Washington’s paranoiac wig out on WikiLeaks

Sadly, this is far from the first time politicians and powers- that-be have found the First Amendment inconvenient for their purposes
Experts testify on “Espionage Act, Legal and Constitutional Implications of WikiLeaks”
Editing, excerpt , comment by Carolyn Bennett

In his testimony on Thursday before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Thomas Blanton, the Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University developed three points:

• Government always overreacts to leaks, and history shows we end up with more damage from the overreaction than from the original leak.
• Government’s national security classification system is broken, overwhelmed with too much secrecy, which actually prevents the system from protecting the real secrets. The rest should all come out.
• National affliction with ‘Wikimania’ wherein Wikimyths are common lends far more heat than light – heat that will actually produce more leaks, more crackdowns, less accountable government, and diminished security.

This is some of Blanton’s detailed testimony.

“The heated calls for targeted assassinations of leakers and publishers remind me of the Nixon White House discussions of firebombing the Brookings Institution on suspicion of housing a copy of the Pentagon Papers. It was the earlier leak of the secret bombing of Cambodia that started President Nixon down the path to the Watergate plumbers, who began with righteous indignation about leaks, then moved to black bag jobs, and break-ins, and dirty tricks, and brought down the presidency.…

“Few have gone as far as Nixon, but overreaction to leaks has been a constant in recent American history. Almost every president has tied his White House in knots over embarrassing internal leaks. … 

The moment of greatest conflict between President Reagan and his Secretary of State George Shultz was not over the Iran-contra affair, but over the idea of subjecting Shultz and other high officials to the polygraph as part of a leak prevention campaign.

President Ford went from supporting to vetoing the Freedom of Information Act amendments of 1974 because of his reaction to leaks (only to be overridden by Congress).

President George W. Bush was so concerned about leaks — and about aggrandizing presidential power — that his and Vice President Cheney’s top staff kept the Deputy Attorney General (number two at Justice) out of the loop on the warrantless wiretapping program. [They] didn’t even share legal opinions about the program with the top lawyers of the National Security Agency that was implementing the intercepts. 

“Even with this background, I have been astonished at the developments of the last week, with the Air Force and the Library of Congress blocking the WikiLeaks web site, and warning their staff not to even peek. I should have known the Air Force would come up with something like this. The [National Security] Archive’s own Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over the last 5 years had already established that the Air Force created probably the worst FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] processing system in the entire federal government – the federal judge in our case ruled the Air Force had ‘miserably failed’ to meet the law’s requirements. Now, apparently, the worst FOIA system has found a mate in the worst open-source information system?

“This policy is completely self-defeating and foolish. If Air Force personnel do not look at the leaked cables, then they are not doing their job as national security professionals.

“Now comes the Library of Congress, built on [third U.S. President] Thomas Jefferson’s books, also blocking access to the WikiLeaks site. On the LC blog, a repeated question has been ‘when exactly are you going to cut off the New York Times site too?’ One might also ask: when will you remove Bob Woodward’s books from the shelves?

“Official reactions like these show how we are suffering from ‘Wikimania.’…

“We need to clear out our backlog of historic secrets that should long since have appeared on the public shelves, and slow the creation of new secrets. Those voices who argue for a crackdown on leakers and publishers need to face the reality that their approach is fundamentally self-defeating because it will increase government secrecy, reduce our security, and actually encourage more leaks from the continued legitimacy crisis of the classification system....”

Sources and notes

Since 1992, Thomas Blanton has been the director (since 1992) of the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The Archive relies for its $3.5 million annual budget on publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals. The organization receives no government funding and carries out no government contracts.

Blanton is series editor of the Archive’s Web, CD-DVD, fiche and book publications of over a million pages of previously secret U.S. government documents obtained through the Archive’s more than 40,000 Freedom of Information Act requests. Blanton co-founded the virtual network of international FOI advocates www.freedominfo.org, and is co-chair of the steering committee of the public interest coalition OpenTheGovernment.org.

Blanton is author of The Chronology (1987) on the Iran-contra scandal; White House E-Mail (1995) on the 6-year lawsuit that saved over 30 million records; and Masterpieces of History (2010) on the collapse of Communism in 1989. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, Diplomatic History and in languages ranging from Romanian to Spanish to Japanese to Finnish, inventors of the world’s first Freedom of Information (FOI) laws.

Statement of Thomas Blanton, Director, National Security Archive, George Washington University, www.nsarchive.org, to the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on the Espionage Act and the Legal and Constitutional Implications of Wikileaks, Thursday, December 16, 2010, Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2141 Washington D.C., http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Blanton101216.pdf

_____________________________________________

Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
_____________________________________________