Journalists, take note. For decades, U.S. government agency heavyweights have tried to suppress, postpone or alter certain sensitive stories by telling editors and reporters that publishing them would endanger national security. Now, in light of the Assange findings, we must apply extreme skepticism to such claims.
“They’re doing too much.” Intercept and Former New York Times“And no one goes back and scrutinizes it,” he said of national security officials’ engagement with the media.
The WikiLeaks incident A bottomless love affair. For example, in July 2010, the anti-secrecy group removed more than 75,000 documents from the so-called Afghanistan War Records, some of which, according to a June 2020 indictment, contained “names of individuals vulnerable to retaliation by the Taliban in Afghanistan and/or insurgent forces in Iraq.” A Taliban member later told a reporter: “We will investigate whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the United States. If they are, we know how to punish them.”
The New York Times, the German magazine Der Spiegel, and Britain’s Guardian newspaper had early access to WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan documents and redacted the names of people who may have been at risk. But WikiLeaks’ flawed approach to the redactions drew warnings from government officials. “WikiLeaks’ irresponsible and reckless actions have, of course, caused damage and will continue to do damage in the months and years to come,” said a spokesman for then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. Similar pessimistic assessments were easy to find in news articles from the time, with occasional reports that the damage had been exaggerated.
But when it comes to predicting doom, national security officials have no clothes. This rhetoric about unspecified damage is familiar to Washington journalists who specialize in national security, including Mr. Risen, who has heard it all and proven it wrong.
When Risen wrote a story in 2003 about a “reckless” plan to impose flawed nuclear weapons blueprints on Iran, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was determined to reject it. In arguments cited by Risen here, Rice believed the information “could lead to the deaths of Americans and millions of innocent victims of foreign nuclear weapons programs.” The Times did not publish the Iran nuclear story, but Risen included it in his book, “State of War.” Rice’s doomsday scenario did not come to fruition.
In 2005, when Mr. Risen and a colleague, Eric Lichtblau, broke a story about warrantless surveillance, President George W. Bush told Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that “there would be blood on the table” if the paper continued the story. Asked what harm the Times’s long-delayed publication of the story had done, Mr. Risen said, “None.”
And then there was the backlash over a 2006 article about how the CIA and other agencies had scrutinized international banking data as part of a counterterrorism effort. The government said publishing the article “would lead to the collapse of the international banking system,” Risen told me. It would take another two years for that system to collapse, he joked, but it wasn’t because of his work.
Risen’s scoops involved much more sensitive matters than the typical WikiLeaks documents, including many State Department cables and daily reports about “significant activity” on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. But the government response in all these cases was uniform: accusations, denunciations and exaggerations.
Glenn Greenwald, whose Guardian article on Edward Snowden’s documents release won a Pulitzer Prize, said that in every major leak going back to the Pentagon Papers, the government has claimed damage but “failed to identify a single document that caused damage or a single person who was harmed.” The excessive classification of government documents exacerbates the discomfort, Greenwald said, noting that some of Snowden’s archives involved “extremely mundane” matters, such as vacation requests that were marked “top secret” or “top secret.”
Dean Baquet, a former executive editor of The New York Times, offered his thoughts on how to approach such issues in an email: “My standard has always been that the government needs to prove that there is a possibility of serious harm, particularly human life, being endangered, and that has sometimes happened.”
By some estimates, between 50 and 90 percent of classified documents could be released to the public without causing harm, but instead national security officials claim the sanctity of the system, citing unprovable harm.
“Unauthorized disclosures undermine trust in the system and can cause damage in certain cases,” said John Fitzpatrick, a former national security adviser in the Trump White House, but he warned that “excessive classification and a culture of ‘security above all else’ also undermine trust, making any discussion of actual damage more complicated than simply alleging that damage occurred.”
State Department spokesman Matt Miller made comments last week that highlighted the fragility of the situation: He said Assange’s actions “endangered the lives of our partners, allies and diplomats, especially those serving in dangerous places like Afghanistan and Iraq,” and that the State Department had taken extra precautions to keep people “out of harm’s way” before the WikiLeaks documents were released.
But while Miller argued that leaks “chill the ability of Americans to build relationships with people abroad,” he couldn’t offer a single example of harm when asked. Free societies are not always easy to govern.
