Update: A revised version of this article is at my white-and-orange blog: Daily Kos
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The Gray Lady has a short memory - she has apparently forgotten the egregious abuse and defamation she perpetrated on Dr. Wen Ho Lee back in 1999 - and how it cost her many tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) when he successfully sued both the government, and her, for invading his privacy and other crimes.
In her new article on Stephen Kim, she appears to not have learned many lessons from that time. At least she did not title it "Korean Spy", however she has completely abandoned the principle of objectivity by saying things like "Kim lied to the FBI". No, Kim is charged with lying to the FBI, much like Thomas Drake was charged with lying to the FBI. Drake, of course, was exonerated, when all 4 'lying' charges against him were dropped, and the judge wrote that one of the things he was accused of lying about, well, he didn't do it. When the government charges someone with 'lying to the police', what it can sometimes mean, is that the FBI lied to someone, kept them in a room for several hours, got them confused, then pounced on a mis-statement or slight discrepancy in verbiage and then called that a lie.
If you don't believe me, go to youtube and type in "never talk to the police" - a video in which both a Law professor and a Law Enforcement Officer will explain how the system works. As in the Drake case, sometimes the law enforcement agent bends the bounds of propriety in their accusations of 'lying', and they use it as a sort of "psychological strategy" against the defendant, working both his own psyche and the media portrayal of his alleged offenses. As we can see, the New York Times has again fallen for this trick, and is again parroting the government accusations without sticking the word 'alleged' on the front of them.
HOWEVER
There is an interesting tidbit of information in this new New York Times article on Dr. Kim, who, like Drake, has been charged with Espionage for discussing material with a reporter.
Stephen Kim, unlike Mr. Drake, or probably any of the other non-spy Espionage, was actually ordered by the state department to leak to the media!!!! (A similarity though - Drake was told to keep his Department of Defense Inspector General documents -- the same documents the government later accused him of "retaining").
Then the CIA turns around and decides Kim has given out too much information - over the telephone! How do you decide that a conversation on a telephone is classified?
I don't know. We shall see.
Like Drake, Dr. Kim has refused to plea bargain. He believes he is innocent, and if you look at all the leaks that continually stream out of Congress and the Whitehouse (the Bin Ladin Raid being the most egregious in recent memory), you will find that he is no more guilty than hundreds, if not thousands of other government employees.
Leaking is as American as Apple Pie. We are supposed to be the country, that, with all it's faults, has always been able to talk about those faults, scream at each other about those faults, laugh at them, lampoon them, have a beer over them, whisper about them, but only during an actual declared war (not a 'contingency operation', whatever that is), have we decided that we should silence ourselves as if it were some sort of patriotic duty.
With the Kim case, the State Department told him to do what he did. He was following orders.
If I were on the jury, how, exactly, would I feel about that? About putting a man in jail for 15 years for doing what he was told to do?
What is going on in this case? Is Dr. Kim simply a pawn, like Drake, in some sort of larger game being played between the powerful forces of government - the CIA versus the State Department?
References
U.S. Pressing Its Crackdown Against Leaks, Scott Shane, New York Times, Jun 17 2011
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