maycocksean said:
I think it should be. If something is vital to national security then it seems like there should be some sort of law about just revealing it to the world.
here's what Dana Priest, who won a Pulitzer for her article on the secret torture chambers the CIA set up in Eastern European nations, has to say about this subject:
[q]Arlington, Va.: No doubt about it, a free media is critical in a democratic system. However, it is not the media's job to determine whether or not information is classified. There are legal processes for declassifying documents. And Congress, as the overseer of the intelligence community (residing in the executive branch), has the responsibility to deal with issues of excessive government secrecy, or not enough secrecy. When the media decides for itself whether or not documents should be declassified, they are breaking the law and should be prosecuted.
Dana Priest: Well, actually, the media is not breaking the law by publishing classified information. That's still a safeguard we have in the law. The person/s who turn it over are breaking the law, technically. But the courts and the body politic have always looked at this as the cost of democracy and that is one huge reason why reporters have not be pursued previously. It's the trade off for having a free press. The alternative is prior censorship and government control of the media, a la Israel, China, Iran, etc.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...4/DI2006041400971.html?nav=rss_nation/special
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[q]MS. PRIEST: Well, it’s not a crime to publish classified information. And this is one of the things Mr. Bennett keeps telling people that it is. But, in fact, there are some narrow categories of information you can’t publish, certain signals, communications, intelligence, the names of covert operatives and nuclear secrets.
Now why isn’t it a crime? I mean, some people would like to make casino gambling a crime, but it is not a crime. Why isn’t it not a crime? Because the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the press so that they could perform a basic role in government oversight, and you can’t do that. Look at the criticism that the press got after Iraq that we did not do our job on WMD. And that was all in a classified arena. To do a better job—and I believe that we should’ve done a better job—we would’ve again, found ourselves in the arena of...
[...]
MS. PRIEST: Still, the point is the tension between the media and the government is long-standing. And that’s to be expected. And in fact, all these—many of the people getting up to lambaste the media now are also people that we talk to with our stories, to vet our stories, to say, “What is it in this story that you’re most concerned about?”
MS. MITCHELL: You mean, to hold things back?
MS. PRIEST: To hold things back. In the prison story, we talked with the administration. No one in the administration asked us not to publish the story. In fact, people said, “We know you have your job to do, but please don’t publish the names of the countries where the prisons are located.” So there is a reasoned dialogue that often goes on between the media and the government behind, behind all this.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13615446/page/5/
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how about Jon Harwood, of the Wall Street Journal:
[q]MR. JOHN HARWOOD: This is what I don’t get. The people who killed 3,000 Americans on September 11, who murdered Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal, commit atrocities every day in Iraq, are evil, but they’re not stupid, and I don’t understand the logic that says all of a sudden they’ve discovered something they didn’t know. September 24, 2001, President Bush walked into the Rose Garden and announced, “We’ve developed a strategy, we’re putting banks and financial institutions around the world on, on notice. We’ll work with their governments, freeze or block terrorists’ money. We’re going to work with the United Nations, the EU, the G8 to follow this money.”
[...]
MR. HARWOOD: Well, Republicans certainly think so. They—if you’re a Republican in the White House or in Congress, would you rather talk about immigration, gas prices, the estate tax, all the things that you can’t get done right now, or would you rather go after The New York Times, the Supreme Court on the Guantanamo ruling—we’ll talk about that later—and make hay and say “They’re tying our hands in the war on terrorism”? It’s obvious they’d rather do the latter, and they love this discussion. They’re going to love it even more if Congress takes up legislation on Guantanamo.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13615446/page/5/
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