Feeding Paranoia

When news of the WikiLeaks publication of 250,000 classified documents came out, the story may have seemed unprecedented in scope.  That's not to say we don't try to find historical similarities.  Daniel Ellsberg was on CNN's Larry King Show last night.  He was the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971.   There is no doubt that the Pentagon Papers fueled an already high degree of paranoia in the Nixon administration that later culminated in the Watergate scandal and the President's resignation in 1974.   In the end, Nixon's downfall wasn't any leaked document.  It was his own paranoia caught on tape.  These new developments put the Obama administration's pledge of transparency to the ultimate test.  I agree with Secretary of State Clinton that these leaks do not make the WikiLeaks people heroes.  The real tragedy would be the resulting reluctance to share vital information without fear of it falling into hands of those who would kill us.  Rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea feed off the chance to justify their paranoid existence.  The WikiLeaks people never considered that.  The Pentagon Papers gave us information that shed light on the Vietnam War, whether we liked it or not.  The random nature and pure volume of these new leaks may provide more heat than light.