Floyd Abrams: Wikileaks is Not Like the Pentagon Papers
Floyd Abrams represented the New York Times in the case of the Pentagon Papers, and has a must-read piece today in the Wall Street Journal: Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers.
The recent release of a torrent of State Department documents is typical. Some, containing unflattering appraisals by American diplomats of foreign leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Libya and elsewhere, contain the very sort of diplomacy-destructive materials that Mr. Ellsberg withheld. Others—the revelation that Syria continued selling missiles to Hezbollah after explicitly promising America it would not do so, for example—provide a revealing glimpse of a world that few ever see. Taken as a whole, however, a leak of this elephantine magnitude, which appears to demonstrate no misconduct by the U.S., is difficult to defend on any basis other than WikiLeaks’ general disdain for any secrecy at all.
Mr. Ellsberg understood that some government documents should remain secret, at least for some period of time. Mr. Assange views the very notion of government secrecy as totalitarian in nature. He has referred to his site as “an uncensorable system for untraceable document leaking and analysis.”
But WikiLeaks offers no articles of its own, no context of any of the materials it discloses, and no analysis of them other than assertions in press releases or their equivalent. As Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told the Associated Press earlier this month, WikiLeaks seems rooted in a “simpleminded idea of secrecy and transparency,” one that is “simply offended by any actions that are cloaked.”
Ironically, this view of the world may aid Mr. Assange in avoiding criminal liability for his actions.
