260,000 Classified Cables Might Be Loose

Here's some bad news. A 22-year old U.S. Army intelligence specialist in Iraq has been arrested for leaking classified information to Wikileaks, which is an internet depository for other people's secrets whose "About Us" page says it should be described as an "open government group," or an "anti-corruption group," or a "transparency group," or simply as a "whistleblower's site."

That's bad news as a general matter but of particular interest to me and, mostly likely, you too, is that among the leaked documents are 260,000 classified State Department cables and other messages that young Bradley Manning downloaded from SIPRNET.

Here are the highlights from Wired.com's story, U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe:

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: Released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voicemail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.

The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.

-- snip --

Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.

This cache of compromised cables has not been posted on Wikileaks so far. Tick ... tick ... tick ...

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Update: Here are some perceptive comments from the WaPo's Spy Talk column on the question of why people steal secrets.

National Archives Opens Military Records

The Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) has a delightful blog , and on this weekend run-up to the 66th anniversary of the D-Day invasion he has posted about the new National Personnel Records Center:

The National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis is the nation’s depository for military personnel records. Within these records are the files of “Persons of Exceptional Prominence” including: Spiro Agnew, Desi Arnaz, Beatrice Arthur, Joe Louis, Humphrey Bogart, John William Coltrane, John Foster Dulles, Marvin Gaye, Theodore S. Geisel (AKA “Dr. Seuss”), Charles A. Lindbergh, Glenn Miller, Edward Murrow, Richard Nixon, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Robinson.

Beatrice Arthur, as in Bea Arthur? That was news to me, but it turns out she was a medical technologist when the U.S. entered World War II, and became one of the first female volunteers for the U.S. Marine Corps.

The National Archives are opening the service records of many famous or otherwise prominent Americans to the public, so you can now see Bea Arthur's DD-214 for yourself, along with records for Omar Bradley and Eddie Slovik, Jack Kerouac and Jimi Hendrix, Jack Webb and William Randolph Hearst, Joseph P. Kennedy and Prescott S. Bush, Steve McQueen and Hugo Black, Grace Hooper and Harry Truman, Rocky Marciano and Margaret Chase Smith, and on and on.

Thinking about that last pairing - Rocky Marciano and Margaret Chase Smith - confirms something I have long believed. Which is that, if ever there was a melting pot in American society, it was in the institution of the U.S. military.

Federal Spending, and Spending, and Spending ...

Federal Spending By the Numbers, a report courtesy of the Heritage Foundation, makes grim reading.

To single out just a few tidbits:

- The last year in which USG revenues equaled spending was 2002
- The Fed will spend $30,543 per U.S. household in 2010
- Average annual deficits of $1 trillion are projected for the next decade

If there is a silver lining in this fiscal cloud, it is that fully 90 percent of the rising long-term budget deficits are driven by rising spending rather than falling revenue. So we could, repeat could, reverse the trend pretty quickly any time Congress decides to spend less.

Political Violence Against Americans Abroad in 2009

The State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security has released the 2009 publication of that invaluable series, Political Violence Against Americans.

Political Violence Against Americans, formerly Significant Incidents of Political Violence Against Americans, is produced by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security's Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis (DS/DSS/ITA) to provide readers with a comprehensive picture of the broad spectrum of political violence that American citizens and interests have encountered abroad on an annual basis

You can view the 2009 report at the link above, as well as archived reports for the years 2002 back to 1987. The series was not produced for the years 2003-2007, when the responsibility for producing such reports passed to the newly-established National Counterterrorism Center. The NTC took up that responsibility and - and here I am counting to ten and exercising restraint - made an unbelievably horrendous mess of it. I'm so glad to see this series once again being produced by people who know what they're doing.

Looking at all the political violence that has been inflicted on American citizens abroad makes me prouder than ever to be a member of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Americans).

Why Is It Always #3? Because He's Expendable

Slate.com asks "why are we always killing Osama's "No. 3" operative?"

Some jobs just seem impossible to keep filled ... No matter what the explanation, it's clear that the sweet spot in al-Qaida management is No. 1 and No. 2. After that, job security seems only slightly better than that enjoyed by suicide bombers.

Slate speculates that U.S. spokesmen might be exaggerating the importance of the AQ figures we manage to clip, or maybe it's a Machiavellian plot to confuse the AQ rank and file, or else AQ just has a flat organizational structure in which everybody below Bin Laden and his henchman Ayman al-Zawahri are collectively the #3 leader.

Personally, I don't think it's so complicated. To slightly misquote Austin Powers: "who does Number 3 work for?" The two senior leaders of AQ keep themselves safely hidden away, so they need a fall guy to run operations in the field and take the risks. It's the same way many hierarchical organizations work; the Chiefs are inside pondering grand strategy while the Indians are outside getting picked off.

Close Encounters of the Third (al-Qaeda Leader) Kind

The WaPo has an interactive timeline of U.S. drone attacks on high-value Taliban and al-Qaeda targets since Obama took office. There were only two such attacks during 2009, but there have been five so far this year. Expect many more.

Al-Qaida #3 in Algeria Resigns To Spend More Time With His Family

He must be the first living AQ #3 man in captivity.

Actually, I don't know that he was really the #3 man in al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb, since the news accounts of today's announcement by the Algerian Interior Ministry describe Atmane Touati only as "an ideological leader of the Algeria-based affiliate of al-Qaida" who has played a part in the Islamic insurgency against the Algerian regime since the 1990s. Well, that sounds like another #3 to me. Anyway, have you ever heard of an AQ leader in any position lower than the #3 slot?

The Interior Ministry also said that Atmane Touati surrendered after his wife "convinced her husband to abandon the criminal horde and come home." That explanation fools no one in Washington, of course, since we hear pretty much the same story every time the law catches up with one of our office holders. I prefer to think that Touati got tired of scanning the sky all day for unmanned aerial vehicles, and listening all night for the sound of incoming missiles.