Tag Archives: espionage

Wikileaks Is Espionage

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from Townhall.com

“Wiki” is a cute Hawaiian word for “quick” — borrowed by Ward Cunningham, creator of the first Internet wiki — from the name of a fast little inter-terminal shuttle at Honolulu International Airport.

But cute and innocent as the word may sound, when attached to damaging wartime leaks by WikiLeaks operator Julian Assange, its cuteness should not protect Mr. Assange from being prosecuted and possibly executed by the U.S. government for wartime espionage.

Title 18 U.S. Code, Section 794, Paragraph (b) reads:

“Whoever, in time of war, with intent that the same shall be communicated to the enemy, collects, records, publishes, or communicates, or attempts to elicit any information with respect to the movement, numbers, description, condition, or disposition of any of the Armed Forces, ships, aircraft, or war materials of the United States, or with respect to the plans or conduct, or supposed plans or conduct of any naval or military operations, or with respect to any works or measures undertaken for or connected with, or intended for the fortification or defense of any place, or any other information relating to the public defense, which might be useful to the enemy, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life.”

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Wikileaks Crime Should Shock America

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I wonder if there is a family somewhere in America whose son’s or daughter’s life was put at risk because of the Wikileaks.org release last month of 76,000 classified documents?

            I wonder if there is an Afghan family whose son’s or daughter’s life was put at risk because of those leaks that we are told contain the names of Afghani citizens who have tried to help U.S. soldiers in their war against the Taliban.

            I’m the father of five and I wonder about those things because war must get very personal and very heart wrenching for parents with children—age doesn’t matter and adulthood doesn’t exist for parents—involved on the violent fronts of the conflict.

            So it was especially alarming to read the reactions of those detached observers suffering from chronic arrogance and elitism who thought the release of the documents was boring, telling us little we didn’t know already.  “Overall, though, the most shocking thing about the ‘War Diary” may be that it fails to shock, wrote columnist Eugene Robinson.  His colleague Richard Cohen went further: “The news in that massive data dump…is that there is no news at all.”

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