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You have to ask yourself is if they had existed then, would such laws have been used by the Nixon administration to help cover up the Watergate fiasco.
Today on NPR's Here and Now, Professor Stephen Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University, talked about this subject. I'll transcribe the salient bits since it's all audio....
"The scope of what comes under the umbrella of classified information could be expanded for any number of purposes, and in fact - this is an old arugment, this is not - although the Bush administration has been especially narrow in its reading of public information, press access questions, a lot of administrations have done this in the past in some form or other, usually a lesser form to try to argue that there's a national security reason not to publish information. In fact Ben Bradley, back in the Watergate days and thereafter used to talk about how so much of the information in Washington that the government tried to argue was national security wasn't really about national security at all. So it's not really a new - a new strategy, but if you're talking about prosecution that's a, that's a different level." - Burgard
Gonzales did not specify which law he was referring to but reporters speculate that it was the 1917 Espionage Act, which when it was created had a narrower purpose - it "would be whether or not someone would ... release information with respect to troop movements, or [...] if you knew the government had cracked the Japanese code and you were then in some way making that info available," that would be illegal "To expand it and apply it to journalists ... would be a real extension." (Burgard)
"...It's a serious matter. The White House is clearly narrowing the area in which it wants to conduct this War on Terror and so forth, and the battle lines are drawn here. I would personally be surprised to see prosecutions, but - you never know." - Burgard
To listen to the whole thing, clicky here. |
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