Wedge Issue

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Only months before a national election, a new wedge issue has emerged – the publication of classified information. It certainly looks this way after the New York Times decision last month to publish a story on a consortium of international banks cooperating with American intelligence authorities in secret to track the finances of terrorists. In the House of Representatives, Republicans are talking about charging the Times journalists under the 1917 Espionage Act, a law that remarkably survives despite its original charter barring even speech that could potentially elicit public criticism of the World War I effort.

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, on June 26 had this to say: “We’re at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous,” despite the fact that the Constitution forbids defining treason the way Mr. King does. The former drug tsar, William Bennett, is now sounding like Arianna Huffington did eight months ago, suggesting that journalists should be threatened with jail time for not disclosing the people who leak to them. Conservative Web logs are full of talk about how journalists and the Times should be prosecuted.

It was bad enough when the left argued for the erosion of press freedoms, but it’s incoherent for conservatives to go down this road. Conservatives are supposed to be skeptical about unchecked power for the federal government. It is one of the principles that binds together a coalition of home-schoolers, federalists, gun owners, and tax cutters – the view that while the federal government may be necessary, its power should be checked at every available opportunity.

Yet if conservatives get their way, enormous new powers will be delegated to the federal government. If the executive branch starts prosecuting the recipients of leaks on a wide scale, then Americans would be trusting the people who make national security policy to determine when the rest of us – without clearances – are allowed to know when they make mistakes. Forget for a moment the problems this poses for the First Amendment. What about the values of good government the congressional Republicans who captured the House in 1994 have all but forgotten?

After all, the people who will be entrusted with declassifying the information that newsmen will be allowed to print without fear of legal retribution are not movement conservatives. They are bureaucrats who have proved all too willing so far in this war to declassify selectively all sorts of information damaging to our foreign policy. A policy of prosecuting leaks would not stop them. It would give an advantage to those leakers who have mastered the classification process.

Here’s my prediction as one who has covered the State Department and the diplomatic beat for more than six years. If the prosecution of leaks becomes routine, reporters, starved of the means to find out the facts of the matter, will rely on the judgment of former analysts and officials with axes to grind. We will see a proliferation of Joe Wilsons and Patrick Langs, willing to peddle rumors and speculation to a press corps starved of real information.

If only the recent bluster was a hypothetical matter. Those calling for a prosecution against newspapers should study the case being brought against two ex-employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The ex-Aipac aides may not be journalists. But they are being prosecuted for activities protected under the same First Amendment that prohibits Congress from acting against the press. The two, Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen, are not being charged for the possession of classified documents, but rather for having a conversation with a Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, about information that was likely already in the public sphere.

Who knows what other cases the FBI is now investigating in its zeal to stop press leaks? Already the investigation has led the bureau to call numerous reporters in for confidential witness interviews and to request the archive of a recently deceased columnist, Jack Anderson.

None of this is to say that the Times story did not damage a valuable program in the war on terror. Insofar as banks may be wary of helping turn over data to the SWIFT database, or that terrorists will know limitations of our efforts to shut down terror financing, the leak and publication of the leak did damage the war effort. But it’s highly doubtful that the damage done is as great as that which would follow from a policy of prosecuting the press.


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