Over the last few days, the website WikiLeaks and its Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange have made international news headlines by publishing almost 400,000 classified United States military field reports from the War in Iraq. Such a publication brings up questions of credibility and responsibility that the US government, WikiLeaks, and the American people should answer.
Assange, an Australian computer hacker who started the site in 2006, has a reputation and flair for the dramatic. His Monday-night round table discussion in London was no different. “The Pentagon lies, and it lies frequently,” he said.
The event, held at Frontline Club, sold out before I heard about it. Thanks to modern technology I got to watch a live stream of it. For almost two hours, Assange took questions from the crowd and CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer, who hosted the discussion.
With every answer, the messy-haired Assange cultivated a notion of WikiLeaks as the hero and most everybody else, especially the US government, as a villain. His explanation of such a dichotomy was comical, as most issues of great significance are hardly that black and white. Just minutes before his comment about the Pentagon lying, Assange responded to a question about WikiLeaks’ goals. “Truth doesn’t need a policy objective,” he said. In other words, the government lies and WikiLeaks tells the truth.
Such a declaration makes for a nice quote, but is it credible? Can we trust WikiLeaks to provide people the “truth,” as Assange so often claims? How does an organization with a goal of increasing transparency lack such transparency in its own organization? His answer on Monday night amounted to an assertion that getting delicate information requires anonymity and secrecy. His answer is a convenient one. In this way, he can publish any information he gets without having the ability to fully corroborate it with the source. Any journalist, as Assange claims to be, should be wary of any information gathered in such a clandestine way. That being said, WikiLeaks claims to make a “detailed examination” of all its documents to judge their credibility and has made a name for itself as a source of accuracy. From a case of $3 billion corruption in Kenya to the insider trading documents from JP Morgan, the site has continued to be right about the information it publishes. The site goes as far as to say it “has correctly identified the veracity of every document it has published.”
Because of the WikiLeak’s history for accuracy, the American government has a responsibility to address and investigate the information contained in the reports. I want to know if the information in those 391,831 documents is accurate. If it’s false, tell me why. If it’s true, and I’m betting it’s true, make the necessary steps to correct the inaccuracies of past reports and statements. The most obvious example of this is the reports of torture. Torture is not acceptable. It violates the inalienable rights set fourth in the Declaration of Independence.
Saying either Assange or the American government is correct and telling the “truth” is unproductive. The inherent debate between security interests and transparency interests locate this debate in more of a gray area. It is difficult to assess the increased security risks based on this report. So far, however, no WikiLeaks-related deaths have been reported as a result of either large-scale publication of documents. The question now is can the US government see WikiLeaks’ side of the security-transparency debate? I hope the answer is a yes. For the hypocrisy of ignoring the released information is something I’d rather not think about.
Ray Whitehouse is a Medill junior and is currently studying abroad in London. He can be reached at [email protected].
