Obama administration's prosecution of whistleblowers is affecting the press.
New York– On April 9, McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay reported that the Obama administration has “targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified ‘other’ militants” in drone strikes, a revelation that contradicts previous administration claims of pursuing only senior-level operatives who pose an imminent threat to the United States.
It was an investigative story clearly in the public interest, shedding new light on the government’s long-running targeted-killing program in Pakistan. But now Landay, a veteran national security reporter for the McClatchy newspaper chain, is concerned that the Obama administration could next investigate him in hopes of finding the sources for “top-secret U.S. intelligence reports” cited in the story. “Do I think that they could come after me?” Landay asked, in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Yes.”
“I can tell you that people who normally would meet with me, sort of in a more relaxed atmosphere, are on pins and needles,” Landay said of the reporting climate during the Obama years, a period of unprecedented whistleblower prosecutions. The crackdown on leaks, he added, seems “deliberately intended to have a chilling effect.”
Landay isn’t alone in that assessment, as several investigative journalists attest in “War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State,” a timely documentary directed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation that premieres this week in New York and Washington. The film details the ordeals of four whistleblowers who turned to the press in order to expose waste or illegality.
“The Obama administration's been extremely aggressive in trying to root out whistleblowers within the government,” NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff says in the film. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, describing the secrecy required in her reporting for a profile of whistleblower Thomas Drake amid government prosecution, said the experience didn’t “feel [like] America, land of the free press.”
Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency, says in the film, "it's extremely dangerous in America right now to be right as a whistleblower when the government is so wrong." He adds: "speaking truth to power is now a criminal act."
Drake was charged in 2010 under the Espionage Act, a law passed in 1917 to prosecute spies. Drake was not a spy, but a government employee who tried unsuccessfully to report waste and abuse through official channels before contacting a Baltimore Sun reporter. The government's case eventually collapsed, with Drake only pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of "exceeding the authorized use of a computer."
"He was vindicated in the end, essentially," Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers, said in the film. "But Drake had his life, for the moment, ruined."
Drake’s story is interspersed with those of three other whistleblowers who endured years of hardship as a result of coming forward through the press or directly on YouTube, including Marine Corps officer Franz Gayl, who spoke out about much-needed protection for soldiers against IED attacks in Iraq; former Lockheed Martin project manager Michael DeKort, who posted a video online revealing security flaws in the Coast Guard’s Deepwater project; and former Department of Justice attorney Thomas Tamm, who contacted The New York Times and provided information that helped expose the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Those men have been fired, prosecuted, or shunned because they spoke out. The government accountability advocates who have been forced to defend them, meanwhile, said they were worried the Obama and Bush administrations' aggressive actions against them have chilled future whistle-blowing.
"I've talked to a number of people who've made it clear ... that they are too afraid for their jobs," said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project On Government Oversight. "You have a combination of the fear of prosecution and this economy. If they lose this job, they might not be able to pay for groceries."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/obama-whistleblower-prosecutions-press_n_3091137.html
War on whistleblowers: How the Obama admin. destroyed Thomas Drake for exposing gov't. waste:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/war-whistleblowers-how-obama-administration-destroyed-thomas-drake-exposing