WikiLeaks’ trove of diplomatic secrets

What happened

The Obama administration was scrambling this week to contain the damage from the publication of 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables on the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. “There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people and nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who joined her staff in phoning foreign capitals with apologies and explanations. Attorney General Eric Holder announced “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into WikiLeaks and its elusive founder and editor-in-chief, Julian Assange, whose whereabouts are not publicly known. Interpol, meanwhile, put its international weight behind Sweden’s warrant for Assange’s arrest on rape charges, which Assange’s lawyer dismissed as “a persecution, not a prosecution.”

The documents’ revelations range from the serious to the merely titillating. One directive signed by Hillary Clinton instructed diplomats to gather personal information, including credit card and frequent-flier account numbers, on foreign and United Nations officials. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan expressed grave U.S. concerns over Pakistan’s ability to keep highly enriched uranium from a reactor out of the hands of terrorists. One cable suggested that China was so fed up with North Korea’s erratic and “childish” behavior that it was resigned to the communist regime’s eventual collapse and reunification with the South; another reported that the U.S. and Yemen had collaborated to lie about American anti-terrorist operations there. Still another cable noted that former Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud carried $52 million in cash out of Kabul on a trip to the United Arab Emirates last year. (For more on WikiLeaks, see Controversy.)

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What the editorials said

Let’s take some “WikiScalps,” said the New York Post. The legality of prosecuting Assange for airing these documents remains uncertain, so Obama should embrace Republican Rep. Peter King’s suggestion that WikiLeaks be designated as a “terrorist organization.” That would block U.S. banks and credit card companies from processing online payments to the group, and make it a felony to provide “material support or resources” to Assange and his reckless organization.

Attacking WikiLeaks would be “an overreaction,” said The Washington Post. Prosecuting Assange “would turn a man now widely perceived as a self-promoting sex-crimes suspect into an international martyr.” The smarter response would be to find out how a low-level operative like the suspected leaker, 22-year-old Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, could so easily access such a trove of sensitive data. One report claims that 3 million U.S. soldiers and low-level officials have access to this kind of material, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When you’ve got that many people behind the government’s firewall, “don’t be surprised when you get leaks.”

What the columnists said

Manning is “a hero,” not a criminal, said Sheldon Richman in The Christian Science Monitor. A government that pursues pre-emptive wars “justified by at best questionable or at worst fabricated intelligence” deserves to have its secret machinations revealed. “It is only an imperial foreign policy that cannot be conducted in public.”

What a deluded view, said Heather Hurlburt in The New Republic Online. These leaks are actually a disaster for anyone who believes that “quiet talk is much more effective than loud threats.” Without the confidence that secret conversations will “stay quiet,” there would have been no Camp David accords, and no Nixon in China. WikiLeakers naïvely think they’re promoting the cause of peace, but they’re doing the opposite—dividing allies, sowing suspicion, increasing the chances of conflict and war.

Once you put aside the salacious gossip, said Leslie Gelb in TheDailyBeast.com, what these diplomatic cables really reveal are “American leaders trying to solve the world’s problems,” and seeking peaceful outcomes and the defeat of terrorism. What the cables don’t show, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post, is the leftist stereotype of “the ugly American.” Our diplomats are seen pursuing straightforward goals such as keeping nuclear weaponry “out of the hands of bad actors,” while contending with a “Bizarro World” populated by the duplicitous Vladimir Putin, the insane Muammar al-Qaddafi, and scores of potentates and presidents “essentially allergic to candor and straight talk.”