The Wikileaks files and government transparency

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New details, including reports on Osama Bin Laden dating from 2006, have emerged from 90,000 US military files leaked to the Wikileaks website. The details come as the Pentagon investigates who leaked the classified documents, in an act the White House says could harm national security.The World’s Alex Gallafent examines how the release of US military documents by Wikileaks raises questions about government transparency, security and responsibility. Download MP3

• Noah Schacthman’s Danger Room blog
• BBC coverage
• Washington condemns Afghanistan leaks
• New York Times: ‘The War Logs’

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. The firestorm over the leaking of classified reports about the war in Afghanistan has plenty of life left in it. The whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks revealed the documents. Stories about them appeared in the press yesterday. Now you’d think that the disclosure of all this information might help enlighten the public about what’s going on in Afghanistan. But tens of thousands of documents? Well, that might be too much information. The World’s Alex Gallafent says it’s not at all clear how we’re supposed to make sense of it all.

ALEX GALLAFENT:  President Obama today gave his first public comments about the leaking of the documents.

BARACK OBAMA:  While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations, the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.

GALLAFENT: Maybe not. But Rebekah Sanderlin is worried. Very worried. She has a personal reason to be concerned. Her husband serves in the US Army. She blogs about family life from her home near Fort Bragg.

REBEKAH SANDERLIN: My biggest fear with this leaked information is that it’s going to cause people to have a knee jerk reaction and then they might rush to judgment.

GALLAFENT: Sanderlin is concerned that people will assume not only that everything in the leak is accurate, but that they’ll think it’s a complete record of what’s been going on in Afghanistan. Sanderlin says she’s generally in favor of transparency. She’s a journalist by trade. But she argues that the documents don’t capture, for example, the information she gets directly from her husband about operations.

SANDERLIN: You know that there is value in there and I think that properly treated, but I think dumping, what was it, 90,000 reports onto the public at once, it’s really just too overwhelming for people to really look at the situations and properly consider it.

GALLAFENT: And yet secret documents are seductive. Secrets are seductive. Steven Aftergood directs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

STEVEN AFTERGOOD: People might think that, oh this is a classified document that I wasn’t supposed to see. It must contain the real truth, as opposed to the truth we think we know. And that assumption is really unwarranted. Classified documents are unlikely to have a higher truth quotient than newspaper reports or other kinds of documents. And it would be unrealistic to think otherwise.

BRUCE RIEDEL: What we have here is really raw data dumped out into the Internet.

GALLAFENT:  Former CIA officer Bruce Riedel says the data are now being mined for stories, for angles, for whatever people want to find. And that includes the Obama Administration.

RIEDEL: Both sides will cherry-pick, I’m sure, from this, but I think that the opponents of the war will probably be more inclined to mine these documents than the administration camp.

GALLAFENT: The Guardian, one of the three newspapers to receive the leaked documents in advance, is inviting its readers to analyze the data themselves and submit their own mash-ups and visualizations of what they find. Some of those reader-generated interpretations of the data may have less to do with the facts than with their biases. But that shouldn’t be a cause for concern, says Alasdair Roberts. He’s the author of Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age.

ALASDAIR ROBERTS: Some people may reach incorrect interpretations, but you have to have faith in the democratic process and the notion that the public at large will eventually sort out what seems to them to be the right interpretation of the facts available.

GALLAFENT: After all, as Roberts points out, the military data are no more complex than, say, financial data from a big investment bank. And few would argue that we need less information about the US mission in Afghanistan. What we need is to understand it. For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent.

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