Historians may someday look back upon the WikiLeaks scandal as emblematic of the sad state of U.S. national security in the age of Obama. Consider a recent New York Times profile of Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army private suspected of giving WikiLeaks an estimated 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables, more than 90,000 classified U.S. intelligence reports concerning the war in Afghanistan, and the classified video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq that accidentally killed three innocent people. The image presented by the Times of Manning downloading and then lip-synching Lady Gaga tunes as he copied thousands of classified government documents represents the intersection of a number of extraordinarily distressing questions.
First, who in the Department of Defense approved Manning as an intelligence analyst with a top secret security clearance? There were abundant warning signs of trouble before and after the clearance was awarded, including his loss of a pre-enlistment job owing to his having the “personality of a bull in a china shop,” according to the Times, and his numerous links to a hacker community centered at Brandeis University. Brandeis was also where Manning’s boyfriend — reported by the Times as a “self-described drag queen” — was a student. Did the same fears of political correctness that prevented Army officials from honestly assessing Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim fanatic and Fort Hood mass murderer, stifle expressions of concern about security in Manning’s case?
