{"id":28072,"date":"2011-12-26T00:17:44","date_gmt":"2011-12-26T04:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28072"},"modified":"2011-12-26T00:46:03","modified_gmt":"2011-12-26T04:46:03","slug":"on-manning-why-so-lonely-in-leavenworth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28072","title":{"rendered":"On Manning: Why so lonely in Leavenworth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple days ago in an article<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

…the hearing also produced equally compelling evidence of the larger issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Manning\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

Despite a series of violent outbursts and other indications he was in serious mental distress, Manning\u2019s security clearance wasn\u2019t 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.
\nYet Manning was allowed to spend about six months in a purportedly secure intelligence center in eastern Iraq with routine access to classified information \u2014 the same center where he sometimes sat at his computer or curled up on the floor, unresponsive to other soldiers.
\nAnd the fact that a junior soldier was downloading 700,000 reports, most of them classified, didn\u2019t 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.
\nSecurity was so lax that anyone with access to the classified network could burn reams of \u201csecret\u201d data to a CD and simply walk out the door.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Merry Christmas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple days ago in an article discussing the developing legal defense of the traitor Bradley … On Manning: Why so lonely in Leavenworth?<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":619,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-issues","category-shitbags"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/619"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}