Obama's campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers has now given way to the most aggressive crusade to expose, punish and silence "courageous and patriotic" whistleblowers by any President in decades.
As the Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood put it, "[The Obama administration is] going after this at every opportunity and with unmatched vigor." Last May, The New York Times described how "the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks." This war has entailed multiple indictments and prosecutions of Bush-era leaks which exposed various degrees of corruption, ineptitude and illegality . . . But it is DOJ's increasing willingness to target journalists as part of this crusade that has now escalated its seriousness.
And most recently, we have the Obama administration's preoccupation with destroying WikiLeaks -- which has led it to boast of efforts to prosecute the group for publishing classified information (which other media outlets do every day), target WikiLeaks supporters with invasive harassment, and even subpoena the Twitter accounts of several WikiLeaks associates, including a sitting member of the Icelandic Parliament -- has been well-documented.
Obama's DOJ has been trying to break down a New York Times journalist to get him to reveal his source for an article that proved to be only a minor embarrassment to the CIA (the article exposed an irresponsible and badly bungled attempt to infiltrate an Iranian nuclear facility). For a while, DOJ had been largely unsuccessful in its attempts to identify the source for the story-- at least up to the point when they decided to break the law by secretly obtaining (without prior authorization by the Attorney General) Risen's bank records, information about his phone and travel activities, and even credit reports to discover the source's identity.
Who needs enemies to freedom like George Bush when you have "friends" like Obama?
No comments:
Post a Comment