The Free Flow of Classified Information Act
04.27.2008 - 11:15 PMGiven his particular set of credentials in national security, it is not a surprise that John McCain understands the critical need for secrecy in the conduct of foreign and military policy. He has, for example, sharply criticized the New York Times for its December 2005 decision to reveal the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, the highly classified effort to intercept the international telephone and email communications of al-Qaeda terrorists. “I understand completely why the government charged with defending our security would want to discourage that from happening and hold the people who disclosed that damaging information accountable for their action,” McCain told an audience in Arlington, Virginia, on April 13.But exactly how is the government to uncover who the disclosers are? One way would be for it to issue a subpoena to the journalists who broke the story and ask them before a grand jury, under pain of a contempt citation, to disgorge the names of their confidential sources. That is precisely what the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald did in issuing a subpoena to Judith Miller of the New York Times as he investigated the leak of the identity of the ostensibly undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Miller spent 85 days in jail refusing to comply with the subpoena before she changed her mind and identified Scooter Libby as her source.
A bill now before Congress would exempt journalists from having to testify in such cases. The bill is called the Free Flow of Information Act, but a better name might be the Free Flow of Classified Information Act. By making it almost impossible to apprehend leakers in government, the flow of highly secret information, already substantial, is likely to grow into a flood. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both supporting this legislation. So, also, is — of all people — John McCain. In addition to criticizing it sharply–he has called it “a license to do harm, perhaps serious harm,” he has also performed a pirouette to praise it as “a license to do good; to disclose injustice and unlawfulness and inequities; and to encourage their swift correction.”
McCain’s effort to have it both ways is either evidence of serious intellectual confusion or shabby political calculation. For its part, the New York Times is insisting that without the law, the flow of news will slow and the public’s “right to know” will be seriously impaired.
I have sought to explain some of the problems with this contention in several articles: Why Journalists Are Not Above the Law, A License to Leak and Not Every Leak is Fit To Print. Whatever one makes of my conclusions, the assertion by the Times that the news will dry up without a shield law is a ridiculous position for a newspaper that is currently in the process of slashing its staff by a hundred editors and reporters. Unless its newsroom is currently populated by a forest of deadwood, those cuts will limit its ability to report the news far more than the purely hypothetical loss of stories caused by the absence of a shield law.
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April 28th, 2008 at 9:01 AM
This is yet another example of McCain’s overweening desire to be the MSM’s best friend, in the hopes that they will remain friendly enough to him through the Fall. He knows they can’t love him as they used to of old, b/c he’s Public Enemy # 1 now, standing in the way of either a postracial paradise or a Glass Ceiling-shattering Pantsuit Revolution. But he hopes beyond hope that they will at least not bury him with distortions of his policy positions and unprovable innuendo about his sex life and god knows what else.
In this he is surely mistaken. The MSM, led by the tirelessly partisan NY Times, will not roll over for McCain simply b/c he’s not George Bush. We are at the beginning of a long road ahead to November, and the media will do its utmost to reverse a bad three months for the Dems. John McCain is sitting in the middle of the MSM’s bullseye, even if he is too enamored of his pals on West 43rd Street to see that his love is unrequited.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:41 AM
McCain is wrong; the bill is wrong; the idea is wrong. Given the rhetorical incontinence of both politicians and the media, the only thing standing between intelligence sources and exposure is the oath-bound US intelligence professional. Countries like India, Singapore, and South Africa, all with superb and unique sources of intelligence, are already reluctant to share things with us because of our inability to keep a lid on it. We have lost covert GWOT cooperation from countries in eastern Europe precisely BECAUSE of press leaks from within our own IC.
Now the Left isn’t content to have the entire justice system prejudiced in favor of the journalist. It wants to guarantee that IC personnel who committed felonies, by acting as journalists’ informants, will be protected from the fully justifiable, due legal consequences. McCain had better remember who voted for this, if it passes. We can’t expect our intelligence to get better, if we have a law on the books that protects IC personnel when they breach the main form of good faith that promotes confidence in our human intelligence sources.
Meanwhile, write your senators.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:23 PM
Why not just dispense with the oath, and any laws that ‘classify’ anything? Why bother to create a new law that says if you violate the old law you won’t be held to account for it?
Or we could just dispense with intelligence altogether. It’s evil, after all. When a Republican is president.
April 28th, 2008 at 12:53 PM
The crazy season in the campaign started months ago, but has now extended to McCain. Who, at this point, has any doubts about which candidate to vote for?
The campaigns, from this point on, cater to a mixed up group of undecideds. In addition, the candidates have to avoid discouraging the turnout of their constituencies, and avoid being macacahed.
The best strategy is to prevent the bill from the floor at least until after the election, since McCain and his advisors sense that opposition to the bill now would be harmful.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:10 PM
When the NY Times reporters say that their news will “dry up” what they mean is that they are NOT going to start actually doing any journalistic work. They are fat, dumb, and happy right now since some people in the government forget about their security clearance and just leak anything.
Don’t ask the NY Times and others to actually start doing some work. They don’t need to right now, and it will only get easier for them if this law is passed. Sen. McCain is probably just trying to appease the mass media types hoping that they’ll treat him with respect in return, but I’m not as smart as he (or the people on his staff) is, so I really can’t do much more than speculate.
Hopefully there are enough in Congress to stop this bill. Hopefully there are enough that don’t think that “THE MAN” has been trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes the whole time and hopefully they think that leaking information from supposedly “secure” government agencies is a bad idea.
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