RSSAnother Dangerous Leak
The Heritage Foundation | July 30, 2010
There’s another leak in our midst, but this time it’s not oil. Over the weekend, roughly 92,000 secret military reports about the war in Afghanistan, dating from January 2004 to December 2009, were leaked by Julian Assange, founder of the website Wikileaks.org and a vocal opponent of the coalition-led war.
A leak of classified information — especially of this magnitude — could potentially pose a grave threat to American national security interests.
But as Heritage Foundation expert Lisa Curtis explains, “the Wikileaks exposé should not be used to argue that the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is doomed to failure. The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan has been refined over the last year and new U.S. troops and civilian resources are pouring into the country. The new counterinsurgency strategy is sound and should be given time to succeed.”
She also noted that much of the information contained in the exposed documents has long been public and many of the challenges highlighted have already been addressed by the new war strategy. President Obama echoed these sentiments in a press conference on Tuesday when he insisted that “these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already informed our public debate on Afghanistan.”
Whether new information is unveiled or not, the release of any classified military information raises important questions and concerns about national security and the rule of law. Heritage legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky explains why this matters:
Besides being dangerous to the lives, safety, and national security of Americans, this type of disclosure of classified military information is a federal crime…18 U.S.C. § 798 which prohibits the disclosure of classified information.
Earlier this month, an Army private, Bradley Manning, was charged with passing classified information to Wikileaks. According to the law, von Spakovsky argues, “he should be prosecuted and if convicted, sentenced to a long term in prison, not just to punish him for violating this law and putting his own personal interests ahead of the safety and national security concerns of his country, but as a deterrent to others within the military and the government who are tempted to do the same.”
There are serious lessons to be drawn from the Wikileaks case, especially as U.S. efforts in Afghanistan enters a critical phase. First, it underscores how, in the age of the Internet, it is easy to disseminate sensitive classified information to the wrong people. On National Review Online, Heritage’s James Carafano outlines how the government should think about combating this challenge.
Second, the leaked documents reveal a level of American frustration with Pakistan’s dual policy of combating some terrorists while at the same time harboring others. The Obama administration should reassure the public of its intent to obtain full Pakistani cooperation in the Afghan war.
Lastly, America’s leaders should seize this opportunity to refocus the debate on victory in Afghanistan.
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