Posted on 01/03/2006 10:15:49 AM PST by RepublicNewbie
Will any reporter, any editor or the publisher of The New York Times be prosecuted for transmitting information relating to the national defense, specifically, that the United States government secretly monitored telephone calls from Al Quaeda operatives or suspected Al Quaeda operatives from outside the United States to the United States after September 11, 2001? And, if there is a prosecution and a conviction, should the penalty be greater because President Bush specifically urged The New York Times not to do, for obvious national security purposes, and The New York Times suddenly published the information more than a year after acquiring it, right after the immensely successful Iraqi parliamentary election and right before the Senate considered the renewal of provisions of the Patriot Act then scheduled to expire at the end of 2005?
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in 1951 and executed two years laterunder section 2 of the Espionage Act, then 50 U.S. Code 32, now 18 U.S. Code 794, which prohibits transmitting or attempting to transmit to a foreign government information "relating to the national defense."
Since Al Queada wants to attack the United States with a nuclear weapon, it is especially appropriate to review the Rosenberg case, which was vigorously contested and very controversial, even though the Rosenbergs were Communists.
(Excerpt) Read more at postchronicle.com ...
"The New York Times suddenly published the information more than a year after acquiring it"
It was timed to be released with the Risen book and Today show appearances. Check other threads.
BTTT
"Outstanding breakdown"? "Well researched"? Gaynor copied his entire article from Wikipedia, as if that somehow reinforces his assertion that reporting on questionable wiretaps is the same as selling nuclear secrets to a foreign government.
As the co-author of the book The Rosenberg File, I would like to add a few comments to this post. The Rosenberg case was unusual in that most espionage cases do not result in a jury trial. The reason is that when a defendant is brought into court he is entitled to be presented with the evidence against him. In practice, this can mean not only revealing the substance of the secrets stolen, but also the tradecraft and methods used to identify him -- disclosures that can cripple future counter-espionage operations and potentially endanger lives.
It was possible to convict the Rosenbergs because there were living witnesses (the Greenglasses, Harry Gold) to testify against them. Also -- and this is key -- the Communist Party USA turned its back on the Rosenbergs. The international propaganda campaign on their behalf did not begin until after their conviction, when it was used to divert attention from the anti-Semitic purges, such as the Slansky trial, going on in Eastern Europe.
Had the CPUSA thrown its resources behind the Rosenbergs, a more aggressive defense team might have been able to abort or overturn the conviction by pressing the government to reveal more about its methodology.
The same issues that make it difficult to obtain jury verdicts against spies apply to terrorists. But the stakes are much higher. Spies, once exposed, spy no more. Terrorists can leave the country, only to resume their activities abroad and maybe even return to the U.S. under another identity.
Edvard Radzinsky in his book "Stalin" argues that while at one time Stalin hoped Jewish financial capital would help rebuild the Soviet Union after the war, Stalin found the prospect of suborning himself to the Baruch Plan world government anathema. That plan had way too many Jewish signatures on it.
This refusal lead to a total break by Stalin who after fomenting the Doctor's plot hysteria and breaking off diplomatic relations with Israel, was within days of preparing to exile the Soviet Jews to the Gulag (as was done previously with various other ethnic minorities such as the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, etc.), and initiate another great purge along the lines of 1938 to once again prepare the Soviet Union for war.
The important thing to recall is that the Doctor's Plot happened at the same time as the McCarthy anti communist business from 1950-54
Stalin already had the concentration camps set up. And some of the preliminary accusations had gone out for the Doctor's Plot.
At the same time the Rosenburgs were tried and executed for treason in the USA--and this less than a decade after the Holocaust. This naturally caused fear and suspicion in the US Jewish community. This fear and suspicion was played upon by knowledgeable communists and leftists--large numbers of whom were jewish. These folk not only knew about what Stalin had done in the 1930's and was about to do with the doctor's plot but also saw the Rosenburg trials as show trials american style ... that is, a prelude to an american pogrom.
What Stalin had planned to do-- in a brilliant piece of jujitsu --leftists and communists imputed to Americans on the right. But it was done soto voce. Basically a blood libel was perpetrated on Americans without their knowing it.
While the American public outside NY/LA were generally given the view that the McCarthy era was an age when innocent men were unjustly tried by suspicious anti semites like McCarthy & Nixon--the NY/LA Jewish establishment was given a different story. They were given to understand that the democrats/liberals had prevented the US from visiting a holocaust on them. And that therefor American Jews owed their loyalty to the liberal democrats because the liberal democrats were the protectors of the Jews.
And this story line went on untouched for decades after McCarthy.
This dual track story line didn't crack until the early 1990's when the kgb/nkvd/gru opened up their files on the WWII-McCarthy Period. In 1995 the US's NSA agency opened up their Venona files. Both Russian and American spy agency files showed that McCarthy was right. The US government --as well as the Manhattan Project--had been at one time soaked with Russian Spies. The Rosenburgs were guilty. While McCarthy was wrong in all the details he got the general outline of the story right. Why did he get the outline right and the detail wrong. The reason is McCarthy's relationship to hoover was the same as hoover's relationship to the NSA.(The NSA told the FBI about the Venona intercepts but insisted that the FBI could not use NSA intercepts as evidence in court. The FBI had to develop their own leads. In 1950 J Edgar Hoover began weekly meetings with Joseph McCarthy. Those meetings ended in 1954. The beginning and end of those meetings coincided with the beginning and end of McCarthy star turn in the national spot light. To this day the FBI denies that Hoover told McCarthy anything about the Venona Cables and maybe Hoover said nothing explicit to McCarthy for which Hoover could be liable in court.)
Needless to say, an American style shoah was never in the cards.
The reason that hollywood hated Ronald Reagan so much was that he was an anti communist in hollywood during the McCarthy period--when anti communist was synonymous with anti semetic.(He was among the first wave of FDR democrats to switch parties.) Reagan was blacklisted from Hollywood. He couldn't get work there after McCarthy. However, his experiences in Hollywood served him well when he went into public service. He always understood the jujitsu of media talk of the age. Something that cannot be said of Nixon.
Actor George Clooney's is directing a McCarthy topic film now open in theatres. The film called "Good Night and Good Luck", in which Clooney also stars, is a look at the impact of McCarthyism on 1950s America.
That Clooney should step up and take on this topic shows that he's either really bright or really stooopid.
I suspect the latter. But I'll never know for sure. Since I won't go see his movie. I went to "A Beautiful Mind" and came out of that movie spitting mad.
When I hear American based Moslems talking about McCarthyism being visited on them. I have to laugh. They don't know that they have pronounced themselves guilty in the eyes of many Americans.
As for the democrats, part of the reason for the loss of their inner coherence has been that part their foundational raison d'être steming from the McCarthy era was revealed to be based on a lie. So now the core of the democratic party is the sodomites. Those folks are not just confusing. They are confused.
Huh?
President of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and 1959-1960.
Elected governor of California in 1966 and re-elected in 1970.
- The Killers (1964) .... Jack Browning ... aka Ernest Hemingway's The Killers (USA: promotional title)
- Heritage of Splendor (1963) .... Narrator
- The Young Doctors (1961) (voice) .... Narrator
- Hellcats of the Navy (1957) .... Cmdr. Casey Abbott Captain, USS Starfish
- Tennessee's Partner (1955) .... Cowpoke
- Cattle Queen of Montana (1954) .... Farrell
- Prisoner of War (1954) .... Webb Sloane
- Law and Order (1953) .... Frame Johnson
- Tropic Zone (1953) .... Dan McCloud
- She's Working Her Way Through College (1952) .... Prof. John Palmer
- The Winning Team (1952) .... Grover Cleveland Alexander
- Hong Kong (1952) .... Jeff Williams ... aka Bombs Over China (USA: reissue title)
- Bedtime for Bonzo (1951) .... Prof. Peter Boyd
- The Last Outpost (1951) .... Capt. Vance Britten ... aka Cavalry Charge (USA: reissue title)
- Storm Warning (1951) .... Burt Rainey
- The Big Truth (1951) .... Host/Narrator
- Louisa (1950) .... Hal Norton
I think you can see that Reagan was never "blacklisted". And the above list doesn't even take into account all his work in TV.
"Will any reporter, any editor or the publisher of The New York Times be prosecuted for transmitting information relating to the national defense, specifically, that the United States government secretly monitored telephone calls from Al Quaeda operatives or suspected Al Quaeda operatives from outside the United States to the United States after September 11, 2001?"
Don't fear, there is lots of time to prosecute the NYT. The wheels of justice grind slowly. And the inquiry into the leak itself will scare away the rest of the media from making the mistake of disclosing classified information.
As for the NYT, don't forget that the grandson "Pinch" sulzberger, who is currently CEO, was a hippie lefty in the 1960s who said that American troops deserved to die in Vietnam more than the enemy. Even his father, Punch Sulzberger, who was head of the NYT back then, thought his words were treasonous. So the d-ckhead gets his Daddy's job, because of his name, and continues his treasonous actions. It will catch up to him.
Most interesting, buried in the article, is that the outcry over the Rosenberg's case was widespread and internaitonal and very polarizing. But they were executed only 2 (that's TWO) years after they were convicted, during 1953. What a difference 50 years makes. It would take 25 years to execute them today.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/meroney200508040830.asp
National Review Online
August 04, 2005, 8:30 a.m.
Night Unto Reagan
The Gipper makes a Hollywood return.
By John Meroney
On February 8, 1950, some of Hollywood's brightest lights gathered at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the kind of glamorous, star-studded soiree typically held on Academy Awards night. While it was Oscar season in Hollywood, the event for which Cecil B. DeMille, Harry Cohn, George Burns, Ed Wynn, Jane Wyman and some 600 others turned out had nothing to do with the film industry's annual awards ceremony. Instead, it was a formal tribute to Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan? The same Ronald Reagan who supposedly had a B-grade movie career and was a failure as a leading man? Why would he be feted with such fanfare, more than 15 years before he was elected governor of California?
In those days, the view of Reagan was far different from today's conventional wisdom about his work in Hollywood. That night at the pink palace on Sunset Boulevard, people were honoring a genuine movie star, labor chief, and accomplished political activist. The Friars Club hosted the evening, but the ambience was far from humorous. The account in Variety describes a "note of seriousness rarely demonstrated at a Friars get-together. This was not a roast." It was unique, "a heartfelt tribute to a real guy." When Al Jolson spoke, he said his wish was that his son would grow up "to be the kind of man Ronnie is." Despite Reagan's enduring popularity with the American people, one would be hard pressed to find that same sentiment among the arbiters in today's Hollywood. For decades, Reagan's career has been marginalized and caricatured by the establishment here as well as in the top film schools. Among those who determine what is deemed worthy of attention and study in film, Reagan is persona non grata.
Hissing Hollywood
That is what makes it intriguing that two of Reagan's most compelling films are reappearing on the big screen this week in Los Angeles as part of an industry salute to the late director Don Siegel. He worked with Reagan in two pictures, Night Unto Night, released in 1949, and Ernest Hemingway's The Killers, which appeared in 1964.
Sponsored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a leading force behind film preservation and restoration, the salute to Don Siegel commenced last month at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a special event held at the Academy's theater in Beverly Hills. Filmmakers such as Oliver Stone, Robert Towne, George Lucas, Robert Altman, and Steven Spielberg regularly take part in and attend these affairs. This time, the writer-director Curtis Hansen hosted the kick-off tribute to Siegel, and Clint Eastwood appeared to reminisce about the director who gave him one of his signature roles in 1971's Dirty Harry and has since inspired his own directing.
Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Goldstein, author of the weekly "Big Picture" column, managed an entire piece about the ongoing Siegel tribute without mentioning the rather significant fact that at least part of Siegel's historical relevance is that he directed two pictures starring a president whom both sides of the political spectrum agree was one of the most consequential of the last century. In the printed program for the Siegel series, Reagan is barely acknowledged even though he stars in two of the featured pictures. When Reagan's name surfaces at industry events similar to this one, it's customarily referenced with sarcasm and contempt. At one Academy event, the audience hissed when Reagan appeared on screen.
Witnessing that causes flashbacks to the salad days of the Reagan presidency when the film capital was red hot with hostility. In 1981, insurgents at the Screen Actors Guild, where Reagan once presided, mounted a campaign to strip him of his life membership in retaliation for his firing the striking air-traffic controllers. Clint Eastwood quelled the movement by coming to Reagan's defense, saying that SAG leaders owed the American people an apology. "How the government solves the legalities of a strike is its business — not some screen actor's," he said.
"Warm, Handsome, Charismatic, and Accessible
One reason it's difficult to make a case for Reagan's Hollywood success is because so few of his 55 films are commercially available. Even Reagan's own supporters have fallen victim to the storyline that depicts him as a disappointment. In the Face of Evil, a recent conservative documentary chronicling Reagan's battle with Communism, characterizes his talent as "questionable" and asserts that "in the unforgiving calculus of the studio system, Reagan was weighed, measured, and found wanting. Leading man status would never come, and the brass ring of stardom would forever be beyond his grasp." (The documentary also erroneously claims that in 1947 Reagan "urged the House Committee on Un-American Activities to abandon witch hunts and the naming of names." Actually, Reagan resented the allegation of a "witch hunt" because there were Communists in Hollywood. Furthermore, he regarded the Communist party as a criminal conspiracy. Party members were the only ones who could accurately "name names" because membership was secret. Reagan admired those who were courageous enough to testify.)
Film historian Robert Osborne was much closer to the truth about Reagan in Hollywood on a Turner Classic Movies salute to Reagan last summer. "He may not have had the acting chops of Spencer Tracy or Sean Penn, but he was exceptionally likeable on film. He was warm, handsome, charismatic, and accessible — all the ingredients required to be a very successful leading man during the 1930s and '40s." Osborne said Reagan made solid films during Hollywood's golden age: "In all of them he more than held his own with actors who ran the gamut from Bette Davis and Errol Flynn to Olivia de Havilland, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, and Jane Wyman." Osborne isn't surprised that Reagan's critics have attacked his movies. "They particularly kidded him about 'Bedtime for Bonzo' in which he shared most of his scenes with a chimpanzee. But as a movie star he had much more going for him than working with a chimp. He was immensely likeable on film," Osborne said. "Reagan was talented. I mean, you can't carve out a 27-year career in Hollywood and win worldwide recognition as an actor unless you have something very special going for you."
LA CONFIDENTIAL
The perception of Reagan as a failure in the movies began long before he first ran for public office. Its genesis was in the days of the so-called blacklist era '40s and '50s. Those outspoken against communism were disparaged in whispering campaigns. In a town that runs on rumor and hearsay, such innuendo is death. Screenwriters Morrie Ryskind, James McGuinness, and Martin Berkeley have had their critical and historical reputations reduced to footnotes. With few exceptions, the Hollywood anti-communists have been written out of history. John Wayne is one who continues to ride high despite decades of critical assault.
On the other hand, Communist filmmakers such as Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo, and Paul Jarrico continue to benefit from Hollywood's own special style of compound interest. Today their pictures are regarded as masterworks of courageous, path-breaking mavericks. Politics helped their career reputations immeasurably; it poisoned Reagan's. It isn't too farfetched to imagine how Reagan's film career would be appreciated for nuance and genius had he defended the Communists, remained a left-wing liberal, and written a weepy memoir about the "dark days" of the blacklist. Without that kind of track record to buoy his standing, Reagan is relegated to status as a "bureaucrat of McCarthyism, and a short-sided searcher after redness" in David Thompson's influential Biographical Dictionary of Film.
In the fall of 1946, Reagan was learning how deceptive the Communist party could be. His real life was starting to look like pages from James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. When he stepped before the cameras on Night Unto Night, Reagan was far from the "happy warrior" known to most Americans. Off-stage, as an officer of the S.A.G., Reagan was taking stands, subsuming himself in the bloody film industry labor strikes that made Los Angeles a cauldron. (Night Unto Night was the only Warner Bros. picture in production during that dangerous time.) Reagan was becoming convinced that the Communist Party had a hand in the upheaval, and that honest strikers were being manipulated. Some people he considered allies were in fact enemies; backstabbing and betrayal seemed to be lurking around every corner. "I found myself misrepresented, cursed, vilified, denounced, and libeled," Reagan wrote years later.
The timing for Night Unto Night was also fitting. In mood and spirit, Reagan's world was beginning to resemble that of his character, John Galen, a professor of applied biology, suffering from epilepsy. Galen is a picture of tragic despair; as he comes to grips with the gravity of his illness, he slips into anguish and skepticism. Life is a mere "mechanical phenomenon" to him. Asked about his view of death, Galen answers, "I'm a self-determined not-knower." Similarly, Reagan himself had become somber. His notions of communism and left-wing politics were being fundamentally challenged. Politics had become deeply personal. According to one observer, "His stock grin was replaced by grim, tense facial expressions; his lanky frame looked too lean to be healthy. He was under great mental and physical strain." Don Siegel captured that. Knowing the circumstances surrounding Night Unto Night makes the film especially haunting. Even with the eerie twilight atmosphere, at heart the picture is about the realization of love and miracles. Metaphorically, the narrative is similar to critical parts of Reagan's life.
By 1963, when Siegel set out to make his version of Hemingway's short story, Reagan was at a far different position in his emotional and professional life. Like his John Galen character years before, Reagan had emerged from the wilderness and lived to tell about it. Surviving the death of a child, depression, divorce, and other trials made him a new man. Hosting and often acting in the acclaimed anthology series "General Electric Theater" for almost a decade on CBS Television put Reagan in more than 20 million households every week. It gave him a level of public notoriety that eluded many of his erstwhile colleagues in film.
In Don Siegel's autobiography, the director writes that it was Universal mogul Lew Wasserman, once Reagan's talent agent, who suggested Reagan for the role of Browning, the picture's leading villain. Siegel described the character as "well educated and charming, yet rugged when necessary. He is in direct conflict with the killers, Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager." Reagan, however, was resisting. "Ronnie and I are good friends and the part's interesting," Siegel told Wasserman. "I'll make it awkward for him to turn me down."
Don Siegel knew how to stage a persuasive power lunch, and he had a smooth pitch when Reagan came to meet him at the Universal Studios commissary. "Many of your friends have played villains," Siegel said, listing Cagney, Gable, and Bogart, all actors whom Reagan admired, as examples. "Do you remember 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre'? Did playing 'bad men' hurt their careers? These actors were not only good friends of yours, but were loved by millions of people throughout the world," argued Siegel. "Now that you've finished your salad and I haven't started mine, you do the talking — I'll do the eating."
Siegel said that Reagan watched him eat and finish his salad. "The trouble with you is that you make sense," Reagan responded. "I'll get in touch with my people and find out if a deal can be made. You still crossing your fingers when you make a take?"
Siegel was definitely blessed with good luck. His version of Ernest Hemingway's The Killers is now considered classic. Two years ago, it was released on DVD as part of the prestigious Criterion Collection. It includes a revealing interview with Clu Gulager who says Reagan was "brilliant" in the picture. Even Lee Marvin, who bragged that his own performance would "bury" the rest of the cast, found Reagan highly adroit.
On Thursday night, Gulager will be on hand in the UCLA theater, watching Don Siegel's handiwork and remembering his scenes with a colleague who became president, regardless of whether Hollywood chooses to forget.
— John Meroney is at work on American Destiny, a book about Reagan's life in Hollywood.
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