Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers

daveschroeder writes "The recent release of classified State Department cables has often been compared to the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg, the US military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has said he supports WikiLeaks, and sees the issues as similar. Floyd Abrams is the prominent First Amendment attorney and Constitutional law expert who represented the New York Times in the landmark New York Times Co. v. United States (403 U.S. 713 (1971)) Supreme Court case, which allowed the media to publish the Pentagon Papers without fear of government censure. Today, Abrams explains why WikiLeaks is unlike the Pentagon Papers, and how WikiLeaks is negatively impacting journalism protections: 'Mr. Ellsberg himself has recently denounced the "myth" of the "good" Pentagon Papers as opposed to the "bad" WikiLeaks. But the real myth is that the two disclosures are the same.'"

Comments

Hypocrites

[Anonymous Coward]

They keep telling us that if we don't like them knowing what we are doing then maybe we shouldn't be doing it. How come we can't say the same in return? It seems even more difficult to swallow, considering they work for us via the hard earned money ripped from our hands to pay them to do these things.

Re:Hypocrites

[Antisyzygy]

US Government and all citizens working in an official capacity for said gov't don't?

To be fair, government officials do have a right to privacy as far as their life off the clock. While they work, their efforts and deeds must be recorded.

Re:Hypocrites

[afidel]

Bullshit. Civil Servants are as much if not more important to keep an eye on *because* they aren't directly responsible to the citizenry! In fact on of the biggest problem with the military industrial complex is that the companies and career staff don't feel like they are beholden to the chain of command because if they can just wait them out they will go away. This is why even when you have a strong leader like Gates who wants to reform things they are extremely slow to respond. One of the worst offenders against the liberties that Americans should hold dear was J. Edgar Hoover who was a civil servant.

Re:Hypocrites

[locallyunscene]

I'm impressed with how ably you've managed to steer the conversation. You're original post referenced many things:
The usefulness of the released cables
The usefulness of "Collateral Murder"
The usefulness of everything WikiLeaks has released
The general idea that The People need to know what The Gov't is doing
And you've used conflation of these ideas as a rhetoric attack and defense. If someone's not paying you for this they should be.

Personally, I'm not happy about how the cables have been released. A lot of the cables don't show corruption and are indeed things that should have been left private to diplomats. However there is important evidence of corruption in there. Some examples: the Afghani president's missing 52 million dollars(which is someone's tax payer money), tax subsidised DynCorps providing children to lavish parties, Hillary Clinton's and Condoleezza Rice's UN spying orders.
There's a reasonable debate whether the need of exposing corruption such as this is worth the harm to diplomatic relations it causes, but that's not the point you're making. You're saying because dgatwood won't expose his private email server, there is no argument for WikiLeaks exposing any state secrets. You side-step his point about The People in a democracy needing to be informed about their Gov't. by invoking a slippery slope argument.
The point that dgatwood was trying to make was not that diplomatic cables should be viewed by all, but that transparency is key in a functioning democracy that has any goal of being moral. There is a line where safety trumps transparency, but that line has been over extended where everything is a secret. A lot of the Afghan War documents were not that shocking to anyone who understands we're in a war, but this administration and the past one have been doing their darndest to make the American public forget we are in a war. Almost all of the stuff in the released documents were things that would have been reported in newspapers 50 years ago. But in this age of embedded journalism, military officers working as media pundits The People is missing the key ingredient to preventing war, understanding how terrible it is.

Re:Hypocrites

[bstender]

elect better people? havent we been trying that for over 200 years?

insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

seems to me that the _only_ possible way to make our servants accountable, (and honest and lawful) is to increase transparency, top to bottom.

No it's not Wikileaks that is negative impacting

[santax]

No it's not Wikileaks that is negative impacting journalism protection... That is like saying, it where the jews that negatively impacted Nazi-German war-crimes. It really are the bastards trying to prosecute Wikileaks and Assange that are negatively impacting free speech and journalism. Make no mistake about that part.

Perspective

[Felix Da Rat]

WikiLeaks is different. It revels in the revelation of "secrets" simply because they are secret.

The article misses one huge fact - Mr. Ellsberg is an American, Mr. Assange is not. While Ellsberg leaked information people needed to know, he was doing so to show how his country was lying to the population. Assange shows other countries places where their governments have lied to their people due to US pressure.

Who is served by the release of these cables is a huge difference between the two situations.

Re:The Gist

[dkleinsc]

Wikileaks has not released 97% of the diplomatic cables they currently have access to, and have redacted a great deal to prevent exposure of legitimate secrets like troop movements and identities of spies. That means that (a) not all of it was leaked initially, (b) portions of it may be held back for years because they would harm legitimate US national security interests, and (c) that the purposes of the leaks were to show exactly what lies the US and other governments have been telling the public, particularly in relation to the "war on terror". I don't blame you for getting that fact wrong though: Many US officials from both major parties have repeatedly stated that Wikileaks dumped all the information all at once, when in fact nothing of that sort has happened.