White House or WikiLeaks to blame for release of Afghan informants' identities?

If  the leadership of the Pentagon is to be believed, the White House could have blood on its hands. No, I'm not referring -- not here, at least -- to the hundreds of Afghan civilians or NATO soldiers that have been killed since Obama took the oath of office.  

Rather, I'm referring to the implications of a story at the top of CNN's website.  The headline reads: "Top military official: WikiLeaks founder may have 'blood' on his hands."  The article begins, "The top U.S. military officer said Thursday that Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was risking lives to make a political point by publishing thousands of military reports from Afghanistan."

After reading the transcript of a recent interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (via Susan Sunflower commenting on a Glenn Greenwald post), it struck me that the accusation made by US military leaders against the WikiLeaks founder left out some critical information.

TONY JONES: Well, not according to the Pentagon. They're accusing you of revealing the identities of Afghan informants and putting their lives at risk. Afghan's president, Karzai, agrees with that he says 'the breach is extremely irresponsible and shocking.' Your response to those comments.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well we have yet to see clear evidence of that. I mean the London Times is also making this allegation today and in a quite disingenuous way, for example they mention some informers' names they say they had found and with a headline Afghan informer already dead, but when you actually read the story what you see is in fact that individual that they're mentioning died two years ago.

So there's a little bit of media manipulation occurring here. In terms of the Afghan government, it's in their interests to sort of play up the irresponsible, irresponsibility of the United States that they say has been involved in sort of collecting and permitting this data to release, be released.

Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request.

Qualitatively, the content of the recent leak was not exceptional.   The leak was distinguished from most previous leaks by its magnitude, by the sheer number of documents involved.   When it has come to incidents involving qualitatively similar information, past administrations have routinely cooperated with the press. In fact, cooperation between the government and press organizations has long been the norm in the United States whenever the news media has found itself poised to publish potentially sensitive names.  In such circumstances,  past governments have agreed to work with the press not because it was politically expedient to do so, but for the good of the country.   Why was cooperation not forthcoming from the White House in this instance?

When it refused to comply with the press group's request, did the White House put politics before its constitutional responsibilities?  Given the expectation -- indeed, the long established tradition -- that administrations cooperate with the press when national security may be at stake, a strong argument can be made that by having sought the assistance of the White House to expunge names, the leaking organizations absolved themselves of the responsibility for the release of whatever names were in the documents.    In this instance, WikiLeaks might -- understandably -- have concluded that if the White House was not concerned about release of this or that person's name (evident from the fact it did not take the group up on its request), then it need not unduly concern itself with the matter. Thereby, any worries Assange may have had about the implications of inadvertantly releasing names may have been put to rest. In other words, WikiLeaks might have trusted that the Obama White House put country first.

If the White House knew that sensitive Afghan informants' names were contained in the documents but refused the group's request to help expunge names from the documents, then the administration knowingly failed to do its utmost to mitigate a known and entirely avoidable national security risk (arguably also neglecting its constitutional responsibility to defend the First Amendment).  Knowing what WikiLeaks was about to do, and aware that WikiLeaks might lack of resources and expertise to catch all the names, the White House ought to have agreed to the group's request.

The question arises: What did the president know about the names in the Wikileaks documents, and when did he know it?

UPDATE
 It's worth noting that WikiLeaks represents a challenge not only to government secrecy, but to a mode of journalism by which a handful of news outlets serve as exclusive gateways to information. WikiLeaks represents a new, more open model of  journalism, an open-source approach to the dissemination of knowledge.  What distinguishes WikiLeaks from other press organizations is that WikiLeaks is committed to publishing source material.   The Times reported:

At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.

Whereas the Times dutifully delivered a vague request by the White House, the White House gave no heed to a far more concrete -- and therefore actionable -- request made by the press group.  The White House may have  objected to  the release of "source material" in particular, but its objection was no excuse for intransigence.  After all, the First Amendment rights of the people are not supposed to be contingent upon the opinions of an administration.

Of course, the work of checking to ensure that all Afghan informants' names had been removed from 92,000 documents sounds onerous.  Might "database size" have been grounds for the White House to have rejected the request?  Not if we consider the resources at the disposal of the administration.   As the Washington Post reminded us last week, the Obama administration has access to upwards of 800,000 Americans with security clearances working at over two dozen intelligence agencies, 1,931 private contracting firms -- not to mention the CIA, the NSA, and the Department of Defense -- any number of which could easily and efficiently have carried out this kind of request. 

The conclusion I draw is that the White House wanted to seize an opportunity to embarrass or discredit WikiLeaks more than it wanted to protect the identity -- and perhaps lives -- of any of its Afghan informants.

US college students now major in counter-terrorism

The other day I was traveling in an airport shuttle bus out of Reagan National in Washington DC when a fellow passenger (who I will call Nancy) inquired about how I liked my new ebook reader.  I was holding the small PocketBook 360.   A marriage of Taiwanese hardware and Russian software, the device is not outstanding in terms of its specifications; but I was nevertheless won over by how the Russians had successfully pushed the compact hardware to its limits.  For example, of the various ereaders devices I have examined, this was the only one of its size that could handle pdf documents to my satisfaction.

Nancy told me that she was a college senior majoring in "national security."  Having never heard of such a major, I asked her what that entailed.

"We study national security threats."

"That sounds like political science or international relations," I said.

"Not exactly -- it's more interdisciplinary. We learn how to write national security briefings."

Some fifty thousand intelligence reports are produced each year in the United States.   I knew this because -- as it happened -- on the plane I had been reading the third installment of a groundbreaking Washington Post investigation on "The Secret Government."  So many of the facts presented in the article were simply mind-boggling:

• Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
• An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
• In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

Having read the article, I realized that Nancy's employment prospects upon graduation were boundless.  But what might the future hold in store for her country and its supposedly democratic institutions?   It occurs to me that those who had programmed my little ereader -- the Russians -- ought to know.