WIKILEAKS – ANY SURPRISES?

“Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously.”
Marshall McLuhan, THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSAGE

McLuhan made this prophetic statement back when most homes had a single black-and-white television (controlled by knobs!) and one corded telephone. Radios were becoming portable, but they were still bulky. Music was recorded onto large vinyl discs and played on a revolving machine, attached to a cord. Computers were slow, big things. Some forty years later, most people in America and Europe, and many people living elsewhere, carry in one pocket a telephone, radio, TV, record player, computer, still and movie camera, and game board. Imagination is challenged to speculate what our inter-connected world will be like forty years hence. But there can be no denying we are in the global village, and as in any small town, everyone knows everything about everyone.
Some high-tech wizards have smugly assured us that privacy is gone and we just have to adjust. They’re probably right. We are glutted with revelations about the amoral habits of celebrities, and an endless cavalcade of commoners seeks a bit of fame by doing the same things. Tasting the so-called forbidden fruits will earn grateful snickering from our fellow humans. Doing nothing is equally exposed. The only bright spot in all this sunlight is the fact there are so many of us that we need to encourage gossip if we want to get more than a little of it.
Why, then, is our government shocked—shocked! at the Wikileaks exposure of so-called official secrets? In the first place, with an estimated 2 1/2 million names on the security list, secrecy is practically unattainable. In the second, there were no surprises. Wikileaks revealed that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are unwinnable. If our government really believes nobody knew that, it is effective only at keeping secrets from itself.
As for the embarrassing little tidbits about State Department staffers engaging in some petty behaviour – anybody who has ever worked with other human beings already knew that. If these facts elicit any thought on the part of us rubes, it is more relief than shock, to know that our government employs human beings much like ourselves. Wikileaks made public an incredible amount of information of no use to an enemy or to us, which accounts for the lukewarm reactions of Hilary Clinton, Robert Gates, and President Obama. And it just might demonstrate a real strength of democratic societies, as we can shake off exposure to embarrassing information.
The government has options. One is to reduce the number of official secrets it classifies. The advantages of such reductions are obvious. It is easier to keep secret a few items and strategies that would truly harm the country if they fell into the wrong hands. Nobody wants that. And if embarrassing facts are routinely brought to light, which is expected in both democratic theory and in law, the government will probably operate in a less embarrassing fashion, which means more effectively. And we can all benefit by our government’s taking a hard look at just what gets classified.
Obviously, in recent decades our elected government has been on a mission, sometimes a frenzied one, to classify more and more of its doings. Now that it can no longer get away with, it might as well operate openly and honestly, as elected governments are supposed to do. As far as giving advantage to real or potential enemies, we remember they are in the global village too. The first of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points: “Open covenants of peace openly arrived at,” could become reality, nearly a century later, as a response to the facts of life.
Governments (ours included) have one other option: to maintain secrecy through fear. Sadly, this option is behind the imprisonment of Bradley Manning, accused of leaking secrets to Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Assange will be tried in Sweden on unrelated rape charges. Should he be acquitted and extradited to the United States, he can afford lawyers who will assure him a fair trial. Manning, on the other hand, has been disappeared. The fate of the “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo and elsewhere is now being visited on an American citizen. He has had no “speedy and public trial”. No such thing is proposed for him. He lapses in solitary confinement, denied even the meager privileges granted to convicted criminals, and this, for all we know, is to be his fate. Manning’s absolutely un-constitutional punishment could serve as a terrifying example to future whistleblowers. If this situation endures, we will need to rewrite history, especially concerning which side won the Cold War.