California Conservative

The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus is reporting that Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is planning on putting language into “the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill to criminalize the leaking of a wider range of classified information than is now covered by law. He indicated the new measure would be similar to legislation vetoed by President Bill Clinton more than five years ago.”

Since the Clinton veto, he added, “I think times have changed, and we may be introducing that in the intelligence authorization bill.” A spokesman for Roberts said late yesterday, “A lot of items are on the table to curb leaks, but we have other matters to take up first.” A senior Democratic staff member said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WVA) and his colleagues “are concerned about leaks, but they don’t see legislation as the remedy.”

Sen. Rockefeller can’t be taken seriously if he means it that “they don’t see legislation as the remedy” to leakers. If there isn’t a law on the books to put a price on leaking top secret national security information in wartime, then what ’stick’ can we hold over these would=be criminals collective heads? That isn’t logic. It’s illogic. And it’s typical of congressional Democrats.

Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating the sources of information for the New York Times article disclosing the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance operations. And the CIA has an internal investigation to discover sources for articles in The Washington Post on CIA secret overseas prisons for suspected terrorists. CIA Director Porter J. Goss told Congress he hoped that eventually journalists who report leaks would be put before federal grand juries and forced to reveal their sources.

This is Example A on why we need to defeat reporters’ shield legislation. If they had that protection, what vital secrets will be written about? And if those secrets are national security secrets and they are revealed, how many innocent Americans will be at greater risk?

Here’s some questions I have about this type of reporting:

• Do reporters care that they’re putting lives at risk by giving out national security secrets?
• Do reporters dig into the Constitutional issues surrounding this type of article?
• Do they think that that isn’t their concern?

It seems to me that the NSA intercept program shouldn’t see the light of day until that technology is obsolete. It’s also my belief that reporters shouldn’t just care about a juicy story but that they should care that they might be putting innocent lives at risk. After all, they screamed bloody murder when Valerie Wilson’s identity was leaked, which put nobody at risk, but they couldn’t care less about leaking highly classified information that was protecting us from future terrorist attacks. Forgive me if I don’t detect a double standard with that logic.

Cross-post at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 6:36 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Homeland Security, Media, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.