Espionage Act:
How the Government Can Engage in Serious
Aggression Against the People of the United
States
By Naomi Wolf
December 10, 2010 "Huffington Post" -- This week,
Senators Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein
engaged in acts of serious aggression against
their own constituents, and the American people
in general. They both invoked the 1917
Espionage Act and urged its use in
going after Julian Assange. For good measure,
Lieberman extended his invocation of the
Espionage Act to include a call to use it to
investigate the New York Times, which
published WikiLeaks' diplomatic cables. Reports
yesterday suggest that U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder may seek to invoke the
Espionage Act against Assange.
These two
Senators, and the rest of the Congressional and
White House leadership who are coming forward in
support of this appalling development, are
cynically counting on Americans' ignorance of
their own history -- an ignorance that is stoked
and manipulated by those who wish to strip rights
and freedoms from the American people. They are
manipulatively counting on Americans to have no
knowledge or memory of the dark history of the
Espionage Act -- a history that should alert us
all at once to the fact that this Act has only
ever been used -- was designed deliberately to be
used -- specifically and viciously to silence
people like you and me.
The Espionage Act
was crafted in 1917 -- because President Woodrow
Wilson wanted a war and, faced with the
troublesome First Amendment, wished to
criminalize speech critical of his war. In the
run-up to World War One, there were many ordinary
citizens -- educators, journalists, publishers,
civil rights leaders, union activists -- who were
speaking out against US involvement in the war.
The Espionage Act was used
to round these
citizens by the thousands for the newly minted 'crime'
of their exercising their First Amendment Rights.
A movie producer who showed British cruelty in a
film about the Revolutionary War (since the
British were our allies in World War I) got a ten-year
sentence under the Espionage act in 1917, and the
film was seized; poet E.E. Cummings spent three
and a half months in a military detention camp
under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of saying
that he did not hate Germans. Esteemed Judge
Learned Hand wrote that the wording of the
Espionage Act was so vague that it would threaten
the American tradition of freedom itself. Many
were held in prison for weeks in brutal
conditions without due process; some, in
Connecticut -- Lieberman's home state -- were
severely beaten while they were held in prison.
The arrests and beatings were widely publicized
and had a profound effect, terrorizing those who
would otherwise speak out.
Presidential
candidate Eugene Debs received a ten-year prison
sentence in 1918 under the Espionage Act for
daring to read the First Amendment in public. The
roundup of ordinary citizens -- charged with the
Espionage Act -- who were jailed for daring to
criticize the government was so effective in
deterring others from speaking up that the Act
silenced dissent in this country for a decade. In
the wake of this traumatic history, it was left
untouched -- until those who wish the same
outcome began to try to reanimate it again
starting five years ago, and once again, now.
Seeing the Espionage Act rise up again is, for
anyone who knows a thing about it, like seeing
the end of a horror movie in which the zombie
that has enslaved the village just won't die.
I predicted in
2006 that the forces that wish to strip American
citizens of their freedoms, so as to benefit from
a profitable and endless state of war -- forces
that are still powerful in the Obama years, and
even more powerful now that the Supreme Court
decision striking down limits on corporate
contributions to our leaders has taken effect --
would pressure Congress and the White House to
try to breathe new life yet again into the
terrifying Espionage Act in order to silence
dissent. In 2005, Bush tried this when the New
York Times ran its exposé of Bush's illegal
surveillance of banking records -- the SWIFT
program. This report was based, as is the
WikiLeaks publication, on classified information.
Then, as now, White House officials tried to
invoke the Espionage Act against the New York
Times. Talking heads on the right used
language such as 'espioinage' and 'treason' to
describe the Times' release of the story,
and urged that Bill Keller be tried for treason
and, if found guilty, executed. It didn't stick
the first time; but, as I warned, since this
tactic is such a standard part of the tool-kit
for closing an open society -- 'Step Ten' of the
'Ten Steps' to a closed society: 'Rename Dissent
'Espionage' and Criticism of Government, 'Treason'
-- I knew, based on my study of closing societies,
that this tactic would resurface.
Let me explain
clearly why activating -- rather than abolishing
-- the Espionage Act is an act of profound
aggression against the American people. We are
all Julian Assange. Serious reporters discuss
classified information every day -- go to any
Washington or New York dinner party where real
journalists are present, and you will hear
discussion of leaked or classified information.
That is journalists' job in a free
society. The White House, too, is continually
classifying and declassifying information.
As I noted in The
End of America, if you prosecute journalists
-- and Assange, let us remember, is the New
York Times in the parallel case of the
Pentagon Papers, not Daniel Ellsberg; he is the
publisher, not the one who revealed the
classified information -- then any outlet, any
citizen, who discusses or addresses 'classified'
information can be arrested on 'national security'
grounds. If Assange can be prosecuted under the
Espionage Act, then so can the New York Times;
and the producers of Parker Spitzer, who
discussed the WikiLeaks material two nights ago;
and the people who posted a mirror WikiLeaks site
on my Facebook 'fan' page; and Fox News producers,
who addressed the leak and summarized the content
of the classified information; and every one of
you who may have downloaded information about it;
and so on. That is why prosecution via the
Espionage Act is so dangerous -- not for Assange
alone, but for every one of us, regardless of our
political views.
This is far from
a feverish projection: if you study the history
of closing societies, as I have, you see that
every closing society creates a kind of 'third
rail' of material, with legislation that
proliferates around it. The goal of the
legislation is to call those who criticize the
government 'spies', 'traitors', enemies of the
state' and so on. Always the issue of
national security is invoked as the reason for
this proliferating legislation. The outcome? A
hydra that breeds fear. Under similar laws in
Germany in the early thirties, it became a form
of 'espionage' and 'treason' to criticize the
Nazi party, to listen to British radio programs,
to joke about the fuhrer, or to read cartoons
that mocked the government. Communist Russia in
the 30's, East Germany in the 50's, and China
today all use parallel legislation to call
criticism of the government -- or whistleblowing
-- 'espionage' and 'treason', and 'legally'
imprison or even execute journalists, editors,
and human rights activists accordingly.
I call on all
American citizens to rise up and insist on repeal
of the Espionage Act immediately. We have little
time to waste. The Assange assault is theater of
a particularly deadly kind, and America will not
recover from the use of the Espionage Act as a
cudgel to threaten journalists, editors and news
outlets with. I call on major funders of
Feinstein's and Lieberman;s campaigns to put
their donations in escrow accounts and notify the
staffers of those Senators that the funds
willonly be released if they drop their
traitorous invocation of the Espionage Act. I
call on all Americans to understand once for all:
this is not about Julian Assange. This, my fellow
citizens, is about you.
Those calling for
Julian Assange's criminalization include:
1. Rep. Candice
Miller
2. Jonah Goldberg, Journalist
3. Christian Whiton, Journalist
4. Bill O'Reilly, Fox News Journalist
5. Sarah Palin, Member of the Republican Party,
former candidate
6. Mike Huckabee, Politician
8. Prof. Tom Flanagan
9. Rep. Peter King
10. Tony Shaffer
11. Rick Santorum
12. Rep. Dan Lugren
13. Jeffrey T. Kuhner, Journalist The
Washington Times
14. Rep. Virginia Foxx
15. Sen. Kit Bond, Vice Chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee
16. Sen. Joe Liberman
17. Sen. Charles Schumer
18. Marc Thiessen, Columnist