[Mb-hair] scary stuff

[venuetheatre at juno.com]

Witch hunts enough to go around
By Joan Chittister, OSB 
Here’s a story we might need to worry about a bit. In 1918 during World
War I, The New York Times reports, 79 Montanans were convicted of
sedition for speaking out “in ways deemed critical of the United States.”
Forty-one of them got prison terms of one to 20 years and were fined from
$200 to $20,000. In one case, 12 children of one family were put up for
adoption after the father went to prison and the family farm failed. One
of these children, now 90, is still alive. She will be present for the
ceremony in which the present governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer,
pardons these German-Americans, one of whom went to jail for saying that
the food regulations put in place during the war were a “big joke.”
Sedition. Convictions. Jail sentences. Pardons for being critical of
government policies. Impossible? Don’t be too sure. It looks as if we
could launch a few witch hunts ourselves these days.
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times and Dana Priest of
The Washington Post were just awarded journalism’s highest honor, the
Pulitzer Prize, for their stories on our secret torture chambers in
Eastern European countries and domestic spying on U.S. citizens.
As I understand it, Bill Bennett, former secretary of education, would
like, on the other hand, to put these three reporters in jail.
Bennett was clear in his condemnation of that kind of journalism. He said
that the reporters “took classified information, secret information,
published it in their newspapers, against the wishes of the president,
against the request of the president and others that they not release
it.”
Nothing to be doubted here. Bennett calls these journalists traitors. He
says they ought to be in prison rather than picking up prizes.
“I don’t think what they did was worthy of an award,” he said. “I think
what they did was worthy of jail. These people who reveal our secrets,
who hurt our war effort, who hurt the efforts of our CIA, who hurt
efforts of the president’s people -- they shouldn’t be given awards for
this. They should be looked into (through) the Espionage Act.”
He did not, however, say anything about the president’s “selective
declassification” -- leak, in common parlance -- of classified material
for political reasons. To bolster his defense of the invasion of Iraq,
the reason for which was beginning to unravel, Bush, we know now, had
aides leak what to that point had been classified but unsubstantiated
material. So, we have to assume that if Bennett wants reporters in jail
for publishing material that “hurt our war effort, hurt the efforts of
our CIA, hurt efforts of the president’s people,” he must mean the
president, too.
Who, in fact, endangers the country more: A president by lying about the
certain need for pre-emptive war, domestic spying or outsourced torture
sites or journalists by telling the truth about the corner-cutting on the
Constitution?
After all, not only was classified material “leaked” by the president --
former chief of staff to the vice president Lewis Libby’s word, not mine
-- it was suspect. Knowingly suspect.
The president’s own intelligence community said it could not be verified.
But the president used it anyway to justify what could not be justified.
It was error upon error -- or treason upon treason -- if we apply Mr.
Bennett’s value system broadly. And since Bill Bennett has become the
“Value Czar” of the country, probably we should.
But that’s the obvious -- and almost irrelevant -- part of the situation.
The real question is what, if anything, will be left of the checks and
balance structure of the republic if we begin to jail reporters for
telling us what we need to know to preserve the Constitution and the
character of the country.
Ironically enough, the very week the Pulitzer Prize was awarded, Mark
Felt appeared on national TV to discuss his guiding role as “Deep Throat”
in exposing the Watergate cover-up and the eventual resignation of
Richard Nixon.
Question: Should Bernstein and Woodward have gone to jail rather than
Chuck Colson, Gordon Liddy, and Bob Haldeman, who planned the robbery
and, worse, the cover-up by the Oval Office?
Think carefully here. The whole future of the country may be at stake.
What will happen to this democracy’s commitment to the Fourth Estate,
that institution of protected public voice that emerged out of the French
Revolution to act as a brake on the human tendency to autocratic
pretensions even in republics? If the media are denied the right to
uncover and publish acts of government wrongdoing, what will happen to
democracy itself?
If we begin to jail journalists for telling us what we have a right -- a
need -- to know about the way any given administration is frittering away
the Constitution, the nation’s integrity will at best be the stuff of
history. We will be one more banana republic governed by successive gangs
of opportunists, thugs and despots.
If journalists are denied the right to investigate those who do not
investigate themselves, how is this country to have any hope of stopping
corruption in its tracks, of really being the country we have always
thought ourselves to be?