Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization's latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to "opening the Stasi archives" in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He also compared the leak to Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers.
Both claims are a bit difficult to swallow. The Stasi were famous for creating a total surveillance state and gathering comprehensive evidence of political "crimes" against their own citizenry; the Pentagon Papers revealed Kennedy's involvement in the overthrow of Diem, and Nixon's decision to illegally bomb Cambodia and Laos. The WikiLeaks archive is... daily incident reports. Incident reports can be revealing, if they say something new. But these don't...
Assange's justification for putting hundreds of lives at stake—"All of this material is more than seven months old, so it has no operational significance... there is no danger"—is as false as it is naí¯ve. Many of the operations he details through these leaks are still ongoing, and many of the people involved in them are still there, hoping these leaks don't make them into targets for assassination. Indeed, Adam Serwer, a staff writer for The American Prospect, tweeted this morning, "Former Military Intelligence Officer sez of wikileaks, 'Its an AQ/Taliban execution team's treasure trove.'" ...
Much more at Columbia Journalism Review.
Comments
We sometimes forget that if someone announces that they are unveiling 90,000 documents that contain a damning indictment of the US, 90%+ of the people who hear the announcement will believe it regardless of what the documents actually say. I suspect that Assange knows this well... certainly the excerpts I've seen are a long way from earthshaking.
Still, I suspect that the propaganda penalty of shutting him down would be greater than the propaganda benefit. I'm reminded of a line from Shaw may have it a little wrong): "Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like; it is the only way a man can become famous without ability."
American government employees create little communities abroad; the members share security clearances and PX privileges; the major concern is image and appearance--this is paradoxical, because the local population works as servants, learns English, and prostitutes itself to earn a dollar. The hypocrisy of pretending to be friends while exploiting fellow local people is overwhelming
Benefits of belonging to a secret society are not obvious, since everyone in town knows who was killed recently or how the police department, because of its access to weapons, communications, and US vehicles, has the power to undermine any traditional authority.
It seems the secrecy has two functions: first to limit and standardize conversation among the US community and second, to keep the US population at home in the dark. Within a town or country, where American foreign service and military reside, Americans seem strange with their little secrets and bonding rituals, unable to speak with the local population on common ground.
This is the dark side of the 'need to share' mentality...I see it a lot on some of the distribution lists I subscribe to where someone will release the draft of a new publication or document, just because they can, and less because of some perceived injustice or wrong or as a means of protest. I wonder if perhaps this is yet another manifestation of leakers' inability to grasp the concept that we are actually at war...aren't we?
-Olof
I appreciate the comment, sure you are right in context. However, making a comaparison like this brings certain perceptions. Perception matters. When the leak is compared to another incident it will be compared in total. The answer may have been about volume but he could have compared the volume of documents to the volume of oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, or to the amount of inoformation made available by the Brookings Institutes Nuclear Weapons Cost Study, or the numebr of apples on a tree etc. BUT By comparing the leak in any way to the Stasi's files released when the wall came down Mr. Assange indirectly colors the leaked documents with the same black paint. The Stasi was as close to an evil organization as can be created. The US military despite its many flaws is not in anyway evil. Any comparison of the US military to the stasi is misplaced, ill informed and in this case deliberately designed to cause a specific negative reaction-- US Military = Stasi = evil.
I think you missed the point about Stasi... The question posed to Assange was what difference one of these documents made. His answer was tha, just like the case with the Stasi-files, any single file did not make difference but that a mass (like 91 000 documents) could make a society look differently upon its own history.