There are worse things one can do than cut off a server; for example, cut off a head. That seems to be where other WikiLeaks critics are headed. Sarah Palin said that Assange should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden; Newt Gingrich said that he should be treated as an enemy combatant; and Bill Kristol wants the Obama Administration to think about kidnapping or killing Assange “and his collaborators.” Kristol doesn’t use the word “kill,” but rather “whack” and “neutralize,” as if some combination of slang and clinical talk made everything all right. Is that where we are? (This isn’t to dismiss Assange’s other, Swedish legal troubles; the characters here are neither supervillains nor superheroes.) One question that came up in the debate about Obama putting Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, on an assassination list without even making a pretense of going through the courts was who else you could kill on the same grounds. It is striking to see how unabashedly that line of reasoning has been pursued. If we can shoot down Julian Assange, how about any investigative reporter who might learn something that embarrasses our government? We seem to have hopelessly confused national security with the ability of a particular Administration to pursue its policies.

My colleagues Raffi Khatchadourian and George Packer have both been asking if WikiLeaks and Assange count as journalists, and if that makes a difference. Raffi argues that the group is at least slouching toward the status of a traditional news organization. George thinks that WikiLeaks is farther away than that. Maybe; but I was stopped a little by George’s belief in “the right of U.S. officials to carry out their work with a degree of confidentiality.” George asked, “Should no government secret remain secret?” Some should, but, when speaking of the use of secrets by the government, I am wary of the word “right.” Privilege, legitimate interest—yes. But rights are something else. George speaks of “officials,” rather than “the government,” and thus more about individual rights than any adhering to the state. That is a telling distinction, but it is not the only or really controlling one here. For example, the Obama Administration, like its predecessor, has been willing to use the state-secrets privilege to get cases thrown out of court. When it does so, it is the more abstract construction—the state itself—that it is asking the courts to protect, not the rights of some bureaucrat. (And note that this is a “privilege,” one whose abuse should lead to its forfeiture.) One can have sympathy for diplomats whose writing has been exposed (or admire their literary skills), but it is not as though these government workers had a proprietary claim to the cables. They belong to the rest of us. What is the “government,” after all, in the crudest, Gov-10 sense? It’s not some giant person balancing his rights against ours; we made it. The artistry of the founders was not to care that their creation could sometimes look humiliatingly clumsy—that it could, and should, be embarrassed.

Another cause for wariness: any assessments of the news, scandal, and public-interest value of a database with a quarter of a million documents in it, only a few hundred of which we have read. Given the number of countries involved, do we even know what meaning certain observations may have for people around the world? Sri Lankans, for example, will care a great deal about one of the latest cables, which deals with a massacre of thousands. Maybe we at home didn’t know about it, or care how much our government and diplomats did know. And maybe we should have. In that sense, WikiLeaks may be a brilliant sort of classroom—full of books that, unfortunately, one can no longer find by way of Amazon.

Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP

Dec. 1, 2010