“i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public”
— Bradley Manning
Live Q&A: Monday at 12 ET
The sentiment is strikingly similar to what Thomas Jefferson, one of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, once said: "If a nation expects to be ignorant — and free — in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
More than 200 years after the Bill of Rights was signed, the tensions between the public’s right to know and the government’s duty to protect the nation’s security are as strong as ever.
With the release of State Department cables, Guantanamo Bay files, and field reports from the Iraq and Afghan wars — all of which the Army has charged Manning with illegally downloading — questions have arisen as to whether the information should be public.
The documents were classified at secret level or below. More than half of the cables were unclassified. Have the releases harmed national security or chilled diplomacy? Have they contributed to to public understanding of the roles played by the United States and foreign governments in current events? Does the gain in public understanding outweigh the potential harm to national security? How significant is the damage to national security from these disclosures compared with previous cases?
Some views:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), former presidential candidate, referring to WikiLeaks’ release of diplomatic cables, speaking on March 9, after meeting with Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard: “It is the greatest, damaging security breach in the history of this country.”
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists: “This whole episode ought to prompt a reconsideration of secrecy policies, because clearly some of this material did belong in the public domain.” He pointed to information on human rights issues in Egypt, cables on economic and trade issues in Asia, material on civilian casualties in the Afghan war, cables revealing internal Israeli government debates over West Bank settlements.
“How is it that issues making front-page news around the world could only be made public through a massive violation of secrecy policy? Security through secrecy is a precarious strategy.”
He said that secrecy — through classification and other forms of markings that keep records out of the public realm — undermines security “when it conceals problems and vulnerabilities without fixing them.” He pointed to the 9/11 Commission report’s statement that if the U.S. government had publicized the threat from al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the public would have been more prepared to meet the threat of terrorism.
P.J. Crowley, State Department spokesman until March, when he was forced out after he criticized Manning’s treatment at the Marine Corps jail in Quantico: The WikiLeaks case is not about freedom of expression or whistleblowing.
“A whistleblower is a person with specific technical expertise who believes there is an impropriety of some kind and chooses to expose it in order to correct it. No one can suggest that in releasing 251,000 [diplomatic] documents this was about whistle-blowing.”
Loading...
Comments