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When does "criticism" of the current military action in Iran (and by criticism I mean a variety of behaviors from our political leadership to randoms on the internet) become "treason" (both in the firm prosecutable sort and the "historically your neighbors would have stopped talking to you or maybe chased you out of town" sort)?
I get it, people are mad at Trump, Republicans, America, the Jews, Israel, whatever.
I get it.
Many people would rather have had us not get here. But we are here. The ship has sailed.
If everyone returns to their corners now at the very least we have billions of dollars in economic dysfunction, realistically we have tremendous destabilization in the region which is going cause the biggest problems we've seen in decades. In truth, we call it all off now, Iran will probably finish arming themselves and nuke a civilian population, likely Israel. Even the most anti-semitic person who ever lived should be able to understand how bad doing that could go. It would likely be the worst thing that's ever happened just from the resulting chaos.
So we are stuck.
But you see a lot of people with an agenda trying to defang the war effort or get it cancelled or whatever. Many probably don't expect it to happen, they are just trying to set up Trump looking bad. An example of this is probably the war powers resolutions.
But at that point you have overt politicking putting American, Israeli, Middle Eastern lives (and maybe everyone else?) at risk because you want to slightly increase the chance you can spend two years repeatedly impeaching Trump.
I think that's kind of treasonous? Maybe not the executing kind, but definitely the "holy shit what are you doing kind."
Like the war. Hate the war. It's happened. Criticizing how we got here is understandable, but I think we need to be careful.
Make the PR bad enough and we stop with the job half done and everyone loses.
United States Constitution, Article III, section 3:
A U. S. citizen joining an Iranian foreign volunteer brigade and shooting at U. S. troops would be guilty of treason. A U. S. citizen giving Iranian intelligence the encryption keys to U. S. military communications would be guilty of treason. Advocating that the United States stop waging war against Iran, however ill-advised that course of action may be, is not treason.
What about lying about the state of the war to help Iranian propaganda efforts? Say, creating AI videos that purport to show Iran winning military victories against the US and presenting them as real news?
What is your (interpretation of the) definition of treason such that it being a lie rather than the truth makes a difference?
If the claims are literally true, then there would be reasonable value in propagating them beyond being a partisan for the other side. If the claims are not true, and you reasonable ought to have known that (as in, you had to have an AI generate the footage you're purporting to supply as "news" because it just doesn't exist), then your actions are a much cleaner, likely entirely indefensible, fit for "giving them Aid and Comfort".
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What did we consider Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw Haw? But is it different if they're just being fooled by Iranian propaganda and reporting what they believe is the truth (and making AI videos or other art to display said "truth"), vice actively taking official marching orders from the regime?
That's the blurry edge. What's the difference between a gullible idiot and someone just explicitly rooting for the other side?
Personally, for my own safety's sake, I'd rather we err heavily on the side of "assuming people are/protecting gullible idiots".
That's fine and fair. I more think this is a ripe scenario for thought experiments and teasing the outlines of things, than I am, say, calling for twitter posters to be jailed.
Imagine you were a juror in a case involving this sort of thing. What kind of evidence would you want to see to conclude that a person was an actively bad actor trying to sabotage their own nation? Or do you think idiocy is a fully general defense?
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