From here:
A little less than a month ago, right-wing internet news outlet NewsMax.com released a rather harsh article quoting a high ranking CIA official saying that journalists who printed sensitive information should be pursued by SWAT teams.
The article has since vanished from NewsMax, but it’s available at the above link in its entirety.
Here are some highlights:
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.
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"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.’”
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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 ..."
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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.
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