Apparently, the word ‘secret’ has lost all meaning nowadays. The New York Times, Guardian, and Der Speigel have all published reports using thousands of pages of classified American intelligence reports on the war in Afghanistan from 2004-2009 given to them by Wikileaks. The United States government condemned the disclosure of these secret documents and so do I. As a proud member of an open society, I know the importance of transparency in governmental affairs, but there is a place for secrecy in national security affairs and the war in Afghanistan qualifies. The US military and government are not angels and at certain times whistle blowers can really provide a service to our republic, but I do not see how the release of thousands of classified documents qualifies.
Here is the New York Times defense of releasing the information (bold is my emphasis):
Deciding whether to publish secret information is always difficult, and after weighing the risks and public interest, we sometimes chose not to publish. But there are times when the information is of significant public interest, and this is one of those times. The documents illuminate the extraordinary difficulty of what the United States and its allies have undertaken in a way that other accounts have not.
Most of the incident reports are marked “secret,” a relatively low level of classification. The Times has taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests. The Times and the other news organizations agreed at the outset that we would not disclose — either in our articles or any of our online supplementary material — anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations. We have, for example, withheld any names of operatives in the field and informants cited in the reports. We have avoided anything that might compromise American or allied intelligence-gathering methods such as communications intercepts. We have not linked to the archives of raw material. At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.
“Secret” is just ‘a relatively low level of classification’ is one of the lamest defenses one could reasonably expect from such an institution of journalism. Basically, the Times is saying that these documents ‘were barely secrets’. And the claim that they have ‘taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests’ is flimsy at best. How do they really know that what they are publishing won’t hurt US interests? They don’t.
Lastly, the organization Wikileaks who obtained and leaked these documents is far from an unbiased group. The group claims to be for ‘transparency’, but what they want to make ‘transparent’ tends to be against the American wars in Iraq in Afghanistan. If they have footage of members of the Taliban blowing up an elementary school, I’d like to see it (while actually I wouldn’t…you get the point!).
I can see how others could see these leaks in a different manner so please feel free to write rebuttals/concurrences in the comment section.
