On WikiLeaks

As a general rule, I oppose government secrecy. As a matter of fact, one of the central tenants of conservatism is the distrust of government. For that reason, principled conservatives should oppose the power of democratic governments to keep secrets from its citizens except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

While it's true that some secrecy is necessary in both diplomacy and war, government tends to expand that necessity to truly ridiculous degrees. In the 1990s, for example, the United States still had documents from the First World War highly classified. Was there a likely threat from a resurgent Kaiser? I, and most other rational people, would think not.

More often, secrets are kept from the people by their government because they might be embarrassing to that government. President Nixon's "secret bombing" of Cambodia certainly wasn't a secret from the people of Cambodia or the North Vietnamese military that it targeted. The Soviets and Chinese knew about it. But it was unknown to the American people for nearly two years.

The Nixon administration is a classic example of the consequences of government secrecy. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy-Johnson years, was leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon and RAND corporation analyst.

When the Times started publishing the papers, Nixon was initially more than happy to allow it, given that they tended to embarrass the previous Democratic administrations. His mind was changed when National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger pointed out that the leak could jeopardize the then-secret negotiations with the hyper-secretive People's Republic of China. The "China Opening" was, in my opinion, a proper exercise of government secrecy as it likely would not have survived if it was negotiated openly.

Attempting to preserve the China intuitive, Nixon went to the Supreme Court to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers. The government was rebuffed by a vote of 6-3 in New York Times Co. v United States. At that point, Nixon sought to discredit Ellsberg through extra-legal means and stop further leaks by creating the White House Plumbers Unit. As we now know, the Plumbers went far afield of their original mandate, setting in motion the events that became the Watergate scandal.

The Clinton administration, under pressure from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, established a process to declassify non-essential material. However, that was reversed by the second Bush administration, which gutted the congressionally-passed Presidential Records Act by executive order. Under Bush, the number of materials that were classified skyrocketed. More importantly, the Obama Justice Department has sought to defend the Bush legacy in the courts by invoking the doctrine of state secrecy repeatedly.

And that's where WikiLeaks enters the picture.

WikiLeaks was the darling of most conservatives in 2009, when it exposed the East Anglia global warming e-mails. They became less beloved when their focus turned to the American prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As I mentioned earlier, there is necessary secrecy and unnecessary secrecy. In their Iraqi and Afghan document dumps, WikiLeaks managed to penetrate both. By naming American collaborators, Assange and company definitely endangered lives and, to some extent, discredited themselves. Having said that, leaks like the "Collateral Murder" video are a valuable public service. As the great Dan Carlin has mentioned repeatedly, a public cannot reasonably support or oppose a war unless and until they see it. Since Vietnam, the United States government has sanitized war journalism to the point that it's essentially meaningless.

Now WikiLeaks has gotten its hands on State Department cables, which even Foggy Bottom admits could be disastrous.

U.S. embassies around the world are warning allies that WikiLeaks might be poised to release classified cables that could negatively impact relations by revealing sensitive assessments and exposing U.S. sources, a State Department spokesman said Thursday.

The State Department has prepared for the possible release - which WikiLeaks has said would be seven times larger than the Iraq files released last month - by reviewing thousands of diplomatic cables and "assessing the potential consequences of the public release of these documents," spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

Crowley said State does not know "exactly what WikiLeaks has or what they plan to do," but the consequences to American interests could be severe. The cables, for instance, could reveal that senior government officials in other countries are the sources of embarrassing information about the inner workings of those governments, thus making it more difficult for the State Department to obtain such intelligence in the future.

Again, I hope that Assange is more careful in redacting potentially lethal information than he has been in the past. Any sources that are cooperating what are likely CIA operations (Most CIA stations are located in U.S embassies are necessarily committing espionage against their countries at best, and treason at worst. This is the kind of thing that could very well get people killed.

On the other hand, more information is always better than less. And a lot of the document dump has appears to deal with U.S machinations against its allies, which I find to be of particular interest.

The cables could also show that allies sometimes take private actions that directly contradict publicly declared policies. The London-based daily al-Hayat reported that WikiLeaks is planning to release files that show Turkey has helped al-Qaeda in Iraq - and that the United States has helped the PKK, a Kurdish rebel organization. The documents reportedly suggest that the U.S. has supported the PKK, which has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984 and has been classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1979.

If the United States has been aiding the PKK, that's important in that it undermines completely the logic behind the War on Terror and that it is in any way designed to protect U.S allies. There are few closer allies than the Turks and the U.S itself has classified the PKK as terrorists. It is also thought that the PKK was supported by Saddam Hussein, although they deny it. In any event, the Turks have the right to know if the CIA is supporting terrorists against them, and if they are, it could put the alleged Turkish aid to al-Qaeda in a new light.

Then there are relevant matters closer to home;

U.S. ambassador to Canada David Jacobson has already phoned Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon to inform him of the matter, the Foreign Affairs department told the Canadian Press. Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Melissa Lantsman said the Canadian Embassy in Washington is "currently engaging" with the U.S. State Department on the matter.

In Australia, the Department of Foreign Affairs and other agencies in Canberra, including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, met to discuss the leaks, which a senior Australian government official said had prompted a "strong measure of concern," according to the Australian newspaper. "The whole thing is pretty big," the official said.

If there's something there that the State Department fears is going to "create tension" between the United States and Canada, Canadians have a right to know what it is. If nothing else, more conspiratorially-minded Canadians could make it out to be worse than it is, suggesting perhaps that there are CIA operations underway in Canada in violation to an understanding between our governments.


Ultimately, if there are American actions that would damage relations with their allies, the wiser course of action would have been not to engage in those actions in the first place. But if they're doing it, I can't really sympathize with them if they become public.

You would think that the U.S government would have learned its lesson after the exposure of the CIA's Family Jewels, the Church and Pike Committees and Iran-Contra. The lesson of course being that you had better be damn sure that the means by which you stop something isn't actually worse than that which you seek to stop. Because it's all going to be public eventually, and you have to explain it to the American people.

Blaming WikiLeaks is simplistic and ignores history. The fact of the matter is that there's always been a WikiLeaks in one form or another, and there always will be. Internet technology is just going to make them faster, more efficient, harder to censor and incredibly comprehensive. Instead of concentrating its energy on keeping secrets, something the United States government has never been especially good at, it should try to avoid doing things that it can't explain or justify to its own citizens.


For a more comprehensive discussion on WikiLeaks, download and listening to these episodes of Common Sense with Dan Carlin here and here. You can also subscribe to the show, which I would highly recommend, for free at the iTunes store.