Secret US gov’t report confirms Manning leaks did no real damage

Chelsea Manning

Whenever a whistleblower exposes government wrongdoing, the first refrain we hear from defenders is that such leaks put lives in danger, by exposing troops and undercover agents or by damaging the country’s intelligence-gathering apparatus. This happened with Edward Snowden, who was accused of causing “profound damage” with “lethal consequences”, claims that were undermined by the lack of any evidence to support them and further refuted by the new NSA director, who said the fallout was manageable.

Before that, Chelsea Manning received the same treatment over her disclosures through Wiki­Leaks in 2010. Throughout her trial, the government argued that Manning’s disclosures would destroy the US’s ability to conduct its foreign policy and, of course, lead to a pile of dead troops and informants. But even then, it was obvious that this was little more than empty bluster. Nonetheless, the prosecution harped on about grave damage assuredly caused, basing this on a classified Department of Defense report that Manning’s defense lawyers weren’t allowed to view.

Well, surprise, surprise. BuzzFeed got a hold of that same document, and it turns out it doesn’t claim quite what the government said it did.

In the seven years since WikiLeaks published the largest leak of classified documents in history, the federal government has said they caused enormous damage to national security.

But a secret, 107-page report, prepared by a Department of Defense task force and newly obtained by BuzzFeed News, tells a starkly different story: It says the disclosures were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.

Regarding the hundreds of thousands of Iraq-related military documents and State Department cables provided by the Army private Chelsea Manning, the report assessed “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former U.S. leadership in Iraq.”

The heavily redacted report also determined that a different set of documents published the same year, relating to the US war in Afghanistan, would not result in “significant impact” to US operations. It did, however, have the potential to cause “serious damage” to “intelligence sources, informants and the Afghan population,” and US and NATO intelligence collection efforts. The most significant impact of the leaks, the report concluded, would likely be on the lives of “cooperative Afghans, Iraqis, and other foreign interlocutors.”

It turns out the gravest consequences of Manning’s actions were that other countries were less keen on working with a foreign government that had lied about the crimes and atrocities they’d committed in their countries, and that knowledge of said crimes and atrocities might put their contacts at risk.

Call me crazy, but I’d say the blame for that goes to the government committing crimes and atrocities in the first place, not whomever blew the lid on their lies.

(via Techdirt)