US: Home of 'Leaks,' Not Conspiracies

In the United States, there has been a great epidemic of “leaks” — secret news leaked to the media. The last one of these people to go before the bar was a high military official, retired Gen. James Cartwright of the Marines, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011. The charge against him, for which he is being investigated by the Department of Justice, is that of revealing to The New York Times secret details of the computer virus Stuxnet, which was capable of freezing Iran’s nuclear program for months. The New York Times last year revealed that Stuxnet was part of the U.S. military program known as Operation Olympic Games, launched during Bush’s administration and accelerated under Obama’s.

The Stuxnet virus was transmitted to computers of Iran’s industrial and nuclear research development centers. In 2010 it blocked the production of at least 1,000 centrifuges used to enrich uranium, fissionable material that can also be used in the construction of nuclear weapons. The collateral effects were vast. Other computers had “contracted” the virus in other countries, including China. This raised many suspicions on the intensity of a nuclear cooperation between the Tehran and Beijing regimes. The United States has often officially denied having programmed the computer virus. Iranian propaganda and many European media had pointed a finger at the usual suspects, Israel’s Mossad, for having programmed and defused the virus. But the investigation currently underway against Cartwright has been, until now, the most implicit admission that the computer weapon was effectively packaged by the Pentagon. The Stuxnet story is an old one. Today there are other military computer viruses, like Flame, which are much more powerful, versatile and invasive.

The story that most worries and interests the American public is that of the epidemic of “leaks” by officials and technicians who talk too much and sell news to the press that is fundamental to national security. The liberals and progressives defend them in the name of freedom of speech. Conservatives — and quite a few Democrats — describe these people as traitors to the country. Everyone is being accused, being hunted down, or already in jail. Bradley Manning, the main source of WikiLeaks, which allowed tens of thousands of secret diplomatic documents to be exposed, is already in jail. Locked up in a Fort Leavenworth jail, after 10 months of isolation in the Quantico military jail, he has become an international case. Juan Mendez, United Nations special rapporteur on torture, has formally accused the United States of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment for this form of imposed detention. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, does not intend to re-enter the U.S. and is still a refugee in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. Another “whistle-blower,” Edward Snowden, who has revealed secrets of cyberespionage by the National Security Agency, is on the run from the United States. He is currently in Moscow.

Beyond the political and moral judgment on the new “Deep Throat,” there is only one lesson to be taken away: In the United States it has become more difficult to maintain a secret. The founding libertarian American culture pushes to condemn secrecy. This image society is transforming these “snoops” into real celebrities, giving them another incentive to talk. Finally there is the initial promise by the Obama administration of greater transparency, betrayed in the later years, which induced a greater number of people who were aware of the facts to implement politics on their own terms. This trend discredits, among other things, the conviction that the U.S. is a home to conspiracies. There are still people who are convinced that 9/11 was part of a CIA conspiracy, that the twin towers and World Trace Center 7 were taken down by pre-positioned dynamite and not by hijacked airplanes. If that is what really happened, at this time, 12 years later, someone would have already leaked the details of the mega-plot to the media. The “spies” have therefore an indestructible merit, even if it is involuntary: having definitely destroyed the conspiracy theories.