Category: Shitbags

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.

I guess the Manning defense team is trying to baffle the jury with bullshit, tossing all kinds of defense strategies against the wall until one sticks. So far, they’ve claimed he didn’t release classified communications to Scandi albino, Julian Asange, the Wikileaks founder, but if he did do it, it was only because he’s gay and it’s hard to be gay in the military. But today’s defense is that the military had the audacity to trust soldiers to not release classified documents to Scandi albinos (Associated Press link);

But witnesses said soldiers routinely accessed music, movies and computer games over the network as well.

“I remember thinking that was something we shouldn’t be so liberal about,” said Capt. Barclay Keay, who was in charge of a night shift Manning worked for a few weeks in late 2009.

Hey, Captain, just how “in charge” were you if you allowed it to go on? Seems to me that someone who was responsible for the product generated by that shift could make his own policies. But, irrespective of this captain’s inability to accept responsibility for the actions of his crew, I assume they all had security clearances and had agreed not to release classified documents to Scandi albinos and they all knew the consequences of their malfeasance if they did.

Keay’s impression of Manning was that he was a good soldier who “did good analytical work.”

But Sgt. Daniel Padgett, one of Manning’s supervisors, said otherwise, recalling an incident when he sat down with Manning for a “counseling session” after the soldier was late for work.

When Padgett tried to impress on Manning the importance of being on time, “his demeanor changed,” the former supervisor testified. He said Manning then stood up and overturned a table, spilling a radio and computer onto the floor. Padgett said he moved Manning away from a gun rack while someone else restrained him until he calmed down. Padgett said he didn’t remember reporting the incident to his supervisors.

So, despite the fact that Ron Paul and Code Pink think that Manning was mistreated by the Army which therefore mitigates his malfeasance, someone in the Army was coddling him. Further evidence of the Amy coddling the sociopath;

Former Spec. Jihrleah Showman, who was Manning’s supervisor, described a succession of outbursts by Manning at their Army base stateside and, later, in Iraq, leading up to a confrontation in which she said Manning “punched me in the face, unprovoked, and displayed an uncontrollable behavior.”

And when Showman reported Manning to her supervisors for the assault, nothing happened. So where is the evidence that he was victimized by the Army because he was gay? It looks to me like they were protecting him.

They should have imprisoned him the first time he was caught lip syncing Lady Gaga’s “Telephone”.

ADDED: ROS sends this nugget;

The Advisory Board of the Bradley Manning Support Network includes Robert Meeropol, whose parents, communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were convicted of violating the Espionage Act and executed for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. Meeropol says “it is an honor to join a Board that includes Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, as well as Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, and filmmaker Michael Moore, among others, but also because I believe it is imperative for as many people as possible to raise their voices in support of Manning.”

Emphasis is mine.

I’m glad to see those traitorous genes still gainfully employed and in the proper company.