A recent biography of the legendary left-wing journalist IF Stone was memorably entitled All Governments Lie.’ Broadly informed by this principle, Stone perfected the art of reading press releases and other public documents more carefully than anyone else, and he often divined what the ‘permanent government’ of Washington’s self-righteous bureaucrats had tried to conceal from the American public. Stone’s discoveries were often relatively minor, much like the routine chatter contained in the ongoing Wikileaks disclosures, but stacked together his molehills habitually formed very consequential mountains. In one celebrated instance, his forensic reading of the available evidence made him the only American journalist to correctly challenge official accounts of second Gulf of Tonkin incident which Johnson administration fraudulently used as a casus belli for the Vietnam war.
One enduring lesson from Stone’s career is that context often trumps facts, that minor discrepancies often provide clues to much larger narratives This consideration is relevant to the Wikileaks’s ‘data dumps’ since it is largely the contexts (the administration of foreign wars, diplomacy, government bureaucracies) and not the facts themselves (often routine errors) which have made the leaks so newsworthy. Some pundits have pointed out that even before the alleged national security implications of the most recent leak (diplomatic cables) there were clear signs that the website was not acting in good faith. For while the release of military reports from Afghanistan and Iraq may have served the public interest by exposing the incoherence of the US military strategy and the unavoidable difficulties of US occupation, they also undermined the war by exposing the true identities of local allies and by disclosing sensitive information about the counterinsurgency efforts such as the detection and disarming of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).
Information that may cost people their lives cannot be morally neutral. It ought to be handled scrupulously, which does not seem to be the case with Wikileaks. In an outraged editorial a US newspaper recently opined that “like small children playing with fires, fascinated with their own power to destroy, Assange and company are setting the world aflame merely to watch it burn. They are not crusaders for a better society. They are nihilists. They are anarchists. And they are enemies of the United States.” This was followed by a call for Assange’s prosecution under America’s Espionage Act or his silencing “by whatever means necessary.”
This anger is understandable, but it is also worth remembering that the government secrecy which Assange and his colleagues are undermining has also enabled snafus in Iraq and Afghanistan to go unaddressed for the better part of a decade. In an online comment for The New Yorker, Steve Coll observes that the more than 80,000 documents from Iraq and Afghanistan which Wikileaks has published this year have revealed “important new facts about civilian casualties, the torture of detainees by our allies, Iran’s exported violence, the disruptions caused by private contractors, and the debilitating patterns of clandestine warfare in two benighted regions.” This, too, is not morally neutral since these events affect the lives of millions of innocent civilians. At what point, then, should US national security considerations take precedence over the need for justice in the mistreatment, torture and killing of foreign nationals? Americans and non-Americans are likely to have very different answers.
During an interview with Forbes magazine in which he promised to release internal documents which reveal behind-the-scenes manoeuvring of an American bank during the recent financial crisis, Assange said his exposé would reveal an “ecosystem of corruption . . . the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.” The exalted almost religious tone sits poorly with Assange’s arrogance and hunger for celebrity, but the advent of Wikileaks as a corrective to the routine secrecy which modern democracies adopt in matters of serious consequence, foreign and domestic, is probably irreversible. In time his contribution to the New Journalism may turn out to be not the disclosure of inconvenient facts so much as the renewal of debate over the contexts which make these significant. This will require America – and any other country that succumbs to the looming epidemic of electronic whistleblowing – to take itself more seriously, to examine its motives and to reconsider its commitment to values like privacy, accountability and free expression. Surely this is to be welcomed even when the harbinger of this new era is a morally questionable character like Julian Assange.
