This is a fairly modern journalistic phenomenon made possible by the weakening of the power of the State to control information in wartime. If anyone had published inside information during the First or Second World Wars about their conduct, they would have been seized and locked up for treachery. Churchill wanted to have the Daily Mirror proscribed because it published a cartoon he found objectionable. What penalty would he have demanded of a newspaper which revealed skulduggery at the heart of government?

Yet a quarter of a century later, that is what publication of the Pentagon Papers did. By exposing to public gaze a secret study commissioned by the then U.S. Secretary of Defense, the edifice of fabrication, lies and deceit behind the Vietnam War was laid bare. Four Presidents were shown to have kept from the American people their plans for involvement, and Lyndon Johnson was shown to have run an election campaign based on a complete lie – that he did not want to get more deeply engaged when he had already ordered that escalation.

This was, at that time, an unparalleled exposé of duplicity by the rulers over the ruled. No one then could have foreseen the creation of WikiLeaks; had they done so, history might have taken a different tack. As it is, the internet fostered a website devoted to the exposure of leaked material revealing government and corporate wrongdoing and, like the Pentagon Papers, revelations involving the exposure of secret documents on both sides of the Atlantic have been made public through newspapers.

In its brief existence, WikiLeaks has scored a number of notable successes, but none matches the publication of more than 92,000 documents on the conflict in Afghanistan. Some of the information was already public knowledge. But there was enough that was new and shocking to damage further Washington's claims that the war was going its way and had been fought honourably. The documents that revealed incidents of civilians being slaughtered were, alone, enough to discredit the American operation.

Predictably, WikiLeaks's founder, Julian Assange, was promptly attacked for threatening the war effort and, more damagingly, endangering the lives of U.S. troops, and Afghans who had become informers. It was ever thus. It is traditionally the messenger who is shot, rather than the perpetrator of the crime he exposes. With major leaks in the past, black propaganda and the might of the courts were the weapons brought to bear on the press. Significantly, this time no legal attempt was made to gag The Guardian or the other two newspapers in America and Germany that published simultaneously. The freedom offered by the internet makes the banning of publication by a traditional title increasingly irrelevant, as The Guardian showed in the Trafigura case.

There is understandable concern about much of the material on the internet, which appears not just unchecked but often is inaccurate or simply unsubstantiated gossip. But when it gets it right, the web fulfils a public service that the mainstream media are often unable or unwilling to pursue alone in an age when few publishers will risk the enormous costs of fighting a long legal action. Yet the need for exposure is as great as it ever was. Some would say greater. Our leaders lie to us, as the evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War is slowly revealing. It is the job of all who believe that the truth must out to do what they can to make that happen.

In 1972, the publisher of The New York Times said of the Pentagon Papers excerpts it had published that all the newspaper had done was make available to their readers a part of history to which they should have had access long before. That case for publishing is as strong now as it was then. If a free press really is the first draft of history, it has a responsibility to get it right. When journalists are deceived, the world is deceived – and when we have the opportunity to correct that, we must do so.

BH