Topics Justice

Question In light of the recent leaking of hundreds of thousands of American classified documents related to the Afghan and Iraq wars by Wikileaks, I have been considering the issue of freedom of information, particularly the right of governments to withhold information from the public. While in some cases such secrecy is easily understandable (releasing the names and homes of Afghan informants, for example, would make the informants useless to the military while simultaneously endangering the lives of the selfsane informants and their families), there are other cases where I cannot understand how the government can morally justify withholding information from the public (for example, the notion that the American military was paying Afghan radio stations to run positive stories about occupation forces). Other cases, pertaining to brutalities committed by enemy forces, seem even less easy to hide away. So my question is, insofar as releasing the information doesn't directly endanger lives, does the government have the right to hide important information pertaining to a war being funded by taxpayer dollars from those same taxpayers? Is there an argument to be made that selective disclosure, rather than full disclosure, is a form of propaganda?

Accepted:
October 27, 2010

Comments

The justification goes something like this. The United States is under various current and potential threats from foreign sources. It is the government's responsibility, as a matter of national security, to keep these threats at bay and perhaps to neutralize them. This task can be made easier or much harder by public attitudes within the US itself. The US failed to prevail in the Vietnam War, for example, because many of its citizens were no longer willing to accept the aerial bombardment of villages with napalm and cluster bombs. To effectively safeguard the national security of the United States and to protect its citizens, it is necessary, then, to establish and maintain a widespread willingness among the American people to support US foreign and military policy. This in turn makes it necessary to withhold from the American people, or to sanitize, any information that might adversely affect their support. Concealing war crimes committed by US soldiers, US contractors or US allies is often as important, or more important, to national security than concealing the identity of our intelligence assets. In the long run, we could not maintain our prominent place in world affairs if we had to compete with one hand tied behind our backs: we must be able to conduct our foreign and military policy without disturbance by the American people just as the Chinese are able to conduct their foreign and military policy without disturbance by the Chinese people.

To be sure, I do not agree with this line of argument. But it is widely accepted among those in power and even by many ordinary citizens. So it's interesting to ask yourself: what if anything is wrong with a people democratically authorizing its government to withhold, at its discretion, any information about its foreign activities whose release it judges likely to have adverse consequences for national security? Would it merely be foolish to give such far-reaching authorization to a government? Or would it be morally wrong by abnegating our inalienable responsibility to monitor and constrain the enormous power our government is wielding abroad in our name?