How the mighty have fallen. Once known as “Obama’s favorite general,” James Cartwright will soon don a prison uniform and, thanks to a plea deal, spend 13 months behind bars. Involved in setting up the earliest military cyberforce inside U.S. Strategic Command, which he led from 2004 to 2007, Cartwright also played a role in launching the first cyberwar in history — the release of the Stuxnet virus against Iran’s nuclear program. A Justice Department investigation found that, in 2012, he leaked information on the development of that virus to David Sanger of the “纽约时报”。结果: 头版文章 revealing its existence, and so the American cyber-campaign against Iran, to the American public. It was considered a serious breach of national security. On Thursday, the retired four-star general stood in front of a U.S. district judge who told him that his “criminal act” was “a very serious one” and had been “committed by a national security expert who lost his moral compass.” It was a remarkable ending for a man who nearly reached the heights of Pentagon power, was almost appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and had the president’s ear.
In fact, Gen. James Cartwright has not gone to jail and the above paragraph remains — as yet — a grim Washington fairy tale. There is indeed a 司法部调查 公开反对总统“最喜爱的将军”(华盛顿文士鲍勃·伍德沃德曾给他贴上这样的标签),因为他可能将有关该病毒的信息泄露给美国政府。 “纽约时报”, but that’s all. He remains quite active in private life, 保持 战略与国际研究中心哈罗德·布朗国防政策研究主席,作为顾问 美国广播公司新闻,并在董事会 雷神公司, 除其他事项外。到目前为止,他只遭受过一次处罚: 剥离 他的安全许可。
实际上是另一个泄密者 议定 to that plea deal for the 13-month jail term. Nearly three weeks ago, ex-State Department intelligence analyst Stephen E. Kim 认罪 to “an unauthorized disclosure of national defense information.” He stood before U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who offered those stern words of admonition, and took responsibility for passing classified information on the North Korean nuclear program to Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2009.
Still, someday Cartwright might prove to be unique in the annals of Obama era jurisprudence — the only Washington figure of any significance in these years to be given a jail sentence for a crime of state. Whatever happens to him, his ongoing case highlights a singular fact: that there is but one crime for which anyone in America’s national security state can be held accountable in a court of law, and that’s leaking information that might put those in it in a bad light or simply let the American public know something more about what its government is really doing.
如果这不是《华盛顿2014》,而是乔治·奥威尔的小说 1984,那么真理部正面的标语——“战争就是和平,自由就是奴役,无知就是力量”——就必须修改,添加第四条口号:知识就是犯罪。
卡特赖特可能是一个例外,国家安全国家的成员与我们其他人不同,存在于所谓的“国家安全国家”中。 “后法律”美国. They know that, no matter how heinous the crime, they will not be brought to justice for it. The list of potentially serious criminal acts for which no one has had to take responsibility in a court of law is long, and never tabulated in one place. Consider this, then, an initial run-down on seven of the most obvious crimes and misdemeanors of this era for which no one has been held accountable.
*绑架: After 9/11, the CIA got into kidnapping in a big way. At least 136 “恐怖嫌疑人”和 可能还有更多 (包括 完全无辜 人)在全球城市的街道以及地球的偏远地区被绑架,通常是在当地警察或情报机构的帮助下。 五十四 other countries were enlisted in the enterprise. The prisoners were delivered either into the Bush administration’s secret global system of prisons, also known as “black sites,” to be detained and mistreated, or they were “呈现”直接落入酷刑政权手中 埃及 至 乌兹别克斯坦. No American involved has been brought to court for such illegal acts (nor did the American government ever offer an apology, no less restitution to anyone it kidnapped, even those who turned out not to be “terror suspects”). One set of CIA agents was, however, 在意大利被起诉 for a kidnapping and rendition to Egypt. Among them was the Agency’s Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady. He had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a la dolce vita 版本 of rendition and later fled the country for the United States. Last year, he was briefly被拘留 在巴拿马,却被美国政府偷偷地带出该国并返回安全地带。
*酷刑(和其他虐待行为): 同样,对于任何人来说,在他们臭名昭著的“酷刑备忘录”,布什司法部官员释放了中央情报局审讯人员“脱掉手套” and use what were euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” against offshore prisoners in the Global War on Terror. These “techniques” included “waterboarding,” once known as “the water torture,” and long accepted even 在这个国家 as a form of torture. On coming to office, President Obama 拒绝 这些做法,但是 拒绝 to prosecute those who practiced them. Not a single CIA agent or 私人承包商 曾经参与过 带电,同样受到审判,布什司法部或政府其他部门中也没有人为这些做法开绿灯,据报道其高级官员 看到他们展示了 在白宫。
To be accurate, a single member of the national security state has gone to prison thanks to the CIA’s torture program. That was 约翰基里亚库, a former CIA agent who tortured no one, but offended the Obama administrations by turning whistleblower and going public about Agency torture. He is now serving a 监禁30个月 “向记者透露一名秘密特工的名字。”换句话说,与该机构的酷刑活动有关的唯一可以起诉的罪行是威胁要让美国公众更多地了解这一情况的罪行。
然而现在,多亏了来自 四面楚歌 参议院情报委员会关于中央情报局审讯和酷刑计划的 6,300 页报告,我们 知道 that the Agency “used interrogation methods that weren’t approved by the Justice Department or CIA headquarters.” In other words, its agents went beyond even those techniques approved in the torture memos, which in turn means that they acted illegally even by the standards of the Bush administration. This should be an obvious signal for the beginning of prosecutions, but — not surprisingly — it looks like the only prosecution on the horizon might be of 无论是谁泄露的 麦克拉奇新闻未发布的参议院报告的部分内容。
*销毁犯罪证据: To purposely destroy evidence in order to impede a future investigation of possible criminal acts is itself, of course, a crime. We know that such a thing did indeed happen. Jose Rodriguez, Jr., the head of CIA clandestine operations, 销毁 92 videotapes of the repeated waterboardings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 attacks, and alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, “tapes that he had been explicitly told to preserve as part of an official investigation.” The Justice Department 调查 his act, but never charged him. He has since defended himself in a book,硬措施, 说 he was, in essence, “tired of waiting for Washington’s bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives.” He is still free and writing 选集 等加工。为“华盛顿邮报” 为他销毁的审讯程序辩护。
*法外监狱系统的规划: 众所周知,全球法外监狱网络,或“黑场”,其中规定了各种酷刑和虐待行为的可能性 愿望 of the highest officials of the Bush administration. This system was created specifically to avoid putting terror suspects into the U.S. legal system. In that sense, it was by definition extralegal, if not illegal. It represented, that is, a concerted effort to avoid any of the constraints or oversight that U.S. law or the U.S. courts might have imposed on the treatment of detainees. This was a well-planned crime committed not under the rubric of war against any specific power, but of a global war without end against al-Qaeda and like-minded groups.
*在该法外系统中杀害被拘留者: 中情局在离岸(或借用)监狱羁押的被拘留者因中情局处理人员下令的严厉对待而死亡的事件数不胜数。不考虑 a crime. In two cases — in the “盐坑” 在阿富汗和 阿布格莱布 伊拉克监狱——司法部对此类死亡事件进行了调查,但没有人受到调查 曾经充电过。 在 案件 古尔·拉赫曼 (Gul Rahman),盐坑中的囚犯,根据 “华盛顿邮报”, “a CIA officer allegedly ordered Afghan guards in November 2002 to strip Rahman and chain him to the concrete floor of his cell. Temperatures plunged overnight, and Rahman froze to death. Hypothermia was listed as the cause of death and Rahman was buried in an unmarked grave.” (In a rare case brought before a military court, a low-level Army interrogator was 被定罪 “将一名伊拉克将军的脸塞进睡袋杀死了他”,并判处“在接下来的四个月内没收 6,000 美元的工资,接受正式谴责,并在 60 天内限制其在家中、办公室和办公室内活动”。教会。”)
*暗杀: Once upon a time, off-the-books assassination was generally a rare act of state and always one that presidents could deny responsibility for. Now, it is part of everyday life in the White House and at the CIA. The president’s role 作为刺客头目,作为真正做出杀死谁的最终决定的人,几乎是公开的 提拔 as a political plus. The drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, though “covert” and run by a civilian agency (with much 秘密帮助 from the U.S. Air Force) are openly reported on in the media and discussed as a seeming point of pride by those involved. In 2009, for instance, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta didn’t hesitate to enthusiastically 赞美 the drone attacks in Pakistan as “the only game in town.” And best of all, they are “legal.” We know this because the White House had the Justice Department prepare a 50-page document on 他们的合法性 它有 拒绝释放 to the public. In these campaigns in the 荒地 尽管在遥远的地方,很少有记者,但我们知道 数千人 已经死亡,其中包括大量孩子. Being run by a civilian agency, they cannot in any normal sense be “acts of war.” In another world, they would certainly be considered illegal and possibly war crimes, as Christof Heyns, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, has 建议. Top officials have taken responsibility for these acts, including the drone killings in Yemen of 四名美国公民condemned to death by a White House that has enthusiastically taken on the role of judge, jury, and executioner. No one involved, however, will ever see a day in court.
*在国会作伪证: Lying to Congress in public testimony is, of course, perjury. Among others, we know that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper committed it in a strikingly bald-faced way on March 12, 2013. When 问 参议员罗恩·怀登 (Ron Wyden) 提出的一个问题是,国家安全局是否收集了“有关数百万或数亿美国人的任何类型的数据” 提前一天 — Clapper answered, “No, sir. Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” This was a lie, pure and simple, as the Snowden revelations on the NSA’s gathering of phone metadata on all Americans (including, assumedly, 我们的国会代表) would later make clear. Clapper subsequently apologized, saying that he 发言 in what he called “the least untruthful” way possible, which, were crime on anyone’s mind, would essentially have been a confession. Congress did 没什么. Just in case you wondered, Clapper remains the director of national intelligence with the “SUPPORT总统的。
请注意,上述七个类别甚至没有考虑到 无证监视 应该将某人送上法庭的美国人,或者各种战士公司在战区过高收费或欺骗政府的方式,或者私人承包商的方式“狂奔” in those same zones. Even relatively low-level crimes by minor figures in the national security state have normally not been criminalized. Take, for example, the private surveillance of and cyberstalking of “love interests,” or “LOVEINT,” by NSA employees using government surveillance systems. The NSA 索赔 that at least one employee was “disciplined” for this, but no one was taken to court. A rare exception: a number of low level military figures in the Abu Ghraib scandal were tried for their abusive actions, 被定罪及 送进监狱,虽然没有人比 陆军上校 因那些臭名昭著的系统性和有组织的酷刑和虐待行为被法庭追究责任。
太大而不能倒,国家安全风格
All in all, as with the banks after the meltdown of 2007-2008, even the most obvious of national security state crimes seem to fall into a “too big to fail”-like category. Call it “too big to jail.” The only crime that repeatedly makes it out of the investigative phase and into court — as with Stephen Kim, 切尔西曼宁, and John Kiriakou — is revealing information the national security state holds dear. On that, the Obama administration has been 激烈和起诉.
Despite the claims of national security breaches in such cases, most of the leakers and whistleblowers of our moment have had little to offer in the way of information that might benefit Washington’s official enemies. What Kim told Fox News about the North Korean nuclear program was hardly likely to have been news to the North Koreans, just as the Iranians are believed to have 已经知道 卡特赖特将军可能泄露了什么 时 关于 Stuxnet 病毒的起源。
Of course, leaking is a habit that’s often considered quite useful by those in power. It’s little short of a sport in Washington, done whenever officials feel it to be to their advantage or the advantage of an administration, even if what’s at stake are “secret” programs like the CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan. What’s still up in the air — and to be tested — is whether leaking information in the government’s supposed interest could, in fact, be a crime. And that’s where General Cartwright comes in. If there is, in fact, but a single crime that can be committed within the national security state for which our leaders now believe jail time is appropriate, how wide is the category and is knowledge always a crime when it ends up in the wrong brains?
If there were one man of power and prominence who might join Kim, Kiriakou, Manning, and Edward Snowden (should the U.S. government ever get its hands on him), it might be Cartwright. It’s a long shot, but here’s what he doesn’t have going for him. He was an insider who was evidently an outsider. He was considered “独狼”谁私下去找总统, 在背后, and to the evident dismay of, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense. He seems to have had few supporters in the Pentagon and to have alienated key Republican senators. He could, in short, prove the single sacrificial lamb in the national security state.
In Washington today, knowledge is the only crime. That’s a political reality of the twenty-first century. Get used to it.
Tom Engelhardt是该联合创始人 美国帝国计划 和作者 美国的恐惧 以及冷战史, 胜利文化的终结。 他负责国家研究所的 TomDispatch.com,本文首次出现的地方。 他与尼克·图尔斯合着的最新着作是终结者星球:无人机战争的第一个历史,2001-2050.
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