Afghan war documents point to overuse of government secrecy

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The most important lesson from the release of tens of thousands of pages of classified information about the war in Afghanistan seems to be getting lost: Far too much information is classified, often simply because it is embarrassing to the government. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that there "weren't any new revelations in the material,"and nothing has been identified that is likely to be damaging to national security. The question, then, must be why so much of this material was classified and kept from the public?

The parallel to the Pentagon Papers is striking. In 1971, the New York Times, and then other newspapers, sought to publish a classified history of America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Since it was published in the newspapers in daily installments, the federal government went to federal court to seek an injunction to stop the newspapers from publishing more. At every level of the courts, the United States claimed that publication of the classified material would cause grave danger to national security.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers, in large part because the government never could point to any material that would be harmful to reveal. Whitney North Seymour Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who defended the federal government, later said that he kept pressing the officials in the Defense Department for examples of material that would be damaging to release. But they never could point to any, although they constantly asserted that publication would be harmful.

The Nixon administration vehemently opposed the release of the Pentagon Papers even though the documents were largely historical material about what occurred during prior presidencies. The Obama administration has decried the release of the information about the war in Afghanistan even though it appears to be primarily about what happened during the George W. Bush presidency. The reason is the same in both cases: The administrations feared that the disclosures would undermine public support for the wars in question. In both instances, the concern was that the revelations might make it harder to gain continued congressional support and to sustain public support for the war effort.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chemerinsky-wikileaks-20100728,0,4762357.story