Sources and Security

On Jan. 25, the New York Times reported at length on the contents of two classified transmissions sent by the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl W. Eikenberry, to his superiors at the Department of State. In the confidential communications, the Ambassador was highly critical of Afghan President Hamid Karzai because of his authoritarian and non-transparent practices, calling him “an unreliable ally.” The diplomat expressed strong skepticism about whether his country would continue to send troops to Afghanistan in the future — an attitude that contrasted with the optimism that was being projected from the White House. Eikenberry refuted the counterinsurgency plans sponsored by General Stanley A. McChrystal, head of NATO operations in Afghanistan.

The newspaper’s revelations opened an intense public debate. The Secretary of Defense was immediately called to the Senate and the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives and warned to curb budgetary allocations. U.S. operations in Afghanistan were not stopped due to the newspaper revelations, and this was not the intention. However, the article strongly contributed to the debate on Obama’s triumph in said operations.

The act of publishing classified documents through a source that was not revealed by the newspaper was not even a matter of discussion. Keeping secret the identity of the source, especially when it comes to matters of public interest, like a military operation, is so entrenched in the American constitutional tradition that to discuss this topic would have seemed strange. What they did discuss was what Ambassador Eikenberry said in these transmissions.

Belgium is the leading European country in terms of freedom of expression. Its laws only allow the suspension of the right to reserve an information source to prevent a criminal act in which a person’s life is in imminent danger — nothing else. Arguments such as state security, public interest or similar concepts are not accepted. The French Assembly is debating a bill aimed at protecting journalistic sources. They have done it to harmonize national law with the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, which has suspended the laws, decrees and judgments of European Union countries that they consider to violate the right of journalists in maintaining the confidentiality of the source. In recent days, there have been demonstrations in Rome about a bill, dubbed “mordaza,” which seeks to limit the right of information source confidentiality, which would complicate the work of journalists in their research on the government and the Mafia.