Brandjack News

By Quentin Langley

Let us start by accepting that there are serious negative consequences to the latest batch of Wikileaks. They are less serious than the previous tranche, which covered actual battlefield tactics in the war against the Taliban, but they are serious nonetheless. They are highly embarrassing to the US, and even more embarrassing to other governments, including key western allies. It is even possible that they will put lives at risk, as the State Department claims. That Julian Assange claims to have redacted everything that would expose Afghan sources to reprisals is, I suppose, to his credit. But it is unlikely that he succeeded in this aim. He doesn’t know what information al Qaeda and the Taliban already have, so he cannot know what new information, when combined with this unknown old information, will point them in the direction of patriotic Afghans who oppose the Taliban.

The whole Wikileaks project will therefore certainly lead to death and torture for innocent Afghan and Iraqi patriots. But the fact that there are risks, does not make the project as a whole one which is a bad thing, on net. The motor car has killed huge numbers of people, but, overall, the wealth and freedom it has promoted has saved and enhanced more lives than it has cost.

From now on governments, and other organisations, are going to have to accept that secrecy doesn’t work any more. Overall, that is good.

Right now, we have a biased impression of Wikileaks. Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal, accused Julian Assange of waging cyber-warfare against the US. In a sense, that is true. He has done more damage to the US than anything the Taliban or al Qaeda has managed lately, and in the short term he is certainly advancing the cause of Osama bin Laden.

But there is a reason why much of the information in the Wikileaks seems mundane. There is a reason why much of the information is confidential assessments of foreign governments, which there are good reasons for keeping confidential. And there is a good reason why most of the embarrassment so far has been for governments other than that of the US – such as the awful Gulf monarchies. The US was the easiest target for Wikileaks, but also the government put least at risk by this sort of revelation.

The US has both had a statute of Freedom of Information and an ingrained culture of transparency for decades. All the stuff where there was no justification for secrecy has already been revealed. That’s how they do it in the US. That is not how they do it in most other countries.

One day – perhaps soon – Wikileaks will uncover information on a similar scale about the government of China, or that of Iran. Perhaps similar information will emerge about less malevolent governments, like those of India or Nigeria, which will shine the light on deeply ingrained corruption.

These revelations are such that the US can shrug it off. There will be no impeachment of Barack Obama as a result. But there are many other governments which cannot afford to shrug off similar revelations.

There are people right now who are very worried about the future survival of their governments, and their own survival as individuals. Those people are not in the White House or on Capitol Hill. They are in Tehran, Beijing, Havana, Harare, Riyadh, Tripoli . . . I could go on, but there is no need. That handful of governments would do for a start.