Bill Kristol, champion of the First Amendment, wants to "whack Wikileaks," asking why the government won't "use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are?"
I suspect sufficient legal bases already exist for whatever presidential findings, authorizations, and orders would be needed to be given to intelligence agencies, the military, and federal investigative agencies to do what they need to do to defeat WikiLeaks. But perhaps not. In any case, there's one institution that can quickly find out. Congress has just come back into session. Congress can have emergency hearings—in closed session, if necessary—to find out if the executive branch has the necessary means to defeat WikiLeaks. If it doesn't, Congress can provide additional means and authorities to those that already exist.
But in either case, Congress can act, in an expeditious and bipartisan manner, to encourage and authorize the use by the executive branch of all necessary means to respond to and defeat WikiLeaks. Surely the Obama administration would welcome such congressional action. Surely the nation—and all our friends and allies, amazed and alarmed by our apparent helplessness—would as well.
Like Rep. Peter King, Kristol was among those calling for prosecution of The New York Times after it revealed the existence of a government program tracking terrorist finances. What these people want is the ability to tell news organizations what to publish when it comes to matters of national security; in Wikileaks they've found a relatively unsympathetic target. But any effort Congress takes to single out Wikileaks for legal sanction will ultimately be used against conservatives' true white whale, the librul mainstream media.
The question media organizations really need to ask themselves is how much they want people like Kristol and King telling them what they're allowed to publish, because that's what they're aiming at. It's not a coincidence that the people once calling for the prosecution of the Times are now talking about Assange like he's a terrorist leader hiding in the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
