Last month, I flagged a letter Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Jim Webb, D-Va., wrote on Nov. 7 to National Archivist David S. Ferriero asking him to open the records of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ferriero had previously and summarily sealed those records for 20 years. Guess what? Webb’s office tells me they still haven’t received a reply. Where’s Wikileaks when you need them?
It’s been about a year since the furor crescendoed over Wikileaks. Then and now, I consider the revelations of lying, incompetence and betrayal of foundational principle as revealed by the massive dumps of classified documents by the Wikileaks organization to be a public service.
The fact is, a government of the people, by the people and for the people, whose officials, as recently noted in the New York Times, “made 77 million decisions to classify information” in 2010 alone, should have the shutters yanked off so the sun can shine in.
Unfortunately, we just get more shutters. For example, the Obama administration just sealed the court records on the murder of federal agent Brian Terry, whose killers, Mexican drug smugglers, used weapons from a failed federal program — Fast and Furious — to smuggle arms into Mexico.
As Judicial Watch noted, “no one will know the reason for the confiscation of public court records in this case because the judge’s decision to seal it was also sealed.” That’s about as secret as it gets.
By contrast, what Wikileaks was dealing with was classified information, which the 4.2 million Americans with security clearances already could read.
Yes, you read that number right. In its first public count ever, the intelligence community reported to Congress in September that 4.2 million Americans have security clearances, with nearly 1.2 million of those being “Top Secret.”
Suddenly, the charges against Bradley Manning, the Army private who allegedly leaked tens of thousands of classified documents, whose pretrial hearings begin next week, fall into a quite sprawling context.
Manning faces life in prison for charges related to divulging national secrets. But not only did literally millions of Americans have access to these same “secrets” Manning is alleged to have downloaded from a government server known as SIPRNet and passed to Wikileaks, his civilian defense attorney, David E. Coombs, is arguing that the news they contained was not harmful to national security.
Coombs also claims that the government is denying his client access to exculpatory evidence proving the leaks did no national harm, evidence to which Manning is entitled by law in order to mount his defense.
So far, the government is — you guessed it — keeping that evidence a secret.
Coombs has asked for copies of several internal reviews of the Wikileaks material that he said in a recent court filing were conducted by the White House, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department, all of which, he claims, conclude the leaks weren’t harmful to the nation because they conveyed dated information, low-level opinions or previously disclosed information.
Quoting a published report, Coombs continued: “A congressional official briefed on the reviews stated that the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the Wikileaks website and bring charges against the leakers.”
More lies? More hypocrisy? Come to think of it, lies and hypocrisy, along with incompetence, were the major revelations of Wikileaks. Which tells us the real dangers to U.S. national security are our own foreign-policy makers who shield themselves from public scrutiny with too much secrecy.
And no one should go to jail for life for telling us that.
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
