Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Freedom of The Press… Whatever…

By

and a side order of

Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press

In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.

Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program that was described in “State of War,” a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases.

(the second’s not exactly a freedom of the press issue, but it has the ultimate effect of chilling the its mission)

Please share widely!
fb-share-icon
Tweet
0

Comments

  1. w.r.t. the beach video…

    <

    p>it’s easy for me to suggest this, but the journalists need to just start walking past private security in public spaces.  Either you work for the gov’t (local, county, state, national) or you are permanent, well established security (I’d imagine some gov’t buildings use private security).  Some dude in a blue shirt telling me where I can and can’t go on a public beach?  Just walk by him, and keep the tape rolling.  Simple as that.

    <

    p>w.r.t. the leaks…

    <

    p>the leaks you quoted were classified.  It’s pretty straightforward — mishandling classified documents is a big freaking deal.  I used to work in a building with classified documents, and that stuff is taken really seriously.  In addition to the background investigation, when you get clearance you’re taught the rules very explicitly.  These folks didn’t just leak some information, they violated federal law and, by definition, national security.  They belong in jail.

    <

    p>Now, if you want to argue that some information is being classified, and classified too restrictively, and classified for too long a period of time, you won’t get any argument from me.  That doesn’t legitimize leaking classified documents though.

    • but to protect the government from embarassment or officials from prosecution. This seems to be the case 98% of the time (of course, this is a wild guess- the real percentage is, of course, classified). We have a paranoid, secretive government that views the media as a natural enemy, but which can commit virtually any crime it wants to and then hide its actions by calling everything “classified”. The only thing that should be “classified”, IMO, is “How to Make a Nuclear Bomb”- and that probably isn’t even classified.

      • I’m sure plenty of cases of classification have political motivation, but I don’t think it’s anywhere near 98% in this country. I suspect it’s less than half of the time.

        <

        p>This country has, by global standards, very lax secrecy. A large portion of our militarily funded research is publicly published. We have a fairly powerful Freedom of Information Act (while it does have a national security exemption, that can’t really be invoked unless it makes some kind of sense, a huge step above the situation in many places).

        <

        p>I’d love to see further improvements in transparency; we’re far from perfect. I do think, however, that we have to keep this in perspective. When you have enemies, it’s wise to keep some secrets.

      • Check the patent office.  

        <

        p>One of the most important points Mr. Obama ran on was “transparency”.  The secretive government edicts and laws make to only further the distrust of the citizens.  Freedom cannot endure when the become the subjects of the government and not informed citizens.  When “transparency” died at the start of the administration we simply entered another Bush administration.  The two party system degenerated into a tag team match against We The People.  

        <

        p>I got what Obama’s administration was about last year when, in the National Archives, he stressed the importance of the Constitution.  He then went on as to how he was working with the Justice Department to circumvent the document.  He’s only PR puff.  

        <

        p>“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”  –George Washington  

      • Re “How to Make a Bomb”, there’s an interesting story in that: in United States v. Progressive, Inc., the government sued to stop publication of an article disclosing the design of the hydrogen bomb, but it ultimately dropped the case, avoiding a decision. Interestingly, the defendants refused to accept the security clearances that would have been necessary for them to participate in the in camera portion of the trial. They did the right thing–if you can’t keep a secret, then don’t accept a security clearance. It’s pretty simple, I think.

        <

        p>Maybe my view of this is colored by my training as a lawyer. Suppose a client comes in and tells me a super-dooper secret that it would clearly be in the public interest to disclose, and despite my best efforts, the client refuses to allow me to make it public or to do so himself. Can I leak the story? You know the answer.

        <

        p>TedF

        • Yes, there are exceptions to lawyer confidentiality, for things like preventing certain crimes and frauds or rectifying a fraud a client committed using the services of the lawyer. But if BP came to me, told me that they had secretly known for years that the blowout preventer didn’t work, and asked my advice on what to do, could I tell? No.

          <

          p>TedF

            • To your point, if breaking your promise–and legal obligation–of confidentiality is important enough for you to consider engaging in civil disobedience, you shouldn’t whine about the punishment.

              <

              p>TedF

              • Father Twiddly confesses to Father Smith that he has a problem with molesting kids. Father Smith can’t/won’t tell anyone about Twiddly’s crimes because of confessional sanctity or whatever. Same basic principle, as far as I can tell, except the lawyers probably have more legal cover than the priest.  

        • Surely he accelerated the process of their declassification. A lot of good it would have done have them declassified in 1992 or whatever.

        • “Some schlub” — Daniel Ellsberg, to be precise — leaked the papers to the NY Times, which published them.  A couple of weeks after that, Senator Gravel entered the papers into the congressional record.  That did not “declassify” them, though it was a clever maneuver on his part to find a way to publish them without subjecting himself to criminal liability for doing so.  Ellsberg was not so lucky — he was indeed criminally charged, though ultimately the charges were dismissed.

          <

          p>Do you think Ellsberg did the right thing?  I sure do.

    • was vital public information, and only classified insofar as to protect the government from charges of war crimes, as far as I’m concerned.

      <

      p>The guy who leaked that video is a freaking hero, yet Liebama wants his ass in prison.  

    • This is pretty much exactly my view. I’ll only add that on the classified document stuff, it’s important to distinguish between the leaker, who ought to be punished, and the reporter and the paper, which cannot be forbidden to run the material and which cannot be punished.

      <

      p>TedF

      • The paper is free to publish any known state secret, merely because they’re the paper?  I’m a little skeptical of this.

        <

        p>After all, that means that anybody could form “a newspaper” and publish any classified doc he wanted, free from prosecution.

        • My non-expert view on this is that a prior restraint against publication of the Iraq video would be unconstitutional on Pentagon Papers kinds of grounds–the information is embarrassing but doesn’t give away the secret to the H-bomb. The H-bomb question is a harder one, and we don’t know how it would have come out. So I stand by my comment as it applies to the Iraq video, but I agree with you that we don’t really know what the law is in harder cases.

          <

          p>TedF

    • Either people are leaking five times as much stuff, or prosecutions are getting very, very aggressive.  Seems like they’re prosecuting cases that they know they’ll lose in an attempt to scare people.

      <

      p>In any case, we can add it to the lengthy list of areas where Obama is the same or similar to Bush.

  2. It has struck me repeatedly that the PR fiascos of the BP mess are due to a lack of RECOGNITION of First Amendment rights.

    <

    p>The whole ‘I want my life back’ remark?  While probably true, I couldn’t help thinking that in Brtitain, the ‘BEEB’ or papers would have simply been told to omit that remark from coverage.  The all-encompassing shelter of the Official Secrets Act would have prevented any on-air gaffe.

    <

    p>It isn’t just Britain – in pretty much all the world, the media is owned, censored, or shackled by government.  So when foreign guests are involved with media here, the whole concept of never being off the record is pretty startling.

    <

    p>SHOULD they recognize/compensate?  Of course.  But it’s just not that big a shock to me when others fail to immediately defer to the special status of our Fourth Estate.

    • On it’s worst day, the BBC is ten or twenty times better than most US news sources – are you really claiming that the reporting of the Guardian is more controlled by the government than the New York Times?  

    • The American media is controlled by the corporations who, through their advertising, determine which stories are and are not broadcast. If you think that today’s “fourth estate” is going to protect us from stories that corporate America doesn’t want the public to know, you are living in a dream world.

      <

      p>The following clip (from The Corporation) makes the case rather nicely.

      <

      p>

      <

      p>It will take much more than empty posturing to bring BP to justice. It is blogs like this one, ensuring front-page coverage of outrages like this one, that will provide President Obama with the political force he will need to win this battle. As stomv has observed, courageous whistle-blowers like Bradley Manning must be willing to face prosecution and incarceration for revealing stories that the government and corporate America don’t want published. That is simply part of “freedom of expression.”

      <

      p>Freedom requires courage and sacrifice. It always has, it always will. Just because the First Amendment says we have “freedom of speech” doesn’t mean that the sh*t won’t hit the fan when we exercise it. It is only when the pigs cops realize that the marches will continue whether or not they brutalize the marchers that unpopular views will be actually heard.

      <

      p>The reporters in the thread-starter needed to keep walking, just as stomv observed. They would have been stopped, they probably would have been arrested, they might well have been beaten, and they needed to keep walking anyway.

      <

      p>The stakes of the energy battle are enormous. The issues this catastrophe raise strike at the heart of corporate control of the government and the media.

      <

      p>This is for real, guys. Make no mistake about it.

Archives