The White House punishes whistleblowers even as it permits flattering leaks. So which will it be for a Navy Seal's new book?
Earlier this year, the Obama administration responded to a lawsuit seeking videos and photographs of the Osama bin Laden raid by claiming (as usual) that it was all too secret to disclose. A federal court (as usual) acquiesced to those assertions and dismissed the suit, finding that "the release of the images and/or videos 'reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.'" The administration made the same secrecy and national security claims to deny the requests of multiple news agencies for related materials about the Bin Laden raid.
Those materials would have resolved still lingering and serious questions about that raid – questions created by the administration's numerous inconsistencies and false claims, including whether it was a "kill-not-capture" mission from the start and whether Bin Laden resisted capture in any way. Despite the decree of the always-imperious Democratic Senator John Kerry that everyone wanting answers should just "shut up and move on", actual journalists continue to ask the right questions. Shortly after the raid, Mother Jones's Adam Weinstein, an Iraq war veteran, wrote:
"Now that Osama bin Laden rests in the briny deep, reporters and citizens alike are asking good questions about the operation that dumped him there. Was it a kill mission? What happened to everyone else in the compound? And what was up with that sea burial, anyway?
"Each of these questions fundamentally involves how Americans ought to act in combat, and as such, they deserve good answers – which haven't been fully articulated by the White House or the military."
Last August, in the same magazine, Mark Follman wrote a comprehensive article exploring many of these questions that began with this sentence:
"You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be still scratching your head about the end of Osama bin Laden."
Noting that "there have been multiple divergent accounts of the Navy Seals' mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the story seeming to be colored by politics, sensationalism, and outright fantasy," he detailed the multiple "glaring discrepancies" in the various leaked stories which, he correctly observes, have "big implications".
An event of this magnitude deserves clear transparency and disclosure, but the Obama administration's typically reflexive invocation of secrecy claims has prevented it. What makes that so much worse, though, is that at exactly the same time that it was telling a court that the mission is too secret to permit such disclosure, the White House launched a coordinated campaign of selective media leaking that had only one purpose: to glorify the president for political gain.
Thus the same administration that resisted judicial disclosure pursuant to transparency laws leaked bits and pieces about the mission (always favorable to the president) to their favorite media message-carriers; secretly met with and shoveled information to big Hollywood filmmakers planning a pre-election release of a film about the Bin Laden raid (now pushed back until December in the wake of the ensuing controversy, though the already-released film trailer – see below – will soon be inundating the nation); and then sat down with one of America's most obsequious, military-revering news anchors for an hour-long prime-time special that spoke of the raid with predictable awe but asked none of the hard questions about these lingering issues.
This is all just part-and-parcel of the administration's modus operandi when it comes to classified information. The same administration that has launched an unprecedented persecution campaign against whistleblowers (who disclose information about high-level deceit and wrongdoing) routinely leaks classified information for political gain. Only Bad Leaks (ones that expose government wrongdoing) are punished, while Good Leaks (making Obama look good) are overlooked if not officially sanctioned. Similarly, as the ACLU documented in a Guardian op-ed last June, the same administration that continuously blocks courts from reviewing the legality of their conduct by invoking secrecy claims compulsively leaks classified information to the media about those very same programs in order to depict the president as our "tough" and resolute protector.
Now comes news that one of the Navy Seals who participated in the Bin Laden raid will, using a pseudonym, publish a book setting forth his first-person account about what happened. In a stroke of excellent luck for Obama's re-election effort, the book – entitled No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden – will be released on 11 September: providing the double political whammy of exploiting the emotions of that date and putting Obama's most celebrated national security coup front and center less than two months before the election. As the New York Times observes:
"[T]he book promises to be one of the biggest titles of the year, with the potential to rattle the presidential campaign in the final weeks before the November 6 election … the publisher is expecting a major bestseller, with a planned print run of 300,000 copies in hardcover."
The description provided by Penguin, the book's publisher, promises a "blow-by-blow narrative of the assault, beginning with the helicopter crash that could have ended [the author's] life straight through to the radio call confirming Bin Laden's death". Although Pentagon and White House officials deny any advance knowledge of the book, the Navy Seal author is hardly attempting to conceal his identity. According to the NYT account, he provides ample biographical information that should make the process of identifying him extremely easy, including discussions of "his childhood in Alaska", the fact that he "has completed 13 combat deployments since" the 9/11 attack, and that he "retired within the past year". The book also includes accounts of "his other previously unreported Seal missions".
Given that many of the details of the Bin Laden raid remain classified, this would appear to be a clear and obvious case of the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The same is presumably true of any details he provides about "his other previously unreported Seal missions". Alternatively, if the raid has now been declassified, then what excuse remains for continuing to conceal the video and photographic evidence in the possession of the CIA that would reflect what actually happened?
As the administration continues to persecute numerous actual whistleblowers under espionage statutes (and to legally harass the journalists who published their leaks), will there be any attempt to criminally investigate the Navy Seal who wrote this very-helpful-to-Obama book? (As a side note, remember when Democrats – who now coordinate with Hollywood studios to produce pre-election hagiography of the commander-in-chief's kill orders – used to complain bitterly about how Bush/Rove Republicans would (spoken with purse-lipped disgust) exploit national security for political gain?)
Allowing the government to operate behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy is destructive in its own right. But all of that becomes substantially worse when the administration is permitted to play these sorts of games with its secrecy powers: overlooking or rewarding politically beneficial leaks while severely punishing leaks that provide an important public value by exposing high-level corruption. Manipulating presidential secrecy powers in this way is an odious instrument for propaganda: it ensures that all embarrassing or incriminating information remains suppressed, and the only thing the public learns – and the eager, grateful press amplifies – are the informational crumbs doled out by the White House in order to glorify the leader. That's the very definition of state propaganda.