WikiLeaks first burst into my consciousness in 2010 with the publication of a video that purported to show a U.S. Army Apache helicopter crew gunning down innocent civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
The video was part of the cache of classified material stolen by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning at the behest of the online database WikiLeaks and published under the description “Collateral Murder.” To this day, people who should know better refer to that 2007 engagement glibly as a “war crime” committed by trigger-happy pilots who indiscriminately murdered more than a dozen people.
“He was exposing war crimes and government lies at the time in a way that was exciting and also won awards for all of the different news outlets that, that collaborated with him,” said Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of the Intercept, on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” last week. “The Apache helicopter that killed dozen Baghdadis, including two journalists, is just one example.”
If the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of war reporting is context. In posting that video, WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange showed themselves to be not journalists but rather anti-privacy activists with a decidedly anti-American agenda.
At the time the video was published, I was writing a blog on the military and media, and I reviewed the video for evidence of a war crime. I didn’t have access to all the facts when I first saw the video, but it seemed clear to me that the Apache crew believed the military-age men depicted, who were carrying weapons just a short distance from an American Humvee, were about to fire on U.S. troops. What looked like a rocket-propelled grenade launcher from the air was, in fact, the telephoto lens of a Reuters photographer.
[Related: WATCH: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange dragged out of Ecuadorian Embassy in London by police]
A U.S. military investigation would show that the helicopter crew had no way of knowing that a photojournalist and his driver were with the men or that there were any noncombatants in an area where there had just been a firefight.
When American infantry troops eventually got to the scene, they found rocket-propelled grenade launchers and several RPG rounds. They couldn’t do a detailed search because they were still taking ground fire. (You can read the full Army investigation in my 2013 blog post at Line of Departure, “Upon Further Review: Collateral Murder?”)
Whatever it was, the engagement in an active war zone was not a violation of the internationally recognized law of armed conflict. But the stain stuck.
Over the course of 2010 and 2011, Assange would release almost 750,000 classified U.S. documents on his WikiLeaks website, including 250,000 sensitive State Department cables. Unlike reputable news organizations that make good faith attempts to determine whether leaked classified information serves a legitimate pubic interest and whether it would harm national security or put lives at risk, Assange shows no regard for the quaint idea that there might be such a thing as a necessary secret.
[Also read: Pamela Anderson rages at Trump, UK, and Ecuador after Julian Assange arrested]
At first, Assange worked through established newspapers, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and the Washington Post, but gradually he had a falling out with these organizations as they attempted to vet the documents and place them in context. In recent years, WikiLeaks has dumped large caches of documents on the internet, leaving it to others to sort them out.
There has been another very discernible trend in Assange’s actions, which the FBI notes in its unsealed affidavit in support of the government’s arrest warrant: a clear animus toward America.
“Manning and WikiLeaks had reason to believe that public disclosure of the Afghanistan War Reports and Iraq War Reports would cause injury to the United States,” writes FBI agent Megan Brown in the affidavit, asserting the reports “contained information the disclosure of which potentially endangered U.S. troops and Afghan civilians, and aided enemies of the United States.”
Cited to back up that claim was a July 30, 2010, New York Times article headlined “Taliban Study WikiLeaks to Hunt Informants,” which quotes a Taliban spokesman saying, “We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the U.S. If they are U.S. spies, then we will know how to punish them.”
Journalists are split over whether the attempt to prosecute Assange is a threat to press freedom, as many don’t consider him a journalist.
“The indictment seeks to criminalize what journalists are not only permitted but ethically required to do: take steps to help their sources maintain their anonymity,” write Glenn Greenwald and Micah Lee in the Intercept. As a journalist, Greenwald worked with Edward Snowden to reveal various National Security Agency mass surveillance programs, but even Snowden doesn’t agree with Assange’s anti-privacy absolutism.
“I am not anti-secrecy. I’m pro-accountability,” Snowden told Vanity Fair in 2014. ”I’ve made many statements indicating both the importance of secrecy and spying, and my support for the working-level people at the NSA and other agencies. It’s the senior officials you have to watch out for.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
