Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange’s goal to expose the U.S. military’s inefficiency and wrongdoing is noble; but the means he has chosen are dangerous, his scofflaw tactics that have shattered informants’ trust in us and have compromised the integrity of our laws.
Wikileaks may be withholding 15,000 documents as they redact the names of informants, but the identities of many informants have already been revealed in the 75,000 documents of the Afghan War Diary. These revelations enabled the Taliban to identify and murder informants, forced those lucky enough not to be murdered to flee, and marred would-be informants’ trust in the U.S. military’s ability to maintain secrecy. Wikileaks ruined lives and confounded the war effort.
Mr. Holmes suggests this debacle has exposed the inefficiency of the “classified documents industry,” but the large number of documents merely may be a product of the ease of computer aided data storage. The cost metrics may justify producing an additional thousand documents for one gem; and, for the government, to err on the side of caution should be to document.
Moreover, those who have supplied information to Wikileaks have broken the law. If the people of the United States believe that current policy fails to hold the military accountable for its misconduct and needlessly withholds important information, then the people have democratic channels through which they can realize their vision. Until the law is modified, we ought to respect the integrity of our legal system by following it. A legally sanctioned process would be less dangerous than a wholesale data dump.
Ed Seyler is a music industry junior. He can be reached at [email protected]
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