Thursday, May 25, 2006

Big Chill planned to ice the public's right to know

Big Chill planned to ice the public's right to know: "In what can only be seen as a pathetic acknowledgment that it has abandoned its constitutional compass, a lost Bush Administration has put newspapers and reporters on notice that they are now the enemy. A Big Chill is coming to ice the public's right to know.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez announced Sunday that prosecution, possibly under a 1917 espionage law never before used against America's free press, will be pressed into service to thwart the printing of any new classified information.
Presumably, those arrested and charged would include not only reporters, but their editors, publishers and anyone else involved the decision-making process by which a story sees print. Nor does it take a great leap of imagination to foresee that if the top hierarchy of a newspaper, radio or television station, or web site blog can be punished, so might anyone else in possession of the banned news, or anyone passing the verboten report on to someone else. "

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