Chalabigate
2005-01-24
Moonie Editorialist: Hersh is a Traitor and should be Prosecuted for Espionage
Tony Blankley, editorializing for the Moonie owned and operated Washington Times, suggests Seymour Hersh is a traitor and a spy and should be tried for espionage. Blankley admits that he does not know if Hersh’s article—The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secret—is technically a violation of the unconstitutional Espionage Act, but considers it only one of many “egregious government leaks of military secrets” to the press, in other words Blankley is outraged by the fact the American people have learned the details of the Strausscon plan to wage World War IV against the Muslim world.
“Mr. Hersh is revealing to all the world, including the Iranian government, that our commandos are currently behind enemy lines in Iran on a dangerous and vital military assignment.”
In short, according to Blankey, Hersh has betrayed our “brave commandos,” who are in fact in the process of attacking a sovereign nation minus a declaration of war, unless of course you consider Bush’s absurd “axis of evil” speech a declaration of war, not that Congress had anything to do with this oblique war declaration, never mind that declarations of war are to be issued by Congress according to the once venerated but now doormat document, the United States Constitution.
Wasting precious little time, the guru of mass murdering Iranians in the name of Israel and Zionism and exponent of “creative destruction,” Michael Ledeen, weighed in on Blankley’s editorial in the National Review. “I entirely agree with Tony Blankley that any journalist who reveals details of our quest for that information [on Iran’s supposed nuclear program] should be relegated to the lowest levels of Hell, whether the real thing or the legalistic equivalent. Guantanamo, maybe? No, no, only kidding, hoHo,” writes Ledeen with typical perverse wit.
Of course, he is not kidding.
Ledeen and the Strausscons love the idea of journalists—well, journalists who don’t write for the Moonies and the National Review, anyway—being tortured, a la Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, as are “terrorists,” or goat herders and taxi drivers scooped up in Afghanistan and accused of conspiring with Osama bin Laden. Recall that Ledeen’s buddy and co-conspirator, Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle, accused Hersh of terrorism. “Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly,” Perle told CNN. In Iraq, “terrorist” journalists, that is to say journalists not “embedded” with the Pentagon, are routinely executed by the U.S. military. Blankley is not calling for the military to kill Hersh, but does mention that the Espionage Act of 1917 is a crime punishable “by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life,” the next best thing a military sniper taking aim at journalists in Iraq.
As for the remainder of Ledeen’s article, he chews through a thousand or so words debunking Hersh’s claims, essentially telling us Hersh’s article is “an overwritten and hyperventilated assault” on Donald Rumsfeld. Maybe so, but since Rumsfeld is running the Pentagon—and the Pentagon is in the process of sneaking inside Iran and blowing things up and killing people, at least according to Hersh’s sources—it makes perfect sense for Hersh to take Rumsfeld to task.
Finally, Bush has not officially declared war against Iran—in fact, he never sought an official declaration of war prior to invading Iraq—and thus Blankley’s off-the-wall suggestion that the moth-eaten Espionage Act of 1917 be used against Hersh is not only ludicrous and ahistorical, it is crack-brained, revealing the vicious and anti-democratic character of the Strausscons and their fellow travelers, in this instance a writer who works for whacked out Moonies, who are at war with much of the world, absent any legal foundation, precedent, or consensus.
Invasions of Iraq and possibly Iran are not analogous to World War I, when the Espionage Act was conceived to get rid of antiwar activists—Eugene Debs, Bill Haywood, Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman, to name but a few of the more famous—although the Strausscons consider their war against Islam to be World War IV and of the same caliber, if not more important than World War I. Strausscons, embracing the authoritarian elitist formulations of their dead swami, Leo Strauss, are incapable of tolerating open and honest discussion of their apocalyptic plans for humanity, beginning with Iraq and Iran. Not unexpectedly, they suggest severe punishment, including execution by the state, for heretics, especially those as lucid and valorous as Seymour Hersh.
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=505This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
