When I was a kid, a friend of my father — his name was Dick Welch — was assassinated by Greek terrorists in his own driveway, which had previously been my family's driveway. This was because he was a CIA station chief and his name was exposed by a former CIA agent named Philip Agee.

A couple years later, diplomatic cables written by my dad appeared in the Pentagon Papers. Read out of context — the context being his entire life — they gave the impression that he supported the overthrow and subsequent assassination of South Vietnam's doomed president, Ngo Dinh Diem.

Because of this personal history, I didn't jump into the controversy over the 90,000 classified reports released this week by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and defended by various members of the Obama administration. Actual knowledge always gums up the punditry process.

But now it's becoming clear that Assange's document dump may have mortal consequences for the local Afghan informants and cooperators who are named in the battlefield reports. This is exactly why, during the many conversations I've had with retired CIA officers — men and women so frail and age-spotted they seem like literary abstractions — they often refused to let me use their real names or the names of anyone they knew. As one elderly gentleman told me during an interview in his lovely Maryland home, speaking of a World War II-era source he still refused to name, "He's dead and his children are dead, but I just don't feel comfortable with it."

On the other hand, the shining example of the Pentagon Papers leads me in the opposite direction. Despite the awkward moments they caused my family, the Pentagon Papers did give America a fresh vision of the Vietnam war at a time when the government was still intent on lying about it to the American people (not so much, it must be said, from an evil conspiracy to dominate the world as a mixture of willful self-delusion and the public-relations impulse spun out of control). This confirms my fundamental journalist's belief that more information is almost always a good thing.

And motive counts. Philip Agee wanted to hurt America and didn't care who got killed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, Assange wants to expose government secrets because he believes that secrecy makes the horrors of war more palatable. It's hard to denounce someone who puts his personal freedom at risk because he refuses to shrug off the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

For the government, the answer is obvious. They have to fight people like Assange, especially since he's dumping this stuff without screening it for deadly revelations. Even the best "good war" would suffer and perhaps be derailed by a close-up, real-time look at the inevitable failures, atrocities, scandals and war crimes.

For the public, though, the answer isn't so clear. It may be that this document dump doesn't have much that is new to change our perspective of the war, as people say. But everything that makes war vivid is sure to change our perspective of war. One pertinent example is Assange's previous release of a video of military pilots who seemed to be wantonly gunning down civilians in Iraq. The counterargument — that videos like this are a misleading partial view, so we should just trust the Army to make all decisions about what we see and hear from the battlefield — doesn't carry much weight after Vietnam with each new restriction on the freedom of the press in war zones.

The scary thing about the truth is that you never know where the truth will lead you. But maybe if we lied less about the good wars, we'd think twice before we jump into the bad ones.

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