Reckless Journalism

Wikileaks, an international organization that leaks secret government information has recently released hundreds of thousands of files about the War in Iraq and Afghanistan. On October 22^nd, Wikileaks released a document that contained 391,832 secret reports from the War in Iraq. This recent leak along with a number of leaks about the Afghan War threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to establish stability in the Middle East region.

Wikileaks is no ordinary media outlet. Wikileaks does not have established war correspondents that report information from the front line. Rather, Wikileaks obtains classified information from anonymous sources that can be submitted to them online or by mail and them disseminates that classified information to news outlets around the world. This is especially troubling because Wikileaks publishes this classified information without understanding the implications of the material or if it is entirely true. 

Wikileaks claims on their website that their publishing of this classified information is an effort to improve transparency and that “this transparency creates a better society for all people.” While I agree that transparency is beneficial to society, I do not believe that it is the general public’s business to know classified information about how our government is conducting a war. The distribution of the classified material that contains many of our strategic goals and operations in both wars is likely to cause more harm then good.

One would be foolish to say that the only people reading these Wikileaks reports is the general public who are just trying to keep their government accountable for their actions. Our enemies, such as the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are reading these leaks and are probably paying more attention to them then many people in the United States are. These leaks give out valuable information to our enemies such as who our allies in the region are. This allows enemies like the Taliban to seek out and kill allies of the United States who are fighting to establish a better society in places like Afghanistan. Does the dissemination of classified material to anyone and everyone in the world create a better society? I think not. 

Another troubling aspect about Wikileaks and their efforts to create transparency is that they are clearly not a neutral news-media outlet. The editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, a Australian computer hacker who does not have a permanent address is known to be anti-war. His anti-war agenda is made clear in this controversial video of an airstrike in Baghdad that occurred on July 12, 2007. The video, which was posted on a website entitled “Collateral Murder,” is gun-camera footage of a Apache Helicopter attack on insurgents in which two Reuters staff members were said to have been deliberately targeted. The video was carefully edited with commentary and distorted viewpoints that created the implication that there were no armed insurgents in the area, which is clearly not true. What Wikileaks failed to post with the video was the first hand accounts of soldiers in the area or the pilot’s reports that said that there was armed insurgents in the area at the time of the attack. If these reports were added in the video, this attack would not have been such a controversy; it would just have been an example of a tragic situation in which reporters were killed accidently along with the armed insurgents that they were following.

 The information that has been leaked is not the only thing that is worrisome about Wikileaks.  It is the precedent that this organization sets. The ability for someone to anonymously submit information and to have that information organized into a large release of documents is especially frightening. It encourages people like Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is responsible for leaking the Baghdad airstrike video along with over 200,000 other classified documents, to easily submit information anonymously to the organization. People like Manning, who was an intelligence analyst should not have such an easy outlet to anonymously disseminate classified information. This precedent that Wikileaks has set is dangerous and will only become more threatening in the future. Organizations such as Wikileaks must be monitored. Individuals should not have the ability to anonymously give out classified material to an organization that can distribute that material without knowing the dangerous implications of releasing it.

I would rather not know the details of how my government is conducting a war then have the details released in a distorted fashion that fosters anti-war sentiment and benefits our enemies.