Open Letter on WikiLeaks by Ambassador Fay Hartog Levin

November 30, 2010

Ambassador Fay Hartog Levin. Photo: State Dept.

The past few days you have been seeing news reports in the Netherlands on the release of documents which claimed to originate from the U.S. Embassy in The Hague.  

According to these reports these were confidential communications between the Embassy and the Department of State in Washington.  While I cannot and will not comment directly on classified documents, I would like to share with you my thoughts on these disturbing developments.   

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have made it a priority to reinvigorate America’s relationships around the world.   

Our diplomatic relations with the Netherlands date back to the days when John Adams was the first envoy to this country from the young American republic.  Through the years this bond has strengthened and been enriched.  In recent years we have been close partners on such key issues as counter-terrorism, development assistance, climate change and piracy.

Of course, we maintain close ties through alliances such as NATO.   As the United States Ambassador to the Netherlands, I am proud to be part of all of these efforts and have found my relationship with the Dutch government to be candid, collegial and warm.

Of course, even a solid relationship will have its ups and downs.  These communications which were purportedly downloaded from U.S. Defense Department computers appear to contain our diplomats’ assessments of policies, negotiations, and leaders from countries around the world as well as reports on private conversations with people inside and outside other governments.

I cannot vouch for the authenticity of any one of these documents. But I can say that the United States deeply regrets the disclosure of any information that was intended to be confidential. And we condemn it. Diplomats must engage in frank discussions with their colleagues, and they must be assured that these discussions will remain private. Honest dialogue—within governments and between them—is part of the basic bargain of international relations; we could not maintain peace, security, and international stability without it. I am sure that Dutch ambassadors to the United States would say the same thing. They too depend on being able to exchange honest opinions with their counterparts in Washington and send home their assessments of America’s leaders, policies, and actions.

I do believe that people of good faith recognize that diplomats’ internal reports do not represent a government’s official foreign policy. In the United States, they are one element out of many that shape our policies, which are ultimately set by the President and the Secretary of State. And those policies are a matter of public record, the subject of thousands of pages of speeches, statements, white papers, and other documents that the State Department makes freely available online and elsewhere.

But relations between governments are not the only concern. U.S. diplomats meet with local business leaders, human rights workers, journalists, religious leaders, and others outside the government who offer their own candid insights. These conversations depend on trust and confidence as well. If an anti-corruption activist shares information about official misconduct, or a social worker passes along documentation of sexual violence, revealing that person’s identity could have serious repercussions: imprisonment, torture, even death.

The owners of the WikiLeaks website claim to possess some 250,000 classified documents, many of which have been released to the media. Whatever their motives are in publishing these documents, it is clear that releasing them poses real risks to real people, and often to particular people who have dedicated their lives to protecting others. An act intended to provoke the powerful may instead imperil the powerless. We support and are willing to have genuine debates about pressing questions of public policy. But releasing documents carelessly and without regard for the consequences is not the way to start such a debate.

For our part, the U.S. government is committed to maintaining the security of our diplomatic communications and is taking steps to make sure they are kept in confidence. We are moving aggressively to make sure this kind of breach does not happen again. And we will continue to work to strengthen our partnership with The Netherlands and make progress on the issues that are important for our two countries. We cannot afford anything less.  We are in close contact with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make sure we continue to focus on the issues and tasks at hand.

President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and the American Embassy in The Hague  remain committed to being trusted partners as we seek to build a better, more prosperous world for everyone.