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<h1><font size=4><b>US Intelligence Veteran Defends Bradley Manning and
WikiLeaks</b></font></h1><font size=3>18.4.11<br>
</font><font size=1>
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/04/18/us-intelligence-veteran-defends-bradley-manning-and-wikileaks/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/04/18/us-intelligence-veteran-defends-bradley-manning-and-wikileaks/<br>
<br>
</a></font><font size=3>The story of Pfc Bradley Manning, the young US
Army intelligence analyst allegedly responsible for leaking hundreds of
thousands of classified documents to
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/category/wikileaks/">
WikiLeaks</a>, continues to act as a magnet for supporters worldwide, who
are appalled by the accounts of his solitary confinement, and
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/04/12/on-the-torture-of-bradley-manning-obama-ignores-criticism-by-un-rapporteur-and-300-legal-experts/">
the humiliation to which he has recently been subjected</a>, which has
involved him sleeping naked at night, and having to stand naked outside
his call during cell inspections in the morning, even though the alleged
basis for this humiliation that he is at risk of committing suicide
has been disproved by the miltary’s own records, in which his alleged
propensity to commit suicide has been repeatedly challenged.<br><br>
While sympathizing fully with Pfc Manning’s plight, I do hope that those
supporting him will also realize that the humiliation to which he is
being subjected, and its probable intent to make him produce false
confessions about his relationship with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is
not unique, as it echoes the conditions in which prisoners in the “War on
Terror” at Guantánamo and elsewhere, including,
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/12/20/is-bradley-manning-being-held-as-some-sort-of-enemy-combatant/">
in three instances, on the US mainland</a> were held by the Bush
administration, whose detention also involved torture and abuse, and the
creation of circumstances in which confessions would be produced, whether
they were true or not.<br><br>
This was part of a disgraceful policy that has not come to an end under
President Obama, as Guantánamo is still open, and 172 men are held there,
with the administration, Congress and the courts having all
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/03/10/guantanamo-obama-turns-the-clock-back-to-the-days-of-bushs-kangaroo-courts-and-worthless-tribunals/">
conspired to prevent the release of any of them</a> (even though
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/01/12/the-political-prisoners-of-guantanamo/">
89 of them have been cleared for release</a>). In addition, at Bagram in
Afghanistan, there are still men held who were seized up to nine years
ago in other countries, and were rendered to Bagram (after a tour of a
variety of secret CIA prisons), where
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/04/04/broken-justice-at-bagram-for-afghans-and-for-foreign-prisoners-held-by-the-us/">
they remain in a legal black hole</a>.<br><br>
While I encourage readers to spare a thought for those still held in
Guantánamo and Bagram, I reiterate that I understand the significance of
Bradley Manning’s plight, as it is unacceptable that the ill-treatment of
such a prominent prisoner is continuing, despite international outrage,
just as
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2011/03/03/death-penalty-for-bradley-manning-the-alleged-wikileaks-whistleblower/">
it is unacceptable that he has not yet been put forward for trial</a>, as
he has now been held for nearly a year, since his initial arrest in
Kuwait last May.<br><br>
In an important update to Manning’s story, the website
<a href="http://westernfrontonline.net/news/13331-manning-peer-sheds-light-on-wikileaks-former-military-intel-analyst-shares-his-thoughts-on-the-motive-of-alleged-leaks">
The Western Front recently interviewed Evan Knappenberger</a>, an Iraq
War veteran and former Army intelligence specialist, who graduated from
the same intelligence school as Manning, and who has some important
insights: firstly, about how dehumanizing it was working as an intel
analyst in Iraq, and how, at the same time, when it came to having access
to classified documents on the Defense Department’s online network, “Army
security is [or was] like a Band-Aid on a sunken chest wound.”<br><br>
Knappenberger also explains how the leaking of information by Manning (if
indeed it was him) “has raised consciousness quite a bit of the true
nature of what’s going on,” adding that he is appalled by the military’s
obsession with classifying as secret everything that takes place in its
wars, and how he is also appalled that Manning, as a whistleblower,
should have rights and protections that are denied to him, and also
regards his treatment as a disgrace.<br><br>
This is a powerful interview, and I do hope that you have the time to
read it, and also to circulate it to others.<br><br>
</font><h3><b>Manning Peer Sheds Light on WikiLeaks: Former military
intel analyst shares his thoughts on the motive of alleged leaks<br>
By Will Graff, The Western Front, April 15,
2011</b></h3><font size=3><i>Former military intel analyst shares his
thoughts on the motive of alleged leaks.<br><br>
</i>The alleged leaker, intelligence specialist Private First Class
Bradley Manning, is now in Quantico military prison in Virginia, where he
has been held in solitary confinement since his arrest in July 2010. On
April 10, nearly 300 top legal scholars, authors and experts signed a
letter condemning his treatment as torture.<br><br>
Evan Knappenberger, an Iraq War veteran and former intelligence
specialist in the Army, graduated from the same intelligence school as
Bradley Manning in May 2004 and was given secret clearance.<br><br>
Knappenberger is now a junior at Western majoring in mathematics. He was
interviewed last week for a PBS Frontline documentary about WikiLeaks,
Manning and military information security. The Western Front interviewed
Knappenberger about his experience in the military and his connection to
WikiLeaks.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: What is your connection to Bradley
Manning?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: Well, I have a couple connections to Bradley.
The first is that we both went to the same intelligence school. We went
to the same basic training company, pretty much an identical track all
the way through.<br><br>
They have [Manning’s] chat logs with the guy who turned him in. He talks
about why he [leaked the documents]. He says on those chat logs that it’s
out of principle. He didn’t like what he saw in Iraq. He talks about the
collateral murder video, watching civilians get killed by American
soldiers pretty much unprovoked. He had a change of heart, I think,
that’s why he says he decided to release all these documents if in
fact, it was him that did it.<br><br>
I was involved in torture in Iraq. Part of an intel analyst’s job is
“targeting.” You take a human being and put him on a piece of paper,
distill his life into one piece of paper. You’ve got a grid coordinate of
where he lives and a little box that says what to do with him: kill,
capture, detain, exploit, source you know, there’s different things you
can do with him. When I worked in “targeting,” it was having people
killed.<br><br>
The thing that gets me about that is I don’t think anybody who’s aware of
what’s going on can do that work for very long without having a major
problem come up. Most of the guys I went through intel school with, who
went to Iraq with me, are either dead, killed themselves, are in a
long-term care institution or completely disabled. I’m actually 50
percent disabled via PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), mostly
because of the stuff that happened.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: What kind of access did you have here and in
Iraq?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: Army security is like a Band-Aid on a sunken
chest wound. I remember when I was training, before I had my clearance
even, they were talking about diplomatic cables. It was a big scandal at
Fort Huachuca [in Arizona], with all these kids from analyst school.
Somebody said [in the cables] Sadaam wanted to negotiate and was willing
to agree to peace terms before we invaded, and Bush said no. And this
wasn’t very widely known. Somehow it came across on a cable at Fort
Huachuca, and everybody at the fort knew about it.<br><br>
It’s interesting the access we had. I did the briefing for a two-star
general every morning for a year. So I had secret and top-secret
information readily available. The funny thing is, Western’s password
system they have here on all these computers is better security than the
Army had on their secret computers.<br><br>
There are 2 million people, many of them not U.S. citizens, with access
to SIPRNet [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, the Department of
Defense’s largest network for the exchange of classified information and
messages]. There are 1,400 government agencies with SIPR websites. It’s
not that secret.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: Do you think private military contractors play
a role in this?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: Oh yeah. I worked in a place called a SCIF
[Secret Compartmentalized Information Facility] and almost anybody, if
they spoke English, could get in there. It wasn’t hard at all.<br><br>
Every military base has [a SCIF]. There’s one in Bellingham, too. It’s by
the airport. The only security they have at the SCIFs I worked at was one
guy on duty at a desk. They had barbed wire you could literally step
right over.<br><br>
We basically gave [the Iraqi army] SIPRNet. It’s not official, but if
you’ve got a secret Internet computer sitting there with a wire running
across from the American side of the base, with no guard, you’re
basically giving them access.<br><br>
Then in every Iraqi division command post, you have a SIPRNet computer,
with all the stuff Bradley Manning leaked and massive amounts
more.<br><br>
I could look up FBI files on the SIPRNet. In fact, I was reading Hunter
Thompson’s <i>Hell’s Angels</i> book, and I was like “this sounds cool,”
and I looked up all the Hell’s Angels.<br><br>
We looked up the JFK assassination, I couldn’t find anything on that. It
was kind of a game, but, yeah, that’s the SIPRNet. You’ve got access to
every so-called sensitive piece of information.<br><br>
You’ve basically got us sitting there in an Iraqi division command post,
and to make it all better, the U.S. Army put one guard guy there to guard
it. They would switch us off every 12 hours with another guy. If he gets
up to go to the bathroom, the SIPRNet is just sitting there. All you need
is knowledge of the English language and knowledge of how to use Internet
Explorer.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: Is all the information Bradley Manning leaked
on those computers under the same security?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: He has top-secret clearance, and it’s a little
better. It’s like there’s one more door you have to go through to get to
the top-secret computers, maybe. Sometimes there is and sometimes there
isn’t.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: What do you think the release of these
documents and WikiLeaks have accomplished?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: I think it has raised consciousness quite a
bit of the true nature of what’s going on. Anybody now can go see the
daily incident log of what happened in Iraq. What WikiLeaks did, what all
of this did, is give real credibility to people who want to tell the
truth. You can corroborate stories.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: What do you think the attacks on WikiLeaks and
Manning’s imprisonment say about freedom in the United States?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: The fact we think we can classify everything
that goes on in a war is ridiculous. And the fact that the press really
doesn’t have the freedom to report on the military is
ridiculous.<br><br>
The second part of it is Bradley Manning and his treatment. If he was in
any other government agency or private agency, he’d be considered a
whistleblower. He’d have protections, but he’s not. It shows the gap of
human rights in our military.<br><br>
If he was anybody else, he’d be covered under the whistleblower
protections or the freedom of speech. If a reporter gets classified
information and publishes it, it’s not a crime. WikiLeaks is a reporting
agency, so they should be covered under that. And anybody that works for
them, i.e. Bradley Manning, should be covered under that, too.<br><br>
<b>The Western Front</b>: What should people know about Bradley Manning
and why should they care about this issue?<br><br>
<b>Evan Knappenberger</b>: This is an American citizen. He’s an
all-American kid. Born and raised in Oklahoma. If the constitutional
rights don’t apply to him, it should scare everybody. Even if you don’t
agree with what he allegedly did, you still have the obligation to care
about the fact that he hasn’t been afforded his trial and he’s been
treated with cruel and unusual punishment. Even if you’re against freedom
of the press in this case, you still have the obligation to care about
the kid. He’s being tortured.<br><br>
It has been almost a year. They wake him up every five minutes. He’s
stripped naked every day. The lights have been on in his cell 24/7 for a
year. He gets one visitor a week. He can’t exercise in his cell, gets an
hour a day to walk around a larger cell with no bed in it for exercise.
Every human rights organization in the world has condemned his treatment
as torture. That should scare the shit out of us because he’s not some
Islamic fundamentalist who talks about Jihad, he’s an American kid,
modern guy, who listens to pop music and happens to be gay.<br>
**********************************<br><br>
Andy Worthington is the author of
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/the-guantanamo-files/"><i>The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal
Prison</a></i> (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the
US, and available from Amazon click on the following for the
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guantanamo-Files-Stories-Detainees-Americas/dp/0745326641">
US</a> and the
<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guantanamo-Files-Stories-Detainees-Americas/dp/0745326641">
UK</a>) and of two other books:
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/stonehenge-celebration-subversion/">
<i>Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion</a></i> and
<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/battle-of-the-beanfield/"><i>
The Battle of the Beanfield</a></i>. To receive new articles in your
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definitive Guantánamo prisoner list</a>, updated in July 2010, details
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Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo</a>” (co-directed by Polly Nash
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<a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/outside-the-law-stories-from-guantanamo-uk-tour-dates-2011-the-save-shaker-aamer-tour/">
on tour in the UK throughout 2011</a>, and available on DVD
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definitive Guantánamo habeas list</a> and
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the chronological list of all my articles</a>, and, if you appreciate my
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