The WikiLeaks Scare

The WikiLeaks saga continues, in a frenzied atmosphere fed by U.S. authorities. Yesterday, the vice president of the United States of America, Joe Biden, donned his Dick Cheney costume to declare that Julian Assange, the face of the nebula, was a “high-tech terrorist.”

Yes, a terrorist. Nothing less!

If you thought that stupidity had no place at the White House since the Cheney-Bush duo packed up their stuff, think again. …

Much nonsense has been said about WikiLeaks — an unusual pest — since the nebula began to publish American diplomatic cables. Biden is just the latest in a large group of politicians to cry wolf upon the sight of Julian Assange.

There is also a lot of bull: The U.S. Air Force and the Library of Congress (!) no longer allow their computers to connect to WikiLeaks. We are swimming in delirium. We forget that employees of the U.S. Air Force and the Library of Congress likely have computers at home, where they can connect to the site. …

We mostly make WikiLeaks out to be a very convenient bogeyman in these paranoid times. Fortunately, there are reasonable voices that inject a bit of insight into the fray. One such voice is that of Thomas Blanton.

At George Washington University, Dr. Blanton* leads the National Security Archive, which takes an inventory of, for purposes of historical analysis, “declassified” (as they say in intelligence jargon) government documents — that are no longer secret. Before Congress last Thursday, this “made in the USA” intelligence-maze expert urged parliamentarians to take a deep breath. “Leaks have always existed,” he said, “and attempts to counter them are almost always counterproductive.”**

Is WikiLeaks a terrorist organization? Three days before Vice President Biden’s remarks, Mr. Blanton was incredibly sarcastic.

“I wish all terrorist groups would write the local U.S. ambassador for a few days before they are launching anything — the way Julian Assange wrote Ambassador Louis Susman in London on Nov. 26 — to ask for suggestions on how to make sure nobody gets hurt.

I wish all terrorist groups would partner up with Le Monde and El Pais and Der Spiegel and The Guardian and The New York Times, and take the guidance of those professional journalists on what bombs go off and when and with what regulators. Even to make the comparison tells the story — WikiLeaks is not acting as an anarchist group, even remotely as terrorists, but as a part of the media, as publishers of information, and even more than that — the evidence so far shows them trying to rise to the standards of professional journalism.”

Blanton is not the only one to moderate WikiLeaks’ actions. Unfortunately, those in his camp are drowned by a tsunami of paranoia. And so, Joe Biden confirmed that the U.S. Department of Justice is seeking ways to criminalize Assange for having published these secrets.

If in the near future a U.S. journalist publishes Chinese or Russian state secrets, we cannot wait to see Biden explain why China or Russia would be wrong to demand the extradition of that American journalist.

“Almost all of the proposed cures … are worse than the disease,” explained Blanton. The real danger of “WikiMania” is that we could return to a notion of secrets worthy of the Cold War, the kind of thinking that left us exposed before Sept. 11, 2001; to prosecutions under the Espionage Act, which are a waste of public funds and which are ultimately dropped; [and] to pressures on ISPs akin to censorship inspired more by the Chinese state power model than to the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Everything Thomas Blanton testified before Congress is known. Anyone who knows anything knows that WikiLeaks is not acting as a digital al-Qaida. Anyone who does not buy the political-patriotic propaganda of the day recalls Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ official report about the WikiLeaks revelations in early December: annoying, yes; devastating, no.

Knowing all this, why the holy war waged by the United States against WikiLeaks?

Maybe this is not a war, exactly. Maybe it’s just another battle in a separate holy war — that which launched in 2001 against terrorism, in whose name Americans have accepted all sorts of nonsense, from the invasion of Iraq and the groping of their family jewels in airports, to the use of torture to make “enemy combatants,” who have been accused of nothing, speak.

This is why, of course, they will meekly accept an example to be made of Assange. On behalf of the war on terrorism today, everything is justified.

*Editor’s Note: Thomas Blanton is the director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

**Editor’s Note: This quote, accurately translated, could not be verified.