Today I want to talk about treason.
According to Title 18, U.S. Code Section 2381, the maximum penalty for treason in the United States is death, and the minimum penalty is either five years in a cage or $10,000, depending on how much you value your time. Treason is defined in the law as being when someone "owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere".
So there are three key actions qualifying as treason: "levies war against [the U.S.]", "adheres to their enemies", and "giving [enemies] aid and comfort". Having done some looking around, I concluded that "adhere" and "aid" don't have a explicit legal definitions outside of their commonly understood meaning. So, a more complete understanding of treason requires a definition of the term "War". According to Title 18, USC Section 2331(4),
The term "act of war" means any act occurring in the course of -- (A)declared war; (B)armed conflict, whether or not war has been declared, between two or more nations; or (C)armed conflict between military forces of any origin.In order to understand that, it would be nice to have a clear definition of "military force". I couldn't find a positive definition, but Title 18 happened to have a negative definition in USC Section 2331(6).
The term "military force" does not include any person that -- (A)has been designated as a -- (i)foreign terrorist organization by the Secretary of State under section 210 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C 1189); or (ii)specially designated global terrorist (as such term is defined in section 594.310 of title 31, Code of Federal Regulations) by the Secretary of State or the Secretary of the Treasury; or (B)has been determined by the court to not be a “military force”.Honestly, not that helpful, but based on the definitions I found in a few dictionaries, I'd say it's safe to summarily qualify a military force as "an organized group of armed persons, serving as part of a larger military group", where a "military group" would be any group existing for the purpose of carrying out military (violent, either defensive or aggressive) action.
If you do a Google image search for the word, "treason", on the day that I post this, you'll see several caricatures of Donald Trump. The accusation against him is that he colluded with Russia, by means of verbal communication, to undermine the democratic election process here in the U.S.. Whether or not that qualifies as "adhering to the U.S.'s enemies" is not a matter I'm prepared to determine, but given that Russia does not appear to be an enemy of Trump, and in spite of his failures Trump seems to have benefited the economy here, and he is the de facto figurehead of the United States, I lean toward supposing that Russia isn't an enemy, per se. Now, again, whether or not Russia "should" be our enemy is something that I don't quite know how to answer, for lack of Russian troops actively killing Americans on American soil. If Russian meddling by means of a mostly-unverified mix of true and false internet words is an attempt to undermine our democracy, and if anyone attempting to undermine democracy by means of their words is an enemy of the U.S., then I think we would find that many Americans fit the description "enemy". But we protect the free speech of those individuals on the grounds that they are American, and I've never heard anyone propose that we impeach an American president based on the fact that some or most of his followers spread lies on the internet. I'll do what the rest of the media does and avoid talking about whether or not those "lies" are actually "truths" and the opposition's ideas are actually mistaken.
For the record, I, here, with my words, oppose the notion that an American should have more right to share words online, whether the words are knowingly true or false, than any other group of humans, simply on the grounds that those humans are from another part of the world. Suppose the group of people disingenuously spreading true or false information about Hillary or Trump in order to affect the elections were all from Ohio [arbitrarily]. Wouldn't we just call them an activist group? What if they were all SJWs?
For the sake of time, I'm going to close out this post... But I wrote this blog intending to devote a future blog to a closely related topic: blasphemy. I want to eventually compare U.S. feelings and legislation regarding treason, hate-speech, and falsehood to Biblical Law regarding blasphemy, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech.
"...created an opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit."