by David Swanson

Not yet 30, Evan Knappenberger has already lived several lives.  His story destroys the U.S. government’s case against whistleblower Bradley Manning, exposes the toxic mix of fraud and incompetence that creates U.S. war policies, and highlights the damage so often done to soldiers who come home without visible injuries.

Knappenberger, seen in this video, was trained as an “intelligence analyst” at the U.S. Army’s Intelligence Training Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona in 2003 and 2004, the same school attended by Bradley Manning.  In April of this year, the PBS show Frontline, responding to an article Knappenberger had published, flew him to Los Angeles on a private jet, and interviewed him for four hours.

Knappenberger told Frontline that he, like Manning, had had access to the U.S. government’s SIPRNet database when he had been in Iraq.  Knappenberger told Frontline that 1,400 U.S. government agencies put their information on SIPRNet, and that 2 million employees were given access to it.  SIPRNet has secret blogs, secret discussions, and its own secret Google search engine.  At one point, the Pentagon encouraged gambling on SIPRNet on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.  Knappenberger also pointed out that the United States had given the Iraqi Army access to the database, knowing full well that many members of the Iraqi Army were also on the U.S. target list as enemies fighting U.S. troops.

Knappenberger was in Iraq in 2006, but said he believes the practice of sharing SIPRNet with the Iraqi Army began in 2005.  The U.S. Army ran cables to laptops in Iraqi command posts, and gave each post a CPOF (command post of the future) super computer.  Each Iraqi command post had access to everything Bradley Manning allegedly leaked to Wikileaks.  At some point in 2006, the U.S. Army decided to get serious about security by assigning two U.S. soldiers with security clearances to guard each site.  Each soldier was on guard for 12 hours and off for 12.  Another step taken to boost security was the creation of passwords to access SIPRNet, but because no one could remember the passwords they were written on sticky notes and stuck to the backs of the computers.  Knappenberger says he had the password on the back of his computer and has read that every computer in Manning’s unit had it too.

So, Knappenberger related this kind of information to Frontline for four hours and says that for three or four months afterwards he expected to go to prison for violating nondisclosure aggreements. He popped a lot of PTSD pills and gained a huge amount of weight as a result of nervousness, he says.  Then, the day before he expected the Frontline story to air, he says, the show told him it would not be airing.  Frontline was afraid of being held liable for inducing Knappenberger to violate his nondisclosure aggreements.

Knappenberger has made the same information public without any charges being brought against him.  Frontline would simply have made it more public.  Like Bradley Manning, Frontline would not have provided enemies of the United States with tools to be used against us.  Rather, like Bradley Manning, Frontline would have informed more of us what our government was doing in our name.  And some of what it has been doing is extremely hard to look at without turning away.

This past January, Knappenberger says he testified on the record, via telephone, to the office of the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner on the topic of torture.  Knappenberger was not qualified to “interrogate” people, but Donald Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Army found ways to put non-combat troops into combat roles. 

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