[Azure]

But the WikiLeaks story is a new and troubling event. Our initial reaction was that the documents expose no big lies about the war and, judging from what we've seen so far, no small ones either. They reveal nothing that wasn't already widely known about Iranian and Pakistani support for the Taliban. In other words, their value in terms of the public's right to know is de minimis.

But the closer we and others have looked at the documents, it's clear that the WikiLeaks dump does reveal a great deal about the military's methods, sources, tactics and protocols of communication. Such details are of little interest to the public at large, and they are unlikely to change many minds about the conduct, or wisdom, of the war. But they are of considerable interest to America's avowed enemies and strategic competitors such as Russia and China.

In his defense, Mr. Assange dismisses concerns about harm to U.S. national security, calling it ridiculous. That may be his right as an Australian national, although Australia deploys some 1,500 troops to Afghanistan and has lost more than two dozen men in combat. But Mr. Assange also says he takes threats to individual safety seriously, and he boasts that he has withheld or edited thousands of documents as a precaution against potential harm.

If so, he hasn't done a very good job of it. Yesterday, the Times of London noted that "in just two hours of searching the WikiLeaks archive, The Times found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers' names."

The newspaper goes on to note that "named Afghans offered information accusing others of being Taliban. In one case from 2007, a senior official accuses named figures in the government of corruption. In another from 2007, a report describes using a middleman to talk to an alleged Taliban commander who is identified. '[X] said that he would be killed if he got caught interacting with any coalition forces, which is why he hides when we go into [Y].'" The deletions here were done by the London Times, not WikiLeaks.

Perhaps the various countries that host WikiLeaks' servers can provide these informers and their entire families with refugee status now that their lives are in jeopardy. We'd say something similar about the New York Times, Britain's Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel, which coordinated publication of the documents with Mr. Assange. The Times has made a show of seeking to corroborate the information it published, and to delete information the paper believed was especially sensitive (including the names of Afghan informants). It went so far as to urge Mr. Assange not to publish certain documents.

We don't believe in prior restraint, but it is worth asking whether the Times, the Guardian or Der Spiegel are really serving the public, much less allied security interests, in validating Mr. Assange's methods by flying in publishing formation with him. "I don't know, and I'll bet they [WikiLeaks] don't know, if publication of this mass of material is in some ways genuinely harmful to national security," Floyd Abrams, the well-known First Amendment lawyer, told the Journal yesterday. "That's one of my problems with their modus operandi."



Mr. Abrams went on to defend the behavior of the Times, which he credited for urging Mr. Assange not to publish certain documents. However, years after the Times exposed the Swift financing operation—an act we criticized at the time—we have still found no public benefit from that report. The most notable consequence is that Europe stopped cooperating with the U.S. on the program.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

Clearly nothing to see here. Move along now.