By Patricia H. Kushlis
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said yesterday at a briefing for reporters that he did not think a young officer at a forward post in Iraq needed to be kept up-to-date on the twists and turns of the negotiations over New START. He’s right. There’s a lot more these officers and enlisted personnel didn’t and don’t need to know either – at least from the cables I’ve seen released thus far by Wikileaks that have appeared in the media.
Yesterday, a once-bitten, twice-shy State Department announced it had restricted the flow of its cable traffic to the Department of Defense. It’s a little like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, but I don’t blame State for clamping down on the flow of sensitive information outside the department just as I think neither State, DOD nor the US government as a whole should permit the copying of classified documents to personal CDs, DVDs or other mobile devices. That, according to Gates yesterday is no longer possible at DOD.
One dilemma is where “the need to know” doctrine should begin and end with government secrets and non-secrets. Another is the whole issue of classification.
Since when, for instance, are unclassified cables secret?
Bottom line: they aren’t.
But confidential assessments about other governments, negotiations, leaders and political and economic situations likely are – and it can be particularly damaging when the reporting gets into the gratuitous and names are named and names are called or when negotiating positions and bottom-lines are revealed in public. That's a good way to turn an almost done deal into a dead one.
As far as I’m concerned, however, a PfC in Iraq does not need to be knowledgeable about the internal workings of US relations with much of the rest of the world or, for that matter, have access to someone in the State Department’s pet names for Russian or German or any other country’s leaders. I’m not sure pet names even belong in any department’s cable traffic – but that’s another story. And I fail to see why any soldier at a forward base in Iraq should have had access to at least 8,000 State Department cables about our Embassy's dealings with - or its officers views of - the Turkish government. What does that have to do with "the need to know?"
Name-calling may be Cutesy.
But it's certainly juvenile and it’s the name calling that has led the stories in too much of the media perhaps because the contents of the cables generally reveal little substantively that has not previously appeared in the press in one form or another or perhaps because much of the Wikileak cache thus far just doesn't contain a treasure trove of eye-catching headlines. The former is, after all, what press briefings and judicious leaks are all about.
As others have pointed out, Wikileaks' data dumps are not The Pentagon Papers in so many ways.
Information sharing and access to confidential reports among employees of different US government agencies can be crucial for this nation's security – depending on the topic and the employees’ need to know.
But Gulfstream-sized rivers of cables – not to mention e-mails and other forms of communication between Embassies in the field and Foggy Bottom where the really cutesy stuff likely exists in profusion are hardly job-related for a soldier in a field unit in Iraq or elsewhere who should, in my opinion, be focusing on a much smaller universe that above all concerns his or her unit’s tasks and survival.
Presumably PfC Bradley Manning - if that’s who was Wikileak’s source - did not take the time to read the cables he downloaded before he blithely copied and passed them on. There wouldn’t have been enough hours in a day for that - even for a speed reader. And if he did have the time to read all the cable traffic that crossed his computer screen, then it seems to me he was far from gainfully employed. The Defense Department could have done quite nicely without the position itself let alone the person who occupied it.
Data deluge blowback
Yet, why and when the DOD decided to engage in such undiscriminating, free-flow of information among the troops and who made the decision or decisions to permit this to happen are questions among many others awaiting answers – if that is, they are being asked. There are times, after all, where avalanches of information in and of themselves are not necessarily a good thing.