If a tweet declares war, is it treason to take it down?
abe-winter.github.io
abe-winter.github.io
The short answer to almost all these kinds of questions is "it's never treason".
2) It specifically addresses the question of the US and Congress. https://abe-winter.github.io/2019/10/18/tweason.html#can-a-t...
Even John Walker Lindh couldn't be charged with treason, and he had the weight of an actual AUMF against him.
What makes this case so interesting is it was treason vs a specific state not the entire USA.
“That levying an army may or may not be treason, and that this depends on the intention with which it is levied, and on the point to which the parties have advanced, has been also stated. The mere enlisting of men, without assembling them, is not levying war. The question then is, whether this evidence proves Col. Burr to have advanced so far in levying an army as actually to have assembled them.”
In the Burr case no men where actually assembled. “No evidence existed that either Bollman or Swartwout engaged in any military activity or violent acts.” I could be misreading this but I believe the military acts of a non violent nature could still qualify under this definition. Though, it’s stretching the definition of war to call such non violent acts war, such is the way of such things.
In any case I believe the line for treason is close to but before what could be called “open war.”
They arguably do, if either the war is levied under the authority of a Congressional aujorization, conditional or others, including the War Power Act, which effectively includes an open-ended conditional declaration of war, or the other side fights back, in which case it is levying war against the United States making it an enemy whether or not war is declared.
In practice, the former condition will almost invariably be adhered to though every President has denied it's Constitutional necessity (the NATO-Serbia war under Clinton being a notable exception), and the latter is even more certain.
> Even John Walker Lindh couldn't be charged with treason
He wasn't charged with treason, that doesn't mean he couldn't have been.
I'm trying to parse this.
Waging war on behalf of the US?
It is also treasonable to provide aid and comfort to those against whom Congress has declared war.
Congressional declaration of war is sufficient, but not necessary, to make an entity an enemy of the United States.
"Actually waging war on the US is treasonable"
And the Congress bit is a needless modifier, leading me up the (wrong) garden path.
Fine, but is it RICO?
What is an enemy of the United States? 50 USCS § 2204 says that enemy of the United States means any country, government, group, or person that has been engaged in hostilities, whether or not lawfully authorized, with the United States [https://definitions.uslegal.com/e/enemy-of-the-united-states...].
I don't know how much case law there is about that.
It's certainly the case that if there was a declared war, then aiding the declared enemy would be treason, and only Congress can declare war.
In the case of adherence to an opponent in hostilities w/o a declared war, my guess is no court would sustain a treason charge. But that's a guess. In any case, it'd be strange if the President's say-so alone (tweeted or otherwise) could cause someone to be guilty of treason!
In any case, the paucity of treason charges (none since WWII) and convictions, together with the large number of lesser charges available, means that it's extremely unlikely that we'll see a treason charge in any event not connected to a formal declaration of war by Congress.
Would the New York Times refusing to run a story about how war was declared be treason? What about CSPAN cutting away the broadcast in the middle of a war announcement?
I don't think so, in either case, and I don't think it's the case for Twitter either - because them not carrying the information doesn't change the material facts of the declaration. They're not interfering in an official congressional process in any capacity, because they're not part of an official congressional process.
For example, it is against Twitter's official rules (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules) for a user to use their platform to say hateful or racist things, and they regularly ban people for violating those conditions, but they they regularly allow famous people (like the President of the USA) to get away with violating many of those rules.
Why does Twitter let Trump (and many other famous people) get away with breaking the rules? Because Twitter directly benefits from the viewers and the outrage.
Acknowledging that fact (and yes, it is a provable fact) hardly means someone has a personal vendetta against Twitter.
This is the crux of it I'd say.
article 1:
The Contracting Powers recognize that hostilities between themselves must not commence without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war.
article 2:
The existence of a state of war must be notified to the neutral Powers without delay, and shall not take effect in regard to them until after the receipt of a notification, which may, however, be given by telegraph. Neutral Powers, nevertheless, cannot rely on the absence of notification if it is clearly established that they were in fact aware of the existence of a state of war.
There is nothing saying that a declaration of war must be preserved. Indeed the only mentioned method of transmitting a declaration of war is by telegraph, which does not preserve the information at all and would mean the message might be completely missed if the receiver was unmanned at the time.
Ignoring the absurdity of declaring war exclusively via twitter, or the improbability that a declaration of war on twitter by a nation state would go unnoticed, it seems even an extremely rapid deletion of the tweet would not hinder the tweeter's ability to formally declare war, and thus the deletion could never be treason to begin with.
There might be an issue with the Federal Recordkeeping Act, but this would be on the part of the entity tweeting, not Twitter, and would certainly not be grounds for treason in any capacity.
Maybe they don't put up with anything. I couldn't find any official complaint of a Twitter inc. spokesperson about having to "put up" with what any head of state is doing on their platform.
They should have stopped the article there. They're way off base on almost every point, with no idea about some of the basics of law at all.
The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous.
I know the federal archivists have logistics and software in place to automatically collect and archive digital content [0]. But that doesn't do much for real-time current announcements made on Twitter or Facebook. In the hypothetical event in which the President posts something that could irrevocably lead to diplomatic disaster and war, it's not impossible to imagine a tech executive, or even low-level employee, having a Vasily Arkhipov moment and making the unilateral decision to censor/ban the president.
From the perspective of the White House and the President, of course, it's deeply undesirable to have a main communication channel cut off, especially during an emergency. And yet President Trump has stoked a mindset among the public and media to see his Twitter as the direct feed of executive-level news and decision making, without any concern that Twitter's execs have ultimate veto power over his channel.
[0] https://archivesocial.com/whitehouse/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)
X declares war on Y. Twitter takes it down so Y never sees it. Are they at war?
Obviously, yes, for two reasons:
1) X isn't going to wait for confirmation that Y sees a tweet before actually going to war and
2) Y isn't going to depend entirely on Twitter to know what X is doing.
> Are they at war?
Yes. Moreover, it doesn't matter, as no one declares war before initiating hostilities anymore; since aggression has been uniformly understood to be a crime, the only legitimate reason for waging war is is immediate, including imminent, national or collective self-defense (including, in the latter, implementation of UNSC resolutions pertaining to maintenance of peace and security), which requires claiming that the other side has already initiated war, which makes declarations superfluous. For domestic purposes, in the US, Congress will sometimes issue what is legally, though not formally labelled, a conditional declaration of war conditioned on executive determinations, but those conditions tend to be an executive determination that conditions which include (among more specific findings) a violation of UNSC conditions or acts of aggression against the US.
Now in an alternate universe where Germany didn't realise it was at war if it invaded Poland, so it never invaded France. Fast forward X years on, and France wants to sign a peace treaty (because it's embarrassing being in the EU but at war with a fellow member, and makes Schengen complicated), but Germany doesn't see the need because they aren't at war. Can France unilaterally declare peace? Is Germany at war? (I suppose theres a legal and real world answer to this)
I'm reminded of an urban legend, where Berwick on Tweed wasn't included in the peace treaty concluding the Crimean war, therefore still technically at war with Russia [1]. In all the tellings, a second treaty has had to be signed to end the war, which suggests both parties need to agree.
[1] http://www.berwickfriends.org.uk/history/berwicks-war-with-r...