Khatchadourian was present to record Jónsdóttir, the feisty feminist MP for Reykjavik South, rather unwillingly trimming Assange’s hair while he sat hunched over his laptop, engaged in important messaging. The profile writer was also taking notes when the message came back from Baghdad:
The journalists who had gone to Baghdad … had found the two children in the van. The children had lived a block from the location of the attack, and were being driven to school by their father that morning. “They remember the bombardment, felt great pain, they said, and lost consciousness,” one of the journalists wrote …
Jónsdóttir turned to Gonggrijp, whose eyes had welled up. “Are you crying?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “OK, OK, it is just the kids. It hurts.” Gonggrijp gathered himself. “Fuck!” he said … Jónsdóttir was now in tears, too, and wiping her nose.
Assange premiered the Apache helicopter video at the National Press Club in Washington on 5 April. He chose to title it “Collateral Murder”. Although the video caused a stir, something went wrong. It did not generate the universal outrage and pressure for reform of, say, Seymour Hersh’s earlier exposé of leaked photos in the New Yorker showing Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.
One of the reasons why the video caused less of a storm than he had hoped was that Reuters, whose own employees had been killed, chose not to go on the attack over the leaked information. They had, it transpired, been shown privately a partial clip of the two men’s deaths, within days of it happening, although subsequent freedom of information requests for the actual video had been repeatedly blocked. Reuters’ editor-in-chief, David Schlesinger, wrote a muted, more-in-sorrow column for the Guardian:
“Reuters editors were shown only one portion of the video. We immediately changed our operating procedures. The first portion of the video made clear that anyone walking with a group of armed people could be considered a target. We immediately made it a rule that our journalists could not even walk near armed groups. However, we were not shown the second part of the video, where the helicopter fired on a van trying to evacuate the wounded. Had we seen it, we could have adjusted our procedures further.”
Another reason for the limited response was the tendentious title: “Collateral Murder”. Readers and viewers often hate the feeling they are being bulldozed into a particular point of view. What went on in the video could be interpreted as a much more nuanced event, to eyes not entirely blinded by rage or sorrow.
For the soldiers had clearly made a mistake. Some of the group they fired on were indeed armed, and the Reuters cameraman’s long lens did look like a weapon pointed furtively at “our brothers on the ground” as one of the pilots put it. The cruel decision to treat the Baghdad streets as a battle-space on which all were fair game was made not by individual sadists or war criminals, but by the US military at a much higher level. The pilots were doing the murderous things they had been trained to do – as some soldiers in the ground unit concerned were later to publicly say. Clearly there was far more to be debated than could be encompassed in the crude legend “Collateral Murder”.
Nevertheless, it was a debate that might never have been held at all, had not one young US soldier somewhere decided the video ought to be seen, and had not Assange boldly put it on public display. From now on, the civilian death that American soldiers so often rained down from the sky would be treated a little less casually by the US public. This was surely what free speech was meant to be all about. In many people’s eyes, Assange deserved to be seen as a hero.
CHAPTER 6
The Lamo dialogues
Contingency Operating Station Hammer, Iraq
21 May 2010
“I can’t believe what I’m telling you”
BRADASS87
At his sweltering army base in the Iraqi desert, specialist Bradley Manning showed signs of considerable stress in the weeks following Assange’s release of the Apache helicopter video. In web chats, he confided that he had had “about three breakdowns” as a result of his emotional insecurity, and was “self-medicating like crazy”. He added: “I’ve been isolated for so long … I’ve totally lost my mind … I’m a wreck.” On 5 May, Manning posted on Facebook that he was “left with the sinking feeling that he doesn’t have anything left”.
Part of this emotional turmoil was probably related to the break-up of Manning’s relationship with Tyler Watkins back in Boston, which took place around the same time. But he was also feeling scared about the possible fall-out from his “hacktivist” activities, as he described them, with WikiLeaks. At one point he boasted that “No one suspected a thing … Odds are, they never will.” But at others he contemplated going to prison for the rest of his life, or even the death penalty.
“I’ve made a huge mess … I think I’m in more potential heat than you ever were,” he would confide online to Adrian Lamo, a hacker in the US who himself had been sentenced to two years’ probation for having hacked into computers in a range of enterprises including the New York Times. The combination of losing Watkins and feeling under threat of discovery by the authorities had clearly left Manning feeling rattled. Days before he began unburdening to Lamo over the internet, he was demoted from the rank of specialist to that of private first class, after he punched another soldier in the face.
Julian Assange had recently publicised, in rapid succession, four leaked classified files he had laid his hands on, all of different types, but all accessible to a member of the US army in Manning’s position. At some point between mid-January and mid-February, Assange received a copy of the cable from the Reykjavik embassy, which he published to good effect during his Iceland media campaign. Posted on 18 February, it was later described by Manning as a “test”.
On 15 March, Assange next posted a lengthy report about WikiLeaks itself, written by an army “cyber counter-intelligence analyst” and headlined by Assange “US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks”. The “special report” dated from 2008 and its author was exercised about lists of military equipment WikiLeaks had managed to obtain. Despite its 32 pages, the report was really a statement of the obvious: that a good way to deter WikiLeaks would be to track down and punish the leakers. But Assange’s bold headline was a sound journalistic method of advertising and attracting donations.
Two weeks later, on 29 March, Assange caused more turbulence in Iceland by posting the series of US state department profiles of top local politicians: they appeared to have been taken from a separate biographical intelligence folder, rather than from a cabled dispatch. Icelandic officials called in the US charge d’affaires, Sam Watson, to make a complaint.
Just one week on, Assange flew from Reykjavik to Washington to publicise the Apache video. It appeared from what Manning said subsequently that he had done detective work on the video and leaked it in February after finding it in a legal dossier, a Judge-Advocate-General (JAG) file, presumably because the Reuters employees’ deaths led to a formal investigation at the time.