(Updated below)
After the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks released more than 91,000 documents pertaining to the Afghanistan War, the Obama Administration was quick to condemn the leaks as an action that jeopardizes the security of Americans.
The Pentagon, however, doesn't appear to agree:
No sooner did the stories appear this weekend than U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones "strongly" condemned the WikiLeaks disclosure, saying that the trove of classified documents "could put the lives of American and our partners at risk and threaten our national security."
But David Lapan, deputy assistant secretary of defense for media operations, told NBC News on Monday that a preliminary review by a Pentagon "assessment" team has so far not identified any documents whose release could damage national security. Moreover, he said, none of the documents reviewed so far carries a classification level above "secret" — the lowest category of intelligence material in terms of sensitivity.
Essentially, the preliminary findings of the Pentagon's review team directly contradicts what the White House has been saying vis-a-vis the threat to national security presented by WikiLeaks. The White House's condemnation also contradicts the statement of Senator John Kerry, who argued that the WikiLeaks documents "raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," even if obtained illegally. Just as was true with the aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers like Thomas Drake, the Obama Administration has apparently taken the view that leaking information that illuminates corruption, wrongdoing, and failure in our national security apparatus and our war efforts represents a grave threat to our security -- even though those who committed criminal wrongdoing and atrocities in the name of national security and war during the previous administration face no accountability at all.
It's also interesting to note that besides citing a vague and unexplained threat to national security, the White House also claimed that the WikiLeaks documents were outdated and thus revealed nothing new about the Afghanistan War. One wonders why they would condemn the publication of those documents in the first place if they didn't raise any new revelations -- how can documents which do not say anything new possibly threaten our national security?
Now, it is worth mentioning that although the Pentagon has not found any evidence that the leaks could endanger the troops in the field, Lapan clarified that WikiLeaks is still withholding about 15,000 documents it claims to have. But, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange himself has clarified that his organization has worked hard to ensure that innocent people would not be put in harm's way as a result of releasing these documents; and that WikiLeaks will be redacting people's names to protect them when the next set of Afghanistan documents is released. Furthermore, the news organizations which were provided the materials in advance of today's reports (The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel) all agreed that there was substantial public interest in publicizing the documents, and would not reveal sensitive, classified information.
The fact that WikiLeaks made these documents publicly available should be celebrated by anyone who believes in the value of bringing about greater transparency of our government's conduct in war. As The New Yorker's Amy Davidson notes, the availability of the leaks provides us with a critical context by which we can and should ask questions about how our tax dollars are being used to fund corrupt warlords, how the Taliban and Pakistani intelligence operations are connected, and how our nation is failing to win the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians whose families and homes have been destroyed by unmanned drone attacks. The release of the Afghanistan documents is also timely given a recent report that a rocket fired by a NATO-led foreign force in the southern Helmand province killed at least 45 civilians, many of whom were women and children.
But unfortunately, it would seem the Obama Administration chose to adopt the Bush Administration's frequent method of justifying the suppression of documents on the grounds that such information would threaten the security of our troops and put American citizens at risk -- without providing concrete evidence demonstrating how such a claim is true. As Jay Rosen put it, it's as though the White House believes that the argument that the leak threatens national security "still had some kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been party to."
For anyone who has maintained that the release of the documents by WikiLeaks does in fact harm national security, I have a few questions:
- When the Bush Administration was prosecuting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, what was your reaction to the Republicans' repeated claims that exposing information of our brutal conduct at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would harm our national security? Furthermore, what was your reaction when the Republicans persistently demonized those who sought such information as anti-American liberals who were hurting the troops?
- What is (or was) your reaction to the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, in which Daniel Ellsberg greatly helped expose our nation's deceitful conduct during the Vietnam War? Did the leak of the Papers harm national security, and if so, what evidence do you have to support that claim? Keep in mind that Erwin Griswold -- the Solicitor General who originally argued to keep the Pentagon Papers secret -- completely rejected that view in 1989:
"I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication. Indeed, I have never seen it even suggested that there was such an actual threat.... It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has consideration experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but rather with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another. There may be some basis for short-term classification while plans are being made, or negotiations are going on, but apart from details of weapons systems, there is very rarely any real risk to current national security from the publication of facts relating to transactions in the past, even the fairly recent past. This is the lesson of the Pentagon Papers experience, and it may be relevant now."
-- Erwin Griswold, "Secrets Not Worth Keeping: The Courts and Classified Information," Washington Post, February 15, 1989, p. A25
- Which of the following do you believe has the greater potential to harm our national security: Covering up our nation's conduct in wartime, or exposing the full and true nature of the occupation -- even when that involves evidence of wrongdoing on our country's part?
- Is it not possible that our country's conduct in war (occupation, unmanned drone attacks, the use of private military contractors, the killing of civilians, and the suppression of vital information) does more to exacerbate the threat to national security by further radicalizing the people whose countries we've invaded than does releasing information exposing such conduct?
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Update: For more discussion about the critical role that WikiLeaks plays, I highly recommend reading Jesselyn Radack's diary from earlier today.