Michael Scherer does an excellent job of dissecting toture advocate Mark Thiessenattack on Wikileaks. Scherer looks back at history, namely the release of the Pentagon Papers that helped turn the war. The Pentagon Papers showed that more than one president deliberately mislead the country about the war in Vietnam and almost 70,000 US troops died as a result.
Supreme Court’s opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, the so-called Pentagon Papers case from 1971.
Concurring in that case, Justice Potter Stewart observed, “In the absence of governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the area of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry — in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government.. . . . Without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.”
The article also quotes from Justices Hugo Black and William Brennan
[W]e are asked to hold that, despite the First Amendment’s emphatic command, the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws enjoining publication of current news and abridging freedom of the press in the name of “national security.” The Government does not even attempt to rely on any act of Congress. Instead, it makes the bold and dangerously far-reaching contention that the courts should take it upon themselves to “make” a law abridging freedom of the press in the name of equity, presidential power and national security, even when the representatives of the people in Congress have adhered to the command of the First Amendment and refused to make such a law. To find that the President has “inherent power” to halt the publication of news by resort to the courts would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make “secure.” No one can read the history of the adoption of the First Amendment without being convinced beyond any doubt that it was injunctions like those sought here that Madison and his collaborators intended to outlaw in this Nation for all time. The word “security” is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.
A government that lies to its people betrays everything a soldier hopes to be fighting for, everything. Long live Wikileaks and all independent media because without it we have no democracy at all.
