Dianne Feinstein: Prosecute Assange Under the Espionage Act – WSJ.com
From Feinstein’s piece this morning in the WSJ Opinion page:
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove—more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government. The release of these documents damages our national interests and puts innocent lives at risk. He should be vigorously prosecuted for espionage. The law Mr. Assange continues to violate is the Espionage Act of 1917. That law makes it a felony for an unauthorized person to possess or transmit “information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” The Espionage Act also makes it a felony to fail to return such materials to the U.S. government. Importantly, the courts have held that “information relating to the national defense” applies to both classified and unclassified material. Each violation is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. No doubt aware of this law, and despite firm warnings, Mr. Assange went ahead and released the cables on Nov. 28.
Whatever you think of Wikileaks and the disclosure of previously classified materials as practice, doesn’t this escalation of political language stink disgustingly of angry parent berating us kids of the terrors in the big world we could never possibly understand?
Continued…
Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions. But he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.
And yet, insofar as politics is awash in hand-wringing, it’s the media outlets working directly with Wikileaks who are acting as arbiters of release. According to the AP late last week, in fact Wikileaks did not release the cache of cables indiscriminately — and has released only a fraction of the 250,000 total — but called on expert journalists to carefully select and release the documents appropriate to the national dialog.
The Associated Press: Respected media outlets collaborate with WikiLeaks
“The cables we have release correspond to stories released by our main stream media partners and ourselves. They have been redacted by the journalists working on the stories, as these people must know the material well in order to write about it,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s website Friday. “The redactions are then reviewed by at least one other journalist or editor, and we review samples supplied by the other organisations to make sure the process is working.”
Each publication suggested a way to remove names and details considered too sensitive, and “I suppose WikiLeaks chooses the one it likes,” El Pais Editor in Chief Javier Moreno said in a telephone interview from his Madrid office.
…
The media outlets agreed to work together, with about 120 journalists in total working on the project, at times debating which names of people cited in the documents could be published.
After the mainstream media released their stories, vetted by journalists arguably as expert (if not more so) as those trying to prevent Wikileaks release, Wikileaks itself publishes related source cables on their own site.
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told readers in an online exchange that the newspaper has suggested to its media partners and to WikiLeaks what information it believes should be withheld.
“We agree wholeheartedly that transparency is not an absolute good,” Keller wrote. “Freedom of the press includes freedom not to publish, and that is a freedom we exercise with some regularity.”
These are not clowns inconsiderate of the political, ethical, and professional implications of publishing dangerous information. Not The New York Times. Not Le Monde. Not The Guardian. Not Der Speigel. Not Julian Assange. And, as if to prove that point, the U.S. Government mistook outreach from Assange himself to help determine what should and should not be released as “half-hearted gesture.”
Days before releasing any of the latest documents, Assange appealed to the U.S. ambassador in London, asking the U.S. government to confidentially help him determine what needed to be redacted from the cables before they were publicly released. The ambassador refused, telling Assange to hand over stolen property. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley called Assange’s offer “a half-hearted gesture to have some sort of conversation.”
Even the Secretary of Defense stands by his early call that it’s premature to sound the alarm, as they continue their own investigation. This, from August:
Gates, Wikileaks, Aug 16, 2010
The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security; however, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure.
And this, his most important point, from the WSJ November 30:
Gates: WikiLeaks Isn’t ‘Game Changer’ – Washington Wire – WSJ
The release of the WikiLeaks documents also showed, Mr. Gates said, that there was little difference between what the U.S. said privately and what it said publicly.
Mr. Gates defended the expansion of information sharing, as part of an effort to improve the intelligence military troops on the front lines had access to, but said that sharing had gone too far. “No one at the front was denied, in Afghanistan or Iraq, any information that would be helpful to them. Now obviously that aperture went too wide,” he said.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul: Don’t prosecute WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange – Yahoo! News
Alex Pappas reports in the Daily Caller on Ron Paul’s predictably libertarian response: “‘In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth,’ Paul wrote on Twitter Friday. ‘In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.'”
[Weirdly, I can’t find the Paul Twitter post anymore. Paul’s account appears to have no posts and the link from the Caller article on Yahoo! news is dead.]
Normally, it’s easy to dismiss Paul as a kook. But he’s carrying an important flag in Washington and we need to think about this one carefully. If Feinstein and Leiberman have done anything in this mess, it’s elevate Assange in status and importance, even on this, the day of his arrest. After all, isn’t it some part of the Golden Rule that reminds us not to put in print that which we’d be afraid our mothers might read?