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CIA Calls for Sending SWAT into Journalist homes

Josey1Josey1 Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
edited August 2002 in General Discussion
CIA Official Calls for "Sending SWAT Teams into Journalists' Homes"


>>> On 27 July 2002, NewsMax.com ran the article "CIA Expert: Leaks of Classified Information Must Stop." Widely linked to at alternative news Websites, the article quoted a CIA official calling for drastic measures to end leaks of classified info.

In the 1 August edition of his e-newsletter Secrecy News, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists noted that the article had been quietly removed from the Website. NewsMax offered no explanation, but Aftergood reported that "one source said that Mr. Bruce's remarks last week had been made 'off the record' and were never intended to be quoted or publicized."

The Memory Hole originally ran the first five paragraphs of the article with a link to the story on NewsMax. Now that it's been flushed down the memory hole, we're running the whole thing.

[the article used to be here]


CIA Expert: Leaks of Classified Information Must Stop

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Saturday, July 27, 2002

WASHINGTON - "We've got to do whatever it takes - if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes - to stop these leaks," admonished James B. Bruce, vice chairman of the CIA's Foreign Denial and Deception Committee.

Whether the classified information is National Security Agency encrypted message intercepts of pre-Sept. 11 chatter, war plans for the invasion of Iraq, or the fact that U.S. intelligence was tracking Osama bin Laden's wireless phone calls, leaks have more than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Chaney in an uproar.

'Presumptive Right to Leak'

Bruce, who has also served the CIA as deputy national intelligence officer for science and technology in the National Intelligence Council, admonished, "Somehow there has evolved a presumptive right of the press to leak classified information.

"I hope we get a test case, soon, that will pit the government's need to prosecute those who leak its classified documents against the guarantees of free speech. I'm betting the government will win," Bruce said to an audience this week at Washington's Institute of World Politics.

"What the media person should do is return the classified materials to the source with the proviso: `I have no right to this material.'"


Look What Clinton Veto and Pardon Did

Bruce, a former professor of national security policy at National War College and current adjunct professor at Georgetown University, nailed home his points by touting the Shelby Amendment, vetoed by Bill Clinton, to make leaks of classified materials criminally actionable.

He decried Clinton's pardon of former Navy intelligence analyst Samuel L. Morison, the only government official ever convicted of leaking classified information to the media.

Current laws (under which Morison was charged and convicted) prohibit the release of information that would compromise national security. The measure sponsored by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., would impose a broader standard, making it a felony to leak anything that the government has deemed classified. Violators, including government officials of all kinds, would face a fine and up to three years in prison.

"I helped pushed legislation for years to make it easier to prosecute people who willfully and knowingly leak classified information," Shelby recently told CBS News.

"President Clinton vetoed that bill several years ago. It might be the time to try to bring it back. I've talked to the White House before about this. The attorney general, John Ashcroft, is working - now he's got a task force working with some of us in the Senate to try to come up with some acceptable legislation. Maybe this fall ..."

Where's Bush?

Despite Shelby's apparent optimism, the Bush administration thus far has not been exactly beating the drum for Shelby's tough legislation.

Last year just days before 9-11, Shelby returned to Capitol Hill for what he thought would be a hearing on his plan to criminalize the release of classified information. He was surprised, however, by a last-minute request by Attorney General John Ashcroft to call off the hearing and give Justice more time to evaluate it. The bill has been shelved since.

Although Shelby said Ashcroft simply needed more time to review the issue, a senior administration official told the Associated Press at the time that the bill was problematic and unnecessary.

Shelby was also in the van of those sharply critical of Clinton's 11th-hour pardon Jan. 20, 2001 of Morison, who, after his surprise gift from the president, admitted that he was wrong to leak satellite photos of a Soviet aircraft carrier to Jane's Fighting Ships. Morison justified his leak of the classified pictures by arguing that the public needed to be warned that the Soviet Union was preparing to greatly expand its naval reach.

At the time Shelby said the pardon only underscored the need for new legislation explicitly criminalizing leaks. Those that lauded the pardon argued that Morison's 1984 transgression was a strained test case that unfairly hammered relatively benign facts to fit the espionage statutes.

Bruce agrees with Shelby's assessment. The senator has said: "It's not an issue that's going to go away. The leaks are too prevalent. The news people like all the leaks because they give them stories, but there has been and will be damage to national security because of leaks. They're just too prevalent."

And Bruce's hoped-for test case may indeed be on the horizon.

Last month, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., asked the Justice Department to investigate who told reporters about the NSA's intercepted messages on the eve of the Sept. 11 attacks. The messages, referring to an upcoming "match" and "zero hour," were not read and interpreted until Sept. 12.

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, has opined that whoever spoke those words now realizes that his communications were monitored. "There is the potential for harm," Aftergood concluded
http://www.thememoryhole.org/cia-swat-journalists.htm


"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878

Comments

  • kimberkidkimberkid Member Posts: 8,858 ✭✭✭
    edited November -1
    Journalists are going to be saying soon "The First Amendment is an INDIVIDUAL RIGHT" ... sound familiar? Lets see them defend it without arms ...

    Realistically, the press have become oblivious to responsibility of what they "report" ... to get the "Scoop" and hiding behind to First Amendment. Where do you draw the line? It can't be so low as to give our enemies Intel of true National Security confidence, but it can't be so high that the government can hide transgressions behind it (as in the past) either ...


    ======================================================
    Just because your paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you!kimberkid@gunbroker.zzn.com
    If you really desire something, you'll find a way ?
    ? otherwise, you'll find an excuse.
  • 4GodandCountry4GodandCountry Member Posts: 3,968
    edited November -1
    Common sense would lead most to the rationalisation that if certain information could place our military personel or their mission in jeopardy it should not be devulged. If a journalist or news agency would release information causing our military to loose the element of suprise and cause mission failure/loss of life, then direct responsibility is laid at their feet. Consequently they should be held responsible and punished accordingly. So many times they release information thats not in the best interests of the American people. Ratings are the driving force and the moral obligation is blinded by pure greed. Freedom of speach is our own individual right, but that right only exists up to the point before it infringes upon anothers right. As for the person/persons in congress that are allowing top secret information to be leaked to the media for their own personal gain or the gain of their party platform, if caught, they should be tried for high treason and executed...

    When Clinton left office they gave him a 21 gun salute. Its a damn shame they all missed....
  • Judge DreadJudge Dread Member Posts: 2,372 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November -1
    It will be fruitless ..... some one will leak them first when they are goin to be searched ....

    They get in all is empty.........

    HAHAHA HEHEHE! HARRR HARRR HARRR !

    JD

    400 million cows can't be wrong ( EAT GRASS !!! )
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