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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (55226)	7/20/2004 11:27:23 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 793917

If an American serviceman stole classified documents, he would be in pre-trial confinement. If he inadvertently discarded the documents, our military would deliberately discard the key to his cell. No doubt. But wouldn't you want to know more details? If what he took was a copy, then perhaps his motivation was to leak something. Or espionage. If what he took was an original, then perhaps his motivation was to cover something up. Those are entirely different problems requiring entirely different investigations and perhaps different punishments. You used the word "stole." We don't know that anything was stolen. It could have been borrowed. Why would it have been borrowed. Again we have different motivations all the way from inappropriately dealing with how difficult it is to do competent analysis when you have to go to that little room to study something and not even being able to take notes, to espionage. I was quite clear in not excusing what was done. There is no excuse. It was illegal and should be punished. But there's a difference between wanting to study important documents where one can give them proper attention and selling secrets to the enemy. Making this about "he stole documents" is too simplistic and sounds too much like a gotcha.