To Leak Or Not To Leak

The story of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is getting pretty Tom Clancy-like here.  Wikileaks is the site that broke the story of a military video from a US Apache helicopter showing two Reuters journalists killed back in April.  The Defense Department tracked down the military source of that video, an Army intel analyst named Bradley Manning, who was arrested at his base in Iraq earlier this week.

Here, the story gets really, really weird.  The Pentagon believes Manning leaked a hell of a lot more than just that video, and they want to stop Wikileaks before they potentially compromise US national security.  That means the DoD wants to have a little chat with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.

The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.

The cables themselves, as you can guess from Manning being in Iraq, are of the very sensitive "involving our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan" kind of thing.

As The Daily Beast reported June 8, Manning, while posted in Iraq, apparently had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East, regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders, according to an American diplomat.

The cables, which date back over several years, went out over interagency computer networks available to the Army and contained information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diplomat said.

American officials would not discuss the methods being used to find Assange, nor would they say if they had information to suggest where he is now. "We'd like to know where he is; we'd like his cooperation in this," one U.S. official said of Assange.

In other words, these cables date back to the Bush years, and if wikileaks does drop this little nuke, it could seriously harm our ongoing relations with, oh, let's say everybody.

I've seen arguments on both sides of this.  On one side, if Bush and Cheney (and yes, even Obama and Hillary) cut some sort of really horrible deal with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. then the American people need to know about it.

On the other hand, we kinda do have a couple hundred thousand US troops in the way right now, and if these cables are as bad as people are saying they are, then our troops could be in real trouble.  (I mean more than they already are, being in what amounts to a permanent war zone.)

As much as I despise the wars, pragmatic reality is that should these cables be really, really damning to the point of destabilizing what remains of the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan and especially nuclear-armed Pakistan, we could be in a hell of a lot of trouble.

The ends do not justify the means.  The didn't when Bush was President, they don't now.