The Truth Hurts

Updated on 12/4/10

The people who keep the secrets always want them to stay secret and always insist it's a matter of life and death and not a way to cover for their corruption, duplicity and incompetence. So once again the latest disclosure of secret US government documents by WikiLeaks on Monday has been greeted by condemnation from top US officials who insist that national security and lives are being compromised by the disclosures.

They know whats best for us. Whether it's top government officials huffing and puffing about WikiLeaks or the local bureaucrats and cops I've dealt with as a journalist refusing to release public documents. And the American people are always the last to know what is being done in their name and with their tax dollars.

The latest condemnations about Monday's leaks were more ludicrous than the assertions made about the leaked documents in June and October concerning the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. WikiLeaks didn't redact names of Afghan collaborators, but did so for Iraq collaborators. A legitimate case could be made that Afghanis were potentially endangered although the Pentagon admits there is no evidence of anyone being killed due to the leaks  http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/28/104404/officials-may-be-overstating-the.html
But the latest leaks concern the US State Department and rather than endanger lives the documents confirm the hypocrisy of our leaders and our allies and the mainstream media that covers them. Former ambassadors Christopher Hill and Ronald Neumann spoke on National Public Radio about how the publicity makes their jobs harder.

Neumann laughably asserted that Pakistan's refusal to release nuclear fuel to the US was due to fears of publicity. As if Pakistan, which covertly developed nuclear weapons and created and continues to fund the Taliban doesn't regularly defy the US.

Hill pooh-poohed documents showing how State Department diplomats were ordered to act as spies recording personal information about foreign diplomats and officials. The kind of actions that if done by  foreign diplomats in the US would lead to them being kicked out of the country.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted the leaks threaten national security. Clinton should know about making threats.

This is the same woman who as a presidential candidate in the 2008 presidential debates talked about nuking Iran if it attacked Israel. Israel which refuses to admit it has over 100 nuclear weapons and unlike Iran, refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treat (NPT).

Clinton even went farther than existing US policy by talking about extending a "nuclear umbrella" over Middle Eastern countries which would expand the number of countries the US would nuke Iran for attacking. Imagine the reaction if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ever discussed nuking the US. The bombs would start raining down on Iran before he finished his sentence.

The New York Times, which checked with government officials before deciding which documents to publish, focused much of their coverage on lots of fretting about Iran getting one nuclear weapon. As opposed to the approximately 5,500 tactical and nuclear warheads the US has.

 Little mention is made of Saudi Arabian donors supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq which has targeted for death US soliders and Iraqis who cooperated with them. The same Saudi Arabia that was the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. The same Saudi Arabia that just received $60 billion in US arms http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/nov/19/us-60-billion-arms-deal-saudis-going-through-tonight/ to help protect it from the bogeyman in Iran that King Abdullah, the Saudi dictator, called on the US to attack, according to the documents.

And not much mention of Yemen's dictator  President Ali Abdullah Saleh falsely taking credit for US drone strikes. Of course the families of the civilians murdered in the notoriously inaccurate drone strikes know the US was behind them, but the American people footing the bill for them didn't.

Government officials attacking WikiLeaks is to be expected given that they're protecting their turf. And in a way so are the media kingpins who did the same.

Perhaps the biggest hypocrite is Bob Woodward who tried to have it both ways on Larry King Live on Monday night http://www.livedash.com/transcript/larry_king_live/49/CNN/Monday_November_29_2010/525600/

Woodward said Wiki Leaks needed to check with government sources before publishing documents to make sure lives or secret operations weren't jeoparadized. But any cub reporter, much less the man who broke the Watergate scandal knows government officials will always insist that information needs to be kept secret because revealing it would endanger lives or national security. Whether it's the State Department or the local cop shop, standard operating procedure is almost always to give the media as little info as possible and use safety as the catch-all excuse.

After saying Wiki Leaks needed to essentially get government permission to leak the documents, Woodward then said,  "We need to make the government more transparent, but to -- you know, you need to step back from this." That sounds a lot like the argument against releasing the Nixon tapes. We need to be transparent, but not if transparency jeopardizes national security, with the people behind the veil getting to decide what gets kept secret.

Woodward who has made a career out of quoting anonymous sources and trusting their recollection of prior conversations and events says that it's bad to let the public see actual documents quoting people by name.
When someone anonymously leaks to Woodward for one of his books that come out to late to change events, that's O.K.

But real time leaks of documents with real names on them that could could actually change events, not O.K. Just as the people who keep the secrets want to maintain control, so do those who selectively reveal them with permission of their keepers.

Update 1: So much for WikiLeaks' release of State Department documents compromising national security and endangering lives. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - who should be given credit for his honesty- called condemnation of the leaks "overwrought" and consequences for US policy "fairly modest." http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/gates-on-leaks-wiki-and-otherwise/

But don't you just know media and government opponents of WikiLeaks will ignore Gates' comments and continue their kneejerk fearmongering. As if the opinion of the Secretary of Defense, a former CIA chief with some 40 years as a Cold Warrior, counts for nothing.