WikiLeaks Walks Line On National Security, Freedom Of Information
By aaroncynic in News on Jul 27, 2010 5:45PM
Revelations, criticism and some praise for leaked information clearinghouse website Wikileaks will likely continue all week. Over the weekend, the website released more than 90,000 classified military records on the Afghan war. The White House strongly condemned the move, calling it a threat to national security. In the same hand, however, members of the Obama Administration dismissed the actual content of the documents, saying there were “no new revelations.”
While the Afghan War Logs aren’t exactly the Pentagon Papers or even as shocking as the gunship camera footage Wikileaks released in April, they should arouse questions and discussion about the overall mission and purpose of the war in Afghanistan. Instead however, officials and many in the press seem to be more focused on haranguing Wikileaks for releasing the documents. If the documents are actually a threat to national security and endanger lives, how exactly can the information be “nothing new?” One has to wonder if civilian casualties, "collateral damage" and the like potentially pose a larger threat to national security. We may have never heard the details of a special ops unit accidentally killing seven children in a firefight stateside, but Afghans knew about it. Incidents like that galvanize insurgents and terrorists and those are precisely the people who pose the largest threat to the U.S.
While Wikileaks did not contact the White House directly, they gave the NYT, Guardian and Der Speigel a full month to look at the information. In that time, The New York Times urged Wikileaks at the request of the White House to withhold anything "harmful." In fact, the website held back 15,000 documents so that sensitive information could be edited out and the Pentagon stated the documents released don't have a "a very high level of classification."
If anything, the Afghan War Logs show a beleaguered war effort that needs serious re-evaluation. We still haven't found Bin Laden, but nearly eliminated al-Qaida, our original original justifications for war in Afghanistan. According to CIA Director Leon Panetta, there could be as few as 50 members of al-Qaida left in Afghanistan, yet there were 93 NATO soldiers (including 56 Americans) killed in Afghanistan last month. Our nation is drowning in debt, but we've spent hundreds of billions of dollars on the war.
These documents force us to ask bigger questions about the whole point of the Afghanistan war. We don't ask because it's something of a sacred cow - we're supposed to just accept that this war exists, slap a bumper sticker on our car about supporting the troops and never question why the troops are there, fighting bravely, in the first place, because the party line answer is always "freedom." If anything, 90,000 documents highlighting things we don't know about a war we support via indifference combined with the realization that there is an entire power structure at work in this country we literally know nothing about (the Washington Post expose on the national security industry) should scare the living daylights out of us and empower us to ask what exactly is going on and demand accountability from any and all administrations. But we've been led to believe (through decades of propaganda) that most things are things "we don't want to" or "shouldn't" or "are dangerous" to know.
The cornerstone of democracy is the ability to hold our officials accountable for the direction of the country. If we're to perform that essential democratic function, we need to be an informed populace.