http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/i-ve-got-secret_748485.html?nopager=1 Does the press have an absolute right to declassify?
Fare thee well Bradley Manning. Welcome Chelsea Manning. Hello Fort Leavenworth. The story of national-security secrecy in America grows stranger by the day.
Where did all these troubles come from? The leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 is obviously central. James Goodale was general counsel of the New York Times during that epic legal struggle and he has now written an engaging—if also somewhat wrongheaded—memoir, which I’ve reviewed for the Weekly Standard……GS
A stream of national security leaks has lately turned into a tsunami, plunging the country into the most intense controversy over the publication of government secrets since the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. As we wade through the issues raised by the illicitly disclosed information now flowing out of Washington, it is a useful moment to look back at that seminal legal battle. More than a few books tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leak of a trove of secret Defense Department documents to the New York Times and other newspapers and Richard Nixon’s subsequent efforts to stop the presses. A new volume by an inside player in the great legal drama has now, four decades later, joined the crowd.
James C. Goodale offers a view of events as seen from his perch as general counsel at the Times during the case. Goodale was not a First Amendment lawyer back when the case broke; the general counsels of great newspapers in that era were typically more concerned with business dealings than with constitutional niceties. He had to get up to speed, and he immersed himself in the intricacies of the espionage statutes.
His reading of both the law and the purloined documents themselves led him to favor publication. His own experience as an intelligence officer in the Army—where he and his colleagues regularly clipped articles from the New York Times, stamped them “secret,” and locked them in a vault—had already convinced him that the workings of the secrecy system were “nonsensical.” The documents taken by Ellsberg were historical in nature: Not one of them was from the Nixon era, which was already well into its third year, and nothing in them, Goodale believed, would cause harm to national security—least of all the kind of grave harm that might trump the newspaper’s right to publish under the First Amendment
