Harry Browne Quotes
It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.
Browne, Harry. "The First Casualty of War." HarryBrowne.org, 24 Mar. 2003.
The quotation was given by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld just prior to the war with Iraq, 2003.
Wikileaks had just released 400,000 classified American documents relating to the Iraq War. Many accused him and Wikileaks of endangering the lives of not only soldiers, but Iraq civilians who might be identified as cooperating with the coalition forces by the released documents. The heart of the problem is that governments tend to use classification to hide embarrassing facts or policies that might be controversial as well as to protect legitimate national security secrets and sources and methods of information. The majority of the 400,000 leaked documents, when examined, were clearly not protecting any legitimate people or secrets but just staved off criticism or embarrassment; in many cases, there was no value to the contents and the maw of the censorship and classification process was applied indiscriminately to many documents. A much better argument than Assange made, can be gleaned from the vast number of WWII documents that America, England, France, Russia and others still keep secret, when the people who might have been protected have already died and the methods are long since obsolete.
Theodore Roosevelt was the Presidential nominee. See {634097} and {585962}--Samuel Johnson, for a 1758 version of this idea.
Most CIA Directors have not had this extreme attitude, but because Casey did, journalists, members of Congress, other government officials and even Presidents have often distrusted the CIA and their personnel more than was necessarily warranted.
Harry Edson Browne was an American writer, politician, and investment advisor. He was the Libertarian Party's Presidential nominee in the U.S. elections of 1996 and 2000. He authored 12 books that in total have sold more than 2 million copies.
