Original Post: CS Monitor
By Husna Haq
Associated Press reporters are not alone. One week after news broke that the Justice Department secretly obtained phone records from AP, more news has emerged about the Obama administration’s campaign to silence leaks.
Gary Pruitt, CEO of the Associated press, told CBS's "Face the Nation" this weekend that the Justice Department’s investigation is already silencing AP sources.
This time, it’s new details about a 2010 Justice Department investigation into a Fox News correspondent who reported government secrets on North Korea. The twist is that in the Fox News case, the government is suggesting that the reporter broke the law and criminal charges could result.
The news points to how the Obama administration is going to unprecedented lengths to defend secrets – prosecuting more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the crackdown is having an effect, with AP saying some of its sources are falling silent. But that success could come at the expense of the newsgathering and investigative-reporting process that the Founding Fathers saw as a crucial check on federal power.
The Fox News case, in particular, suggests the “criminalization of investigative journalism,” writes Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian, a British newspaper.
According to a Washington Post report Sunday, Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen reported in June 2009 on a CIA analysis that suggested North Korea may respond to UN sanctions with more nuclear tests. The story was published online the same day that a confidential report on the matter was released to select officials in the intelligence community, including a State Department security adviser, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.
Detecting a connection, FBI investigators built a case alleging Mr. Kim leaked information to Mr. Rosen. To do so, they used every tool in their arsenal: analyzing security badge access records to track Rosen’s comings and goings from the State Department, tracing the timing of his calls to Kim, even subpoenaing his personal e-mails.
Ultimately, FBI agents concluded Kim did, in fact, leak information to Rosen using a complex, if clumsy, system of communication including aliases and coded signals.
In his report, FBI investigator Reginald Reyes said evidence suggested Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
While details on the case are forthcoming, it is not a crime for journalists to report classified information, except in rare circumstances. Furthermore, government seizure of media records is tightly circumscribed under the government’s Code of Federal Regulations.
The AP and Fox News cases renew concerns about the potential stifling effect government investigations have on reporters and their sources.
“Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” said First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin in the Washington Post report. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker goes further: “It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill,” she told the New Republic.
As a case in point, Gary Pruitt, CEO of the AP, told CBS’s "Face the Nation" this weekend that the Justice Department’s investigation is already silencing AP sources.
“Already, officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of news gathering are already saying to us that they're a little reluctant to talk to us,” he said. “They fear that they – they will be monitored by the government.”
Perhaps the most serious implication, however, is that the investigations threaten to jeopardize the very practice of investigative journalism, already endangered by budget cuts and the 24/7 news cycle.
“Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information,” writes The Guardian's Mr. Greenwald. “That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ – that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for 'soliciting' the disclosure of classified information – is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.”
Showing posts with label due process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label due process. Show all posts
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Memo spells out when it's OK to kill Al Qaeda-linked Americans without trial
Original Post: The Star
WASHINGTON—The White House and its critics faced off Tuesday over the legality of drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens abroad, in a likely preview of arguments that will be raised during this week’s confirmation hearing for President Barack Obama’s choice to head the CIA.
The disclosure of an unclassified Justice Department memo laying out the legal framework for the U.S. government’s ability to attack its own citizens drew criticism from civil liberties groups. But the White House strongly defended the controversial policy as legal and ethical.
The memo, first obtained by NBC News, argues that drone strikes are justified under American law if a targeted U.S. citizen had “recently” been involved in “activities” posing a possible threat and provided there is no evidence suggesting the individual “renounced or abandoned” such activities. A top U.S. official must determine that the targeted person “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” cannot be captured, and that the strike “would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney defended current U.S. drone policy, saying they are used to mitigate threats, stop plots, prevent future attacks and save American lives. “These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise,” he said. Civil liberties groups expressed concerns, while lawmakers called on the White House to release more of its legal underpinning for the assertion that the president has the power to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial.
“My initial reaction is that the paper only underscores the irresponsible extravagance of the government’s central claim,” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote on the ACLU’s blog. “Even if the Obama administration is convinced of its own fundamental trustworthiness, the power this white paper sets out will be available to every future president.”
The use of drones figures to be a prime topic for White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan when he faces the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in a confirmation hearing on his nomination to become CIA director.
The U.S. government has dramatically increased its use of drones abroad in recent years to target Al Qaeda figures in far-flung places from Pakistan to Yemen.
The document was disclosed as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators called on the Obama administration to release to Congress “any and all” legal opinions laying out the government’s understanding of what legal powers the president has to authorize the killing of American citizens.
The senators who signed the letter, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s co-operation would “help avoid an unnecessary confrontation that could affect the Senate’s consideration of nominees for national security purposes.”
One national security official said the leak of the Justice Department memo may have been timed to blunt such congressional demands for the release of additional documents. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who chairs the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that she had been calling on the administration to release legal analyses related to the use of drones for more than a year. Feinstein said the document obtained by NBC had been given to congressional committees last June on a confidential basis, and that her committee is seeking additional documents, which are believed to remain classified.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday said he was concerned that the release of more documents could put sources and operations at risk.
There is “a real concern to reveal sources, to potentially reveal sources and methods and put at risk the very mechanisms that we use to try to keep people safe, which is our primary responsibility,” he said at a news conference.
The memo is drawing new attention to the 2011 strike that killed U.S.-born Anwar al Awlaki, who U.S. investigators say was a major player with Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate and linked to a botched plot to blow up a U.S. airliner with a bomb hidden in a man’s underwear on Christmas Day 2009. His teenage son was also killed in a drone strike.
Targeted killings carried out by remotely piloted unmanned aircraft are controversial because of the risks to nearby civilians and because of their increasing frequency. The United Nations recently launched an investigation into their use.
Most such attacks have been carried out by the United States, but Britain and Israel have also used drones.
Hina Shamsi of the ACLU, which has sued for more information on the drone program, called the memo “profoundly disturbing” and “a stunning overreach of executive authority.”
Shamsi, head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, in a statement called on the Obama administration to release what she said was a 50-page classified legal document on which the 16-page summary is based.
“Among other things, we need to know if the limits the executive purports to impose on its killing authority are as loosely defined as in this summary, because if they are, they ultimately mean little,” she said late Monday.
WASHINGTON—The White House and its critics faced off Tuesday over the legality of drone strikes to kill U.S. citizens abroad, in a likely preview of arguments that will be raised during this week’s confirmation hearing for President Barack Obama’s choice to head the CIA.
The disclosure of an unclassified Justice Department memo laying out the legal framework for the U.S. government’s ability to attack its own citizens drew criticism from civil liberties groups. But the White House strongly defended the controversial policy as legal and ethical.
The memo, first obtained by NBC News, argues that drone strikes are justified under American law if a targeted U.S. citizen had “recently” been involved in “activities” posing a possible threat and provided there is no evidence suggesting the individual “renounced or abandoned” such activities. A top U.S. official must determine that the targeted person “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” cannot be captured, and that the strike “would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney defended current U.S. drone policy, saying they are used to mitigate threats, stop plots, prevent future attacks and save American lives. “These strikes are legal, they are ethical and they are wise,” he said. Civil liberties groups expressed concerns, while lawmakers called on the White House to release more of its legal underpinning for the assertion that the president has the power to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial.
“My initial reaction is that the paper only underscores the irresponsible extravagance of the government’s central claim,” Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote on the ACLU’s blog. “Even if the Obama administration is convinced of its own fundamental trustworthiness, the power this white paper sets out will be available to every future president.”
The use of drones figures to be a prime topic for White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan when he faces the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday in a confirmation hearing on his nomination to become CIA director.
The U.S. government has dramatically increased its use of drones abroad in recent years to target Al Qaeda figures in far-flung places from Pakistan to Yemen.
The document was disclosed as a bipartisan group of U.S. senators called on the Obama administration to release to Congress “any and all” legal opinions laying out the government’s understanding of what legal powers the president has to authorize the killing of American citizens.
The senators who signed the letter, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration’s co-operation would “help avoid an unnecessary confrontation that could affect the Senate’s consideration of nominees for national security purposes.”
One national security official said the leak of the Justice Department memo may have been timed to blunt such congressional demands for the release of additional documents. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat who chairs the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that she had been calling on the administration to release legal analyses related to the use of drones for more than a year. Feinstein said the document obtained by NBC had been given to congressional committees last June on a confidential basis, and that her committee is seeking additional documents, which are believed to remain classified.
Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday said he was concerned that the release of more documents could put sources and operations at risk.
There is “a real concern to reveal sources, to potentially reveal sources and methods and put at risk the very mechanisms that we use to try to keep people safe, which is our primary responsibility,” he said at a news conference.
The memo is drawing new attention to the 2011 strike that killed U.S.-born Anwar al Awlaki, who U.S. investigators say was a major player with Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate and linked to a botched plot to blow up a U.S. airliner with a bomb hidden in a man’s underwear on Christmas Day 2009. His teenage son was also killed in a drone strike.
Targeted killings carried out by remotely piloted unmanned aircraft are controversial because of the risks to nearby civilians and because of their increasing frequency. The United Nations recently launched an investigation into their use.
Most such attacks have been carried out by the United States, but Britain and Israel have also used drones.
Hina Shamsi of the ACLU, which has sued for more information on the drone program, called the memo “profoundly disturbing” and “a stunning overreach of executive authority.”
Shamsi, head of the ACLU’s National Security Project, in a statement called on the Obama administration to release what she said was a 50-page classified legal document on which the 16-page summary is based.
“Among other things, we need to know if the limits the executive purports to impose on its killing authority are as loosely defined as in this summary, because if they are, they ultimately mean little,” she said late Monday.
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