Senators: Prosecute WikiLeakers

Rep. King Urges WikiLeaks Listing as "Foreign Terrorist Organization"

As the latest release of information reveals the unseemly way in which the US government behaves abroad, the Obama Administration was naturally quick to lash out at those whose whistleblowing showed the comfort with which President Obama and company took the reins of a despicable number of foreign policy decisions and left them, in the main, intact.

Outraged too were a number of Congressmen, with Senators Lindsey Graham (R – SC) and Claire McCaskill (D – MO) joining hands in a bipartisan call to prosecture WikiLeaks and its associates despite a paucity of information revealing that they committed any crime. Sen McCaskill slammed the foreign organization for being insufficiently patriotic.

Which was still a step up from Rep. Peter King (R – NY), who called on the State Department to declare WikiLeaks a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” insisting that the release of factual information by the organization was “worse than a military attack.

Sen. John Ensign (R – NV) has previously announced his intention to put forth a specific anti-WikiLeaks law that would label the organization a “transnational threat” and the group seems to be a popular scapegoat among long-serving officials. At the same time, the Tea Party movement won election victories by and large with promises of a more transparent (or at least less overtly crooked) government, and WikiLeaks’ revelations may well give them fodder to pursue the Obama Administration for some of its more obvious crimes (like the attempted theft of UN Security Council members’ credit card numbers).

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.