Freedom of the Press

Everybody is for motherhood until they get scared and then they are ready to "throw mamma under the train".

Wikileaks is a wonderful organization that is struggling to give teeth to the idea of "freedom of the press"...


How can you have a democracy if your government stamps everything as "secret"? I'm willing to agree that some things need to be secret, but that number is relatively small. Governments use secrecy to avoid the scrutiny of the public. But how can you have a "res publica" (a thing of the people) if the people are blind, deaf, and dumb? I like the US Bill of Rights that decides this by saying "go ahead and publish, and if it can be shown that what you did endangered the republic, then be prepared to be punished severely". That is how you guarantee the public is informed and is able to be a competent electorate.

The US Constitution gets it right:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This right is so essential to a democracy that the framers of the US Constitution were willing to grant the press (and the people via "free speech") the right to say and print anything. It didn't give them the right to avoid the consequences. But it recognized that tyrants can only be stopped if the people are free to think, speak, and organize and not be pre-emptively censored by an abusive government using "national security" as a bully stick to scare people from exercising their rights.

For some perspective about this release of material, here is a bit from an article in the New Yorker:

But after more than eight years at war, how carefully are we even looking at Afghanistan? The Times had a piece in Sunday’s paper on the strange truth that our expenditure since 9/11 of a trillion dollars on two wars has barely scraped our consciousness. ...

This stash will be compared to the Pentagon Papers, and in some ways that’s right—WikiLeaks, like Daniel Ellsberg, has been accused of ignoring the national interest. (An unfair charge, unless by “national interest” one means the political interests of a particular Administration.) But the Pentagon Papers were a synthetic analysis, a history of the war in Vietnam. WikiLeaks has given us research materials for a history of the war in Afghanistan. To make full use of them, we will, again, have to think hard about what we are trying to learn: Is it what we are doing, day to day, on the ground in Afghanistan, and how we could do it better? Or what we are doing in Afghanistan at all?

Go read the article. It gives an example of the kind of details released by this "leak".

Here's an example from Yahoo News of what WikiLeaks exposes (and that the US public needs to know):

Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.
Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as "our journalists" and directing them in how to do their jobs.

Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.

In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering "12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming" to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them "$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October".

Go read the full article and get the embedded links.