Wikileaks: State Secrets and Political Dissidence in the 21st Century

OPINION by Joe Ahern: The Comment Space's Civil Liberties Expert

As I am writing this, the situation regarding Wikileaks and its director Julian Assange is still unfolding. Assange has been arrested and is due for a hearing at London’s magistrate court at 2.00PM.
These are the facts: on the 28th of November the website Wikileaks began leaking confidential documents that detailed the correspondence between the United States’ diplomats and those of other countries. Some of the information dates back to 1966. The website intends to release all of the cables over a number of months. The Guardian, Der Speigel, The New York Times, El Pais and Le monde are being fed these cables directly.
The Cables have so far revealed, amongst other things, extreme Arab distrust for Iran and even calls by certain Arab leaders for the US to attack Iran, United states diplomats were ordered to spy on figures in the United Nations, including its leader Ban Ki-Moon (and that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was aware of this) and that diplomats had labelled Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan, both “paranoid” and “extremely weak”.

I have a feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The contents of the encrypted insurance files that Wikileaks has asked supporters to download are likely to contain some damaging revelations, as are the cables that are yet to be released.
The response from the international community has been overwhelming. All countries involved, which by the way is almost all countries, have condemned the actions of wikileaks. Some Political figures in Canada and the USA have called for Mr Assange to be assassinated. Sarah Palin has called him a terrorist and an anti-American. He has now been detained in the UK, it must be said, purportedly not in relation to the leaks, but on charges of sex crimes. Amazon.com, PayPal and Mastercard have denied Wikileaks their services.
We are told to join in this outrage. Wikileaks may have caused deaths we are told, diplomatic relations are in jeopardy, America’s national security is at stake, as is any prospect of peace in the middle east. In essence, the privilege that we afford to our leaders to be able to have secrets, when in our interests, has been compromised. I agree that there ought to be official secrets and times where things are kept from us by the state in order to defend national security. However, we must assess these leaks and their responses in the context of the world we live in.

It is clear both from these cables and previous events that many western states, particularly the USA have been operating outside the rule of law. As an example of this in these cables, I cite the use of diplomats as spies against the general secretary of the UN. We know that America, not too far in the past, has used extra judicial torture against suspects of terrorism, engaged in mass spying and bugging against its population domestically and committed war crimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. I could elaborate on these points, but I could easily write thousands of words detailing the ways America has become a rogue state in both foreign and domestic affairs. In the interest of fairness I will state that this country is not to be exempt from charges of operating outside of the law.  As well as assisting America in the pursuit of an aggressive and illegal foreign policy, our government seriously eroded civil liberties through an array of supposed anti terrorism legislation.

Wikileaks is doing its best to expose activities like these. It has already done so through publishing the Afghan war diary and Iraqi war logs, and is continuing to do so with these cables. It is providing a vital service: transparency. We cannot trust the state to share it’s dirty secrets with us and our media is often too servile to scrutinise our government effectively. This blogger says that until the state is brought back under the rule of law, until the lying and cronyism that defines contemporary international relations has collapsed, until our leaders our accountable for their half-baked adventures in foreign lands and until we cease to see western society slipping towards authoritarianism: Let a thousand wikileaks bloom!