Opinion: WikiLeaks Finally Goes Too Far

(Nov. 29) -- So now we know what it takes to get everyone to realize how damaging WikiLeaks is to U.S. foreign policy.

When WikiLeaks released nearly half a million documents undermining U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan earlier this year, it was met with a collective yawn. And it was hard to find more than a just few top officials in the United States or abroad who complained when the site released raw footage of a shooting video taken from a U.S. helicopter in Iraq. What's the big deal? After all, those were unpopular wars.

But now that the site has started releasing what it promises to be 250,000 diplomatic cables, suddenly, the entire world is up in arms.

Examples:

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reacted to the July release of some 91,000 Afghanistan-related documents by writing at the time, "However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Now Kerry is calling the latest release a "reckless action which jeopardizes lives by exposing raw, contemporaneous intelligence."

The White House Office of Management and Budget issued a directive Sunday for federal agencies to review their security procedures, prompting ABC News' Jake Tapper to note that "it was unclear why this memo is being released now, after the third WikiLeaks document dump, instead of after the first one."

Foreign leaders are only now denouncing WikiLeaks.

Absent from the debate when the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq bore the brunt of WikiLeaks attacks (even though Italians served proudly in both campaigns), Premier Silvio Berlusconi is portrayed in unfavorable terms, and Foreign Minister Franco Frattini described the current release as "the 9/11 of world diplomacy."
French Budget Minister Francois Baroin remarked, "Authority and democratic sovereignty are threatened by such practices. If there was such a thing as French WikiLeaks, we would have to be inflexible."
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari now terms WikiLeaks actions as "unhelpful and untimely."
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit said the "extremely negative reports" as they pertained to Pakistani-Saudi relations were "misleading and contrary to the facts."

At least this near-universal hostile reaction is pushing the Obama administration to do what it should have been doing long ago -- working to put WikiLeaks out of business.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said today that "we are taking aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information."

Attorney General Eric Holder also reminded reporters today that there is "an active and ongoing criminal investigation" into the release of classified U.S. documents to WikiLeaks. In progress jointly with the Defense Department since the summer, the investigation has reportedly focused on 22-year-old Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, an intelligence specialist who served in Baghdad and boasted online of sharing military secrets with WikiLeaks.

Though leaks of military and diplomatic secrets are not new, such an indiscriminate release of massive amounts of national security-related sensitive material is. And the Obama administration needs to act decisively to discourage repeats, as such incidents will continue to damage national security interests.

In addition to courts-martial and stiff prison sentences for any offending military personnel, the Justice Department should pursue legal action against WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, Julian Assange -- regardless of his citizenship. A notorious Australian hacker, Assange is already the subject of an international arrest warrant issued in Sweden for rape and sexual molestation. Two decades earlier, he was charged by Australian police with hacking into the master server at Nortel, a telecommunications company, and pleaded guilty in 1991 of 25 counts of hacking. Spending a lifetime on the run, he told a Der Spiegel before publishing the Afghanistan files that he "enjoys crushing bastards."

While punishing the offenders is one important step in putting WikiLeaks out of business, U.S. officials must be more proactive in preventing such massive leaks in the first place.