Just after president Obama’s visit to India, former president Bill Clinton has come forward and contacted the governments of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, India, Israel, Norway, and Russia in an attempt to stop what it thinks might be a catastrophic and embarrassing international incident The potential unfolding incident could come as the result of millions of pages of documents being published and becoming a matter of public knowledge thanks to the web site Wikileaks.
Wikileaks is no stranger to controversy after releasing thousands of documents earlier this year involving previously classified information detailing the true stories behind casualties in Afghanistan. While this move was more potentially dangerous for troops in Afghanistan, there has been no shortage of controversy over the latest move either. Wikileaks has received great amounts of attention over the past few years much to the chagrin of a number of politicians, government agencies, religious organizations, and multinational corporations as it removes the veil of a number of secrets worldwide.
As for this latest release, the UK government has released a DA notice to newspapers urging them not to talk about this upcoming release in the event that it turns out to be too sensitive to publish.
It’s no secret that in the matter of international affairs the United States has become involved in projects and diplomatic relationships that require some level of secrecy on an understandable level. And it’s even understandable that when dealing with some groups, diplomats as a whole have a reputation of using a sort of double speak. But this latest leak has provided many an opportunity to open a dialogue about the true purpose of secrecy and whether it exists in order to promote national security, or whether this same secrecy can exist solely in order to protect the image of a country. On the one hand, secrecy for the purpose of true national security seems legitimate when the releasing of documents could compromise lives or needlessly endanger the safety of individuals or groups, such as with the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative in the Plane affair. Such a leak compromised Plane’s security and put her life in danger. On the other hand, this latest incident seems almost comical as domestic spying is at an all time high.
And then there’s also the possibility that the documents have little or nothing to do with what world governments are preparing for. Regardless, there will no doubt be plenty of people curious as to what the documents are about. Whatever they are, the site has said that they are seven times the size of the war diaries published in 2007.