The MSM’s Official Irresponsibility Act

The hysterical editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune this morning is typical of the half-truths and deceptive practices within the MSM that has brought it so low in respect for its reliability and, consequently, its profitability and viability.

Titled “A Soviet secrets act,” as purposely inflammatory a headline as the editorialist can imagine, the editorial rails against the Senate Bill 3774 that (the editorial only mentions Senator Bond) Senators Chris Bond, Lott, Chambliss, Stevens, Cochran, Burns, Hatch, Santorum, Cornyn, Domenici, Bennett and Alexander introduced last summer, with the endorsement of the 4,500-member current and former Association for Intelligence Officers.

For fairness, more than the editorial considers appropriate, the entire editorial is below. Then we’ll add what the editorial doesn’t consider relevant for the public to know. That epitomizes the abuse of position and public trust and ears that the MSM has fallen to, in effect, demands for official irresponsibility both on the part of government officials to whom we entrust our very lives and on the part of leaders in media who expect it’s their right to ignore that trust.

These are not good days to be whistle-blowers or investigative reporters. Between the federal government's relentless push to put more of its activities under wraps and the increasing readiness of prosecutors at all levels to try to force journalists to give up their sources, the whole notion of a watchdog media sometimes seems under siege.
If that seems a tad melodramatic, consider Senate Bill 3774. Sponsored by Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., the bill is a de facto Official Secrets Act, under which for the first time the disclosure of any classified information would be a criminal act. Contrary to the contentions of the measure's loudest supporters, there are already laws to punish those whose disclosures harm national security. Also contrary to their contentions, there are hundreds of examples of government scandal, waste and perfidy that only came to light because of whistle-blowers' courage and reporters' digging.
This is not to belittle the concerns of those who worry that at a time of war, the media are insufficiently worried about national security. Yet those who voice their fear often seem inclined to give undue deference to politicians whose opposition to disclosure may be driven by less-worthy concerns. It is hardly outrageous, for example, to wonder whether the secrecy surrounding domestic electronic eavesdropping was more about delaying the inevitable legal challenges to its legitimacy than any other factor.
The Supreme Court may yet declare such eavesdropping to be illegal. Yet Bond and his allies would have us live in a country where the disclosure of government lawbreaking is itself against the law.
This is outrageous. We are not the Soviet Union. We are not Saudi Arabia. We hope this occurs to a majority of senators before they embrace Bond's atrocity of a bill.

I wrote at length on this subject last June, before the reintroduction of this Bill. Please refer to it for links about what is summarized below.

This Bill has a history that is not told us by the editorial. As Senator Bond makes clear in his August 2, 2006 Statement introducing the Bill, it is the “legislation that was passed by the Intelligence Committee in 2000. It had been adopted by unanimous vote, but it was vetoed at the time.”

In other words, prior to 9/11, prior to the Democrats shamelessly exploiting or manufacturing any charge against the prosecution of the war in Iraq for the political purpose of bringing down Bush and reimplanting their own boot on Congress and the presidency, the U.S. Congress in November 2000 passed this Bill, only to have then President Clinton veto it the following month in one of his last official acts, after intense lobbying by the major media organizations.

The new Bush administration’s conciliatory stance toward the media, in the wake of 9/11, was reflected in then Attorney General John Ashcroft’s concurrence with the veto in October 2002. Ashcroft, recognizing that prior efforts to enforce security leaks had been slight, encouraged government agencies to increase their security safeguards.

That conciliatory stance has not been reciprocated, either by the major media or the Democrat Party or its allies within government bureaucracies, especially some within the CIA. Instead, leak after leak of national security secrets have been vaingloriously trumpeted, and selectively exposed for maximum damage, by the major media, without regard either for the stakes of a nation at war.

In August, the 1917 Espionage Act was upheld by the U.S. District Court in Virginia, saying: “[E]ven private citizens who do not hold security clearances can be prosecuted for unauthorized receipt and disclosure of classified information.” That’s the reasonable judgment the editorial hopes for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn.

Every body examining the wiretapping program exposed by the media has found it legitimate and lawful, most recently the Europeans (although the NYT's seeks to obscure that). More importantly, the program has proven itself essential to the war against our enemies. Yet, the editorial blithely misinforms and slanders the program and its supporters by accusing its secrecy as being solely for the purpose of hiding lawbreaking, ignoring the rest of the truth.

As the Associated Press report on the Bill states:

Government workers, contractors or anyone who has signed a nondisclosure agreement with the federal government could be prosecuted under Bond’s bill if they “knowingly and willfully” disclose classified information to someone who is not authorized to receive it.

So, what part of responsibility for adhering to one’s written agreement in order to be on the public’s payroll doesn’t the media, this editorialist, understand? There are within government inspector generals and within the Justice Department enforcers of law and within Congress legislators all authorized to investigate and disclose and correct infractions by government agencies, to whom whistle blowers may turn. No one deputized the New York Times or Washington Post, for example, with this legal responsibility. Nor do they have the necessary background, nor the necessary impartial integrity, to investigate and reveal wrongdoing.

Instead the editorial and major media expect, misuse their platform, to endorse what should be called official irresponsibility acts, on their part and by those in whom we’ve legitimately entrusted our nation’s safety. The extremist partisanship of this posture is deserving of the scorn the MSM has so widely earned.

As the Association for Intelligence Officers wrote in support of the Bill:

...a crisis now exists. With no serious punishments nor enforcement of penalties, we lack any meaningful impediment to this growing willful harm to the national interest. As a result, the leaks grow -- essentially sabotaging our own intelligence and military operations and causing the deaths of our troops and intelligence operatives. Our allies, understandably, are losing trust that we can engage in mutual operations and hesitate to share crucial intelligence and battlefield information with us.

I'll take their knowledgeable word for that, particularly over that of an obviously ignorant and self-centered and deceptive editorialist.