Jeff Sallot on Wikileaks

No need to be so sensitive – While Hillary Clinton and other powerful people may have red faces, on balance the WikiLeaks document dumps are doing a service

Byline: Jeff Sallot, Citizen Special
Publication: Ottawa Citizen
Date: Tuesday December 7th, 2010

Jeff Sallot, a former foreign and security correspondent for The Globe and Mail, teaches journalism at Carleton University.

To hear U.S. officials tell it, the WikiLeaks disclosures are a death sentence for civilized diplomacy, and thus pose a threat to world peace. To many cyber-libertarians and Julian Assange cultists, the digital document dump is the greatest journalistic scoop of all times.
It’s neither.

American officials have been saying since late July, when the leaks first became a flood, that the disclosure of intelligence reports from Afghanistan will compromise U.S. intelligence sources and put people’s lives at risk. Top brass at the Pentagon said Assange, the narcissist who runs WikiLeaks, may already have the blood of innocent Afghan families on his hands.

The fact is, the U.S. government has been unable to identify a single individual who has been assassinated, assaulted, or harassed after being identified as an American source or collaborator in Afghanistan since WikiLeaks first started putting Afghan reports out there four months ago.

The latest disclosures, a pile of American diplomatic cables from around the world, got Secretary of State Hillary Clinton riled up, claiming the leaks were an attack on not just the U.S., but the entire community of nations. If these documents really are as sensitive as Clinton or Defence Secretary Robert Gates claim, why haven’t either of them taken responsibility and resigned for allowing such a flimsy document security system to operate under their watch at the State Department
and the Pentagon?

These documents cannot be that sensitive if more than 60,000 people in the U.S. government and military had access to them, including the alleged leaker, a lowly 23-year-old Army private with too much time on his hands, sitting before a computer terminal in a fortified compound in Baghdad.

As The New York Times and others have noted, even the most sensitive of the current batch of leaked cables do not carry the highest security classifications. Real secrets, the kind on which lives depend, don’t get wide distribution. The U.S. knows how to keep real secrets. Vice-president Harry Truman was kept in the dark on the atom bomb project until president Franklin Roosevelt died and Truman was sworn in.

Compare the importance of the A-bomb secret to a WikiLeaks revelation that Prince Andrew told the U.S. Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan that he thinks the French government is corrupt. Fleet Street went wild, ignoring the fact British aristocrats have been saying such things about the French for generations.

How about this diplomatic dispatch from North Africa? Libya’s Col. Moammar Gadhafi likes to take his attentive blond nurse with him when travelling.

U.S. diplomats in Ottawa wrote home about how the CBC’s comedy hit Little Mosque on the Prairie uses stereotypes of American officials to get a laugh.

American taxpayers are spending millions to employ diplomats to write gossip.  Why is Washington in such a lather about the leaks? It’s embarrassing when diplomats or other officials are shown to be
saying different things in public than they tell each other in secret.
But Hillary Clinton’s discomfort last week is specific. Thanks to WikiLeaks we know she allowed a cable to go out over her name directing U.S. diplomats to spy on United Nations officials, including the secretary general, and the UN ambassadors from Britain, France, Russia and China. The American diplomats were told to steal credit card numbers, computer passwords, frequent flyer numbers and biometric information. This is an apparent violation of a 1946 international
treaty banning spying on people at the UN.

Well, yes, that’s embarrassing. But it is hardly a surprise to anyone who’s ever worked at the UN. Many of them are spies for their own countries.
By the end of last week, Clinton found the silver lining. The leaked documents, she said, really show what a great job American diplomats do.

“What you see are diplomats doing the work of diplomacy, reporting and ana-lysing and providing information, solvingproblems, worrying about big complex challenges.”

The Times quotes her as also saying that, in a way, the documents “should be reassuring, despite the occasional tidbit that is pulled out and unfortunately blown up.”

Let’s do a cost-benefit analysis of the leaks. On the damage side, Hillary Clinton and a bunch of powerful people have red faces. They’ll get over it.

On the plus side, the leaks give a sharper public focus to the enormous problems facing the U.S. and its allies, including Canada, to halt proliferation in the Middle East and North Korea and to bring security and stability to the Middle East and South Asia.
As Canadians we should be grateful for the disclosure of a document reporting that our nominal ally and host in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai, told the American ambassador he prefers working with the U.S. military instead of the military from other NATO countries. That would be us.

The documents highlight Washington’s belief that the Chinese have no better understanding of what’s up with North Korea’s nuclear weapons program than does anybody else. That’s a valuable insight to start a public policy discussion on how to deal with North Korea.

We’re also told in the leaked documents U.S. officials doubt the Pakistan military will ever take on the extremist groups that attack NATO forces in Afghanistan and run operations against India. That, too, is valuable to know in any public debate about how to deal with security issues in the region.

Imagine how different the debate might have been in 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, if the public knew the Bush administration was blowing smoke about Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction.

But before Assange and his associates take a bow for their great journalism, consider this: documents are only one type of source. And, like other sources, they can be inaccurate. What if the ambassador in Kyrgyzstan simply misheard Prince Andrew and he was really badmouthing the Finns, not the French.

Good journalism requires trying to verify information. As valuable as these documents may be to journalists and for informing public debate, until WikiLeaks attempts verification what it’s doing is not journalism.