Whistleblowing site leaks documents that reveal failures in the Afghanistan war.
The White House has come out to “condemn” Wikileaks and leader Julian Assange for releasing over 90,000 pages of classified material on the war in Afghanistan, including “news” that Pakistani officials have helped Afghan insurgents and that some of our actions took civilian life for granted.
According to the administration, via National Security Adviser James Jones, the reports threaten our national security: “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.” That would be true if the documents detailed any forthcoming action; they do not.
The data doesn’t detail anything especially relevant to today’s war efforts, a fact that the White House wants to use to their advantage: “The documents posted by Wikileaks reportedly cover a period of time from January 2004 to December 2009. On December 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan.”
Since that’s the case, their “national security” argument falls flat, especially when compared to Assange’s assurances that he and his peers wiped names and numbers from the papers. The only way national security could be in trouble would be if our tactics haven’t changed since over a year ago. Even if the White House believes their own press release, it still severely damages President Obama’s many promises to make the government more transparent.
Transparency became quite the buzz word for Obama’s campaign. “As president, Obama will restore the American people’s trust in their government by making government more open and transparent and by giving regular Americans unprecedented new tools to keep track of government officials, who they are meeting with, who is giving them money and how they are spending taxpayer dollars,” he wrote in campaign literature. Those taxpayer dollars, of course, go toward funding our wars in Afghanistan in Iraq.
Obama attempted to keep that promise after moving onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and created websites to track bailout dollars, White House developments and other ways in which our government operates behind the scenes. In January of 2009, as he altered the Freedom of Information Act, Obama said, “The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.” The White House’s opposition to these leaks, then, creates quite the political dilemma for Obama.
The reports released this weekend don’t really offer us anything new: I mean, how many of us ever doubted that Pakistani intelligence officials were helping insurgents in Afghanistan? To claim the whistle-blowing threatens “national security” buys into a message more closely associated with the right wing: information must be suppressed, rather than revealed, lest our dirty laundry be used against us.
Back in 1971, as the Vietnam War continued to rage, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg became a political and social hero when he turned the “Pentagon Papers” over to the New York Times. Those papers detailed our nation’s work in the war torn Asian nation, specifically how we expanded our efforts despite promises of curtailing violence. Though the reports included Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s time as Commander-in-Chief, they proved to be political poison for Richard Nixon, who, like Obama has done with Afghanistan, embraced the war as his own. That poison only spread when then-Senator Mike Gravel introduced the papers into the Congressional record.
It will be interesting to see how the Democrats tackle this scandal. Will they fall in line with the White House and deride the leaks as a national security breach, or will they keep up with the President’s past promises to bolster transparency, a key concept in liberal democracy? Either way they go, they’re in a political pickle: objection to the leaks comes off as supporting a secretive military apparatus, one that directly contradicts past promises of Pakistani cooperation, and acceptance of the leaks puts them in the White House’s crosshairs.
As for the Republicans: they too will face a dilemma: will they support the White House’s claims of “national security,” therefore giving their opponents some political credence, or will they try to play to the left wing and claim that these leaks are in the interest of democratic dialogue?
More than anything else, these leaks provide politicians on both sides of the aisle an opportunity to speak truth to power, as Mike Gravel did so many years ago. So, elected officials, who wants to take the lead on this one? Clearly not the President.
September 28, 2010 at 6:31 pm, WikiLeaks: Daniel Schmitt Gives a Whistle-Blowing Interview, The World Starts to Go Deaf | Death and Taxes said:
[...] also tells Spiegel that his problems at WikiLeaks were unfixable: “I worked on WikiLeaks because I considered the idea to be right and important. [...]