After some exchange with a couple of people on Twitter regarding the WikiLeaks subject, I decide to post some quick, personal notes here, where I’m not limited to 140 characters of text, though I still aim for brevity.
To give you some context on what shapes my opinion (in no specific order and obviously not an exhaustive list):
- I have strong libertarian beliefs. I believe my personal freedom is extremely important and to achieve that I’m willing to fight for your personal freedom.
- I served in the U.S. Army
- I read a lot, on a broad range of topics
- I don’t limit myself to ‘friendly’ sources of information
Now some of my thoughts on WikiLeaks:
- Governments should be held accountable for their actions
- A republic is bound by the rule of law, which is rooted in the shared values and morals of the citizenry
- In a republic, journalism is the primary means of gaining insight into the workings and dealings of the government
- Journalism then, has a moral and ethical responsibility to be unbiased and thorough in investigating and revealing the workings and dealings of the government. Anything short of that and journalism becomes a part of or an extension to the government.
- The funding of journalism must either be 100% transparent, or 100% double-blind; meaning neither the donors nor the recipients know where the money came from or where it’s going. Since there’s no mechanism for the later, we must stick to the former; 100% transparency in funding. This should be obvious; if a particular group of journalists owe their very existence to a particular funding source, that dependency can become a lever for ideological manipulation (consider Soros or Murdoch/Koch).
Therefore I strongly agree with the premise of WikiLeaks, which is in part:
We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.
However, as I stated in a previous post, titled Collateral Damage In A War Of Choice (April 9, 2010), WikiLeaks has an established history of manipulating what they release and that defeats their stated purpose by removing transparency and adding a layer of deceit, regardless of how righteous they may believe they are acting. By editing or by cherry-picking what they leak, they completely destroy their credibility. By concealing their source of funding, they conceal their “owner/master.”
Only a free, unrestrained and unbiased press can effectively expose deception in government.
here is a recommendation about the other side of the total transparency expectation.
http://shortlinks.de/0719
(no idea if the html will work here, i'll try: click.
I'm not sure what you're referring to as "cherry picking" in that link. Are you referring to the other 15,000 documents they've yet to leak?
I'm not sure how withholding 15,000 documents for harm minimization is "cherry picking." And as for the timing, Wikileaks has never claimed to be impartial. They are openly anti-war.
Very good point…we'll certainly have a better idea of potentially nefarious motives once the remaining documents are released. If they come back a scathing reflection of poor management even under Obama then we can further suspect manipulation (i.e. it could be argued that WikiLeaks was convinced to time the release of the final 15,000 documents to coincide with a political agenda).
I hope to be wrong, because I want to believe in the idea of WikiLeaks.
I could be wrong, but I don't think the last 15,000 were necessarily in chronological order, and there are were war docs released from as recent as the end of 2009 (when Obama was president). That's probably as late as they have files. My guess is that the "insurance file" is the other 15,000, un-redacted in case something interrupts their process before they are done redacting names. (But of course it would be more fun if it were something else.)