Eric W. Dolan writes for The Raw Story:
Two distinguished scholars and activists, Noam Chomsky and Peter Singer, signed an open letter to the Prime Minister of Australia on Tuesday, urging the government to condemn calls for Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be assassinated.
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"The materials—we should understand—and the Pentagon Papers is another case in point—that one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population," Chomsky said in an interview with the Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. "In the Pentagon Papers, for example, there was one volume, the negotiations volume, which might have had bearing on ongoing activities, and Dan Ellsberg withheld that. That came out a little bit later."
The Pentagon Papers were a collection of top-secret Department of Defense documents on the history of the United States' involvement in Vietnam that were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg.
"But if you look at the Papers themselves, there are things that Americans should have known that the government didn't want them to know," he continued. "And as far as I can tell, from what I've seen here, pretty much the same is true. In fact, the current leaks are—what I've seen, at least—primarily interesting because of what they tell us about how the diplomatic service works."
Singer said there was a "clear parallel" between the Afghanistan war documents leak and the Pentagon Papers.
Although greater transparency has some bad consequences, Singer concludes that "a climate of openness makes it more likely that governments and corporations will act more ethically."
"In a world in which terrorists have committed atrocities and threaten to commit more, to seek complete government transparency is utopian," Singer wrote at Project Syndicate in August. "Sometimes it is possible to do good only in secret. Yet on the whole, a more transparent community is likely to be a better one – and the same applies to a more transparent world."
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