WikiLeaks: Truth or Treason?
WikiLeaks. It’s dominated the news cycle for days now and with new information being released on a regular basis, there’s no end in sight. The media can’t stop talking about it, and anyone who pays even the slightest bit of attention to current events has an opinion about it.
Many passionate arguments against WikiLeaks and its activities have been thrown around in the press lately, stated in the strongest possible terms. They range from the oft-repeated claim that leaks endanger the lives of American troops and their informants, to the fear that those informants will no longer supply their handlers with names and addresses to feed into the targeting computers of Predator drones, to the idea that anything WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange does is discredited because he has expressed leftist ideas in the past and thus only wants to destroy America. Therefore, any extrajudicial action taken against him is justified. After all, he’s a terrorist. This last argument in particular has been put forward by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and supported by Sarah Palin.
When you boil away the hysteria, though, and really get at the facts, these arguments simply don’t hold water. Pentagon officials and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have admitted that none of WikiLeaks’ revelations have done anything to compromise national security or endanger American lives. Certainly there are times governments must keep information confidential. Even Assange himself acknowledged this, telling Time that, “Secrecy is important for many things … [but it] shouldn’t be used to cover up abuses.” Assange is asking: To what degree is government secrecy justified? And when particular secrets could be damaging to the American people, should those secrets be revealed in the name of protecting the public?
How often does our government use “national security” simply as an excuse to cover up questionable dealings? Reports Time: “in the past few years, governments have designated so much information secret that you wonder whether they intend the time of day to be classified. The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75% … At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times…”
To say that government must keep secrets is not to say that all government secrets must be kept.
One of the most recent WikiLeaks cables concerns a Texas security contractor, DynCorp, which gets 95% of its $2 billion annual revenue from American taxpayers. DynCorps is tasked with training recruits for the Afghan National Police. A cable dated June 24, 2009, discusses a meeting between Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and US Assistant Ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. Prime among Atmar’s concerns was a party thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.
The party was a bacha bazi (“boy-play”) party, much like the ones uncovered earlier this year by Frontline. Bacha bazi is a pre-Islamic Afghan tradition that was banned by the Taliban. Bacha boys range from eight to 15 years old. They put on make-up, tie bells to their feet and slip into scanty women’s clothing, and then, to the whine of a harmonium and wailing vocals, they dance seductively to smoky roomfuls of leering older men. After the show is over, their services are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will sometimes purchase a boy outright. The State Department has called bacha bazi a “widespread, culturally accepted form of male rape.” (While it may be culturally accepted, it violates both Sharia law and Afghan civil code.)
So thanks to WikiLeaks, we now know that American taxpayers are unwittingly helping to fund the auctioning off of Afghan boys to sex slavery. Is this really something that should have been stamped “Secret”? Is this something we don’t have a right to know?
Clearly, this party was illegal, both under American and Afghan law. What this means is that we as Americans can no longer trust our own government to distinguish between secrets that need to be kept to protect American lives, and secrets that are kept to conceal criminal activity carried out by recipients of taxpayer money. If that is the world we live in, and it appears that it is, then we must err on the side of transparency.
Those in the anti-WikiLeaks camp who have expressed such outrage against WikiLeaks and Assange seem to be missing the point. Calling for the extrajudicial killing of Julian Assange for the “crime” of revealing secret diplomatic cables is like a business owner who reads in the newspaper that one of his employees has been caught embezzling from his firm and then, instead of firing the dishonest employee, sues the newspaper. What sense does that make?
What has been revealed is nothing less than the truth about how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being conducted, civilian deaths and all. What has been revealed is the gossipy backbiting engaged in by our diplomats abroad. What has been revealed is that our government continues to lie to us about both wars and ignore its own intelligence analysis, blundering around like a blind elephant in a small room.
On Thursday, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the incoming chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, introduced H.R. 6506, the SHIELD Act, which would amend the Espionage Act to criminalize publishing the names of American intelligence sources who provide information to the US military or intelligence community. The bill is a companion bill to a Senate version already introduced by Senators Joe Lieberman, John Ensign, and Scott Brown. If WikiLeaks is prosecuted under the Espionage Act, then no journalistic institution or entity is safe. If prosecution can be brought anytime a journalist obtains a document that has “information related to the national defense” that could be used “to the injury of the United States,” it would destroy journalism as it currently exists.
Also frightening is the reality that government officials, looking to skew public debates one way or another, regularly leak information to the press; so the government would really only be prosecuting people for publishing leaked information they didn’t want leaked.
Despite the best efforts of governments around the world, WikiLeaks isn’t going anywhere. Yes, Assange is in a British jail cell and many large U.S. companies have cut ties to the organization. Nevertheless, thousands of mirror sites have popped up all over the world, and the data is also circulating through the file sharing service BitTorrent.
Ultimately, it seems that WikiLeaks’ revelations leave us with more questions than answers. Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen? Could a larger question be: how can an Army private gain access to so much secret material; and why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not our government’s failure to protect classified information?
Are we getting our money’s worth from the $80 billion per year we spend on our intelligence agencies? Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war, or WikiLeaks’ revelations?
If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the Internet? Could it be that the real reason for the attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy than it is about maintaining national security? Isn’t there huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in the time of a declared war – which is treason – and the releasing of information to expose government lies that promote secret wars and corruption? Wasn’t it once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it’s wrong?
Thomas Jefferson was right when he advised: “Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.”
————–
Adam Love is the NC State Coordinator for Campaign for Liberty. The Mission of Campaign for Liberty is to promote and defend the great American principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy, by means of educational and political activity.
We need your help! If you like PunditHouse, please consider donating to us. Even $5 a month can make a difference!
Short URL: https://pundithouse.com/?p=4425
