Right Wing News has a very interesting interview with Tony Blankley. I’ve posted quite a few times about leakers - I heartily despise them and think they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And now that we’ll have a Democrat in office, I’m willing to bet real money on the fact that unfavorable, national-security harming leaks – if they occur at all in the highly politicized CIA – will not be published by the Obama worshipping, Tiger Beat media. But Blankley’s right: in order to get anything done about leaks, you’d have to have a public who’s completely outraged, and an administration who’s willing to take the media heat for doing the right thing. Bush did not have the political capital for it, but with the media’s love affair with Obama, he could pull it off if it ever became an issue.
Here’s an excerpt:
You’ve called for pragmatic limits on civil liberties. What sort of pragmatic limits?
Well, I was very specific. It has to do with reporting in the newspapers of war plans, ongoing covert operations — we saw another example of it Sunday. The New York Times reported that while President Bush had blocked Israel from bombing Iran, he had started a covert operation to sabotage the Iranian nuclear system…
Yeah, that was absolutely outrageous…
Now, what’s more important than trying to stop a madman from getting nuclear weapons and yet, they’re able to publish that. Now, that used to be called sedition.
…Well, let me ask you: under the current laws we have, why shouldn’t it still be called sedition? It puzzles me — and maybe you can answer this — why do you think the Bush Administration has been so extremely reluctant to go after the people who are leaking this incredibly sensitive classified data to the press?
I can guess — my guess is that…leak investigations are very tricky. …Watergate started as a leak investigation. It gets out of hand. The problem with only going after government employees — and I am completely in favor of going after government employees who leak classified information about national security — but, if you only do that, you don’t deter it.
I’ve been in Washington 30 years and leaking information is pretty easy in this town. What’s not so easy is to print it and not notice that you’ve printed it. If the New York Times and the reporter who reported it, the publisher, the owners, and the editors were prosecuted for giving that information to the public, it wouldn’t matter who leaked that information.
Admittedly, on the internet, you can leak information out there and if you go after a website, they can set up a new website. But, anybody who publishes this information, I think, has committed a crime and if it’s not a crime under the sedition laws that are on the books, then it should be. But, you have to have a public willing to support those prosecutions or a President and an Attorney General may not be willing to go against the fury they’d get from the media if they ever proposed such a thing. …That’s what we did during WW2. I think it was perfectly reasonable. FDR was a great liberal and he didn’t have any hesitation about censoring war information.
In the lead up to the Iraq war, we saw in both the Washington Post and New York Times what was reported as, and I believe actually was, actual war plans. Immediately before the war, they published what our plans were. American troops were likely to be killed as a result of that and there was no legal consequence. I think there should be.
Read the whole thing.
