Treason of the Clerk

Accused of sedition, a V.A. nurse beats the rap.

David Weigel from the July 2006 issue

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This attitude is a mainstay of every war, but it’s more pronounced when there’s substantial public doubt about the war effort, as with the World War I–era belief that Greenwich Village reds were hurting our doughboys by handing out peacemongering fliers.

While an actual Sedition Act 3.0 isn’t making its way through Congress, a “no tolerance” view of criticism is expressed widely and frequently by many backers of Bush and the war. In April, when a series of retired generals hit the cable TV circuit to pillory Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Washington Times Editorial Page Editor Tony Blankley speculated about whether the generals had conspired to retire around the same time in order to bring down the Pentagon’s head man. If so, Blankley wrote, they were engaging in “mutinous sedition.” Shortly afterward, the popular anti-Muslim blogger Charles Johnson wrote—in complete seriousness—that “in a very real way, mainstream media’s culture of ‘If It Bleeds It Leads’ is becoming a major liability in the clash of civilizations.”

An even better example of this started two weeks ago at U.C.-Santa Cruz, where a group called Students Against War protested and successfully expelled military recruiters from a job fair. The anti-war students had done this before and won themselves a place in a Pentagon surveillance file. That hardly slowed them down—they remained confident enough, after their latest stunt, to fire off a media advisory and make themselves available for interviews. Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin read their press release and posted the students’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses on her own site, directing hordes of death threat–tossing readers their way.

Malkin’s UCSC post was titled “Seditious Santa Cruz vs. America.” Even after the UCSC students cried uncle and pulled their phone numbers offline, Malkin continued to post their information alongside the office numbers for the “capitulationist chancellor” who had refused to purge them.

All these charges of sedition—and treason, if you’ve followed the controversy over CIA leaks—represent a view of free speech during wartime that has less to do with our Constitution and more to do with Singapore’s. But at the moment, it’s just a view. And Laura Berg still has a job, along with a little notoriety that could protect her if she decided to speak out again.

“Would I do it again?” says Berg. “Yes, I would. I’m hoping to write a little bit more.”