Wikileaks – A discussion

Professor Wendy Bacon is the Director of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism and a well known Australian investigative journalist and non-practising lawyer. Her current research interests include the reporting of humanitarian and environment issues, finding innovative ways to combine investigative journalism with scholarly research and developing e learning projects around simulation games and blogs. On Wednesday 27 January 2011, Wendy Bacon joined Richard Ackland, Janet Albrechtsen and Gerard Henderson to address The Sydney Institute on the Wikileaks phenomenon.

WIKILEAKS – A DISCUSSION

WENDY BACON

I have long complained of the passivity of our mainstream media, of reporters’ cosy relationships with politicians, of the frustrations of suppression orders and the failure of governments to protect whistleblowers.  Critics have grumbled about journalists reprinting press releases or falling for government propaganda, while we journalists express despair at the increasing power of government and corporate public relations professionals who make it a daily struggle to get answers to even simple questions. So cynical have we become that the idea that journalism could actually be about the truth, about serving citizens rather than powerful interests, is often pushed aside as a cliché or even an illusion.

It is in this context that we encounter Wikileaks and it is in this context that we need to assess its contribution to journalism.

What inspires so many people about Wikileaks is that they have “beaten the game” and in doing so have changed the rules. While established media were still often fumbling around trying to work out how to use the new media, the Wikileaks team of Julian Assange and other new independently minded media people took their advanced technical skills and applied them to produce a novel sort of news organization which would give confidential sources the chance to break through the information barrier to safely leak information.

Wikileaks’ fundamental contribution is to reignite the relationship between the media and citizens, which is supposed to underpin democracy. At the heart of this relationship is journalists’ ethical obligation to respect the anonymity of sources who trust them with confidential information.  This ethical principle is derived from the claim that the role of journalists in a democracy is to seek to reveal the truth on behalf what is called the “public right to know”. Without this practice of keeping the identity of sources confidential, the media cannot play a critical, watchdog role on powerful institutions.

According to its websites, the criteria Wikileaks applies in deciding whether to publish leaks are these:  that the information has not previously been revealed; that it was previously classified, confidential, censored or otherwise withheld from the public; and that the information is of political, diplomatic, ethical or historical significance. Wikileaks has a practice of querying any issues about the veracity of information. [1]

Wikileaks is not about opposition to all secrecy – indeed few would argue that governments never need secrecy. One can understand, for example that negotiations for the release of kidnapped citizens might need to be confidential. Through its stated criteria and its practice of removing names of people who could be endangered, it is clear that Wikileaks is not about publishing simply any information. What is at stake are the boundaries of secrecy and about whether citizens have a right to know what governments are doing. It’s about degrees of openness and whether governments should actively mislead the citizens of their own and other countries.

I am not suggesting that Wikileaks will singlehandedly democratise the media or that they have not made any mistakes or experienced growing pains and economic difficulties. It is clear, for example, that the massive leak of US diplomatic cables in 2010 was beyond the capacity of Wikileaks to handle leading them to team up with some mainstream media organisations, a practice that worked well at first but has certainly brought added conflicts and misunderstandings with The New York Times and The Guardian. Funding is also precarious. But to the extent that Wikileaks has weaknesses, it shares them with the best and worst of media organisations.

Wikileaks is, of course, far more than Cablegate, the gradual and continuing release of 251,000 diplomatic cables between embassies in 274 countries and the United State Department. Wikileaks had already been operating for several years before the large foreign policy related releases of 2010.  For example, it released a detailed private consultants’ report on the leaking of toxic waste causing health problems, even death, to those living along the Ivory Coast in West Africa.  More recently, it has inspired new developments such as the largest ever leak on the Palestinian /Israeli conflict to Al Jazeera this year[2] and sites such Unileaks[3], designed to break through the corporate veil that smothers free expression in universities.

Most media attention however has been focussed on the December 2010 massive leak of US diplomatic cables, only a tiny percentage of which have so far been released. These cables have become part of the daily news diet. It is to the campaign against Wikileaks since their release that I will devote most attention.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard greeted the cables with hysterical claims, almost unbelievable from a qualified lawyer. She branded the actions of Wikileaks director Julian Assange as “not only grossly irresponsible” but “an illegal thing to do” [4]and referred the matter to the Federal Police, who understandably could not find any Australian law that had been broken.

In the United States, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called the cables’ release an “attack on the international community” while Republican Congressman Peter King claimed that Wikileaks should be classified as a terrorist organisation. Meanwhile huge multinational corporations such as Mastercard, Amazon and Apple respectively blocked donations, closed off servers and suspended software applications for Wikileaks, demonstrating once again that private capital is in favour of free speech so long as it is in their interest. The effect of all of this was to give the public the false impression that the publication of the cables was in some way criminal or at the least deserving of censorship.

At the same time as this aggressive attack continued, another refrain was building (particularly in Australia) that the publication of the cables was revealing  “nothing new” or that “we” had known about the information in the cables. The “we” of this elitist argument is presumably the inner circle of journalists, politicians or those “in the know”, not the broader public.

The material in the Australian cables mostly consists of accounts of a constant stream of reassuring advice and information supplied by Australian politicians, union officials and business people to US embassy officials. Even with an “iron clad” ally, as Australia was described in one cable, Washington needs to track that both major parties remain solidly behind the alliance, the war in Afghanistan (even if it has little prospects of success) and are pro-Israel. On this latter score the cables show that Julia Gillard attracted favourable mention for her pro-Israel comments in the January 2009 attack on Gaza.  It’s disappointing that Fairfax newspapers publication of stories based on the Australian cables did not lead to more public discussion about the wisdom of Australia’s role in its alliance with the United States, especially since some of the material suggests we have been deceived or unwisely represented by our politicians.

The first published mention of Australia was a report of a cable which recounted how current Foreign Minister, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd when asked by Clinton for his advice on dealing with China, responded by saying he was a “brutal realist on China” which should be integrated into the international community but that countries should be prepared to “deploy force if everything goes wrong”. [5] Response to this news varied from Federal independent politician’s Andrew Wilkie’s view that Rudd might have been ‘posturing’ [6] to respected defence reporter Brian Toohey’s view that this was one of several revelations in the cables that indicated that Rudd was not fit to be foreign minister:

The cable quotes Rudd as raising – apparently in an almost casual manner – the option of using force against China if things go wrong. Perhaps the official US note of the conversation is incomplete but it gave no sign that Rudd appreciates how a war between our main ally and our largest trading partner could kill millions, shatter the world economy and render any notion of victory meaningless. Rudd may be a “brutalist”, but he’s not a realist.[7]

In the same column, Toohey also noted that the 2009 defence white paper said the Rudd government “is opposed to the development of a unilateral national missile defence system by any nation because [it] would be at odds with the maintenance of global nuclear deterrence”.  It seems however that the public was misled as one cable states that one of the paper’s authors defence secretary Mike Pezzullo told the US embassy in June 2009 that Australia would continue to help the United States develop this weapons system.

Rudd demonstrated more understanding of freedom of speech law than Gillard by commenting that it was not illegal for Wikileaks or any newspaper to publish the leaks but refused to answer any questions about the cables. For this, he earned a congratulatory mention in The Australian for ‘staying cool under pressure’ and the serious issues raised by Toohey remained largely undiscussed. [8]

The cables reveal much else that is relevant to Australia but has been glossed over by our media. Take the cables on Sri Lanka, which reveal that the US ambassador believed that current-ruling politicians of Sri Lanka to be involved in a massacre of thousands of Tamil citizens in the final stages of the civil war in Sri Lanka. “While regrettable, the lack of attention to accountability is not surprising. There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking wholesale investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while that regime or government remained in power,” the Ambassador wrote, adding, “In Sri Lanka this is further complicated by the fact that responsibility for many of the alleged crimes rests with the country’s senior civilian and military leadership, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and opposition candidate General Fonseka.”

This cable raises issues for the Australian government, which despite entreaties from human rights activists has failed to push for international investigation of war crimes in Sri Lanka. What was the view of the Australian embassy at the same time? Were they aware of US Ambassador’s views? It also highlights the weakness of our mainstream media. Unpublished research by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism demonstrates that the Australia’s major newspapers strongly relied on Sri Lankan government and military sources throughout the last stages of the conflict despite their appalling record of attacks on freedom of expression. The Australian media even ignored significant reports by UK’s Channel 4 (the only major media organisation to breach the Sri Lankan government’s information black-out) of war crimes, even when its television reporters were ejected from the country.

There are thousands of examples of significant material contained in the Wikileaks cables. New cables continue to be released on a daily basis because of their public news value.  What are needed from the opponents of Wikileaks are empirically based arguments about why this material should not be in the public arena.[/pullquote] Instead what we get is a set of off- the-shelf arguments that have a long history of being trotted out to support claims to secrecy.  It is not enough to assert that government needs secrecy. Even in countries, such as our own, with no effective constitutional protection for freedom of expression, the courts have recognised that confidential government information can be published where it reveals an iniquity or where it is in the public interest, even when it does cause embarrassment.[9]

One criticism of Wikileaks is that it put people’s lives at risk by revealing the names of informants, particularly some Taliban informants who were named in the release of Afghanistan cables. A conventional journalistic practice when publishing leaks is to remove names where people could be in physical danger if their identity were known. John Pilger has reported that before publication, Wikileaks “wrote to the White House asking that it identify Afghan names that might draw reprisals. There was no reply. [10]

In the later releases, a more careful policy of redaction (a word most people had never heard of pre Wikileaks) has been applied. Statements by the US State Department about the impact of the releases have been contradictory but it has said that no one is known to have been physically harmed, although admittedly we would not necessarily be told the truth even if they had been. The key point is that the US government included these names in cables going to hundreds of thousands of people so they can scarcely then claim that they should have been kept secret.

It is also hypocritical at the least for those who remain silent about  “collateral damage”, i.e. the killing of completely innocent civilians, in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to purport to be concerned about the fate of Taliban informants.  Why haven’t they called for the prosecution of soldiers who wantonly attacked civilians as revealed in the shocking Collateral Murder video?[11] What did they say when Wikileaks published cables showing the US government warned the German government of the “potential negative consequences” for the bilateral relationship between the US and Germany if it should prosecute CIA agents who mistakenly kidnapped an entirely innocent German citizen taking him to a secret prison in Iraq for interrogation? [12]

Commenting on Wikileaks’ opponents in the United States, Glen Greenwald aptly wrote on Salon.com, “those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon.”[13]

Another argument central to the Wikileaks opponents’ case is that diplomats will no longer feel they can be frank in their advice if they think it will become public. Even Defence Secretary Robert Gates declared this argument to be overblown in November:

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments — some governments — deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.

Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest. [14]

As those who follow “breach of confidentiality” cases know, this argument about frankness within government is nearly always used to justify secrecy. In the 1980s, Brian Toohey’s magazine The Eye adopted a policy of encouraging and publishing leaked information. It published the then Foreign Minister Bill Hayden’s frank views on leaders of some Asia and Pacific nations. Even more embarrassingly, The Eye published documents that proved that then US Secretary of State George Schultz had actually drafted the text for the Australian government’s press release about its policy on visits by US nuclear ships. Despite claims of likely harm to foreign relations and threats to frank communication, both the US Alliance and relationships with our neighbours survived.

The argument that secrecy is needed to allow for frank advice to continue, is used to to justify wide exemptions to Australian Freedom of Information laws for internal department papers, many of which could easily be in the public arena. More openness may indeed mean that people try to conceal information in other ways but this itself is not an argument for more secrecy.

This notion of internal frankness goes along with the idea that public communications should not be frank, open or necessarily honest. The citizens of the United States may well wish to know that their taxpayer dollars are being used to prop up regimes which their government knows to be corrupt and crooked. Similarly, citizens of Tunisia may well have appreciated more frankness from the United States government about their views of the inhumane and oppressive conditions they endured under their now ex- President Ben Ali. Little seems to have been gained by the frank but secret advice from the US Ambassador to Washington revealed at the end of one cable:

We do recommend a more pragmatic approach, however, whereby we would speak to the Tunisians very clearly and at a very high level about our concerns regarding Tunisia’s democracy and human rights practices, but dial back the public criticism. [15]

So far, I have said little about the Director of Wikileaks Julian Assange himself. Recently, in typical fashion, there has been a huge media focus on his personality. He has been labelled as a narcissist, addicted to his celebrity status, dirty and a control freak. Others who have met him disagree. I don’t know Assange. My own expectation would be that a person who would take the high unusual and risky path that Assange has chosen is scarcely likely to be a conventional, unexceptional person. Yet, from what I have seen on video, he seems to have thought out his position on Wikileaks well and to have survived a short spell in prison and much longer under fairly luxurious house arrest.

There is no doubt that the sexual assault allegations against him by two Swedish women have been a huge distraction for the Wikileaks project. I have no intention of disparaging the women who have made the allegations against him and know little of the Swedish sexual assault regime, which is clearly different from our own.

Assange has appealed against a UK magistrate’s order that he be extradited to Sweden. He is still only wanted for questioning, has not yet been charged and should be presumed to be innocent which he says he is.  No lawyer would advise him to submit to imprisonment and a secret trial in Sweden in which the judges would include representatives of political parties that vehemently oppose Wikileaks without exercising all his legal rights.[16] As will no doubt be strongly argued at the extradition appeal, this could result in him being convicted without us ever knowing the evidence against him.

It has also been falsely suggested that Assange supporters have expressed no interest in the welfare of the Bradley Manning who allegedly leaked the files. Manning, who has been charged but not tried, is being kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and is shackled when exercising the remaining hour. These conditions are designed to punish and break him. They are so severe that Amnesty International has condemned them as inhumane and there is a United Nations investigation into whether they amount to torture. Pentagon papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and the filmmaker Michael Moore have called for his release and Berkeley City Council in California are part of a larger global campaign calling for the inhumane treatment to stop. Until recent reports by the ABC’s Background Briefing and Four Corners, the Australian media largely ignored all of this, which is not to say that it was not happening.

So far, it has been reported that a secret US grand jury has been unable to find any evidence to build a case for espionage against Assange by proofing a link between Manning and Assange, despite demanding the Twitter hand over private records of customers, including those of an Icelandic politician Birgitta Jonsdottir. [17] Secret corporate proposals to target media and supporters of WikiLeaks have recently been exposed. One of the supporters specifically targeted in these proposals was journalist and lawyer, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald who reported that the phrase used was “forcing us to choose between, quote, “preservation of career over cause,” meaning threatening our careers if we continue to speak out in favour of WikiLeaks.” [18]

To finish back at the point where I started, Wikileaks is a game changer and the stakes are high. Wikileaks is part of a broader trend which means that while mainstream media still have a powerful agenda setting role, they are losing control over the information flow. So as not to be sidelined, some major media organisations are moving to develop more secure ways that they too can receive leaks. This is a healthy development that has been brought about by Wikileaks. But if these mainstream organisations adopt the policy that the New York Times used of meeting with Washington before publication, confidential sources will pass on them by and stick with Wikileaks and other similar sites. [19]

[1] http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/UK_Toxic_dumping_along_the_Ivory_Coast_broke_EU_regulations;_confidential_report_to_Waterson_and_Hicks,_14_Sep_2006/.

Given the interference with Wikileaks, it is difficult to locate original sites. This is a contemporary mirror site of a publication by Wikileaks in September 2009. Accessed Feb. 2011.

[2] http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112214310263628.html

[3] www.unileaks.org was started on

[4] http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/wikileaks-acting-illegally-says-gillard-20101202-18hb9.html?from=smh_sb

[5] Cullen, S. ‘ Rudd silent on Wikileaks claims’, December 6, 2010. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/06/3085195.htm

[6] http://www.theage.com.au/national/rudd-posturing-about-using-force-on-china-wilkie-20101206-18lsu.html

[7] Toohey, B. (2010)  ‘Control freak’bum note on China’ Financial Review, Dec 11, pp. 63

[8] ‘Wikilkeaks: Rudd stays cool under pressure’ , The Australian, December 11, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/wikileaks-mr-rudd-stays-cool-under-pressure/story-e6frg71x-1225969175624

[9] Butler, D.& Rodrick, S. (2009) Australian Media Law , Thomson Third Edition pp. 302.

[10] Pilger, John ‘ Why Wikileaks must be protected’ August 10, 2010 New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/08/pilger-wikileaks-afghanistan

[11] Wikileaks: Reuters and kids in collateral damage’,  http://antemedius.com/content/wikileaks-reuters-and-kids-collateral-damage

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,733860,00.html

[12] ‘Cables Show Germany Caved to Pressure from Washington’
[13] Greenwald, Glenn WikiLeaks reveals more than just government secrets’ November 30, 2010, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/30/wikileaks
[14] Bumiller, Elizabeth ‘Gates on Leaks, Wiki and Otherwise’ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/gates-on-leaks-wiki-and-otherwise/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110126/ts_yblog_thecutline/ny-times-editor-reveals-difficult-dealings-with-assange

[15] ‘09TUNIS492

http://test.cablegatewiki.org/index.php?title=09TUNIS492

[16] In my original speech I said that he had always been available to be questioned by the Swedish prosecutor. It seems from the evidence at the extradition hearing that he was not available for one period when they did wish to question him. They have not however been prepared to question him in London which UK’s Scotland Yard could easily have arranged.

[17]NBC : US government can’t link  accused army private to Assange,  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41241414/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/?ocid=twitter

[18], For full transcript of interview with Glenn Greenwald see Democracy Now, Feb. 24, 2011. http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/24/glenn_greenwald_on_the_assange_extradition

[19] Calderone, Michael, ‘NY Times editor reveals difficult dealings with Assange’ Jan. 26, 2001