The Distress Signal

Executed as Spies

WikiLeaks has been taking a bit of a pounding from the right since it began the release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables last week. Sarah Palin called for the organization’s founder Julian Assange to be treated as a terrorist and described him as an “anti-American operative with blood on his hands”. Mike Huckabee, and others in the right wing press, went further and suggested that those involved in the leak should be executed as spies.

From Red State:

..my preferred course of action would for Assange to find a small caliber round in the back of his head.

Meanwhile, Senator Liberman and members of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee managed to bully Amazon into dropping WikiLeaks from it’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) service. The site had earlier moved to EC2 following several DDOS attacks on it’s servers in Sweden.

While the right indulges in its usual vim and verve about how far they’re willing to go to “protect” the American Way, far enough to trample all over it, I thought it might be helpful to keep in mind a few points about what WikiLeaks has really been trying to accomplish:

From the recent cover story in Forbes:

Kaupthing Bank collapsed in October 2008—a calamitous chain reaction that has strapped Iceland with $128 billion in debts, around $400,000 per capita. Ten months later Bogi Agustsson, a Walter Cronkite-ish anchor for Icelandic national broadcaster RUV, appeared on the evening news and explained that a legal injunction had prevented the station from airing a prepared exposé on Kaupthing. Viewers who wanted to see the material, he suggested, should visit a site called Wikileaks.org.

In September 2009 Commodities giant Trafigura filed an injunction that prevented British media from mentioning a damaging internal report. The memo showed the company had dumped tons of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, chemicals that allegedly sickened 100,000 locals. But it couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from publishing the information. Trafigura eventually paid more than $200 million in settlements.

Reuters, through the Freedom of Information Act, tried unsuccessfully for two years to get the U.S. military to release video of a Baghdad assault in 2007 that left 12 people dead including two employees of Reuters (Mr. Noor-Eldeed and Mr. Chmagh). Someone got the video and handed it off to WikiLeaks who decrypted it and published it online.

From the NYTimes coverage:

The American military in Baghdad investigated the episode and concluded that the forces involved had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group. No disciplinary action was taken.

The video though, painted a brutal portrait of war and the shocking way in which innocent people become victims.

From the same NYTimes article:

it begins with a group of people milling around on a street, among them, according to WikiLeaks, Mr. Noor-Eldeen and Mr. Chmagh. The pilots believe them to be insurgents, and mistake Mr. Noor-Eldeen’s camera for a weapon. They aim and fire at the group, then revel in their kills.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one pilot says. “Nice,” the other responds.

A wounded man can be seen crawling and the pilots impatiently hope that he will try to fire at them so that under the rules of engagement they can shoot him again. “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon,” one pilot says.

A short time later a van arrives to pick up the wounded and the pilots open fire on it, wounding two children inside. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one pilot says.

At another point, an American armored vehicle arrives and appears to roll over one of the dead. “I think they just drove over a body,” one of the pilots says, chuckling a little.

War is horrible. That fact should be able to be made painfully clear to everyone, lest we forget. If WikiLeaks had been around in the run up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq maybe we would have been better informed about just how ridiculous the Bush Administration’s argument for jumping into that conflict really was. Maybe it would have been easier to remind everyone just how horrible war is and how desperately it should be avoided. Maybe the U.S. could have been kept out of an unnecessary war.

My point is this:

In a society where the free press has become marginalized by an ecosystem of corruption, no one is left to hold the wealthy and powerful in check to create balance for the people.

Is what WikiLeaks is doing, strictly speaking, really Journalism? No, probably not. They don’t provide any real context or analysis to the material, they just publish it. Like a big Xerox machine on the Net, they publish what people send them. They provide “a secure and anonymous way for independent sources around the world to leak information to journalists.”

It may not be journalism as we’ve known it in the past, but it does enable journalism, most critically in it’s role to inform the citizenry. And, According to legal experts, it enjoys the same protections under the law.

Ultimately what WikiLeaks is trying to do, I think, is to provide some cover so real journalists can get back to doing what they’re supposed to. Inform the public and hold those in power accountable for their well-being.

As usual, someone already said it way better than I ever could:

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution — not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants” — but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

The above was from President Kennedy’s speech to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961. Listen to the whole speech.