WikiLeaks: Whistleblowers or Info-Terrorists?
I am wrestling with why I feel so unsettled about the massive, unprecedented data dump by the website WikiLeaks, which has posted some 91,000 formerly secret documents about the Afghanistan war.
As a professional journalist I have been on the receiving end of hundreds of leaks, and they have been invaluable in helping me sort out unvarnished fact from official fiction, which after all is at the core of my job.
As an amateur historian also I know that when it comes to understanding past events, documents are the key. Memories are unreliable, people have agendas, memoirs can be self-serving, but contemporaneous records can offer the clearest picture of what truly transpired.
And despite some of the snarky dismissals of the admittedly awkward official explanations offered by everyone from Robert Gibbs to Robert Gates, I also know from experience that what they say it true. Namely that, while the leak is stunning in its scope, so far there has been little in the way of surprises, at least for anyone who has been paying attention to the Afghan war for the past eight years.
A “blinding flash of the obvious.“
The major “revelations” are what we used to call a BFOTO “a blinding flash of the obvious.”
Among them:
– Many civilians are killed by accident by U.S. troops, and sometimes those accidents could or should have been avoidable. Many more civilians are killed deliberately by the Taliban and al Qaeda.
– The U.S. has long suspected collusion between Pakistan’s secret services, and the Taliban, and has complained bitterly in private, while being more circumspect in public.
– The enemy sometimes employs weapons and tactics the U.S. doesn’t want to publicize, i.e. heat-seeking, shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles.
–Many fighting the war, including many of our NATO allies, have deep misgivings about the prospects for success. And that’s especially true for some of our front line troops.
– The U.S. is battling a growing insurgency, with not enough troops, and unreliable Afghan partners.
– In internal reports, the U.S. military tends to be more critical in evaluating the performance of its allies, than of itself. And it rarely gives the enemy the benefit of any doubt.
So why is the WikiLeaks leak troubling?
WikiLeaks is no Whistleblower.
I bristled a bit Sunday night when the story first broke and I heard several news organizations shorthand WikiLeaks as a “whistleblower” group. A whistleblower is someone who exposes wrongdoing. To apply the label to WikiLeaks is not only imprecise but unfair, in that it creates a preconceived perception that the released material “blows the whistle” on illicit activity. Let’s be clear: WikiLeaks is an anti-privacy, anti-secrecy group, whose primary tenet is that nothing should be kept from the world, not military secrets, not sources or methods of intelligence gathering, not even the secret rituals of fraternities and sororities. Governments, Corporations, Private citizens all have some right, even responsibility to keep some secrets. WikiLeaks only allegiance seems to be to the source of its leaks. By remaining agnostic on the consequences of its actions, WikiLeaks seems to me to to be functioning less in the tradition of good old-fashioned muckrakers, and more like anti-privacy terrorists. If I were the New York Times, I would not be happy about being described as one of WikiLeaks “media partners” on the organizations website.
Can we handle the truth?
One reason the government and the military keep details of military operations confidential is they have little confidence the public — and news organizations in particular — can appreciate the nuances and context of complicated information. We can see this result already in some of the superheated coverage of what has by necessity to be only a cursory review of the documents. No doubt over time, many people will mine these files, and produce nuggets of interesting, even helpful contextual insights. But for now I don’t envy the government spokespeople who have to argue for perspective in the face of skeptical media and politicians more interested in inflaming than informing the public. As I have observed from my 30 years in journalism, providing context is a thankless job. Rarely is anyone ever congratulated in the newsroom for keeping a headline-grabbing story it in perspective.
Increased Understanding, Undermining Support?
It’s undeniable that these documents — if studied carefully — can greatly increase our understanding the complexities of the war, and by illuminating the enormity of the task, will like undermine support, for what increasing looks like a short-term strategy that can only be won in the long term, and great continued sacrifice.
So if the end result is much more textured look at the gritty realities of war, including a lot of the stuff the Pentagon would prefer we didn’t know what’s the harm? Shouldn’t we all have a more clear-eyed view of how things are going?
Well it certainly more difficult to live in a world where there are no secrets, where nothing can stay private. How do get sources to help the U.S. fight terrorism, when there’s no guarantee that they can be protected? How can governments quietly cooperate on diplomatically sensitive matters if everything has to be done in public, where posturing and political gain have to be part of the calculus?
The Naked bottom line
It’s not any one particular disclosure that bothers me. It’s the idea that nothing can be private. There are no state secrets, no matter how important, or how vital to our collective security and well-being.
In a way, it’s like those full body scanners at the airport. They produce grainy, indistinct, black-and-white images, but with basic image-enhancement software they can easily be converted to full-color pictures that leave nothing to the imagination. And you know somebody, somewhere will store them, and somehow, despite the best efforts of those in charge, someone with no respect for privacy will obtain them. There are only two things you can do: rail against the loss of privacy, or just get used to walking around naked. Increasingly for governments and private citizens alike, the only option is the latter, metaphorically speaking.
Tags: Whistelblower, WikiLeaks
