U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is heading to Capitol Hill today, where hes expected to be grilled over the Justice Departments decision to secretly seize the work, home and cellphone records used by almost a hundred reporters and editors at the Associated Press. On Tuesday, Holder defended the move as a necessary step in a criminal probe of leaks of classified information.
The phones targeted by the subpoena included the general AP office numbers in New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Hartford, Connecticut; and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. The records were from April and May of 2012. Among those whose records were obtained were Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, three other reporters and an editor, all of whom worked on a story about an operation conducted by the CIA and allied intelligence agencies that stopped a Yemen-based al-Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane headed for the United States.
The Associated Press had delayed publication of the story ’til May 7, 2012, at the government’s request. One day before the AP story was finally published, a U.S. drone strike in Yemen killed Fahd al-Quso, a senior leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Attorney General Holder, who says he recused himself from the leak probe, defended his departments actions.
Chris Hedges talking:
Its part of a pattern. Thats whats so frightening. And its a pattern that weve seen, with the use of the Espionage Act, to essentially silence whistleblowers within the governmentKiriakou, Drake and others, although Kiriakou went to jail onpled out on another chargethe FISA Amendment Act, which allows for warrantless wiretapping, the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows for the stripping of American citizens of due process and indefinite detention. And it is one more assault in a long series of assault against freedom of information and freedom of the press. And I would also, of course, throw in the persecution of Julian Assange at WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning as part of that process.
Espionage Act been used six times by the Obama administration. It was written in 1917 and wasis our Foreign Secrets Act. It is never meantit was not designed to shut down whistleblowers, first used against Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers. So, three times from 1917 until Obama takes office in 2009, six times. And if you talk to investigative journalists in this country, who must investigate the inner workings of government, no one will talk, even on background. People are terrified. And this is, of coursethe seizure of two months of records, of AP records, is not really about going after AP; its about going after that person or those people who leaked this story and shutting them down. And this canard that it endangered American life isyou know, theres no evidence for this.
all of these measures to essentially shut down the freedom of information, including the persecution of Assange and Manning, as symptomatic of a reconfiguration of our society into a totalitarian security and surveillance state, one where anyone who challenges the official narrative, who digs out cases of torture, war crimeswhich is, of course, what Manning and Assange presented to the American publicis going to be ruthlessly silenced. And I find the passivity on the part of the mainstream press, publications like The New York Times, The Guardian, El País, Der Spiegel, all of which, of course, used this information, and turning their backs on Manning and Assange, to be very shortsighted for precisely this reason. If they think its just about Manning and Assange, then they have no conception of what it is thats happening. And, you know, everyone knows, within the administration, within the National Security Council, the effects of climate change, the instability that that will cause, the economic deterioration, which is irreversible, and they want the mechanisms by which they can criminalize any form of dissent. And thats finally what this is about.
War on terror becomes the same paradigm in the war against communism. Its an excuse to ferret out and destroy legitimate movements that challenge centers of power. And thats, of course, how the war on terror has worked in exactly the same way. But we are seeing environmental activists, Occupy activists, people who function, like Manning, as a whistleblower being caught up in this war on terror and silenced through these rules.
So what they do is they pass, you know, for instance, Section 1021 of the NDAA. They pass it in the name of the war on terror, but then they can use it. Anybody can become a terrorist. I mean, in the trial in federal court, which we brought againstin the Southern District, we used, in the Stratfor-leaked emails that were put out by WikiLeaks, where they were trying to link a group that was close to Occupy, US Day of Rage, and al-Qaeda. Thats precisely what happened. So when we allow this kind of thing to go forward, we essentially shut down any ability not only to ferret out whats happening internally within the mechanisms of power, but to protest or carry out dissent.
I find whats happening terrifying, truly frightening. And when you look closely at all of the documents that were purportedly given to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning and published through Assange, none of them were top-secret. I mean, as a former investigative reporter for The New York Times, it was my job to go and find out often top-secret information. And thats why I cant understand the inability of the traditional press to grasp that we are now in the last moments of an effort to, in essence, effectively extinguish press freedom. And if youI mean, AP is anlike The New York Times, an amazingly cautious organization, but read the comments. I mean, they get it, internally. But, unfortunately, you know, they have divided us against ourselves, andand this isyou know, what weve undergone, as John Ralston says and as Ive said many times, a kind of corporate coup détat.
What we are seeing is a system put into place where its all propaganda. And anybody who challengesI mean, look, this constant reference to a shield law is absurd, because they just violated the shield law by not going to court and informing AP of a subpoena but doing it secretly. So, I mean, youve got to hand it to the Obama administration. Theyre far more clever than their predecessors in the Bush administration, but theyre carrying out exactly the same policy of snuffing out our most basic civil liberties and our most important press freedoms. And thats because they know whats coming, and they are going to legally put in a place by which any challenge to the centers of corporate power become ineffectual or impossible.
talk to any investigative journalist who must investigate the government, and they will tell you that there is a deep freeze. People are terrified of speaking, because theyre terrified of going to jail. And Kiriakou is now sitting for 30 months in a prison in Pennsylvania. Kiriakou is the former CIA official who purportedly gave information to The New York Times. And, you know, theyve subpoenaed Risens records, both for his book and For reporting on warrantless wiretapping. Which they held onto, a story they held onto for more than a year. that gets into the cowardice of The New York Times, but thats another show. Yeah, it was about to come out in the book, and then the _Times_ Bill Keller ran it, becausebut they had held it. And so, yeah, I think were in a very, very frightening moment.
the logs were taken of these different phones that more than a hundred AP reporters used, reporters and editors, shows who is calling them and who theyre calling. having done that kind of work, Im almost certain that whoever gave the AP this information didnt give it to them over the phone. But what theyre doing is finding outmatching all of the phone records to find out who had contact with someone in an AP bureau, whether that was in New York or Hartford or Washington or wherever else, and then they will probably use the Espionage Act to go after them, as well. That wouldthats certainly what the Obama administration has done since its inception.
I have tremendous respect for Julian Assange and what hes done. Again, even within the liberal intelligentsia, who should know better, theyve turned their back on him. You know, whatever the sexual misconduct charges in Sweden were, it certainly wasnt rape, but there was something. hes actually not been charged at all, so thats right, in a legal sense. But, you know, that kind of character assassination has left him very much alone. And I think the courage of a Manning, the courage of an Assange, the courage of a MumiaI mean, how that man remains unbroken. I was there with Cornel West and the theologian James Cone. I mean, it was a privilege for me. I mean, three of the probably greatest African-American intellectuals in the country, and certainly radicals. Itsyou know, those people who hold fast to thea kind of moral imperative, or hold fast to the capacity for dissent, whether thats Manning, who exhibitedI was in the courtroom when he read his statementtremendous courage, poise, whether thats Assange, whether thats Mumia, lets look at where all those three people are, because for all of us who speak out, thats where they want us to be, as well. And that gets back to this AP story, because that is exactly the process that we are undergoing and whereif they win, where were headed.
– source democracynow.org
Chris Hedges, senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times for 15 years and was part of a team of reporters that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the papers coverage of global terrorism. His most recent article is an interview with Julian Assange called “The Death of Truth” and appears in The Nation magazine and at Truthdig.org.