In light of the recent leaking of hundreds of thousands of American classified

In light of the recent leaking of hundreds of thousands of American classified

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?

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