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NEWS > U.S.A. > WIKILEAKS FAILURE NOT EXACTLY WHAT THE ARMY HAD PLANNED
WIKILEAKS FAILURE NOT EXACTLY WHAT THE ARMY HAD PLANNED
December 21 2011
Washington, D.C. – Information in the modern age is perhaps the most powerful of all weapons. In the past, things like the catapult or the longbow decided the fates of nations, but in our current information revolution, the tools of war are simply not all that relevant anymore. Information, though, is supremely important.
That is no better evidence than in the case of Bradley Manning, the Army soldier who leaked thousands of documents to Wikileaks, the infamous whistleblower website. Now Manning is finally facing punishment for those actions, and things certainly don’t look good.
On the larger scale, however, the trial of Manning isn’t really about him or what he did but the fact that he was able to do it, and the power that leak had. Similar to an English defector sneaking bows from his headquarters and delivering it to the French, Manning’s level of espionage exposed not only the weakness’ inherent in information collection, but also the power it holds. Despite that very valuable lesson, the Army is continuing to purse to former Private instead of thanking him for his work, insisting that despite the lessons learned, this is still not what they had in mind.
“There's a limited amount of supervisors and you can't supervise everyone at every second of the day. You trust that they'll safeguard the material the way they've been taught,” Captain Casey Fulton, an intelligence officer charged with overseeing Manning, told the court. 
Manning is facing life in prison on 22 charges of distributing state secrets.
Many of the actions by intelligence personnel have also been called into question during the trial, with the army making it clear that these types of massive leaks are not the way things are designed to work.
“This is a really a huge black eye for military intelligence on all sorts of levels. I mean nothing that was leaked was really all that important, but the point is that it was leaked. The content is almost irrelevant, really, in the big picture. It’s the fact that the information got out so easily that’s really at issue,” said Scrape TV Military analyst Michael Kent. “This is certainly not the way the system was designed to work. Obviously there are flaws, both on the technological side and on the human side. Leaking thousands of pieces of classified data is certainly not a part of the plan. There really isn’t any other way to look at it. They screwed up.”
Much of the testimony has focussed on Manning’s personal mind set, which may have made him more prone to leaking thousands of secret documents.
“Obviously the screening process for these soldiers is lacking. Putting someone who is predisposed to leaking thousands of documents to whistleblowing websites is their first mistake, but is part of the intrinsic problems with the whole mechanism. In a solid system, that just wouldn’t happen. People prone to that type of things wouldn’t be given that kind of access,” continued Kent. “In the future I’m sure they will try to avoid that type of thing. It’s really something that is obviously problematic. Hopefully they’ve learned their lesson from this incident and won’t repeat it again.”
If it does happen again, we will likely hear all about it.
Mike Michaels, American Correspondent
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