THE "INCOMPREHENSIBLE" ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917

[Clara T]

THE "INCOMPREHENSIBLE" ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917

In its efforts to punish unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media, the US Government is turning to the Espionage Act of 1917 (18 U.S.C. 793) which, among other things, prohibits "communication of national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it."

The Act may also be employed by the special prosecutor investigating the unauthorized disclosure of the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, according to news reports. But using the Espionage Act to prosecute leaks to the press is an extraordinary step with potentially profound ramifications. In fact, the precise meaning of the Act is uncertain and experts argue that it cannot mean what it says.

The Espionage Act is "in many respects incomprehensible," wrote Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. in a definitive study three decades ago ("The Espionage Statutes and Publication of Defense Information," Columbia Law Review, May 1973, vol. 73, pp. 929-1087). As written, the espionage statutes are "so sweeping as to be absurd," wrote Edgar and Schmidt. "The source who leaks defense information to the press commits an offense; the reporter who holds onto defense material commits an offense; and the retired official who uses defense material in his memoirs commits an offense."

Therefore, it appears that if government officials are liable for unauthorized communications of defense information under the Act, then reporters and other members of the public should be as well-- which would be plainly unconstitutional. Conversely, if reporters cannot be held liable under the Act for communicating defense information to the public, as they do all the time, neither can government officials.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2005/10/101905.html

The Espionage Act - June 15, 1917

Section 3. Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Civil_Liberties/Espionage_Act_1917.html

[NVMojo]

1. gawd, it's always something with these fuckers, always looking for

new ways to fuck over the US citizens.

[Kagemusha]

2. What's absurd is treating reporters with no security clearance like

govt officials with security clearance.

The writers above seem to think that if you can't treat them both 100% the same way then the law is plainly unconstitutional.

Certainly prosecuting leaks in the press as I've heard proposed is probably stretching the law well beyond its limits. Fitzgerald specifically decided not to attempt to do so. His restraint is, far from being commended, being wholly ignored and his investigation lumped in with this nonsense.

[Muddy Waters Guitar]

3. Yes, Woodrow Wilson quite possibly the worst US President of the 20th c.

The parties were quite different then. Wilson was an ardent segregationist and a filthy racist even for his time, a warmonger who invaded countless Latin American countries for the most foolish reasons, and a naive idiot who led the US into WWI-- in large part at the behest of US arms manufacturers who wanted to turn a profit and were nervous about losing their investments.

It is no exaggeration to say that Wilson, in large part, was responsible for the terrible bloodletting that ensued later in WWII. By 1917, Europe was approaching the point of stalemate, at which each side was on the verge of realizing that no gains were to be had and that the only option was to give up their plans for victory on each side-- learning a crucial lesson about the unwinnability of modern warfare. Instead, Wilson enabled the resentments to commence which would later erupt into WWII with the Versailles Treaty, and Wilson-- while claiming to uphold freedom-- also gave carte blanche to France and Britain to go in and imperially carve up the Middle East, which is the founding cause of the unworkable Iraqi state and the current US mess in Iraq. Wilson was not only a bigot, but an idiot who despised First Amendment freedoms, encouraged persecution against blacks, Irish and German-Americans, and curtailed US civil liberties in a way that hasn't been repeated since, well, the Patriot Act.

The only positive thing that one could say about Wilson is that, inadvertently, he may have hastened the end of the British and French Empires that were oppressing hundreds of millions of people. Even though Wilson actually helped the British and French to go into the Middle East and extend their empires there, his extension of WWI (and transformation into WWII) delivered the coup de grace that utterly destroyed the British Empire. Had a stalemate prevailed in 1917, the British would have been somewhat wounded, but not bankrupted as they were by 1919, and especially by 1945, and thus been able to reassert control over their empire in such a way that the British might still be hoarding themselves over 1/4 of the world's population in 2006. Ditto for the French imperial realms. Still, the damage Wilson did far outweighs any of his rather minor accomplishments.