Back of the Envelope

A number of bloggers have been asserting that the leaks to the press about the NSA program to monitor communications between terrorists outside and inside of the US amounts to treason. It is indeed illegal to leak classified information, but bloggers, such as Dean Esmay and Doc Rampage, are saying that execution is an appropriate punishment.

It is rare that people are executed for spying in the US, even when they are selling classified information to our enemy. See, for example, this list from CNN. A few examples:

• 1984 — Richard William Miller
  
  Miller was a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who was arrested for passing classified documents to two pro-Soviet immigrants, who also were arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Miller pleaded innocent, saying he was trying to infiltrate the KGB. His first trial ended in a mistrial, but he was found guilty in second trial in 1986. That verdict was overturned in 1989 on a technicality. In a third trial, he was convicted again and sentenced to 20 years in 1991. He was released in 1994 after a federal judge reduced his sentence.



• 1985 — Jonathan Jay Pollard
  
  A civilian employee at the Naval Investigative Service, Pollard was arrested for selling classified information to Israeli intelligence. Convicted of espionage on June 4, 1986, he was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. His wife, Anne Louise Henderson Pollard, was also convicted of espionage and received a five-year prison term. Israel, which granted Pollard citizenship, has lobbied former Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to pardon Pollard. Clinton considered doing so in the midst of the Wye River peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in 1998. Clinton pulled back after CIA Director George Tenet threatened to resign if Pollard was pardoned.



• 1985 — Walker family
  
  John A. Walker Jr. was a retired Navy warrant officer charged with selling information to the Soviets for 18 years, including data on U.S. encryption devices that compromised U.S. communications. Once out of the Navy, Walker recruited his son, Michael Walker, a petty officer aboard the USS Nimitz; his brother, ex-Navy Lt. Cmdr. Arthur James Walker; and Jerry Alfred Whitworth, a retired Navy communications specialist, to procure classified documents that the elder Walker paid for and then sold to the Soviets. John Walker's ex-wife tipped the FBI to his activities, and he was arrested in May 1985. The three others were apprehended around the same time.
  
  In late 1985, John Walker Jr. pleaded guilty to espionage charges as part of a plea agreement to testify at Whitworth's trial and provide full details on what he gave to the Soviets in exchange for a lesser sentence for his son. The elder Walker was sentenced to two life terms plus 10 years, and his son, who also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 25 years. Arthur James Walker was convicted of seven counts of espionage in late 1985 and was sentenced to life in prison. Whitworth was convicted of espionage and tax charges in 1986 and sentenced to 365 years.



• 1994 — Aldrich Ames
  
  Ames was characterized as probably the most damaging turncoat in U.S. history. A career agency official, Ames began selling U.S. secrets to the KGB in 1985, when he was head of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence unit. Within a decade he had revealed more than 100 covert operations and betrayed at least 30 agents. Ten of the spies revealed by Ames were later executed by the Soviets, including Dmitri Polyakov, the top CIA informer inside Soviet military intelligence. Ames' activities also may have allowed the Soviets to dupe the CIA by sending fake intelligence to the agency through the agents whom Ames compromised.
  
  Along with his co-conspirator and wife, Rosario, Ames was paid more than $2.7 million for the information before he was arrested in 1994. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole, while his wife, under the terms of a plea agreement, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years and three months in prison for conspiring to commit espionage and evading taxes.



• 1997 — Squillacote, Stand and Clark
  
  Theresa Marie Squillacote, husband Kurt Alan Stand and friend James Michael Clark were college buddies who spied on behalf of East Germany. Prosecutors said Stand began his spying activities in 1972 when East Germany recruited him to line up spies in Washington. Stand enlisted Clark in 1976 while the two were members of a radical leftist group at the University of Wisconsin and recruited his wife about the time the couple married in 1980. Stand was a labor union official, while Squillacote was a lawyer who later worked as the senior staff attorney in the office of the deputy undersecretary of defense. Clark was a civilian analyst for the Army.
  
  U.S. authorities learned of the past activities of the spy ring from German files following the collapse of the communist East Berlin government. A U.S. agent contacted Squillacote in 1997 claiming to be a South African official and Communist Party member. She then produced secret Pentagon documents describing arms transactions and assessing U.S. troop strength and one document about U.S. nuclear weapons.
  
  All three were arrested in October 1997. Clark pleaded guilty in June 1998 to conspiracy to commit espionage and received a reduced sentence of 12 years and seven months in prison in exchange for testifying against Squillacote and Stand. The couple were convicted in 1998 of conspiracy and espionage charges, and Squillacote received 21 years in prison and her husband 17 years.

Given these examples, and the seriousness of the crimes committed by these traitors, execution for leaking damaging information to the New York Times is disproportionate. The leakers are undoubtedly guilty of a crime, but I think twenty years to life is a more appropriate sentence.

Every time I hear about the outrageous expansion of surveillance powers under the current administration, I end up thinking the same thing, "Wait a minute! You mean our intelligence services weren't doing that before 9/11? What the heck did we even have them for?" That, ultimately, is why the Democrats won't make any headway in this line of attack. I, and most Americans, grew up on a steady diet of spy thrillers, both in novels and movies. In them, the all-powerful CIA, NSA, or even intelligence organizations whom the government didn't publicly acknowledge the existence of, ran all sorts of crazy operations in order to protect US citizens. In their desperate efforts to counter the terrorists, torture, warrantless searches, and assassinations were the norm. In the context of killing the enemy before he could set off a nuclear device in New York City, all this was considered justified. And if occasional mistakes were made and the wrong person died, or if laws were broken, that was acceptable collateral damage in this shadowy war. True, this attitude towards the intelligence services made us feel a little bit paranoid about big brother, but ultimately we felt better for the knowledge that such powerful organizations were out there, protecting us from the terrorists.

Of course, it turns out that the real organizations aren't anywhwere near as powerful or effective as we had been led to believe. And when we hear this outcry over them listening in on conversations between terrorists outside and inside of America, what bothers us most is not that they were doing it without a warrant after 9/11--we didn't even know that they needed a warrant for that--but that they apparently weren't doing it at all before.

I dunno. However, if you look at bin Laden's public statements, you can see what he really wants:

Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals, bar women from appearing in the press and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.

Professor Bruce Lawrence did us the great favor of translating bin Laden's speeches for us. It's hard to appease someone like this, so I really think we ought to quit trying. (Thanks to Tim Blair for pointing this one out.)