Calling Treason Treason

Major Mike

There have been many great posts covering the NYT leaking of a highly classified intelligence gathering program…only mushrooms, time travelers, and ganja smoking Rickie Williams clones could have missed it. Great stuff from Hugh Hewitt, John Hinderaker and many others for their great legal and constitutional analyses. Not much on that I can add…each piece correctly supports the idea that the President is well within his rights in attempting to protect the American people from those who are harboring themselves in the freedoms of our democracy, while at the same time doing their utmost to destroy it.

Yesterday Hugh hit upon a portion of this topic that has not yet garnered enough serious discussion. At what point will this nation come to use its treason laws against those seeking fame and notoriety at the expense of safety and security?

Key here is the vulnerability of such programs to leaks in operational security. While in the Corps, I was read into a couple of “black” programs. Of course I won’t discuss those in any detail, but what I can say is that each were fairly simple applications of technology, that gave us huge tactical advantages in the air, BUT each would have been reduced to rubble had the nature of the program been carelessly exposed. Sometimes the simple leveraging of an existing technology allows the imaginative person to gain a superior operational advantage over those who have yet to conceive of the idea. Rifled muskets, automatic weapons, tanks, airplanes, etc., etc., etc..

Such was the case with the two programs I was familiar with. Someone used their imagination, and we had a significant tactical advantage going forward. But, had those programs been exposed, that huge, and simply acquired advantage would have been negated by simple operational adjustments by our enemies...and, by the way, not to be regained.

That is what concerns me here. Have we, for the sake of some short-lived political hi-jinks, surrendered a huge operational advantage, which we will never be able to reclaim? My answer is …likely.

The Islamafacists have made countless operational adjustments over the years to counter our methods. Box cutters, IEDs. Nuff said. So it is extremely likely that by simply watching the gyrations over the past seven days, they have figured out what the NSA was doing, and taken measures to protect themselves. And even if they didn’t figure it out completely, they have certainly re-examined their operational security practices enough to diminish our previous advantage.

Hello, MSM, this is how people who fight wars play between firefights.

So, to follow Hugh’s question about what would we have done during WWII had the NYT compromised the highly classified Enigma program, what are we going to do about this?

I suggest that we need to start viewing the conscious publication of known classified documents what it truly is… TREASON, and not some mythical right to “FREE” speech that comes with a magic First Amendment Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card.

This deliberate leak has jeopardized the citizens of this country, likely made the tracking of terrorists more onerous, and set us on a needless, and distracting path towards a constitutional crisis (started by NYT, and driven forward by the spineless amoebas in the Congress…both sides of the aisle) regarding Presidential powers that has been previously decided many times. Sorry, but someone should pay…both the leaker, and the NYT.

Treason is treason. No namby-pamby defense about checking the president’s power…on the facts, this is treason and it should be rightly, and harshly dealt with.

OBTW…for those in Congress trying to leverage this opportunity to strip the president of his rightful wartime powers see …SHEEPDUNG previously posted. P- Politicize Strategy. Once you morons start futzing with the war, it will be lost. So stay off the net and let the warfighters…including this President, do what they are trained and sworn to do… “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign AND domestic (including incompetent and impotent, Congressmen and Senators, who would sell their moms at a chance to hand out keys to Camp David cabins).”