Julian Assange, founder of the website Wikileaks, released 391,832 classified military documents from the Iraq War on Thursday in one of the most comprehensive releases of military information in American history, on par with the release of the Pentagon Papers exposing secrets of the Vietnam War in 1971.
The reports reveal a shocking array of information about the war, and showed that the death toll for Iraqi citizens is likely higher than the number given by the Bush administration, that abuse of Iraqi soldiers by American soldiers was more brutal than previously suggested and that the troop surge that worked in Iraq has a lower likelihood of success in Afghanistan.
The massive release of classified information has caused outrage throughout the country, with Assange going on the run after being vilified by thousands who believe his actions pose a direct threat to the American war effort in Afghanistan.
But just like with the release of the Pentagon Papers, the information contained in the leaked documents provides a perspective on the war that is critical for Americans to know in order to truly understand the conflict. The time is gone when citizens are willing to blindly trust a government that leads them into unjustified wars, as they should be. One of the consequences of the ubiquitous presence of the news media and the prevalence of information is that people are given enough information to make their own judgments. The invention of Wikileaks and the release of these documents is in some ways a natural extension of that.
The problem comes in the way that the information was disseminated &- in bulk, with no interpretation done and without any regard for protecting the identities of Afghan and Iraqi informants involved in the incident reports. With such volatile information, Assange should have taken more care to make sure the reports were released responsibly while protecting individuals who may now suffer severe consequences for their involvement.
Although both Assange’s motives and methods are questionable, ultimately the implications of the information contained in the leaked documents needed to be made known in order for Americans to be able to appropriately judge the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We may not like what we find out, but as a nation based on the principle of a free press, Americans should understand that although freedom of information may cause short-term harm, in the end it leads to far more good.
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