By Norman Solomon
There’s something profoundly
despicable about a Justice Department that would brazenly violate the First and
Fourth Amendments while spying on journalists, then claim to be reassessing
such policies after an avalanche of criticism — and then proceed, as it did
this week, to gloat that those policies made possible a long prison sentence
for a journalistic source.
Welcome to the Obama Justice
Department.
While mouthing platitudes about
respecting press freedom, the president has overseen methodical actions to
undermine it. We should retire understated phrases like “chilling effect.” With
the announcement from Obama’s Justice Department on Monday, the thermometer has
dropped below freezing.
You could almost hear the slushy flow
of public information turning to ice in the triumphant words of the U.S.
attorney who led the investigation after being handpicked by Attorney General
Eric Holder: “This prosecution demonstrates our deep resolve to hold
accountable anyone who would violate their solemn duty to protect our nation’s
secrets and to prevent future, potentially devastating leaks by those who would
wantonly ignore their obligations to safeguard classified information.”
Translation: This prosecution
shows the depth of our contempt for civil liberties. Let this be a lesson to
journalists and would-be leakers alike.
Audibly on the chopping block are provisions
in the Bill of Rights such as “freedom … of the press” and “no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to
be seized.”
The Obama administration’s pernicious
goal is to normalize circumstances where journalists can’t credibly promise
confidentiality, and potential leakers don’t believe they can have it. The
broader purpose is to destroy independent journalism — which is to say, actual
journalism — which is to say, freedom of the press.
Impacts are crystal clear to just
about any journalist who has done reporting that’s much more than stenographic
services for official government and corporate sources. When unofficial sources
are choked off, not much is left other than the Official Story.
The Official Story is routinely
somewhere between very selective and mendacious. A case in point, ironically
enough, is the Justice Department’s righteous announcement that the prison term
for the leaker of information to The Associated Press reflected the
Department’s “deep resolve to hold accountable anyone who would violate their
solemn duty to protect our nation’s secrets.”
“Hold accountable anyone”? (Laugh, scream or cry; take
your pick.)
Like others before it, the Obama
administration has made a frequent practice of leaking classified “secrets” to
media outlets — when its calculus is that revealing those secrets will make
the administration look good. Of course in those cases the Justice Department
doesn’t bother to track down the leakers.
Such extreme hypocrisy in high places
has become so normalized that major media outlets often seem completely inured
to it.
Hours after the Justice Department’s
announcement on Monday that its surveillance of AP phone records had resulted
in a lengthy prison sentence, the PBS “NewsHour” did not devote a word to it.
Perhaps the program could not find a few seconds to shave off the lengthy
beach-ball interview that Judy Woodruff conducted with former President
Clinton.
To the top echelons of
quasi-journalistic enterprises that are bankrolled by corporate advertisers and
underwriters, the disappearance of confidentiality — along with routine
violations of the First and Fourth Amendments — might hardly matter. Official
sources flood the media zone.
But the New York Times coverage should have given attentive
readers indigestion over breakfast Tuesday: “A former F.B.I. agent has agreed to plead guilty to leaking
classified information to The Associated Press about a foiled bomb plot in
Yemen last year … Federal investigators said they were able to identify
the man, Donald Sachtleben, a former bomb technician, as a suspect in the leak
case only after secretly obtaining AP reporters’ phone
logs, a move that set off an uproar among journalists and members of
Congress of both parties when it was disclosed in May.”
The Times added:
“Sachtleben … has agreed to serve 43 months in prison for the leak, the Justice
Department said. His case is the eighth leak-related prosecution under the
Obama administration. Only three such cases were prosecuted under all previous
presidents.”
How did the Justice Department catch
Sachtleben in the first place? By seizing records of calls on
more than 20 phone lines used by Associated Press reporters over a two-month
period.
This is more than a chilling effect on
the First Amendment; it’s an icy wind, threatening to put real freedom of the
press into a deep freeze. Journalists — and the rest of us — should respond
with outraged opposition.
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Norman Solomon is co-founder of
RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His
books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to
Death.” Information about the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.