WikiLeaks: Open secrets
Never in their wildest nightmares could politicians, bankers, dissidents, world leaders and government officials have imagined that their confidences would be thus distributed
How secret is "secret?" That is the first question posed by the publication today of material derived from the leak of a quarter of a million US state department cables in the Guardian and a number of other newspapers. Much of the material is certainly very private. When people around the world tell sensitive things to American diplomats they do so in the expectation that there is a high degree of implicit confidentiality about the conversations. But "private" is not the same as "secret". It now transpires that these confidences were posted on a US government intranet, SIPDIS, for a very wide distribution among diplomatic, government and military circles. They may have been marked "secret" but all secrets are relative: there are around 3 million Americans cleared to read material thus classified.
The American authorities evidently suspect that the cables – as with the already-published Iraqi and Afghan war logs – were leaked by Private Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old soldier who was able to access them from his post as a junior intelligence officer based in Baghdad. Never in their wildest nightmares could politicians, bankers, dissidents, world leaders, government officials and other sources have imagined that their confidences would be thus distributed to the four corners of the American map. Before US government officials point accusing fingers at others, they might first have the humility to reflect on their own role in scattering "secrets" around a global intranet.
The next question: what is a secret? It is worth remembering the words Max Frankel, a former editor of the New York Times, wrote to his paper's own lawyers as they were fighting off the litigation around the 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, a comparable leak to the present one. He wrote: "Practically everything that our government does, plans, thinks, hears and contemplates in the realm of foreign policy is stamped and treated as secret – and then unraveled by that same government, by the Congress and by the press in one continuing round of professional and social contacts and co-operative exchanges of information."
The information sent to WikiLeaks falls into different categories. There are things that were widely known, but which acquire special significance by virtue of the quality of the source or analysis. It will hardly come as a surprise to President Ahmadinejad, for instance, that he is not flavour of the month in many Arab states. But it is interesting, and significant, to learn what the leaders of Gulf states have said in private; to hear how vehemently they expressed their views; and to compare those private expressions with their public positions. There are things that were not widely known outside a tight circle: the true position on controversial issues of repressive regimes, for instance, or the unguarded remarks of world leaders who imagined they were in safe company. Finally, there are matters which were not known by the wider world – one example being a directive in Hillary Clinton's name for diplomats to gather personal intelligence, including biometric information and email addresses, on the UN leadership. This was one of a number of "human intelligence directives" sent out by the state department across SIPDIS to diplomats across the world, instructing them to gather such information on a wide variety of people.
Once the material fell into the hands of WikiLeaks, an organisation dedicated to publising information of all kinds, there was no realistic chance of it being supressed. While opposing publication, the US administration has acknowledged that the involvement of news organisations has not only given protection to many sources, but has also given a context to information which, had it been simply dumped, would have been both overwhelming and free of any such context. As Timothy Garton Ash puts it: it is both a historian's dream and a diplomat's nightmare.
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