Posted by
Noel Gibeson on Sunday, December 14, 2008 3:21:00 PM
Year-after-year, case-after-case, we constantly hear of Americans with access to classified information selling or giving that information to foreign countries or nationals. Instead of just putting them in jail, isn't it about time this country got serious with these traitors?
In 2005 a low-level CIA analyst named Leandro Aragoncillo was arrested for stealing and giving classified FBI documents to the Philippines. His arrest charged him with printing and downloading 101 FBI documents and providing 31 secret documents to Philippine sources. A separate investigation was trying to determine whether he did something similar when he worked as an administrative clerk in the U.S. Marine Corps assigned to the White House staff.
In another case, Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin plead guilty to three felony counts for spying for Israel in exchange for prosecutors dropping three other felony charges against him. He provided information to two people working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israeli lobbying group. Although AIPAC fired these two employees, AIPAC has long been associated with Israeli spying against the United States. As is typical in all these cases, both AIPAC and the Israeli government deny everything.
There are many other past and current cases of U.S. citizens entrusted with their country’s secrets doing similar, reprehensible acts of espionage, oftentimes for sheer greed – for money.
Whatever their motivations are for spying they are irrelevant. They agreed and swore an oath to safeguard and protect classified information. It does not matter at all if they had a bad childhood, they don’t like a certain policy, their wife left them, they support the goals of another group or country, or their cat was struck by a car.
If they commit treason then they must receive the most severe form of punishment that this country can offer them: death, and not just any death, but death by hanging. It is no more cruel and unusual than the electric chair, the gas chamber, or lethal injection. And it also has the added advantage of making a public statement to other would-be spies that if they spy, then they too will be hanged.
However, lower standards of conduct and law apparently apply to liberals like disgraced Clinton Administration National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. He was the one who stole and then destroyed numerous top secret documents from the National Archives in order for them not to prove an embarrassment to his administration. He was fined $50,000 and ordered to perform a 100 hours of community service. He probably should have received 20-25 years hard-time in prison. And if he were in the military or a civil servant charged with the same offenses, then he probably would have received at least 20-25 years in prison; so much for equal protection and application of the laws.
But spies are worse. They are as bad as a terrorist and some instances, even worse than a terrorist. Aggressive pre-screening, in-service counter-measures, and aggressive investigation, prosecution and sentencing of these people is what is required. Certainly, no quarter must be given to routing them out, finding out what damage they caused, convicting them and then promptly hanging them.
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Noel Gibeson is President of the Mount Vernon Institute