Ok, I'll spell it out for you. The pretext for going to war in Iraq was that Saddam had WMDs - a pretext that was later found to be extremely flimsy. If we (ie.

Ok, I'll spell it out for you. The pretext for going to war in Iraq was that Saddam had WMDs - a pretext that was later found to be extremely flimsy. If we (ie. the public) had had access to unfiltered information, not just what the US/UK goverments wanted us to have, would we have gone to war? I doubt it. Hence you need to balance the cost of releasing the information (maybe a few hundred deaths, but that's yet to be demonstrated) vs. the cost of being led around by whoever's in power (currently >100,000 civilian deaths, and a borderline civil war in Iraq).