Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch issued a statement denying media reports that it had condemned the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Human Rights Watch has said that we do not have enough information about the killing to draw conclusions about whether it was lawful or not. Human Rights Watch calls on the US government to provide that information.
White House press briefings over the past week suggest the US Government has not become more transparent since WikiLeaks. The information that it provides remains at best unreliable, at worst deliberately false and misleading.
One day we're told that, at the moment of death, Osama bin Laden was armed, and he used his wife as a human shield. The next day, we're told he was unarmed, and his wife, also unarmed, rushed at a US attacker. What are we to believe?
If we have learned our lessons from WikiLeaks, we should be wary of believing anything we hear from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, or President Barack Obama himself, except perhaps his patronising assurance: 'You won't see Bin Laden walking on this earth again.'
Paradoxically President Obama issued a statement for World Press Freedom Day last Tuesday pointing the finger at the governments of countries such as Bahrain, China, Syria and Venezuela. As for the US, he said: 'We rededicate ourselves to the basic principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that every person has the right "to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas".'
In reality it seems WikiLeaks could be the only organisation we can expect to furnish us with reliable information on important high-level events and utterances that take place behind closed doors. We do understand that what we're told is often necessarily incomplete. We also excuse the fact that occasionally what we hear through official channels is unintentionally inaccurate or misleading.
Also, at least prior to WikiLeaks, we were prepared to accept that some information was 'classified' for security purposes and needed to be kept from us for our own protection. But now, we know the security purposes are often mixed with political purposes, or are merely spurious. That is not good enough.
Why does knowledge matter? It matters because we are all rational actors on the stage of human life, and we need reliable information in order to draw conclusions that help us decide how we act on all matters of life and death.
We need to know before we're able to