President Obama’s Nixonian assault on the press is rooted in the mistaken belief that leaks of “national security” information can do great harm to the country’s security. Therefore, Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, a former District of Columbia judge who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and vetted by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, have brought the government’s immense surveillance capabilities on reporters for The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Smoking Gun website, Fox News, and now, according to one of its Washington reporters, CBS News.
According to insiders at the National Security Agency, WMR has been the subject of a secret grand jury probe, a National Security Letter, and subpoenas for phone and email records to determine the identities of our sources inside NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
It is clear that Obama is trying to implement in the United States a British-style Official Secrets Act. In Britain, the government can issue what is known as a “D-Notice” and prohibit the publication of any information the government deems “classified” or “sensitive.” British journalists who publish classified information and those who leak such information face jail terms if found guilty. Obama, knowing that President Bill Clinton vetoed such a provision during his administration and not wanting to inflame civil libertarians any more than he already has, is creating a de facto American Official Secrets Act and “D-Notice” system through executive fiat and using the powers granted to the Justice Department pursuant to the USAPATRIOT Act.
The draconian British system of censorship by prior restraint controls on the press has always been used, in part, to prevent British government officials from being embarrassed by revelations of incompetence or illegal or immoral acts.
In fact, Obama’s Executive Order 13526, issued on December 29, 2009, bans the classification of documents to “conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.” However, Obama is not following his own Executive Order. The FBI’s seizure of the phone records of Fox News’s James Rosen and those of his parents who live on Staten Island for a one-month period in 2009, as well as the phone records of at least five other Fox reporters, was to prevent the disclosure that sanctions applied against North Korea directly resulted in its plans to test fire missiles. That disclosure had nothing toi do with U.S. national security, merely that Washington’s fetish for trade sanctions were powerless against countries like North Korea. However, for the image-conscious White House, the revelation was embarrassing.
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