Steve Coll, a former managing editor of the Washington Post and author of Ghost Wars, a favorite book of many readers of this blog, is one of the best journalists I've ever met. He especially understands intelligence matters, national security, and Washington. So when he wrote this week in the New Yorker about the possibility of high-level indictments of national security officials at the Obama White House, I paid attention. Here is an e-mail interview I conducted with him:

• What makes you think that there may be indictments of high-level Obama administration officials down the road?

It's clear that the Justice Department has been carrying out extensive interviews with current and former senior administration officials about David Sanger's excellent reporting on the Obama administration's involvement in cyberattacks against Iran. At the same time, the administration has established that it is willing to tolerate aggressive leak prosecutions against current and former government officials. Equally, the White House is allowing Justice prosecutors to make such decisions without political interference -- as is proper (See: Richard Nixon). So if you add all that up, indictments are a possibility.

• Have you talked to David Sanger, or to anyone else at the New York Times, about the leaks to him? If so, what did they say?

I have not formally approached the Times or Sanger about this investigation -- the subject of my New Yorker reporting was the separate prosecution of former C.I.A. officer John Kiriakou, who pleaded guilty and became the first C.I.A. officer ever sent to prison for providing information to the American press. In that longer story, I mentioned the ongoing Sanger case as context, based on what I picked up along the reporting trail, and I cited some reporting by the Washington Post, which appeared earlier this year.

• Do you think that the situation with Sanger and high-level Obama administration officials may have altered the Times's coverage of national security issues? If so, how?

I don't have any reason to think that. The Times, under executive editor Bill Keller and now Jill Abramson, has had to handle a succession of tricky editorial and publishing decisions involving classified information, from Wikileaks to these multiple leak investigations by the National Security Division at Justice. There was the Kiriakou case, which involved the Times; a separate case involving former C.I.A. officer Jeffrey Sterling and Times reporter James Risen; and now the Sanger case. In the Risen and Sanger cases, the Justice investigations have involved reporting done for books, in addition to reporting done for the Times. My reading from far outside is that the Times editors have done very well handling these dilemmas. It's a complicated responsibility, as I can testify from experience at the Washington Post. I'm sure there are at least a few calls the editors would like to have back, but overall I think they've made courageous, responsible decisions in the public interest.

• Who do you think might be indicted?

I don't know.

• Do you think such indictments would be justified?

Almost certainly not, particularly if they involve heavy charges under the Espionage Act or other similar statutes, as Justice has done in previous cases. As my story about the Kiriakou case outlined, leak prosecutions are highly selective and they fail to take into account the institutionalized failures and hypocrisy of the government's management of classified information. David Pozen, a law professor at Columbia University, estimates in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article that fewer than three in a thousand leak violations are actually prosecuted, and the true percentage, if all leaks of classified information could be counted reliably, is almost certainly much closer to zero. These kinds of prosecutions -- aimed, apparently at creating a deterrent effect -- in an atmosphere of such laxity just can't be justified as public policy, even if they are permissible as a matter of law.

• What does all this say to you about how Washington (both in politics and journalism) works these days?

The Kiriakou case teases some of that out -- it's a very polluted environment. There's a lot of opportunism from all sides. That's why they call Washington a swamp. But I think the single biggest factor -- and a factor that could be fixed -- is the broken system that over-classifies government information by orders of magnitude. Until the government can credibly distinguish a real secret from a phony or artificial one, prosecutions of leakers will always seem selective and without adequate foundation.

The authorities said the other day that Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair, the Army's celebrity one star, will face a general court martial and could wind up doing life in prison.

My guess: A plea deal that winds up with him doing a year or two. Then again, I've been surprised before.

(HT to Attackerman)

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on December 2, 2011. 

I found this essay, which until now has only been available on an internal Army website, quite striking. It essentially asks: How could a place that prides itself on its honor code tolerate sadism?

Just FYI, the author's own title for this piece is "Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and Character Development at West Point."

By Lt. Col. Peter Fromm, U.S. Army (Ret.) 

Best Defense department of military ethics

Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and Character Development at West Point

I have had one serious unanswered injustice done to me in my life, and it occurred when I was 21 years old. I mean "unanswered" in the sense of reciprocity-there has been no accounting for this injustice. I have always wanted to write about it, not because of self-pity but because of something I learned from it that has grown on me over the years. This personal essay describes it as a snapshot from the Army's troubled times in the 1970s. The story surfaces one important aspect about leadership and stewardship in the modern Army: the antithetical relationship between gratuitous cruelty and honor and the duty to do something about it. In my experience as an Army ethicist, having been sent to graduate school for that purpose, I have seen this antithetical relationship as potentially the most important ethical failure the institution faces. I say this because the institution puts weapons in the hands of young, inexperienced people and then gives them the power of life and death over others. If we do not do all that we can to get this part of Army culture right (the relationship between cruelty and honor), we stand convicted of hypocrisy of the worst kind.

When the Army educated me to teach ethics (a sign of health in the organization that it actually does such a thing), I developed an eye for institutional moral window dressing. That's mostly what I want to talk about here. In the Odyssey, Homer says that "the blade itself incites to violence." I want to rephrase that beautiful observation to say that "power over others incites to cruelty." When one exercises power over another, if there is a lack of moral sense, of maturity, or of wisdom in the execution, it inevitably becomes entangled with that most basic of impulses, sexual dynamics.

Read on

I found this essay, which until now has only been available on an internal Army website, quite striking. It essentially asks: How could a place that prides itself on its honor code tolerate sadism?

Just FYI, the author's own title for this piece is "Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and Character Development at West Point."

By Lt. Col. Peter Fromm, U.S. Army (Ret.) 

Best Defense department of military ethics

Cool on Honor: Sadism, Cruelty, and Character Development at West Point

          I have had one serious unanswered injustice done to me in my life, and it occurred when I was 21 years old. I mean "unanswered" in the sense of reciprocity-there has been no accounting for this injustice. I have always wanted to write about it, not because of self-pity but because of something I learned from it that has grown on me over the years. This personal essay describes it as a snapshot from the Army's troubled times in the 1970s. The story surfaces one important aspect about leadership and stewardship in the modern Army: the antithetical relationship between gratuitous cruelty and honor and the duty to do something about it. In my experience as an Army ethicist, having been sent to graduate school for that purpose, I have seen this antithetical relationship as potentially the most important ethical failure the institution faces. I say this because the institution puts weapons in the hands of young, inexperienced people and then gives them the power of life and death over others. If we do not do all that we can to get this part of Army culture right (the relationship between cruelty and honor), we stand convicted of hypocrisy of the worst kind.

When the Army educated me to teach ethics (a sign of health in the organization that it actually does such a thing), I developed an eye for institutional moral window dressing. That's mostly what I want to talk about here. In the Odyssey, Homer says that "the blade itself incites to violence." I want to rephrase that beautiful observation to say that "power over others incites to cruelty." When one exercises power over another, if there is a lack of moral sense, of maturity, or of wisdom in the execution, it inevitably becomes entangled with that most basic of impulses, sexual dynamics.

Read on

The U.S. embassy in Kabul says it is firing its frat boy security contractors. This brings to mind a recent news report that the British security guard charged with murdering two of his colleagues in the Green Zone early in August had a criminal record back in the UK. He actually left Britain despite being on probation for robbery and firearms offenses, the papers reported.

Wikimedia Commons

I hate the fact that my country's leaders panicked after 9/11 and embraced torture. It saddens me to watch this.

I can still remember when it was the bad guys who tortured people in the movies. Here's the test I think is useful for judging abuse: What would I think of this being used against captured U.S. military personnel? Or kidnapped reporters?

Call me a softie, but I don't understand why this murder case involving American troops hasn't gotten more media attention in this country. This seems to me worse than the tortures at Abu Ghraib. According to court testimony, the Army soldiers then dumped the bodies of the four murdered Iraqis in a Baghdad canal.

And Stars & Stripes -- yes, the Pentagon's newspaper -- deserves a shoutout for staying on the story.