America's "War on Whistleblowers" exposes the U.S. govt's war on censorship & persecution of journalists.

The War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State traces how two of the most powerful and secretive Washington power centers—the Pentagon’s military-industrial complex and Internet era’s national security state—ran amok after 9/11 and declared war on a handful of whistleblowers who went to the press to expose lies, fraud and abuses that meant life or death for troops and spying on millions of Americans. It explores why Obama, who promised the most transparent administration, became the most secretive president in recent decades and even more vindictive to intelligence-related whistleblowers than George W. Bush.  

Whistleblowers are not spies or traitors, as the Bush and Obama administration’s lawyers have alleged. They are patriotic and often conservative Americans who work inside the government and with military contractors, and who find unacceptable—and often life-threatening—or illegal behavior goes unheeded when they report it through the traditional chain of command. They worry about doing nothing and feel compelled to go to the press, even if they suspect they may lose their jobs. What they don’t realize is that their lives will never quite be the same again, because they underestimate the years of government persecution that follows. 

The documentary portrays the whistleblower as a special kind of American hero—one whose importance is easily forgotten in today’s infotainment-drenched media. Since the Vietnam War in the 1960s, whistleblowers have been part of many history-changing events: questioning the war in Vietnam by releasing the Pentagon Papers on military’s failings; exposing the Watergate burglary that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation; exposing the illegal nationwide domestic spying program by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11; revealing the military’s failure to replace Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan with better bomb-deflecting vehicles, leading to hundreds of deaths and maimings; revealing how the nation’s largest military contractor was building a new Coast Guard fleet with ships whose hulls could buckle in rough seas and putting radios on smaller rescue boats that wouldn’t work when wet.

These are some of the scandals and issues whose contours are traced by the documentary, especially the explosive growth of the military-industrial complex and national security state after 9/11, and how these institutions sought to silence those who questioned and tried to correct mistakes or seek accountability. The film also shows how reporters, at blogs, newspapers and TV networks, have real power to put pressure on government and force change, and how public-interest activists are a conduit for that critical exchange of information. A free press very much matters.

A key element of War on Whistleblowers is the number of nationally known journalists who speak out collectively and for the first time in reaction to the government’s attacks on their sources and their reporting. The film features many respected mainstream investigative reporters, including the Washington Post’s Dana Priest, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer and Seymour Hersch, USA Today’s Tom Vanden Brook, New York Times’ media critic David Carr and former Times editor Bill Keller, among others.

“What we discovered… was there are over 1,200 government organizations working at the top-secret level on counterterrorism,” said the Washington Post’s Priest. “There are another close to 2,000 companies that work for the government on top-secret matters. And they’re all located in about 10,000 locations throughout the country. There are close to 1 million people who have top-secret clearance.” 

Calling it a "state within the state" is not an exaggeration. The national security state is a vast convergence of government agencies and private interests that are as determined to preserve its power and influence and do whatever it takes to achieve its goals. “We talk about a national security state that pretends that it is interested in national security," said Daniel Ellsberg, the Vietnam War whistleblower. “But in fact, it is interested in the security of corporate interests, of agency interests, of politicians keeping their jobs.” 

The film says that whistleblowers are needed more than ever to hold this secret segment of government and industry accountable. And what’s most surprising is that the Obama administration has been cracking down on a handful of federal employees-turned-whistleblowers in a way that makes what happened to Gayl seem like child’s play.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/groundbreaking-war-whistleblowers-investigation-exposes-obama-admins-record

Reporters attempting to cover the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas threatened with arrest:

Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they've been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.

On Friday morning, Inside Climate News reported that an Exxon spokesperson told reporter Lisa Song that she could be "arrested for criminal trespass" when she went to the command center to try to find representatives from the EPA and the Department of Transportation. On Friday afternoon, I spoke to the news director from the local NPR affiliate who said he, too, had been threatened with arrest while trying to cover the spill.

Michael Hibblen, who reports for the radio station KUAR, went to the spill site on Wednesday with state Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. McDaniel was in the area to inspect the site and hold a news conference, and Hibblen and a small group of reporters were following him to report on the visit. Upon arrival, representatives from the county sheriff's office, which is running security at the site, directed the reporters to a boundary point 10 feet away that they should not pass. The reporters agreed to comply. But the tone shifted abruptly, Hibblen told Mother Jones on Friday:

It was less than 90 seconds before suddenly the sheriff's deputies started yelling that all the media people had to leave, that ExxonMobil had decided they don't want you here, you have to leave. They even referred to it as "Exxon Media"…Some reporters were like, "Who made this decision? Who can we talk to?" The sheriff's deputies started saying, "You have to leave. You have 10 seconds to leave or you will be arrested."

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/04/reporters-say-exxon-impeding-spill-coverage-arkansas