communications, say, between family members, doctors, bankers and others that we’d prefer don’t become public. But what’s often overlooked in this NSA story is that none of that—at least as far as we know!—is happening. No one, including the NSA, is listening in on your phone calls or reading your e-mails. That, however, is not what Americans apparently think. Most of them, fully 85 percent, according to a poll taken before—yes, before—the NSA revelations, believe that the government can “access citizens’ phone calls, e-mails and Internet use without their consent.”

Well, they can’t.

So what about collecting all of the “metadata” on phone calls made to, from and within the United States every few months and storing it all at some huge NSA data bank? That’s troubling, yes. But not really alarming, unless it can be shown that the data is misused, say, in criminal investigations, in tracking the movements of ordinary citizens, and so forth.

In an editorial today, The New York Times asks the right questions:

Are the calls and texts of ordinary Americans mined for patterns that might put innocent people under suspicion? Why is data from every phone call collected, and not just those made by people whom the government suspects of terrorist activity? How long is the data kept, and can it be used for routine police investigations? Why was a private contractor like Edward Snowden allowed to have access to it? So far, no one at the White House seems interested in a substantive public debate.

Every one of those questions needs to be answered. But some of the answers seem obvious. The reason why “data from every phone call [is] collected, and not just those made by people whom the government suspects of terrorist activity” is because if the FBI or other investigators are going to go back and look for patterns of activity after the fact, they’ll need an historical set of data. That’s something that ought to be debated, and if I get a vote, it will be that the threat of terrorism is so low that so vast a collection of data isn’t needed, especially when measured against the civil liberties lost and the potential for government abuse. That’s a debate worth having.

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!

In answer to another of the Times’s questions—namely “Can it be used for routine police investigations”—the answer is no, and in this case we have some proof.

Consider this: if the NSA has metadata stored on every phone call made in the United States from every conceivable landline and cell phone, why would the FBI and the Justice Department need to acquire that very same data on a lot of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation? Why not trundle over to the NSA and look it up? And in this case, especially, since it involved a leak involving an incident of terrorism and counterterrorism? The reason they didn’t, and instead sought the intrusive method that they actually used, is because this was a criminal case—a leak investigation—and not a case that actually involved terrorism. That, alone, should tell us that the NSA’s storehouse of phone metadata isn’t likely being used improperly.

On the other hand, in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombers, the FBI and the CIA can indeed use the metadata to search the patterns of the bombers’ phone calls.

Less clear is the case of the would-be subway bomber, Najibullah Zazi, who the administration says was netted in part because of the NSA’s ability to track and monitor e-mail communications. (That’s the subject of another of Snowden’s blockbuster leaks, involving the PRISM program that gives the government entry in social networking and e-mail servers in cases involving foreign targets.) The administration says that Zazi was caught in the NSA’s net, but others say that he could easily have been tracked using the more standard intelligence and law enforcement tools that allow investigators to conduct wiretaps and electronic intercepts. (Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, reportedly said that Zazi was caught using the NSA phone metadata, which definitely isn’t true.)

As I noted at the outset, comparing President Obama to President George W. Bush—and glibly popularizing phrases such as “George W. Obama”—is just plain silly. It’s comparing, well, apples and invasions. President Bush opted to use the military to invade entire nations in search of terrorists, some of whom didn’t even exist. More rational people, including Obama (and myself) have long argued that battling terrorism primarily ought to be the job of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. (Note to Obama: that doesn’t mean that intelligence agencies ought to use drones!) But if counterterrorism is the province of those agencies, not the military, then we need to discuss, as a nation, what powers those agencies ought to have—and what they shouldn’t.

Lee Fang writes about how intelligence contractors have already abused their power.