Let me be perfectly clear. I'm not talking about releasing truly sensitive classified intelligence. I'm talking about the kind of documents which, under any other administration would have been fully accessible to the Congress and the public through the Freedom of Information Act. I am talking about the regular business of government, the work-a-day documents of agencies like the FDA, FEMA, Treasury, HHS, the FDA and the DOJ. It is those documents which are being withheld because they prove this administration politicized those agencies violating laws in more ways than we can now even imagine.
I am quite certain that in some file in some employee's Executive Office Building cubicle is the list of just who was on Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force. In another office are the Executive Orders President Bush signed authorizing torture. In another office are documents showing how the religious right perverted federally-funded family planning operations. Some DOJ secretary is sitting on the evidence that would prove the White House tried to use the Dept. of Justice to suppress minority voting during the past two election cycles and tried to purge US Attorney's around the country that refuse to bring politically motivated charges against Democratic candidates and office holders.
All that evidence, and mountains more, are destined for oblivion within the next nine months.
Until now federal employees in possession of evidence of a crime had no reasonably safe way of getting that evidence into the public's hands.
WikiLeaks now offers a way -- and in just the nick of time.
Of course breaking the law -- even for laudable reasons -- is inherently risky business and I can't in good conscience encourage anyone to disregard the consequences by advising them to simply break the law. M means and ends must be thought through. The ethics of withholding or releasing such materials weighed and re-weighed and the possible consequences clearly understood.
Daniel Ellsberg understood the means, the justification, the ends he wished to achieve and accepted the risks. He broke the law and so doing, changed history.
(Another Aside: When I was covering banking agencies in Washington during the S&L crisis, federal regulators, unable to get their superiors to act against politically-connected rogues like Charles Keating, would slip me restricted documents. I would write a story and suddenly the agency heads would be forced to act. Finally one day two Treasury agents (with guns even) showed up at my office. They demanded to know who was leaking documents to me. I pointed to my filing cabinet and said,
"Listen you two, it's all in those files -- everything you want to know. I dare you to subpoena's those files. Then you two better go looking for a new line of work. Beecause some of the names in those files are your own superiors."
They left and I never heard a word about it after that. Had it not been for those leaks, to me and other reporters, the looting of the S&Ls would have gone on much longer, and cost taxpayers much more. Those leakers were -- are -- heroes, of a sort.)
Time is short. The perps are already moving in the shredding machines. They are already making lists of the documents that will be sequestered in the yet-to-be-built Bush "Library" in Texas. By this November it will be too late. They will have succeeded. They will have escaped. The evidence of their crimes will be either destroyed or placed beyond reach.
The best disinfectant is, and always has been, the light of day.
Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.
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