Gitmo Leaker Gets Six Months

Gitmo leaker Matt Diaz received a sentence of six months instead of the maximum of 14 years, and he evidently will continue to receive full pay and benefits while he is in jail. While he is being painted by the media as a heroic whistleblower for releasing classified information, let’s remember that there are other ways for people whose conscience is troubled to try to effect change. As Diaz admitted,

“I could have gone to the chief of staff, I could have gone to the IG (inspector general),” or to his commanding officers in Guantanamo, Diaz said. “There were a lot of better ways to do this, and I didn’t take those better ways.”

He also criticized his decision to send the information to Olshansky anonymously, saying he mailed the information off in a goofy-looking Valentine “for selfish reasons.”

“I wasn’t really willing to put my neck on the line, to jeopardize my career,” he said. ” So I did it anonymously. I’m disgraced, I’m ashamed. I was an inspiration to my family. I let them down. I let the JAG Corps down. I let the Navy down.”

Based on the media narrative, people might believe that this is a tempest in a teapot - the man released a list of names, so what? They’re all named Mohammed anyway, right? Uh… no, they’re not, and even releasing a simple list of names might have been harmful on its own - whatever information they may have been privy to, that we were interrogating them to try to learn, was likely invalidated once the enemy knew they were captured. But Diaz didn’t just release a list of names. As prosecutors argued, “It was other identifying information from the intelligence database that could have jeopardized national security, they said, such as the country where detainees were captured and the interrogation teams handling them.”

I don’t pretend to understand the full significance of the release of this information, but even if it were completely useless to the enemy, I’m glad to see Diaz was prosecuted, and I wish that more leakers would be found and prosecuted. “Classified” is a word that should mean something. Giving your word to abide by rules of classification - especially in the military - should mean something. The trend of just ignoring laws and rules we don’t like - like immigration and labor laws, for example - is harmful to everyone. Very few of us want to live in anarchy, or to take it back to the old testament (i.e. Judges 21:5), where every man did what he thought was right. We have the rule of law. If you don’t like it change the law. Diaz had other legal and honorable means to protest and fight a policy he believed was unjust. As did the CIA and State department leakers. To whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48). If you rise to the level in your career where you have access to information that is classified, you are expected to handle it responsibly and honorably; that’s the cost of knowing things the rest of us aren’t allowed to know.

As Power Line says, “too little, too late”: It’s good to see a leaker prosecuted, but the locus of the federal bureaucracy’s war against the administration wasn’t the Navy’s JAG staff. I think it’s fair to say that the bureaucracy’s war against the Bush administration is more or less over, and the bureaucracy won.

The bureaucracy didn’t really win although I’m sure some people are happy they “got” Bush, and others are happy because they believe they’ve corrected what they perceive to be an injustice without any risk to themselves. The truth is that everybody, including the bureaucrats who took matters into their own hands, lost. They just haven’t the wit to realize it yet.

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