FT. MEADE, Md. (CN) - Retired diplomats offered surprisingly diverse perspectives on the "open diplomacy" ideal that Pfc. Bradley Manning professed in sending WikiLeaks more than 250,000 cables.
Documents published under the name "Cablegate" account for more than one- third of sensitive files that Manning exposed, and are among the most controversial.
Amnesty International claims the releases helped fuel the so-called Arab Spring. Manning's supporters cite their role in exposing U.S. drone strikes in Yemen and spying on the United Nations.
Critics claim the releases may have spurred repressive regimes such as Belarus to crack down of democratic reformers.
Manning repeatedly referred to the publication of the cables as an experiment in "open diplomacy," in online chats with Adrian Lamo, the former hacker who alerted authorities to the security breach.
During those chats, Manning's online handle "bradass87" shared an excerpt of a New York Times report from Jan. 20, 1919 describing "open diplomacy" as envisioned by President Woodrow Wilson.
"'Open diplomacy' does not mean that every word said in preparing a treaty should be shouted to the whole world and submitted to all the misconstructions that malevolence, folly and evil ingenuity could put upon it," bradass87 quoted the newspaper as reporting. "Open diplomacy is the opposite of secret diplomacy, which consisted in the underhand negotiation of treaties whose very existence was kept from the world."
Princeton Professor John M. Cooper, who wrote a biography of Woodrow Wilson, described Wilson's ideal as "unprecedented."
The concept, envisioned in the first of his "Fourteen Points," called for "Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."
Wilson "practiced what he preached," Cooper said, adding that the 28th president was the first to conduct a press conference.
In the wake of "Cablegate," Princeton Professor Peter Singer published an article asking, "Is Open Diplomacy Possible?"
Singer told Courthouse News: "It's been endorsed by a president of the United States, and one of the more thoughtful presidents of the United States, I might say."
But President Wilson never opened hundreds of thousands of cables to press and public scrutiny, and the United States has never allowed open access for such documents, at any classification level.
Dismissing such a notion as "naïve," Cooper said, "You can't [do that]. Come on!"
Manning's defense attorney David Coombs described his client as "young, naïve, but good intentioned," in his opening statement.
But two of four retired diplomats interviewed by Courthouse News suggested that open diplomacy could work, under certain conditions.
Brady Kiesling, who served 20 years as a diplomat before resigning in protest of the Iraq war, defended the concept in a telephone interview as an official system of public access.
"It's not hopelessly naïve," he said. "It is difficult, and it takes essentially a philosophical leap that the current U.S. national security state is not prepared to make."
After postings to Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Romania and Armenia, Kiesling was stationed in Greece when he got fed up with what he called the "irrelevance of State Department expertise" in the prelude to the Iraq War.
"I leaked my resignation letter to the New York Times so I couldn't lose my nerve," Kiesling said.
He said he was in Greece when WikiLeaks released "Cablegate" in 2010.