por admin » Lun Nov 29, 2010 11:20 pm
Assange es un enemigo de US, pero US tiene muchos secretos
En el caso de Yen y Pakistan el danio va a ser muy grande. US quiere la cooperacion de Ali Abdullah Saleh para combatir a al Qaeda en ese pais, pero Mr. Saleh quiere mantener la ficcion de que los ataques a al Qaeda son hechos por su gobierno. El filtrado de documentos amenaza la cooperacion de ese pais.
El filtrado de documentos tambien expone el intento de US de salvaguardar el potencia de energia para las armas nucleares producidas por Pakistan. Esta revelacion le dara un golpe a la soberania dentro de Pakistan y hara aun mas dificil la cooperacion de ese pais. No vemos ningun proposito de transparencia en ese caso, si no solamente el hacer mas dificil el prevenir algun intento de un ataque de armas de destruccion masiva.
La leccion es que es mucho mas dificil mantener secretos en la era de la internet, asi que el gobierno tendra que aprender a mantener menos secretos y comunicarlos a menos personas. Es increible que tanta informacion clasificada haya estado expuesta al Private First Class Bradley Manning, quien es el sospechoso principal dell filtrado de documentos a Wikipedia.
Attack by WikiLeaks
Assange is an enemy of the U.S., but the U.S. keeps too many secrets.
Regarding the latest WikiLeaks dump of U.S. secrets, our friends at the New York Sun (at nysun.com) have taken to asking, What would Lincoln do? Their implication is that the President who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War would not be wringing his hands about Julian Assange the way the Obama Administration has for so many months. This week's cable cache does less immediate harm than the previous leaks did to the lives of Afghans and Iraqis who have cooperated with us on the battlefield, but it certainly will damage U.S. foreign policy.
In most cases, of course, the leaks merely pull back the curtain on disputes and the character of global leaders that are already widely known. That the Turkish government of the AK Party is an unreliable ally, or is chock full of Islamists, will not surprise anyone who's been paying attention. The private rage of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak against Iraqi democracy is also no shocker; a modern Pharaoh doesn't like the voter precedent.
Yet in some cases the damage will be real because effective policy often requires secrecy about detail. Foreign officials will only speak candidly to U.S. emissaries if they believe their words won't be splashed all over the world's front pages.
Global View Columnist Bret Stephens explains the world-wide impact of the latest document release.
.In the cases of Yemen and Pakistan, this batch of leaks may do particular harm. The U.S. wants the cooperation of Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh to carry out attacks on al Qaeda bases in that country, but Mr. Saleh wants to preserve the fiction that the attacks are his government's. The cables expose this fiction and now may jeopardize that cooperation, even as the terrorist threat from Yemen has increased.
The leaks also expose the U.S. attempts to safeguard the potential fuel for a nuclear weapon produced by Pakistan's research reactor. This revelation will play as an affront to national sovereignty inside Pakistan and thus make cooperation that much more difficult to secure. We don't see what purpose "transparency" serves in these cases, other than to make it harder to prevent some future terror or WMD attack.
One lesson is that it is much harder to keep secrets in the Internet age, so our government is going to have to learn to keep fewer secrets and confine them to fewer people. It is amazing to discover that so many thousands of cables might have been accessible by Private First Class Bradley Manning, who is suspected of being the main source for the Wikileaks documents. The bureaucratic excuse is that the government was trying to encourage more cross-agency cooperation post-9/11, but why does an Army private need access to the details of a conversation between Yemen's dictator and General David Petraeus?
We've long agreed with the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's critique that the Cold War gave bureaucrats license to keep too many secrets, which they can use as a way to enhance their own policy leverage.
North Korea's transfer of advanced missile technology to Iran is one example of a reality that would have better served U.S. national security if it had been explained to the American public. Yet knowledge of the missile transfer, though widely suspected, might have complicated the diplomatic ambitions of the late George W. Bush and early Obama Administrations. Both had incentive to hide the facts to hide the true nature of these rogue regimes.
But that still leaves the Lincoln question of how to stop the likes of Mr. Assange? If he were exposing Chinese or Russian secrets, he would already have died at the hands of some unknown assailant. As a foreigner (Australian citizen) engaged in hostile acts against the U.S., Mr. Assange is certainly not protected from U.S. reprisal under the laws of war. Perhaps Lincoln would have considered him an "enemy combatant."
In his Saturday letter urging Mr. Assange to cease and desist, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh accused the WikiLeaker of breaking U.S. law without mentioning a particular statute. Perhaps Mr. Koh meant the 1917 Espionage Act, a vague statute which has rarely been used to punish leakers, and never against a publisher. As recently as 2009, the government dropped an Espionage Act prosecution against two lobbyists for AIPAC, the American-Israel lobby, after a rebuke by a federal appeals court.
Mr. Assange is clearly trying to protect himself from such an indictment by inviting the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel to be his co-publishers. Newspapers used to understand that the right of the First Amendment implied some publishing self-restraint. But as publishers ourselves, we nonetheless worry that indicting a bad actor like Mr. Assange under an ambiguous statute would set a precedent that could later be used against journalists.
One alternative would be for Congress and the Administration to collaborate on writing a new statute aimed more precisely at provocateurs like Mr. Assange. At a minimum, the Administration should throw the book at those who do the leaking, including the option of the death penalty. That would probably give second thoughts to the casual spy or to leakers who fancy themselves as idealists.
For all of his self-justification as an agent of "pure" transparency, Mr. Assange is not serving the interest of free societies. His mass, indiscriminate exposure of anything labeled secret that he can lay his hands on is a hostile act against a democracy that is fighting a war against forces bent on killing innocents. Surely, the U.S. government can do more to stop him than send a stiff letter.