If reading the second to last paragraph doesn't give you
pause...
(*SHRUG*)
There is one problem with the entirely justified if
self-interested media squawking about the Justice Department’s snooping into
the phone records of multiple Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James
Rosen.
The problem is that what the AP reporters and Rosen did
arguably violates the letter of the law.
The search warrant in the Rosen case cites Section 793(d)
of Title 18 of the U.S. Code.
Section 793(d) says that a person lawfully in possession
of information that the government has classified as secret who turns it over
to someone not lawfully entitled to posses it has committed a crime.
That might cover Rosen’s source.
Section 793(g) is a conspiracy count that says that
anyone who conspires to help the source do that has committed the same crime.
That would be the reporter.
It sounds as though this law criminalizes a lot of
journalism. You might wonder how such a law ever got passed and why, for the
last 90 years, it has very seldom produced prosecutions and investigations of
journalists.
The answer: This is the Espionage Act of 1917, passed two
months after the United States entered World War I.
* AND DEMOCRAT WOODROW WILSON WAS A PROGRESSIVE
FASCIST... AND RACIST... AND ANTI-SEMITE...
* DON'T BELIEVE ME...? DO A BIT OF RESEARCH. YES... I
UNDERSTAND MANY OF YOU DIDN'T LEARN THIS IN SCHOOL. THAT WAS DELIBERATE.
(*SHRUG*)
In his 1998 book Secrecy, the late senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan tells the story of how it came into being: Congress was responding to
incidents of German espionage before the declaration of war. In July 1916,
German agents blew up the Black Tom munitions dump in New York Harbor. The
explosion was loud enough to be heard in Connecticut and Maryland. The
Espionage Act was passed with bipartisan support in a Democratic Congress and strongly
supported by President Woodrow Wilson, also a Democrat.
* HMM... I WONDER WHAT SPECIFICS I'D FIND IF I WERE TAKE
THE TIME TO LOOK? I WONDER HOW MANY DEMOCRATS JOINED HOW MANY REPUBLICANS IN
UNSUCCESSFULLY OPPOSING THE LEGISLATION...
Wilson wanted even more.
“Authority to exercise censorship over the press,” he
wrote a senator, “is absolutely necessary.”
Wilson got that authority in May 1918 when Congress
passed the Sedition Act, criminalizing, among other things, “abusive language”
about the government.
* AGAIN, FOLKS... IF YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF THIS... TIME
TO PONDER WHY NOT.
(*SHRUG*)
[Democrat] Wilson’s Justice Department successfully
prosecuted Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate who received 900,000 votes for
president in 1912, for making statements opposing the war. The Wilson
administration barred Socialist newspapers from the mails, jailed a filmmaker
for making a movie about the Revolutionary War (don’t rile our British allies),
and prosecuted a minister who claimed Jesus was a pacifist. German-language
books were removed from libraries, German-language newspapers were forced out
of business, and one state banned speaking German outdoors.
It was an ugly period in our history. It’s also a
reminder that big-government liberals can be as much inclined to suppress civil
liberties as small-government conservatives can — or more so.
* EVEN MORE SO...
(*NOD*)
* INDEED... FAR MORE SO! SMALL GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVES
ARE PEOPLE LIKE ME... BIG GOVERNMENT RINOs ARE PEOPLE LIKE GEORGE W. BUSH AND
JOHN S. MCCAIN!
* MY FRIENDS... UNDERSTAND... THERE ARE MAYBE 6 GOP
SENATORS YOU CAN REALLY TRUST... PERHAPS 25 GOP HOUSE MEMBERS; THE OLIGARCHY IS
BIPARTISAN!
Fortunately, things changed after Wilson left office. A
Republican Congress allowed the Sedition Act to expire in 1921.
* A REPUBLICAN CONGRESS...
Debs received 915,000 votes for president in 1920 while
in Atlanta federal prison, but President Warren Harding, a former journalist
and a Republican, commuted Debs’s sentence to time served, effective Christmas
day 1921, and invited him to the White House.
* HARDING... REPUBLICAN...
The Espionage Act of 1917 remained on the books and was
amended to cover news media. But it was used sparingly. Franklin Roosevelt, who
served in the Wilson administration, didn’t use it in World War II. When his
attorney general urged him to prosecute the Chicago Tribune for a story three
days before Pearl Harbor that detailed military plans for a possible world war,
he brushed the recommendation aside. That despite the fact that New Deal
Democrats were as paranoid about the Republican and isolationist Tribune as
conservatives have been in recent times about the New York Times.
Roosevelt did order the internment of West Coast Japanese
Americans in 1942.
* WHILE LARGELY REFUSING TO ALLOW FEDERAL POWER TO BE
USED TO PREVENT AND PUNISH LYNCHINGS IN THE THEN-SOLID DEMOCRAT SOUTH...
(*SHRUG*)
* HISTORY... IT'S A BITCH, AIN'T IT?
But an act apologizing for that and providing restitution
was passed with bipartisan majorities and signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988.
* PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN...
Presidents and attorneys general of both parties have
been reluctant to use the Espionage Act when secret information has been leaked
to the press because they have recognized that it is overbroad. They have
understood, as Moynihan argues in "Secrecy", that government
classifies far too many things as secrets, even as it has often failed to
protect information that truly needs to stay secret.
(*NOD*)
Barack Obama and his Justice Department seem to be of a
different mind. They have used the Espionage Act of 1917 six times to bring
cases against government officials for leaks to the media — twice as many as
all their predecessors combined.
* TWICE AS MANY AS ALL THEIR PREDECESSORS COMBINED...
* FOLKS... JUST THINK ABOUT THAT...
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