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CIA
Expert: Leaks of Classified Information Must Stop
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Saturday, July 27, 2002
WASHINGTON – "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.
Whether the classified information is National Security Agency encrypted
message intercepts of pre-Sept. 11 chatter, war plans for the invasion
of Iraq, or the fact that U.S. intelligence was tracking Osama bin Laden’s
wireless phone calls, leaks have more than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and Vice President Dick Chaney in an uproar.
'Presumptive Right to Leak'
Bruce, who has also served the CIA as deputy national intelligence officer
for science and technology in the National Intelligence Council, admonished,
"Somehow there has evolved a presumptive right of the press to leak
classified information.
"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.’”
Look What Clinton Veto and Pardon Did
Bruce, a former professor of national security policy at National War
College and current adjunct professor at Georgetown University, nailed
home his points by touting the Shelby Amendment, vetoed by Bill Clinton,
to make leaks of classified materials criminally actionable.
He decried Clinton's pardon of former Navy intelligence analyst Samuel
L. Morison, the only government official ever convicted of leaking classified
information to the media.
Current laws (under which Morison was charged and convicted) prohibit
the release of information that would compromise national security. 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 ..."
Where's Bush?
Despite Shelby's apparent optimism, the Bush administration thus far has
not been exactly beating the drum for Shelby's tough legislation.
Last year just days before 9-11, Shelby returned to Capitol Hill for what
he thought would be a hearing on his plan to criminalize the release of
classified information. He was surprised, however, by a last-minute request
by Attorney General John Ashcroft to call off the hearing and give Justice
more time to evaluate it. The bill has been shelved since.
Although Shelby said Ashcroft simply needed more time to review the issue,
a senior administration official told the Associated Press at the time
that the bill was problematic and unnecessary.
Shelby was also in the van of those sharply critical of Clinton's 11th-hour
pardon Jan. 20, 2001 of Morison, who, after his surprise gift from the
president, admitted that he was wrong to leak satellite photos of a Soviet
aircraft carrier to Jane's Fighting Ships. Morison justified his
leak of the classified pictures by arguing that the public needed to be
warned that the Soviet Union was preparing to greatly expand its naval
reach.
At the time Shelby said the pardon only underscored the need for new legislation
explicitly criminalizing leaks. Those that lauded the pardon argued that
Morison's 1984 transgression was a strained test case that unfairly hammered
relatively benign facts to fit the espionage statutes.
Bruce agrees with Shelby's assessment. The senator has said: "It's
not an issue that's going to go away. The leaks are too prevalent. The
news people like all the leaks because they give them stories, but there
has been and will be damage to national security because of leaks. They're
just too prevalent."
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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