This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Bachelorette with Professor H. J. McHinder

International Relations to DC, the point of view of a city now galvanized by said-to-be

serious leaks from the CIA, from the DOD. It's unclear how many documents there are, how long

they've been out there, some say since December, some say since January. We have an alleged

perpetrator, a 21-year-old airman. We also have large questions unanswered, maybe they'll

remain unanswered about how these documents came into the possession of an air national

guard, airman in Cape Cod, Connecticut, given the sensitivity of some of the documents,

such as real-time intelligence, about air defenses in Ukraine. Professor Washington is focused

on one story and one story only, and the word embarrassed is used in many headlines. So,

at this point, what is Washington's point of view about the Ukraine war, given that also

in these documents are doubts about the war and going forward?

Well, let's just start by considering the importance of leaks in American politics and

in American policy making. And the classic leak was the Pentagon papers and Daniel Elzberg

and he just went across the street and Harvard Square to the, you know, the copy place and

had a zerox made overnight and then he delivered it to the New York Times. Well, what was

in that? Was it intelligence about Vietnam? Did he have a lot of information that no one

had ever seen before from Hanoi? Did he have information about Russian policy or about

Chinese policy? Did he have information even about the political structure of North Vietnam?

The answer is no. What he had was a collection of papers that had been written by Americans

using American intelligence about Vietnam. And I have some experience with this and I can

tell you, with American intelligence is by and large, terrible and worthless. The exceptions

would be signals, intelligence and things like locating things geographically and we seem

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