The World According to Brooks

David Brooks is aflutter over the WikeLeaks docudump. After posing a psychological "explanation" of why Julian Assange is such a bad boy, Brooks complains that Assange's bad behavior has upset the "world order."

The New York Times moderators again suppressed my comment on Brooks' column. So here it is:

First, let's establish that Julian Assange is not a traitor, as you obliquely suggest. He is not an American, so he cannot be a traitor to the U.S. He is not an American, so he cannot be a traitor to the U.S. He may be charged with espionage, but that is not a certainty.

Second, let's talk about how "secret" those documents WikiLeaks dumped really are: according to the Guardian, about three million people have access to these "secret" documents. Human nature & technology being what they are, it was downright ridiculous to expect 3 million people to keep this information secret. Allegedly, some low-level grunt was one of the three million not up to the secrets-keeping task. He was a tattletale waiting to happen. If it hadn't been he, it would have been someone else.

Third, let's not give the Times too many kudos for discretion. As we all well know, the Times' "discretion" during the build-up to the Iraq War led many Americans, including Members of Congress who were required to vote on matters concerning the proposal to go to war, to believe stories that just were not true. Instead, they were stories effectively dictated to a Times reporter by an Administration that was just plain making stuff up. I understand the bind journalists are in when it comes to matters of security, especially national security, but the Gray Lady has not always kept her skirts clean. That said, her redactions from the WikiLeaks cables, especially the redactions of names, may well have been the right thing to do. The decision to publish the cables was definitely justified.

Finally, we all should be able to agree the government is too damned secretive. Government secrets have become a cancer on our society, necessities in a limited number of cases, but abuse of the public good in many others. Right now, for instance, our Department of Justice, which is supposed to protect us, is invoking "state secrets" arguments in court to "protect" us from information that has long been in the public square. The victims of these so-called state secrets are real people who will not get a fair shake in court.

If you want to make a villain out of Julian Assange, then you should ask yourself first why what you call justifiable "specific revelations" have not been reported earlier. Why shouldn't we know, for instance, that "Afghan Vice President Ahmed Zia Massoud took $52 million in cash when he visited the United Arab Emirates last year"? Or that Putin & Berlusconi are best buddies? Obviously, our government was keeping secrets that should have been in the public domain. Julian Assange may have been imprudent, but it can be argued that his imprudence was necessitated by the bad behavior of bureaucrats & high-level officials who punish honorable whistleblowers and deprive the public of the right to know.

The WikiLeaks document dumps, and many of the stories they tell, are stories without heroes. You, as a journalist, have a duty to put the Wikidumps into perspective. Your tut-tuts -- absent anything but a weak acknowledgment that a few of the stories might be worth airing -- are an abdication of your journalistic responsibility. So put yourself among the anti-heroes of This Week in Journalism.