WikiLeaks v. State Department

There’s been another major WikiLeaks data dump. The previous ones which made the news here in America focused on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this one shifts focus from the Pentagon to the State Department, releasing around 250,000 lightly classified documents which reveal the inner workings of US diplomatic relations.

The usual cast of clowns are up in arms about this, calling for a quasi-Stalinist government stranglehold of information and war on the press for reporting  embarrassing facts about them. Republican Congressman Pete King of Long Island, NY, is calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a terrorist organization, and the reality television star / internet troll Sarah Palin compared WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the Taliban.  She also suggested that the government use “cyber tools” in order to track him down. Perhaps the cyber police could use their cyber tools in order to backtrace it. And when that happens, consequences will never be the same.

But the American right wing isn’t the only political faction angry with WikiLeaks. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that WikiLeaks is part of an American plot against his country with the goal of stopping Iranian nuclear capabilities because some of the leaked cables contain pleas from other countries in the region calling on the American political leadership to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

To be fair, Ahmadinejad is not exactly the Taliban. For one thing, Iran is mostly Shia while the Taliban is Sunni. But when you’ve got two opposing sides, like the political leaderships of America and Iran, and they both accuse a journalistic organization of being on the side of their enemy, then that’s a pretty strong indication that the journalistic organization in question is not a part of either camp. They’re just doing their job. And that job happens to involve publishing information which will make powerful people in all camps extremely angry.

I normally stay away from sports metaphors, but if you’ve got two opposing teams both of which accuse the referee of favoring their opponents, then similarly that would be a pretty strong indication that the ref is actually being fair and that it’s the players who are biased in their own favor. WikiLeaks is like that kind of referee, but obviously on a much more significant scale.

So the whining of world political leaders over WikiLeaks have basically here been reduced to the level of discourse normally reserved for Buffalo sports fans. Or even, now, the players themselves, but that’s a different story altogether. It’s pathetic.

Joe Lieberman has also weighed in on the subject. He, like many others, is of the opinion that WL puts American lives at risk, but stops short of calling them a terrorist organization. White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs also reiterated the claim that WL puts American lives at risk. But this seems to be largely just chest-pounding, since neither statements contain any specific information in the now-public cables which connect the data to any risk at all. Lieberman and Gibbs are simply asserting that claim without any data to support their assertions. And it can’t reasonably be said that drawing a specific connection between the cables and supposed danger to American diplomats must remained classified because thanks to WikiLeaks and the newspapers involved, those cables are now available to the public.

The only way that the position of “WL endangers Americans” can be maintained would be if a much more general connection were to be made. For example, since the release of these documents makes the DoS look bad, then other countries might be less willing to cooperate with them. But that would be the case for any reporting which reflected poorly on the State Department. Taken to its logical conclusion, that line of thinking would mean a necessary prior restraint on any reporting on the State Department, which would be a problem in a country with something like a First Amendment and a Supreme Court which rules against prior restraint.

If that weren’t bad enough for this “OMG Julian Assange endangers Americans” argument, there’s one final nail in the coffin here. Prior to the release of these documents, WL offered to review the information by proxy with the State Department, just as they had with the Pentagon in the previous cases involving military issues. Here is a link to the relevant correspondences from the UK’s Index on Censorship, but this is the important quote which gives lie to this claim about how the State Department would do anything to prevent these alleged risks to American lives, from State Department legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh:

We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials

So even if you were to believe the ‘putting lives at risk’ claim at face value, the underlying and unspoken claim that the State Department cares very much about these risks is completely ridiculous. They clearly don’t care enough about these imaginary risks to bother talking to a few icky computer nerd hackers. Gross!

A tale of two nontroversies

I really don’t like getting caught up in the faux-controversies like the two I’m about to get caught up in. The way I understand it, controversies are supposed to involve two opposing positions, both of which are intellectually defensible by well-informed adults. These do not qualify by that definition, but the hypocrisy is just so glaringly obvious that it really needs to be pointed out. Here’s what I’m talking about:

1. The construction of an Islamic cultural center two-ish blocks from Ground Zero by a Muslim group, the leader of which worked with the Bush administration as an example of moderate Islam, and
2. A person named Laura Schlessinger on some primitive invention called “radio” said some very racist things to one of her callers.

The right wing’s reaction to the cultural center has largely been that it shouldn’t be built because it might hurt the feelings of New Yorkers and 9/11 victims’ families. There are some notable exceptions, like the Libertarian-style economist Grover Norquist and NYC mayor/billionaire media bigshot Michael Bloomberg. But for the most part the line has been that this offends some people and is opposed by popular opinion. Here is one example. Here is CNN making a big deal of poll numbers. And Twitter user Sarah Palin used the Twitter to explain why the “mosque” (which isn’t a mosque, actually) is very offensive and not at all politically correct and must be stopped somehow:

In other words, rights (and bills which outline them) have to be subordinate to popular opinion and political correctness. That’s what the opposition to this is all about. If it weren’t, then there’d be no need to continue the conversation beyond agreeing that they have the right to build it, because whether or not they should is completely irrelevant.

What’s weird about this is that whenever someone casually refers to America as a democracy, it’s always these same people – Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and people like that – who nitpick the point by correcting them. America’s not a democracy, they say, because democracy means everything is decided by a majority vote. And if you really want to get that pedantic about it, then it’s a fair point, because America’s a republic. We make some decisions by majority vote, some are made by elected representatives, but some issues – rights, for instance – aren’t open to debate or discussion. It’s the job of the government to insure those rights for the citizenry. If this were a strict democracy, then a majority could vote to take away the rights of minorities (although, to be fair usually when someone says that we’re a democratic country, they mean by that that we have elections and free access to information and stuff like that, unlike totalitarian dictatorships).

There’s another inconsistency here, too. They don’t actually come out and use the term “politically correct,” but that’s the perspective they’re defending when they talk about how a cultural center at a former Burlington Coat Factory will offend people and therefore plans to build it should be halted. So you would think that when it came to another issue where the shoe is on the other foot, we should expect some consistency from Republicans on the question of rights v. political correctness.

But of course that’s not the case. When Laura Schlessinger went off on a crazy racist rant about how black (or “buhhh-LACK,” as she puts it) people  are overly sensitive and lack a sense of humor, Twitter user Sarah Palin used the Twitter to defend the radio host:

And this is almost verbatim what Schlessinger herself had to say about her situation. Apparently her First Amendment rights were taken away because her bosses decided to can her for being an ignorant hick. Also, none of her critics even said anything about government involvement inre: Schlessinger’s right to free speech as far as I know.

But even if we were to be generous and pretend that Schlessinger’s First Amendment rights were taken away (she said so on Larry King’s show, apparently without anyone in the government stopping her from doing so, but whatever), this is still a very clear double standard. You’d have to be blind not to notice it. In one case First Amendment rights need to be subjugated to the “will of the people” and cater to hurt feelings; and in the other First Amendment rights are precious and need to be defended regardless of how offended someone might be by someone else using them.

Here’s the best way to illustrate how obvious the double standard is: take any of the statements Gingrich, Palin, Limbaugh, or anyone like that made about Park 51. Then do a quick find/replace so that it’s appropriate to the Schlessinger story. And vice versa. This is what I got:

Schlessinger’s employers were teaching her a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.
-Charles Krauthammer

In that case, Krauthammer would actually be correct if he said that. The airwaves Schlessinger broadcasted on actually were owned by others: her employers. But he was making an analogy with Park 51 in the original quote and there he’s wrong. The Cordoba Initiative purchased the property completely legally and followed every step of due process in approving the construction of the building with the local authorities. It doesn’t “belong to others” – it belongs to them.

Or how about this one:

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: don’t retreat…reload! (Steps aside bc his 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence”isn’t American,not fair”)
-Sarah Palin

That would probably go over well, right? If Palin or literally anybody else tweeted to Rauf to “reload” and fight against the activists taking away his rights, what kind of reaction would you expect from Fox News? Is there any chance in hell they wouldn’t throw a gigantic week-long hissy fit over it?

Whether the Republicans want to be either the people who value hurt feelings and political correctness over Constitutional rights or the reverse, that’s up to them. It would just be nice to have a little consistency. At the very least they could try not to take such extreme and opposite ideological positions on the First Amendment in the span of a few days.