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Sometimes I wonder what's up with the W administration with regard to secrecy.
Seems lots of people in the administration just really don't want us to know much of what's going on.
Even with regard to the mundane.
Perhaps some readers may have heard of the collarbone incident, but then again, perhaps not.
According to Scripps Howard News Service and other sources, it seems last weekend, W and a small group went mountain biking.
This happened at a Secret Service facility outside D.C.
As is the usual custom, there was a pool reporter assigned - well, no, allowed - to cover the event.
The reporter didn't mount up and ride along with the group, so he was out of sight of the riders.
He got wind later, however, that one of the riders fell and got hurt.
The White House, apparently feeling the need to swing into PR mode, gave the reporter a line of what turned out to be blatant horse hockey.
The reporter was told a private citizen who happened to be riding in the group suffered a minor injury in a "one-rider fall."
It was, in fact, a "one-rider fall."
But a day later, reporters learned that it was no private citizen, it was Michael Wood, a nominee to become the next U.S. ambassador to Sweden.
The "minor" injury was a broken collar bone, which, I suppose could be characterized as minor if compared to say, a skull fracture.
To be fair, it should be noted that Wood was able to drive himself to the hospital.
Bush called later to check up on Wood, who is said to be recovering quite nicely.
I said at the outset that this is mundane, and it is. But to me it points to a larger more insidious attitude harbored by administration officials.
Seems they really just have a hard time telling us what they're up to.
This kind of nonsense begs the obvious question. If they can't tell the truth about a stupid mountain biking accident, what can they tell the truth about?
Enter Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General of the United States.
He was on ABC's "This Week" last Sunday and said some frightening things about reporters facing criminal prosecution for publishing classified information.
"There are some statutes on the books which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," he said.
He added that the W administration would track phone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, although they wouldn't do that routinely or randomly.
Whew! That's a relief.
Honestly, this Gonzales guy is a little scary. And he's the one who gets to interpret the laws.
Apparently, the law he's talking about when he says "there are some statutes on the books" is the Espionage Act of 1917, a federal law passed after World War I at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson.
According to Wikipedia, the act made it a crime for a person to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote its enemies.
Wilson thought any widespread dissent in time of war constituted a real threat to an American victory.
Publication the Wilson Administration deemed guilty of the act lost their mailing privilege.
A section of the act allowed the Postmaster General to declare all letters, circulars, newspapers, pamphlet books and other materials that violated the Act to be unmailable.
Some 75 newspapers either lost mailing privileges or were pressured to print nothing about the war between June 1917 and May 1918.
The editor of the Milwaukee Leader - Victor Berger - was sentenced to 20 years after being convicted on a charge of conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act.
The laws were ruled constitutional in the U.S. Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States. Schenck was convicted after publishing a pamphlet urging resistance to the World War I draft.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes joined the majority in upholding Schenck's conviction, but also introduced the theory that punishment should be limited to political expression which constitutes a "clear and present danger" to the government action at issue.
The law was later extended by the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it illegal to speak out against the government.
During and after World War I, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were used in prosecutions that would be considered constitutionally unacceptable.
Many of the laws were repealed in 1921, but major portions of the Espionage Act of 1917 remain on the books.
And these are the laws Gonzales is reading.
The practical end of the crime of sedition came in 1964 in the libel decision in Sullivan v. New York Times, when the high court granted special protection to criticism of public officials.
But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at Gonzales reading of the law.
After all, he's the attorney general who decided the Geneva Conventions were obsolete and didn't apply to "enemy combatants."
(Geneva Conventions: obsolete. 1917 act: settled law.)
He also signed off on a memo condoning some pretty awful treatment of prisoners taken in the war on terror and said U.S. laws banning torture were inapplicable.
He also signed off on warrantless wiretapping of international calls when the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act pretty clearly says you need a warrant.
So I guess his views on jailing reporters should be no surprise.
I agree fully with Lucy Daglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She said, "I can't imagine a bigger chill on free speech and the public's right to know what it's government is up to - both hallmarks of democracy - than prosecuting reporters."
It's one thing to try to keep the public from knowing what government is doing. It's quite another to jail people for letting the public know.
