Censored 2014

by Mickey Huff

  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.20 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.21

  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 whistleblowers—those 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.”22

  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 area—national security—the Obama administration is seen as being “dangerously contradictory” by aggressively prosecuting leakers of classified information and going after the journalists to whom they leak.23

  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:

  ▸ 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.24 Felony charges were dropped in 2011 in exchange for a misdemeanor plea by Drake.

  ▸ 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.25 Sentenced in 2010 to twenty months in federal prison. He served out his sentence and was released in 2011.

  ▸ Bradley Manning: Charged by the US Army for whistleblowing offenses (see Censored story #1, above).

  ▸ 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.26 (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.)27

  ▸ 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.28 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 reportedly appealing the rulings as it moves ahead with prosecuting Sterling.29

  ▸ 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.30 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.31

  ▸ 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.32 He was reported to be under house arrest in Virginia in 2013 as his trial proceeds.33

  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.”34 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.35

  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.”36

  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).37 Similar results were found by the France-based organization Reporters Without Borders in its “World Press Freedom Index” for 2013.38

  The United Nati
ons Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) also documented a rise in the number of media professionals 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.39

  Like other parties, UNESCO attributed these rising numbers in large part to the growing problem of impunity—that 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.”40 It documented seventy journalists killed in 2012 in the course of their work, a jump of almost 50 percent over the year before.41 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.”42

  The New York Times followed up by publishing an article on the release of the CPJ report.43 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.

  In September 2012, the forty-seven-member United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution that for the first time called on nations to “promote a safe and enabling environment for journalists to perform their work independently and without undue interference.” It also called on countries to fight impunity in cases of attacks against journalists, by “ensur[ing] accountability through the conduct of impartial, speedy and effective investigations” into such attacks and “bring[ing] to justice those responsible.”44

  The New York Times and the US corporate press failed to give this important development the prominent coverage it deserved. But if US establishment media reporting of the important UN resolution on journalists’ safety was sparse in 2012, acknowledgment of Article 19 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights—upon which this and other resolutions and press freedom principles are based— has been nearly nonexistent.

  Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the United Nations in 1948, reads:

  Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.45

  Article 19 is worth noting here because it affirms freedom of the press as a basic human right, not just the civil right of a nation. Several UN press freedom-related resolutions of the past are based on Article 19, as is the groundbreaking Windhoek Declaration of 1991 by African journalists, which evolved into World Press Freedom Day.

  Inspired by the Windhoek Declaration, journalists in other regions of the world—Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean—also have drawn up similarly strong statements of press principles.46 Conspicuously missing from that list of regions is North America, where a kind of Windhoek Declaration is arguably most needed in the world today.

  When more news reporters and other media professionals in the United States see themselves and their important public service role as one vital part ofthe larger international picture, and can stand side by side with their colleagues around the world in times of danger, then we may finally begin to see US news reporting that truly informs the public whenever journalism comes under threat of attack anywhere on the globe.

  Censored #22: Pennsylvania Law Gags Doctors to Protect Big Oil’s “Proprietary Secrets”

  Attacking or killing journalists after they report the truth is one way to censor news; another is to use “prior restraints” under the law before the truth is reported. Those in the media profession are no strangers to legal restraints being used to bind and gag them beforehand, based on what they might report. Now, however, that kind of gag is being extended in the US to persons in the medical profession.

  Under a controversial new law that went into effect in 2012 in the state of Pennsylvania, doctors must sign a confidentiality agreement before a corporation will release any information to the doctors concerning the chemicals used in deep underground drilling of oil and natural gas, a practice known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”—even when that information directly affects the health of the doctors’ patients.

  The text of the law, Act 13, stipulates that a fracking company must “identify the specific identity and amount of any chemicals claimed to be a trade secret or confidential proprietary information to any health professional who requests the information in writing,” but only “if the health professional executes a confidentiality agreement and provides a written statement of need for the information” for treating patients.47

  Like other states, Pennsylvania is undergoing a virtual gold rush of fracking by oil and gas companies. There are an estimated 5,000 oil and gas drilling wells located around the state, and the number of sites continues to grow.48 The drilling, which is done with toxic chemicals, has led medical professionals, local residents, and activists alike to raise serious environmental concerns about contaminated groundwater and about the resulting outbreaks of health problems among people living near the drilling sites.49

  This puts medical professionals in a bind: doctors in Pennsylvania can be sued by patients for not informing them of the health risks of fracking, which may involve naming the actual “secret” chemicals used at local fracking sites. As one Pennsylvania doctor put it: “What is the big secret here that they [fracking companies] are unwilling to tell people, unless they know that if people found out what’s really in these chemicals, they would be outraged?”50

  There has been some decent reporting of this “doctor gag rule” in the US corporate press, including, for example, by the New York-based website International Business Times51 as well as by the Los Angeles Times.52 But by and large, considering the huge implications this case has for the wider issue of creeping corporate control over public health matters, the doctor gag rule has not garnered nearly the amount of sustained, consistent coverage in the corporate media that it deserves.

  This is especially true of one related aspect that appears to have gone unreported in the national media: the possible linking of the doctor gag rule on fracking with the gagging of whistleblowers and activists in Pennsylvania’s agricultural industry.53

  Pennsylvania is one of several US states that in the past few years has moved to pass agricultural gag laws—so-called “ag-gag laws”—at the behest of the powerful industrial agricultural lobby. These are laws that would make it a crime for anyone to expose conditions at factory farms where animals are killed and processed for human consumption.

  Under House Bill 683, introduced into the Pennsylvania state legislature in February 2013, it would be a felony offense for anyone who “records an image of, or sound from, the agricultural operation by leaving a recording device on the agricultural operation,” or anyone who “uploads, downloads, transfers or otherwise sends recorded images of, or sound ffrom, the agricultural operations over the Internet in any medium.”54

  Public concerns are now being raised about such factory farms that are located in the same rural areas of Pennsylvania where fracking operations are also being carried out by oil and natural gas drilling companies. HB 683 deals specifically with gags on exposing industrial farming practices. But there
are concerns that if this ag-gag bill is passed into law, it could someday be expanded in scope to include the legal gagging of activists and whistleblowers who expose operations at rural oil and gas fracking sites in Pennsylvania as well.

  This is an important case worth keeping an eye on for the future, as a sign of where the ongoing war on truth in the United States is taking us.

  RELATED VALIDATED INDEPENDENT NEWS STORY

  Prominent Establishment Journalists Turn Whistleblowers over News Censorship

  What happens when journalists themselves blow the whistle on censorship within their own ranks? Ask two such journalists who worked for some of the biggest names in American news.

  Amber Lyon, a reporter for CNN, produced a one-hour documentary in 2011 titled iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring, on how social media were playing a part in the then-unfolding Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East. It included a thirteen-minute segment shot in Bahrain featuring dramatic footage and interviews.55

  Lyon said she was later pressured by CNN during the editing process to include Bahraini government denials and untruths about the Arab Spring uprising in that country.56

  The documentary aired once that summer on the US domestic edition of CNN, but not on the network’s overseas arm, CNN International (CNNi), which is widely watched in the Middle East.57 When she raised questions about it, Lyon said, she was warned by the president of CNNi to drop the subject and not talk about it publicly;58 she later received a similar threat from CNN’s business department.59

  US journalist Glenn Greenwald has suggested that it had something to do with pressure put on CNN by the government of Bahrain, a close United States ally, in conjunction with a high-priced US public relations firm, in an effort to nip Bahrain’s Arab Spring in the bud.60