Wikileaks and Democracy

Many of you have opinions about "Wikileaks" and its publication of government and corporate secrets. As you know by now, Wikileaks released over 92,000 documents constituting the record of the war in Afganistan from the perspective of the people fighting that war.

We all agree (I hope) that revelations of classified information that would endanger troops in the field, or endanger a military mission, would be treasonous. We also agree that publishing legitimate proprietary corporate information should be criminal.

Put another way, we all understand that secrecy has its legitimate uses. In my profession, secrecy increases honesty, candor, and full disclosure between attorneys and their clients, which is vital to obtaining sound legal advice - the surest way to screw yourself legally is to lie or to withhold information from your attorney. Absolute confidentiality regarding AIDS testing saved innumerable lives by allowing those who thought they might be infected to get tested.

But most of the time, secrecy hides and/or facilitates three things: corruption, incompetence, and manipulation. I don't need to tell anybody about the first two - you know from your own experience that your first instinct is to conceal your screw ups - at least until they can be fixed or mitigated. And the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to invoke "state secrets" to keep information about the previous administration’s torture of its detainees hidden from public and judicial scrutiny - and it has done so even when the relevant facts of the case were already public knowledge.

In this latest disclosure, we find secrecy hiding (and thus sustaining) the entire trilogy - but it appears that the biggest use of government secrecy regarding the war in Afghanistan was manipulation - our government was using its powers of secrecy to sustain public support for its war policy. It was concealing the fact that we were (and still are) largely failing in Afghanistan.

In case that doesn't strike you as sufficiently problematic, the practice has another name. Our government was undermining democracy by withholding information about the failure of a particular policy. It used its powers of secrecy to undermine the legitimacy of our social compact, which requires, at its core, that elected officials exercise their powers according to the consent of the governed. Our government obtained our consent by hiding (or distorting) the truth, and in so doing flipped our social compact on its head.

So don't be so quick to condemn Wikileaks.  Julian Assange, in the spirit of Daniel Ellsberg before him - if you don't know who Ellsberg is, look him up on Wikipedia - has done us a huge favor. If there is anyone deserving of our ire regarding these disclosures, it is our esteemed "public servants."

Joe H.