Wikileaks Reconsidered

Since my initial posting late last month, I haven't returned to the Wikileaks controversy, mostly since it's all over the blogosphere and unless I'm the only blogger you read (in which case, unless you're reading me only because you're a close relative, you may need to diversify a bit), you're getting plenty of it. The Arabist and Brian Whitaker and Juan Cole have featured a lot of the key posts on the Middle East; specialist sites like Syria Comment for Syria and Qifa Nabki for Lebanon (who raises some questions about the cables here and some criticism here), are also on the case, and so on. Now that this has metastasized into some kind of cyberwar, with ISPs and financial institutions shutting Wikileaks down while "Operation Payback" is crashing their sites, I guess it's time to say a bit more.

I'm not going to comment much on the content. There have been one or two genuinely disturbing releases, but I think they have made Wikileaks look worse than the US government: the "potential terrorist targets" release is obviously one such. This is a revelation? More like a plan of operations. It was a genuinely harmful leak, reprehensible in my view, and revealed nothing bad about the US government.

Other than that, though, most of the revelations so far have been on the order of Dog bites Man, rather than the other way around. Such stunning revelations! Saudi Arabia doesn't like Iran! Qadhafi sometimes behaves in thuggish or erratic ways! Al-Jazeera doesn't criticize the government of Qatar! Diplomats collect and transmit intelligence! The Moroccan military is controlled by the Palace! And those are the headlines.

Oh, to be sure, there's information. Conversations with key people, apparently well-informed speculation about succession in Libya, Tunisia, and other such places, and much more: but very little that a well-informed student of the region couldn't learn in a short time (sometimes from the very people who wrote the cables).

It's embarrassing, to be sure: no one wants their private assessments published on the Internet. Except for the glaring exception of the potential terrorist targets list, though, there are no great shockers here. This isn't the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the government itself did not actually believe what it was publicly saying. The cables I've read show that US diplomats are perspicacious, informed, discriminating, and can write a lot better than public government documents would suggest. Some folks seem shocked that diplomats gather intelligence. I'm reminded of Claude Rains' scene in Casablanca where he says, "I'm shocked, shocked! to learn that gambling is going on here!" just as he's being handed his winnings. This is either a reflection of a terribly naive view of what "gathering intelligence" means (I do it every morning to write this blog), or of what diplomats have done at least since Sir Francis Walsingham served the first Queen Elizabeth. You could ask Machiavelli, but anyone since the Renaissance will only be feigning shock. It's what they do, people. Ours, theirs, everybody's.

All this being said, I admit to really divided emotions in this whole affair. One reason I haven't posted lots of links is a discomfort with the whole idea of releasing confidential diplomatic correspondence, at least if it shows no malfeasance or crime. Occasional leaks of classified information are part of how national security journalism works. Without selective leaking, major newspapers and defense publications like Aviation Week wouldn't exist. But a huge dump of 250,000 documents defies any realistic vetting, and means that information like the list of potential terrorist targets will slip through even a serious scrubbing, which I doubt that Wikileaks is doing.

As for Julian Assange, he strikes me as an egotistical, self-centered ass. (I intended the last word to have two syllables but decided to keep this PG.) He seems motivated by an ideological dislike of the US, and Wikileaks has almost entirely concentrated on US documents. (Let's see some Chinese, or Russian, or Israeli, or Saudi documents? Oh: instead of some sex charges in Sweden and crashing of your website, you might get the old poisoned umbrella.)

On the other hand, as an Editor, Publisher, and former journalist, I also recognize that he has the same First Amendment rights I do, at least in countries with a first amendment, which at last check was one. In fact, if he doesn't, I don't either. Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it," cliché though it may be, is appropriate here.

Even worse, the release is provoking what, to turn a Lincoln phrase on its head, might be called the worst angels of our nature. Our old Know-Nothing/Red Scare/McCarthyite vindictiveness is rearing its head, even in a liberal Democratic Administration. There's talk of prosecuting him under the Espionage Act of 1917. That's an act that led to mass arrests, and even the jailing of a Presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, in a fit of xenophobia. Basically, it can be construed as banning any publication of information related to national defense, if the government doesn't want you to publish it, regardless of its level of classification.

Let's not go there. If Wikileaks violated the Espionage Act (and on paper it did), then so have the New York Times and the Washington Post multiple times, including the Pentagon Papers case. (The Supreme Court decision, if I remember correctly as a non-lawyer, did not bar prosecution after publication; it forbade prior restraint. Once the barn door was open, no one chose to prosecute.) Using it against Assange would be a bad precedent. If the release of the potential targets cable — the most, and perhaps the only, real national security danger so far — causes real harm, it might be prosecutable under some more immediate statute, since it endangers life and property.

As an editor and publisher, I'll never cheer on censorship, but release of classified documents that do not reveal wrongdoing undercuts the whole system of diplomatic exchange which has endured since the Peace of Westphalia. The worst result of the release could be a major crackdown on all reporting on classified matters. The best might be a court case that sinks the Espionage Act of 1917, which is never enforced anymore but has enjoyed a new burst of popularity.

It's been reported that some universities are advising their students not to access the Wikileaks documents on the grounds the US government still considers them classified, and thus they could jeopardize future security clearances and employment. This is insane. The government may have the right to tell current US government employees lacking proper clearance not to access them, but I'm not even sure the courts will buy that. On government computers, sure. On your home computer? It's now, like it or not, in the public domain. Are you saying Usama bin Ladin can read something an American citizen can't, if he or she ever wants a government job? Think about that for a minute.

Often, I fear, our enemies paint us into a corner in which we seek to abandon our most fundamental freedoms. If the government wants to prevent publication of classified material, here's what you do: don't let anyone steal it. Once it's stolen, apologize to those offended, and make sure it doesn't happen again. But once it's out there, it's out there. The Supreme Court in the Pentagon Papers case banned prior restraint. This sounds like post-restraint: once it's out you can't read it or reprint it even if everyone else in the world is reading it. That won't stand in even a conservative Supreme Court, so please just stop talking about it. You failed to keep this data secret. Everyone on earth can access it. To bar US government employees from reading it is an incredibly Third World move. They're going to learn what's in it. This policy is incredibly counterproductive.

I have no idea whether the charges against Assange are justified or not; let the Swedish courts sort it out. The idea that it's some kind of setup or honeytrap seems a bit strained since the charges originated before the present flap, but whether justified or not, it's still closing the barn door after the horses are out.