Authors: Mickey Huff
Censored 2014 (10 page)
Manning denied in his testimony that anything damaging to US government interests was released in the US State Department cables he leaked, though he conceded they “might be embarrassing.”
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But the bigger embarrassment may have been for the US corporate press.
Manning testified that before leaking documents to WikiLeaks, he had tried going through the proper news company channels:
I then decided to contact the largest and most popular newspaper, the
New York Times.
I called the public editor number on the
New York Times
website. The phone rang and was answered by a machine. I went through the menu to the section for news tips. I was routed to an answering machine. I
left a message stating I had access to information about Iraq and Afghanistan that I believed was very important. However, despite leaving my Skype phone number and personal e-mail address, I never received a reply from the
New York Times.
I attached a text file I drafted while preparing to provide the documents to the
Washington Post.
It provided rough guidelines saying “It's already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this informationâ perhaps 90 to 100 days to figure out how best to release such a large amount of data and to protect its source. This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.”
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Manning never heard back from them, later sent the information he had on to WikiLeaks, and the rest is history.
As the pretrial phase of Manning's court martial is headed toward the scheduled June 2013 start of the main trial proceedings (as we go to press on this book), the big question, especially for US independent journalists and reporters from other countries who covered the trial regularly, was: Where is the American press?
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The big media companies were noticeably absent from or negligent in covering what was surely one of the most important legal cases in United States history.
One of those companies, the
New York Times
âwhich had actually cooperated with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in 2010 by publishing thousands of documents originally leaked by Manningânow found no stomach to stand by Manning in court, or even to be bothered at one point with covering the whistleblower's legal proceedings at all.
The Times
had to be shamed into covering the Manning trial more consistently by its own public editor, who wrote: “In failing to send its own reporter to cover the fascinating and important pretrial testimony of Bradley Manning, the
New York Times
missed the boat. . . .
The Times
should be there.”
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Other corporate news media did not fare much better. Kevin Gosztola, a Chicago-based writer for the progressive news website
FireDogLake,
was one of a handful of independent journalists and activists who turned up day after day at the Manning hearings to record every development
of the trial. At the same time, Gosztola was also monitoring the US so-called mainstream print and broadcast media's attendance at the trial, which he found to be nonexistent at worst and spotty at best.
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Gosztola spoke for many in and outside the media field when he said that as an institution, “the US press failed Bradley Manning” from the very beginning of the whole whistleblowing affair for which he now stood trial.
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Many contend that Manning's status as a modern-day folk hero is well deserved, and that, far from being treated like a criminal, he should be credited with having done a great public service as a whistleblower in what is proving to be an increasingly dangerous environment to report the truth.
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Censored #4: Obama's War on Whistleblowers
The Bradley Manning case stands out as a prime example of official persecution of a legitimate whistleblower, but it is by no means the only one.
During his first election campaign, Barack Obama promised more protection for whistleblowersâthose within government who would take risks to make unauthorized leaks of information. Obama as candidate promised to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government [and] ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.”
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The Government Accountability Project, a Washington DC-based nonprofit organization that promotes and defends whistleblower protections, credits Obama as president with mostly keeping his campaign promises to protect whistleblowers. But in one areaânational securityâthe Obama administration is seen as being “dangerously contradictory” by aggressively prosecuting leakers of classified information and going after the journalists to whom they leak.
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The Obama administration has far surpassed what past US administrations have done by presiding over the prosecution of seven persons for whistleblowing and other offenses under the Espionage Act. As of this writing (May 2013), the seven persons are:
â¸
Thomas Drake:
Former senior executive at the National Security Agency (NSA), the US government's electronic-spying agency. Indicted in 2010 in connection with the leaking of top-secret documents about an NSA program, which he felt violated citizens' privacy rights, to a newspaper reporter at the
Baltimore Sun.
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Felony charges were dropped in 2011 in exchange for a misdemeanor plea by Drake.
â¸
Shamai Leibowitz:
Israeli lawyer/activist in the US working secretly under contract for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a Hebrew-language translator. Concerned about possible plans for a military attack on Iran, he leaked FBI transcripts of wiretapped conversations of diplomats at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC to the blog
Tikun
Olam.
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Sentenced in 2010 to twenty months in federal prison. He served out his sentence and was released in 2011.
â¸
Bradley Manning:
Charged by the US Army for whistleblowing offenses (see
Censored
story #1, above).
â¸
Stephen Kim:
South Korean-born and US Ivy League-educated analyst who worked on a contract basis with the US State Department. Indicted in 2010 for having passed nonclassified infformation concerning North Korea to a Fox News correspondent, who later reported it on television, citing an anonymous source. Kim faces a sentence of up to fifteen years in prison; he has pled not guilty to the charges and his court case continues.
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(Following the AP phone records firestorm in May 2013, it was revealed that the Fox News reporter, James Rosen, had had his movements at the State Department, as well as his phone and e-mail records, monitored by government investigators at the time in 2009.)
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â¸
Jeffrey Sterling:
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer. Indicted in 2010 for having leaked information on Iranian nuclear research to
New York Times
reporter James Risen ffor a chapter in Risen's book
State of
War.
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Facing a sentence of up to 120 years, Sterling pled not guilty. Risen was subpoenaed three times to force him to testify as to whether or not Sterling was his source; Risen has refused to comply. Pretrial rulings by the judge on evidentiary issues have posed a major setback for the Justice Department in the case. The government is report
edly appealing the rulings as it moves ahead with prosecuting Sterling.
29
â¸
John Kiriakou:
Former CIA case officer and analyst. Well known as the first US government official who, in 2007, exposed to the media the CIA's “waterboarding” interrogation technique on al-Qaeda prisoners as a form of torture.
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Kiriakou was initially charged in 2012 under the Espionage Act for leaking the names of CIA colleagues to journalists, including a
New York Times
reporter, for which he faced up to fifty years in prison. Kiriakou pled guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced in January 2013 to thirty months in prison. He is currently an inmate at a federal prison in Pennsylvania.
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â¸
James Hitselberger:
Former Arabic-language specialist who worked for a private company on contract to the US Navy. Though not technically a whistleblower, he was “quietly indicted” under the Espionage Act in late 2012 for taking classified documents from a US naval base in Bahrain where he worked, including some documents that ended up in a collection of his papers at Stanford University.
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He was reported to be under house arrest in Virginia in 2013 as his trial proceeds.
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To be sure, the big corporate media companies have published news reports on these and other whistleblower cases as the lawsuits have come up. But what have been missing from the US press overall are context and consistency: the much wider context of a systematic war on whistleblowers and truth-tellers with the aim of silencing them, and consistency in reporting that wider context over time.
And the war looks to get worse before it gets better. In January 2013, President Obama issued a memorandum, barely reported by the US corporate media, that seeks new rules to allow federal agencies to fire employees without appeal if their work is deemed to be “national security sensitive.”
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This could affect thousands of US government workers, and there are concerns that it would also give the Obama administration yet another weapon in its war on whistleblowers.
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If the final goal of the US government has been to put a “chilling effect” on the press to keep the truth unreported and to deter potential whistleblowers from coming forward, then it has succeeded in at least one noteworthy case.
“I heard from various news sources that the FBI [under George W. Bush] had been monitoring my phone and Internet communications with certain people as part of its leak investigation into our [2005] NSA story,” says Eric Lichtblau, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the
New York Times.
A fear of getting subpoenaed led Lichtblau to quit writing national security stories for the
Times
and move on to another beat before the Obama administration took over in 2009. “While the Justice Department never made good on the threat, it certainly made it more difficult to do my job in dealing with confidential sources when you realize you may be forced to testify before a grand jury or risk going to jail to protect a source.”
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Censored #16: Journalism Under Attack Around the Globe
The domestic war on whistleblowers in the United States is, in turn, part of a much broader pattern of increasing repression of the news media and freedom of expression internationally.
In this digital age, the world has indeed become a smaller place yet at the same time a more dangerous one, if we are to believe the latest reports from press-support organizations and news media around the globe. Are those dangers to journalists in doing their work consistently reflected in news reporting by the US establishment media with the proper context, as they appear to be in other countries? Once again, we see a huge gap between the reality and the reporting in the United States.
Across the board, 2012 was reported by several organizations and institutions to be the deadliest year yet for journalists in various parts of the world, a sign of increasing danger to media workers and ultimately of a growing trend of censoring and gagging of news reporters. The Austria-based International Press Institute documented a record-high killing of 132 journalists worldwide in 2012 in the line of work, with the rate showing no sign of slowing down as of mid-2013 (forty-eight journalists killed).
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Similar results were found by the France-based organization Reporters Without Borders in its “World Press Freedom Index” for 2013.
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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also documented a rise in the number of media pro
fessionals killed on a global scale, along with an increase in “nonfatal attacks” such as journalists being injured, raped, kidnapped, intimidated, harassed, or illegally arrested in the course of their work.
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Like other parties, UNESCO attributed these rising numbers in large part to the growing problem of impunityâthat is, when no one is brought to justice for crimes against journalists. Most of the reporters, UNESCO noted, were not killed while covering war zones but rather while reporting on corruption or illegal activities at the local level. Increasingly, covering human rights issues and even environmental issues are proving to be more fatal for journalists than before, UNESCO found.
The US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued its own report in February 2013, “Attacks on the Press.”
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It documented seventy journalists killed in 2012 in the course of their work, a jump of almost 50 percent over the year before.
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CPJ also identified a record-high 232 journalists imprisoned around the world in 2012, a climbing figure “driven in part by the widespread use of charges of terrorism and other anti-state offenses against critical reporters and editors.”
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The New York Times
followed up by publishing an article on the release of the CPJ report.
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But the
Times'
reporting was all too typical of the poor US corporate media coverage of this important issue, lacking in quantity (at a mere 440 words) as well as in quality (the deeper implications for press freedom of more journalists getting killed). Most noticeably absent from the
Times
story was any mention at all of the landmark United Nations resolution on journalists' safety passed just a few months before, which recognized the severity of the crisis in journalism and which was heralded by media workers and press-support organizations around the world.