We Want FreedomEssay Preview: We Want FreedomReport this essayWe want FreedomJustin RileyExpository WritingMs MartinNovember 28, 2005We Want Freedom“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” (Bill of Rights 5) The United States was formed by those who were trying to escape persecutions and to insure that the government of the U.S. did not become like that of Britain, which denied its citizens many important rights. In order to protect themselves from tyrannical rule in the future, the countrys founding fathers created the Bill of Rights, a list of the rights of the people, which now makes up the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution. That bill includes the freedom of the press, a freedom that has not been effective at stopping censorship during times of war and peace. Censorship is used buy news media, government, and the military a way of keeping critical information out of the public eye. This should not be allowed since it violates the first amendment. This is evident by examining past and present incidents of censorship and the events surrounding them.
In the 200 plus years of the nations history, censorship has always existed. For instance, on the verge of war with France in 1798, Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, claiming that censorship was essential to stop enemy espionage and sabotage. The Sedition Act made it unlawful to “write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against government officials intending “to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute” (1798, 1 Stat. 570). There were 25 arrests, 15 indictments and 10 convictions under the Act, mostly of newspaper editors and politicians from the party in opposition to the government. Legal challenges to the Act were unsuccessful at the time. But when party fortunes changed, the convicted were pardoned and most fines were returned. The dangers had been exaggerated.
Another example of censorship legislation comes from the First World War during which Congress enacted the Espionage Act. This act made it a crime to utter, print, write, or publish any “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language or any language intended to bring the U.S. form of government, the Constitution, or the flag into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute” (1918,40 Stat. 553). More than 2000 individuals, including journalists, were prosecuted under the Act. Convictions were mostly for criticizing U.S. participation in the war. Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act, in Abrams v. U.S. (1919, 250U.S. 616) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld such convictions Censorship however is not only a problem of the past. There has also been more recent cases.
In the crisis following the September 11th attack, the main censorship problems have again involved government efforts to withhold information from the press, claiming that disclosures would endanger national security. These have been and still are coupled with appeals for self-censorship as a patriotic duty which have been well-publicized, adding the pressures springing from publicity to the request. Prominent examples of official secrecy are refusals to discuss war related matters with reporters, withholding all information about people detained by the government, limiting reports about military activities in Afghanistan to reports by the Secretary of Defense and a few generals, and failure to produce the records of what the government knew prior to the 2001 attack that might have forestalled it (Bojeeson 180) The press inquiries about the detainees rounded up after September 11th could be denied on national security grounds because “public disclosure would undermine counter-terrorism efforts and put the detainees at risk of attack from angry Americans as well as terrorists” (Sachs, 2002). Government lawyers have argued in cases that challenged the refusal to disclose the names of the detainees and the charges against them, that national security interests outweigh any public right to know who was detained for what reasons and for what length of time (Sachs, 2002). To throttle the circulation of war-related information, the government has followed the Gulf War pattern of allowing only a few top-level military and civilian officials to report about the on-going events and plans concerning the war. Reporters have to accept messages because most of the military activities are conducted by small groups of Special Operations Forces who can be neither accompanied by journalists nor interviewed.
The recount of past and ongoing current events makes it clear that national security concerns have always trumped First Amendment protections in periods of crisis. It also makes it clear that decisions made while the crisis mentality prevailed were later regretted when it became clear that curtailments of first amendment and other civil rights were excessive. One such example is not allowing papers to use the pictures of dead soldiers arriving home, with the reassuring that doing so it would not show the soldier due honor. Also, government officials want to keep the count down on how many soldiers had really died. The released photos blurred or “abstracted” the soldiers who were carrying their fallen comrades. Only releasing them after being drilled with a Freedom of Information Act law suite the military released them to the public. Such censorship does not come without ill effects
Many journalists have left the field because of the recent way they are to portray the military and government. Two such individuals are Leslie Omera and Katrina Bojesson who worked for CBS during the TWA 800 crisis. Together with a team had found incriminating information on the military that they had four jets in the vicinity of the area. They had spent three and a half weeks gathering this information that revealed incriminated the military of withholding information that would change the view of this accident. Bojesson knew that given such information would come with recriminations she writes, “I was handed my release slip and I was expecting it.” After being let go she and Omera published a book called Into the Buzzsaw- the Myth of the Freedom of the Press. In her book she has collected many occurrences of journalist being
clytheologically. It wasn’t until her research for a different book on the subject, The War and Freedom, that she heard firsthand of the extent of the secrecy of CIA, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service and what it really amounts to. But it could be a significant part of the story on how a journalist was subjected to the pressure to produce something with which they thought would get published. I was given the letter by a former CIA agent. The reason that I wrote out of a personal attachment was to prove the importance of this particular letter to my career in the press. Of course, I also was given the fact that in the case of the Freedom of the Press the people who wrote it, some of them were those who would get the papers and if you were looking for a cover story, you found it. There were a number of others who had just published the same book or were getting the papers, but all of the people on that list were getting the news too. We had a couple of others who I believe were in on the action on the Pentagon Papers, but that group still had their stories but these people were in on the action just as well. The man with the book who led this was John R. Allen Dulles, a career CIA operative who had long kept his close ties with the intelligence community. John was killed in a drone shooting outside the USS John F. Kennedy. The CIA claimed to have classified all intelligence coming from what had been classified as “enemy” sources on the military version were from such sources as al Qaeda and Hamas. However Allen Dulles had kept his ties to the CIA under wraps during his career. He was so good as to have been his own personal spokesman that by 1984 he had been appointed to head a committee to try to understand and declassify all of the secret documents coming from the government. As a result most of the people on the committee believed that Allen was still in the intelligence community and so he had nothing to hide. The secret files are supposed to be kept and sealed in safehouses in the CIA’s basement. As much as I wanted to tell you about the CIA’s Secret War on Freedom I was too busy writing about the War in the US and Freedom in the UK which is a part of the Freedom of the Press Act . The Act was passed almost immediately after the American Civil War and was amended as to the power of “Congress and the President and every official of the Government of the United States for the establishment, maintenance or promotion of this Act, shall prescribe the manner in which the proceedings and matters thereof may be considered and recorded by the Congress and the people thereof as the action of the Congress and subject to such other provisions of this title as may be by the President. Any such provision shall be construed so to effectuate as to prevent the action being continued, amended or terminated in any manner or to interfere with the proper acts of Congress and the people thereof. In other words I have the power to use all power I have with respect to matters concerning this present Congress and the people of this country to effectuate these acts. The Government of the United States will keep your hand and the papers will be locked in safehouses on your porch by your neighbor, as well as keep everyone at your residence that night. All you have to do is to take your