In Praise of Wikileaks: Undressing The Scams and Shams of Government Secrecy

[Better Believe It]

In Praise of Wikileaks
Undressing The Scams and Shams of Government Secrecy
by Pierre Tristam
November 29, 2010

Without offering specifics, the Obama administration claimed that when Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of documents about the Iraq and Afghan wars earlier this year, it endangered lives of soldiers, spy agents and informants. Similar claims were made by the Nixon administration in 1971 when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, the secret military history of the Vietnam War that revealed how, early in the 1960s, the U.S. military was aware that the war was virtually unwinnable. Nixon claimed the papers were endangering "national security," a vague invocation made by every president who's tried to put government secrecy above the public's right to know to what extent its government was breaking laws, murdering en masse, screwing up and hiding from accountability, all at the expense of taxpayers and their patriotic gullibility. George W. Bush and Barack Obama are the latest apologists of deception on a mass scale, emperors whose clothes Wikileaks is stripping one document at a time.

Those emperors might remember what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in that 1971 decision rejecting Nixonian lust for secrecy: "The press was to serve the governed, not the governors," Justice Hugo Black wrote, referring to the origins of the First Amendment. "The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose the Founding Fathers saw so clearly."

Don't bother claiming that Wikileaks isn't part of the free press. In many respects, it's better: It's the raw materials. The C-Span of government's and the military's underbellies. The Iraq and Afghanistan papers have, for example, shown that civilian casualties have been far heavier than reported, that American soldiers and mercenaries have murdered civilians more often than reported (read one example), that Iran's role in the Iraq war, well known by the Bush administration, was far heavier than the administration let on, that Pakistan's secret services, funded by U.S. military aid, have been aiding the Taliban for years, and that, in either Iraq's or Afghanistan's case, public notions of American successes are undermined by the secret documents' grimmer and far less hopeful accumulations of failures.

But claims that Wikileaks' Assange is doing anything illegal, and more hypocritical claims that he is endangering lives or damaging national security, speak more of the illegalities Assange is uncovering than of his own. If it's loss of life the U.S. government is concerned about, it should begin with paying more attention to the soldiers and civilians it's putting in harm's way every hour in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are "informants" and diplomats somehow higher on the totem pole of "assets" to be protected? These aren't secret sources operating under the protection of civilized rules and laws and codes similar to, say, the secrecy guaranteed the whistle-blowing source behind press reports. That guarantee is in place to help uncover wrongs, not hide them. In the world of government secrecy, there is no such broader aim. "Assets" and diplomats are engaged in a game rigged by its own rules and sustained by its own self-serving ends. Power and prestige, not national security or national interest, are being protected.

Read the full article at:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/29-5