This week’s WikiLeaks disclosures have been deplored on the one hand as the “Sept. 11 of world diplomacy” and lauded on the other as a triumph for transparency.
The elusive mastermind, Julian Assange, has been vilified as a reckless anarchist“with blood on his hands,” but also praised as a brave whistle-blower willing to risk his life to expose the truth.
So the question is: Is WikiLeaks a force for good or evil?
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the leak of 250,000 diplomatic cables“tears at the fabric” of responsible government, and Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and former Republican vice-presidential candidate, said Mr. Assange should be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”
But for some (and there appear to be far fewer in this camp), Mr. Assange and his organization are not engaged in“terrorist activity” — as has been charged by a high-ranking U.S. Republican congressman — but are rather in the important business of revealing information that, while embarrassing to some, should never have been secret in the first place.
“The government has created a vast vacuum of information that goes far beyond what can be considered a result of national security concerns,” said Vincent Warren, a human rights lawyer and head of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
In a note to readers, The New York Times— which redacted some of the 251, 287 cables from WikiLeaks, and vetted selected cables with the Obama administration in the name of national security — said “it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.”
Those of this mind should fear not, Mr. Assange, an Australian computer hacker, told the Guardian yesterday,“If something happens to us, the key parts {of the archive} will be released automatically … History will win. The world will be elevated to a better place.”
But is the world a better place, knowing that a U.S. diplomat believes Russian President Dmitry Medvedev“plays Robin to Putin’s Batman”? Is the world a better place, now that the Pakistan public knows its government “quietly acquiesced” to American drone-strikes in tribal areas? Is the world a better place, with revelations that senior U.S. diplomats pressured Spanish officials to drop a criminal investigation into the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”?
“I would say ‘no’,” said Frank Furedi, a professor at the University of Kent and author of Politics of Fear, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? “I very much see WikiLeaks as the journalistic equivalent of reality television, it’s voyeurism, it’s like pornography. … It’s an addiction to more exposures, more revelations, more confessionals. It doesn’t seem to matter what’s being revealed — what matters is the fact of revelation.”
Allen Weiner, an international lawyer who spent the 1990s as a civil servant in the U.S. State Department, and who sent and received diplomatic cables during his five years in the legal section of the U.S. embassy in The Hague, called the megaleak a“bad thing” and said it was especially injurious to the United States.
“Knowing what is likely to be in a quarter-million cables, I think that this poses a substantial harm,” said Mr. Weiner, who is also director of the Center on International Conflict and Negotiation at Stanford University. “I think it’s damaging to America’s national interest, I think America is a weaker country.”
The consequences of the leaked cables— all of which originated from the United States, and which were allegedly downloaded by a disgruntled U.S. soldier under the guise of a Lady Gaga lip-synching performance — is yet to be seen. And while much of the cables amount to little more than shreds of gossip, the data dump has undoubtedlydealt a blow to confidence in America’s ability to keep its intelligence-trap shut.
“The next time we want a country to safeguard its nuclear fuel, the question in their mind will be, ‘Can I trust that the Americans will keep this a secret?’” said Mr. Weiner, referring to a leaked cable that revealed America has for years been working to remove highly enriched uranium froma research reactor in Pakistan. “If it becomes public that the Pakistanis are allowing the Americans to help build safeguards over their nuclear materials, that would be very damaging for the government.”
There are also those who stand somewhere in the middle of the WikiLeaks“good versus evil” debate, including Charli Carpenter, a former consultant for the UN and a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
“It depends on the information, the context, and the manner of the leak,” Ms. Carpenter said, adding that examples of effective WikiLeaks whistle-blowing include the exposure of toxic corporate dumping off the coast of Africa or the “gunning of non-combatants” by a U.S. helicopter in Iraq. “However, megaleaks of mass documents outside any context of specific wrongdoing is much more problematic and can’t be considered whistle-blowing per se.”
She said WikiLeaks would be better off releasing targeted information on specific cases of malfeasance, rather than disclosing a“mess” data that may or may not result in the outing of informants.
Mr. Furedi agreed, and said WikiLeaks has opted for a“promiscuous approach” pegged to the notion of exposing for the sake of exposing — a departure, he said, from the brave whistle-blowers of yore, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers, for example.
Mr. Furedi discounted the argument that the WikiLeaks revelations— which he likened to reality TV “confessionals,” and which have been compared to a UN edition of a Page Six gossip column — will somehow reap the transparency Mr. Assange espouses.
“There’s this silly idea called ‘the public’s right to know’,” he said. “But the right to know what? We don’t have the right to informal and intimate exchanges, because that disrupts the whole process ... {Diplomats} will stop telling each other the truth.”
Mr. Weiner, the former State Department civil servant, said this sort of culture of dishonesty would mark a travesty in information-gathering, as“Washington policy-makers should have the benefit of the most unvarnished advice.”
“If diplomats are worried {their cables} might end up on the front page of The New York Times tomorrow, they might pull their punches,” he said. “They might not say, ‘Our policy in country ‘x’ is to support the government, but that government is corrupt.’ And so then we all pretend that the emperor is wearing clothes — but maybe it would be better for somebody to say ‘Actually, the emperor is naked.’ ”
That U.S. diplomats believe certain countries are corrupt (most notably Afghanistan, the cables predictably illustrate) comes as little surprise to most.
In fact, some experts say the leak offers few damning revelations— despite Mr. Assange’s bid to smear the U.S. as evil — and may actually have the opposite effect than the one anticipated by those who believe WikiLeaks is a force for good.
“When you actually read the cables, here’s what you see: American leaders and American diplomats trying to solve crucial world problems,” Leslie H. Gelb, a former senior government official and author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy, wrote this week in a Daily Beast article headlined “WikiLeaks Accidentally Helps U.S.”
Mr. Furedi, who argues vociferously against the release agrees,“This stuff is relatively banal, and not particularly controversial. If anything, it puts governments in a better light than perhaps they should be.”
National Post
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