WikiLeaks What-Ifs

What if they had exposed state secrets through U.S. history?

Deroy Murdock
Friday, December 17, 2010

On Christmas night 1776, George Washington and his troops silently set out east from Pennsylvania and crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. There they pounced on snoring Hessian mercenaries at their barracks in Trenton. Washington’s surprise attack vanquished the pro-British unit. This unexpected victory rejuvenated the American Revolution just when the cause looked lost.

Had they been alive back then, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning (alleged purveyor of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks) might have forwarded Washington’s covert plans to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s founder. Assange would have galloped on horseback through Trenton’s snow-clogged streets yelling, “The Yankees are coming! The Yankees are coming!” — all in order to “inform the public.”

Roused from their sleep, the Hessians might have crushed Washington and his men and, thus, the Revolution. If so, we would now drink warm beer at cricket matches.

WikiLeakers and their increasingly vocal apologists are stunningly oblivious to military and diplomatic secrecy’s role in preserving freedom and national security. Informing the American people is a noble objective. Unfortunately, our enemies listen in.

Germany was unaware that Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt could read Adolf Hitler’s military commands, thanks to captured Nazi Enigma coding machines. England kept this secret until 1974 — 29 years after Hitler put a gun to his temple in the Führerbunker.

WikiLeaks about Jimmy Doolittle’s post‒Pearl Harbor raid on Tokyo would have knocked American airplanes from Japanese skies. Likewise, self-styled defenders of “the public’s right to know” about D-Day would have told the Nazis that Eisenhower was en route and turned the Normandy landing into an American Waterloo.

There are two possible explanations for the behavior of WikiLeaks’s operators and supporters: They either recklessly disregard the implications of their revelations or actively subvert U.S. interests, risking serious harm to Americans and our allies.

• WikiLeaks disclosed that a major Mediterranean city has become an al-Qaeda hotbed. (To limit further damage, I have excluded its name.) American diplomats there had redoubled their counterterror efforts. Now WikiLeaks has exposed this to America’s biggest enemy, placing a giant bull’s-eye on the relevant U.S. outpost and jeopardizing the country that hosts it.

• WikiLeaks posted diplomatic cables detailing critical infrastructure overseas, such as pipelines and vaccine factories. What a perfect target list for those who want to see “infidels” sick or dead.

• WikiLeaks blabbed that China seems sanguine about Seoul controlling the entire Korean peninsula. Next time Washington asks China to babysit Kim Jong Il, it will not help that leaked U.S. cables outed Beijing as less than thrilled with Pyongyang. This raises, rather than lowers, the odds that Kim will lob more explosives (conventional or atomic) at South Korea, possibly hitting American GIs, killing civilians, and even dragging America into another Korean War.

Since it is painfully clear that America cannot keep secrets (an old problem that WikiLeaks has updated), foreign intelligence sources will tend to clam up. Why whisper to American officials when the result is like shouting into a bullhorn?

Nonetheless, a group called “WikiLeaks Is Democracy” argues that “WikiLeaks performs an invaluable service to the broad U.S. and global public with a commitment to the protection of human rights and the rule of law.” Academy Award–winning filmmaker Michael Moore offered $20,000 toward Assange’s bail. “He should be thanked and honored, not abused and jailed,” Moore declared Tuesday.

Incredible.

WikiLeaks will snuff out innocent lives, if it has not done so already.

The U.S. remains at war with Muslim fanatics who plot mass murder against Americans and our friends overseas. From Mogadishu to Tehran to Pyongyang, bad men wish America the worst. That’s why WikiLeaks is neither funny nor cute nor just a “newsy” offshoot of the logorrhea that fuels breathless “tweets” about Kardashian leg-waxings and such.

Underscoring this point also serves justice. WikiLeaks’s alleged chief source, Pfc. Bradley Manning, should be court-martialed for espionage and treason. If convicted, he should be placed against a wall and executed by firing squad. (If extradited here, Assange deserves the same sendoff.) Maybe that will persuade Americans to stop flapping their gums about things that will enable murderers.