The End Of Self-Censorship

I admit I wasn’t surprised to learn in the diplomatic cables that the king of Saudi Arabia wanted America to “cut off the snake’s head” by blocking Iran’s nuclear projects. Abdallah al-Saud’s fears for his rival Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been well publicized for quite some time now. No one who remotely follows the news would be shocked at the candor of this powerful Arab leader, who is seeming so at ease with his “American friends” that he won’t hesitate to drag them into WWIII. Clearly, America’s international status is falling.

Yet I was really surprised by the outrage my friend expressed in the YMCA locker room last month. His rage did not stem from the possibility of triggering another catastrophic war, encouraged by a grotesquely rich royal family that is autocratic in its domestic policies and takes an extremist view on the Koran. No, his anger was directed at WikiLeak’s “indiscriminate” actions by releasing the diplomatic cables. My friend, who is a liberal and has a PhD in French Literature from Princeton, says “a government can not work” without keeping secrets. Any government, whether its American or the oil prince in Riyadh, must be able to work in privacy to maintain trust and even peace between nations.

My friend took the exact position as Hillary Clinton, a centrist hawk and anti-Iranian, denouncing the latest leak from WikiLeaks by saying “stealing confidential documents and publishing them without consideration of the consequences does not help anyone.” Sure, it doesn’t help neither the Secretary of State nor Saudi Arabia. Rather, the leaks give a different perspective on Hillary Clinton defending America’s relationship with King Abdullah and his murderous desires towards Iran.

…There is nothing brave about sabotaging peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends.

The critical necessity to having an informed public

Still in my basketball jersey and my hair dripping with sweat, I tried to elegantly respond in the name of freedom. Unfortunately my response lacked the historical perspective needed to correct my friend’s misunderstandings about his own country. Contrary to the situation in Saudi Arabia, my friend had already forgotten (not unlike our chief diplomat who asserts the diplomatic cables are private property) that Americans are sovereign, and the government can not legally make distinctions between its citizens.

While scholars still argue the extent of a person’s sovereignty, the first sentence of the Constitution can not be ignored: “We the People of the United States….” In 1765, long before the American Revolution, one of the founding fathers John Adams articulated the most eloquent summary of America’s ideals and the importance and necessity of having an informed public:

Liberty can not be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have…a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, and I mean the characters and conduct of their leaders.

With this rich history in mind, are Hillary Clinton and my friend correct to think that the revelations in the diplomatic cables severely damage relations between the US and its allies?

Julian Assange is not the first person to leak classified documents in history. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg provided the New York Times and the Washington Post with government secrets concerning the Vietnam war. These documents, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Johnson administration, proved the US was lying and censoring information on the war. Ellsberg was soon charged with treason and related crimes that were much more severe than those launched against Assange.

Ultimately (and Ellsberg will agree), that his act of defiance did not accelerate the withdraw of troops from Vietnam. Furthermore the US’s allies during the cold war remained faithful, and they continued to fight the Marxist left and defend their national interests. The humiliation from the “Pentagon Papers” did not prevent Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger from encouraging a coup d’état in Chile against the Marxist president Salador Allende in 1973. Likewise, there is no indication that the New York Times’ articles on the Afghan and Iraq War Diaries will accelerate the withdraw of US military forces. Even in countries where popular opinion is strongly against the war (Canada, France, and Germany) is it unlikely that the leaks will affect their war strategy.

The “sovereign people” learn the truth

The most significant aspect caused by WikiLeaks and the Internet is the changing relationship between traditional media and the government. In 2004, not too long before the Bush-Kerry presidential elections, reporter from the New York Times James Risen discovered a major scoop: The Bush Administration, inflated with arrogance from 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, had illegally authorized the Department of Homeland Security to wiretap numerous private phone conversations.

Instead of publishing critical information that could have given the election to Kerry, the Editor-in-chief of the New York Times complied with the White House’s request to preserve government secretes that were essential to countering terrorism. This is the same argument that Hillary Clinton defends. A year later, the “sovereign people” learned the truth from a book Risen published on the matter.

In October 2004, WikiLeaks didn’t exist and Risen had run out of options. Today, I think that the New York Times could not choose to self-censor.

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This article was originally published on Le Devoir.com

Photo source flickr CC : Wallyg / Stian Eikeland /