Pete Weitzel: It Depends on How You Define ‘Leak’
Posted at 10:47 am, October 11th, 2006
Maybe journalists shouldn’t be concerned that Sen. Kit Bond, R-MO, has introduced a bill to criminalize the disclosure of classified information. After all, the incumbent Leaker-in-Chief lamented the other day that “there’s no such thing as classification anymore, hardly,” even as he was leaking portions of one the nation’s most highly protected documents, the National Intelligence Estimate. Sen. Bond’s Official Secrets Act is a word-for-word replica of a measure that cleared the 106th Congress only to be vetoed by then-President Bill Clinton.
“Leaker –in-Chief” was the Los Angeles Times headline on a David Wise article that contends Washington’s secrecy game reached “new heights of abusurdity” when President Bush declassified portions of the NIE in an effort to rack up more political points than the whoever leaked other sections of that report suggesting the administration had been playing loose with the facts on the war in Iraq.
It’s hard to fault the President for wanting to level the playing field, but the scary thing about Sen. Bond’s bill is that it would radically tilt the playing field in favor of any incumbent administration, which already has an overwhelming home-field advantage. As Wise points out, presidents have been known to selectively declassify information to serve political ends. Murray Waas provided other examples of selective leaking in a National Journal article a few months back.
The proposed legislation would foster investigations certain to freeze the flow of information and be a handy tool for keeping the vast federal bureaucracy either on message or silent. And it would surely lead to the jailing of reporters who did manage to pick up “protected” information, then refused to disclose their sources.
That pretty much leaves any oversight to Congress, which doesn’t appear to want the job. The Boston Globe reported that most members of Congress go out of their way to not review classified information made available. Only a dozen or so of the 327 House members voting in favor of the Intelligence Authorization Bill read the classified portions of the document.
So I guess we should be concerned about Sen. Bond’s bill, after all. The government has been cranking out between 14 million and 15 million classification decisions a year – and if the experts are to be believed, that’s at least twice the amount of information that really needs to be protected for national security reasons. The senator’s bill would make anyone who discloses any piece of that vast cache a criminal, even if he/she didn’t know the information was classified. That sounds like a very deep chill on all but the most routine government information. And a pass to any president to spin with abandon.
October 11th, 2006 at 9:46 pm |
I guess if this law passes the prisons would become perversely egalitarian as more non-violent middle-to-upper middle class people filled prison cells. Who knew that Judith Miller and Martha Stewart might be such trend setters? We could call such a result of Sen. Kit Bond’s bill the millstewidization of prisons. But since we already have a higher percentage of our population in prisons than other developed nations do, it seems irrational to seek more activities or actions to criminalize. It costs a lot of money to enforce such a law and then to keep someone out of the workforce and in prison. Our deficit keeps growing while members of Congress dream up ways to spend more money that we do not have.
October 11th, 2006 at 10:22 pm |
Another attempt to shut the brain off after the mouth has been shut. Once these laws work as desired, no one will be safe asking any questions at all, and so we won’t at all. The query could well be on the list of proscribed topics, now couldn’t it? And if we guess wrong, and it is, well then we can kiss our families and hug our friends good-bye, join other citizens who are uncharged for years in our new jails, and await the pleasure of whoever is president for a possible trial. Maybe.
This country is truly enough getting as scary as 1984 was when I first read it. Of course, when I first read it, and when we discussed the story line in class(es), no one truly believed that those threats could ever come to pass – even if the side you had to represent in that debate class was the one assuring your other classmates that it would indeed happen just as Orwell predicted in his fiction novel.
I feel our chaces of survival as the country we were all born into are remote. Sure a negative opinion. Not my usual outlook at all. I know of no other possible summation of what has happened in the past six years. Is there any way back at all?
October 12th, 2006 at 1:17 am |
Read the foreign press – a lot more down to earth. These stories designed to foment… teeth chattering fear, don’t. The bill is, like a three dollar silver certificate, a work of fiction.
But over-classification is a problem for the Administration. It is the lazy child’s way to “control” people used in China, and all totalitatian regimes. Outside of a few technical achievements and some background issues – most of these docs don’t need classification. As President Carter pointed out recently in a letter to Editor of the Washington Post, there are too many secrets already.
Intelligence tells us “We’re only as sick as our secrets.” Maybe we should come clean with some or our diseased ideas, and sweep out the trash.