http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/21/AR2006022101947.html
Press Can Be Prosecuted for Having Secret Files, U.S. Says
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 22, 2006; A03
The Bush administration said that journalists can be prosecuted under
current espionage laws for receiving and publishing classified
information but that such a step "would raise legitimate and serious
issues and would not be undertaken lightly," according to a court
filing made public this week.
"There plainly is no exemption in the statutes for the press, let
alone lobbyists like the defendants," Justice Department lawyers
wrote in response to a motion filed last month seeking to dismiss
charges against Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former lobbyists
for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Last August, the two men were accused of receiving classified
information during conversations they had with government officials,
one of whom warned Weissman that "the information he was about to
receive was highly classified 'Agency stuff,' " according to the
government's indictment. That official was Lawrence A. Franklin, who
worked at the Pentagon. He recently pleaded guilty to violating the
Espionage Act.
One argument made in the defendants' motion was that the two
pro-Israeli lobbyists were doing what reporters, think-tank experts
and members of congressional staffs "do perhaps hundreds of times
every day" in receiving leaked classified information and passing it
on to others.
In its Jan. 30 response unsealed this week, the government said Rosen
and Weissman, as lobbyists, "have no First Amendment right to
willfully disclose national defense information." The government went
on to say: "Stating this, we recognize that a prosecution under the
espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing
classified information leaked to it by a government source, would
raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken
lightly, indeed, the fact that there has never been such a
prosecution speaks for itself."
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who first
disclosed the government filing on his Web site,
http://www.fas.org/sgp , said yesterday, "The idea that the
government can penalize the receipt of proscribed information, and
not just its unauthorized disclosure, is one that characterizes
authoritarian societies, not mature democracies."
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:21 CST