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NY Sun Editorial: What Would Lincoln Do With Wikileaks?

At some point people are going to start wondering, if they haven’t already, what leaders like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. Grant, and Dwight Eisenhower would have done in respect of Wikileaks. We mention those names because they were presidents who led an army — or the whole nation — in a time of war. It’s hard to think of an attack on any of our nation’s war efforts quite like that which is being made by Wikileaks under the cover of a claim to be a publication. What would our greatest leaders expect President Obama to do in respect of Julian Assange?

Washington had an obsession with secrecy, about which he wrote in a famous letter that contained his celebrated sentence, sent from eight miles east of Morristown, New Jersey, in the middle of the revolutionary war. “For upon Secrecy, Success depends in Most Enterprizes of the kind, and for want of it, they are generally defeated, however well planned & promising a favourable issue.” He took his secrecy so seriously that he refused to share, even with the Congress, the instructions he had given to the negotiator of the Jay Treaty with Britain that nearly precipitated war with France....
Read entire article at NY Sun