Senator? Traitors and treason

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Adams <jadams01 () sprynet com>
Date: May 14, 2006 6:13:27 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: For IP? Traitors and treason

> From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
> Date: May 14, 2006 5:36:04 PM EDT
>
> > From: Joe Pistritto <jcp () jcphome com>
> > Date: May 14, 2006 4:22:32 PM EDT
>
> > In this case, the word you are looking for isn't "whistleblower", but
> > rather "traitor".
>
> Is he a traitor for exposing potentially traitorous conduct, or
> was he a patriot?
>
> Compare and contrast with those 2 pesky Washington reporters who got
> a Pulitzer for talking to that guy nicknamed "Deep Throat"....  Were
> they traitors or not?

Frank Rich had some strong words on strong words today in the Times,  
reaching an unexpected yet not inconsistent conclusion:

Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?

When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem  
onward, we’ve more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent.  
Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his  
publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in  
1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the  
Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War.  
Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who  
squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and  
then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely  
those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the  
thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both  
The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has  
turned on the war in Iraq. The administration’s die-hard defenders  
are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the  
traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the  
newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on  
Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the  
C.I.A.’s secret “black site” Eastern European prisons (The Post).  
Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both  
papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism...

If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president  
with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate  
sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as  
the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

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