The government’s response to Wikileaks is embarrassing.

Wikileaks, the infamous non-profit organization, that, although has the official slogan of “We Open Governments,” seems to do a very good job of simply embarrassing them. Wikileaks previous releases of government data concerning both Afghanistan and Iraq, detailed friendly-fire and civilian casualties in both cases.

The response to these leaks was as expected. All governments involved denounced the act of releasing the documents, but did not deny the validity of the documents; a very public case of ad hominem.

The public ad hominem has also been the standard response to the latest release of documents by Wikileaks. All governments involved, including the Canadian government, have denounced the release of these documents as dangerous and “harmful to national security.” Lawrence Cannon, the Foreign Affairs minister to the Harper government, characterized the leaks as “deplorable” and continued to say that the leaks “do not serve anybody’s national interests.”

While it may not serve any government’s interest, it seems to be a strange and dangerous characterization that the public, specifically organizations such as Wikileaks, should tailor their actions to serve the government’s actions rather than vice versa.

In fact, Rep. Peter King, a Republican from the great state of New York, has gone so far as to say that Wikileaks should be dubbed a “Terrorist” organization akin to Al-Qaida.

Not only does King argue that Wikileaks, an organization that does little more than feed media outlets, should be considered a terrorist organization but he follows suit with other government officials, claiming that the release of the cables by Wikileaks damages national security and puts lives at risk. Lawyers for Julian Assange (editor of Wikileaks) argued quite the opposite, saying that “I think you’ll find, if you look at it, there is no threat to either the security of individuals or ongoing operations.”

I think the majority of us remember writing essays in school and an important lesson can be taken from those essays and applied to this case. The burden of proof is implicit on those making a positive claim; in this case the governments arguing that these leaks harm national security. Lawrence Cannon and his colleagues who have joined arms in attacking the character of Julian Assange and Wikileaks have shown no proof that these releases harm national security. Until the public is shown the proof that these documents hurt national security, or indeed put lives at risk, than we have no choice but to believe the lawyers for Wikileaks. I, as well as many others (I hope), see a problem with putting blind-faith in our government as we are being asked to do.

It is a sad state of affairs when governments around the world devolve into name-calling and ad hominem attacks on those organizations, such as Wikileaks, who are working to open governments and expose things such as civilian casualites in Iraq and Afghanistan, friendly-fire incidents in warzones and a failure to investigate crimes done by an invading force against the civilian population in a war-torn country.

Aside….

Does this remind anyone of the movie Mean Girls? Girls (the government in this case) obsessed with gossipping?