From Dick Cheney to Edward Snowden
Disillusioned Nation
Bill Keller, New York Times
Bill Keller, New York Times
June 10, 2013, 12:12 pm
In the Guardian’s profile of Edward Snowden, the source of the latest revelations about our government’s data-mining, there is one detail that conjures a larger context for this whole story. Surveying the leaker’s Hong Kong hotel room, the writer spots a copy of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” Barton Gellman’s account of our unrepentantly manipulative former vice president, the principal author of our war-on-terror excesses, foremost among them the occupation of Iraq. Snowden’s bedside reading probably has something to do with the fact that Gellman, a Washington Post reporter, had also been negotiating for Snowden’s material. But as we parse the disclosures for larger lessons, here is one that should not be overlooked: The price we are paying for that misbegotten war goes beyond the obvious waste of blood and treasure. One major casualty of Iraq, we are reminded, was faith in those who govern us.
For Edward Snowden – as for Bradley Manning, the private who handed a wealth of war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks – Iraq was an incubator of disillusionment. Unlike Manning, Snowden was discharged from the army before he reached Iraq, but the war was by his own reckoning an important factor in the disenchantment that would later turn to disloyalty. Snowden told the Guardian he enlisted in the army in 2003 hoping to join the special forces in Iraq. “I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,” he said. His sense of purpose was soon dispelled. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone.”
Iraq was also the place where the United States – straining to fight a second Middle East war with the first one far from finished – began to outsource national security on a scale without precedent. As James Glanz and Andrew Lehren reported in 2010, drawing on the secret war dispatches made available by WikiLeaks, Iraq brought about “a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.” In Iraq, private companies like Blackwater, Custer Battles and ArmorGroup guarded installations, gathered intelligence, and killed presumed insurgents. Back home, consultants like Booz Allen Hamilton prospered by selling computer security and other services to intelligence agencies. The contractor boom enabled Snowden, a high-school dropout with computer skills, to command a $200,000 job and a top-secret security clearance.
So great was the demand for such services, Binyamin Applebaum and Eric Lipton reported this morning, that private contractors are allowed to dispense security clearances to private-sector employees. Almost half of the 25,000 employees at Booz have top secret clearances.
(More here.)
In the Guardian’s profile of Edward Snowden, the source of the latest revelations about our government’s data-mining, there is one detail that conjures a larger context for this whole story. Surveying the leaker’s Hong Kong hotel room, the writer spots a copy of “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” Barton Gellman’s account of our unrepentantly manipulative former vice president, the principal author of our war-on-terror excesses, foremost among them the occupation of Iraq. Snowden’s bedside reading probably has something to do with the fact that Gellman, a Washington Post reporter, had also been negotiating for Snowden’s material. But as we parse the disclosures for larger lessons, here is one that should not be overlooked: The price we are paying for that misbegotten war goes beyond the obvious waste of blood and treasure. One major casualty of Iraq, we are reminded, was faith in those who govern us.
For Edward Snowden – as for Bradley Manning, the private who handed a wealth of war logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks – Iraq was an incubator of disillusionment. Unlike Manning, Snowden was discharged from the army before he reached Iraq, but the war was by his own reckoning an important factor in the disenchantment that would later turn to disloyalty. Snowden told the Guardian he enlisted in the army in 2003 hoping to join the special forces in Iraq. “I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,” he said. His sense of purpose was soon dispelled. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone.”
Iraq was also the place where the United States – straining to fight a second Middle East war with the first one far from finished – began to outsource national security on a scale without precedent. As James Glanz and Andrew Lehren reported in 2010, drawing on the secret war dispatches made available by WikiLeaks, Iraq brought about “a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.” In Iraq, private companies like Blackwater, Custer Battles and ArmorGroup guarded installations, gathered intelligence, and killed presumed insurgents. Back home, consultants like Booz Allen Hamilton prospered by selling computer security and other services to intelligence agencies. The contractor boom enabled Snowden, a high-school dropout with computer skills, to command a $200,000 job and a top-secret security clearance.
So great was the demand for such services, Binyamin Applebaum and Eric Lipton reported this morning, that private contractors are allowed to dispense security clearances to private-sector employees. Almost half of the 25,000 employees at Booz have top secret clearances.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home