The Obama administration has once been revealed as an opponent of media freedom.
According to Fairfax NZ News report, U.S. spy agencies collected "metadata" phone records of New Zealand journalist Jon Stephenson.
This information was turned over to the New Zealand Defence Force, which was upset about Stephenson's revelations about the treatment of Afghan prisoners.
"New Zealand SAS troops in Kabul had access to the reports and were using them in active investigations into Stephenson," wrote Fairfax reporter Nicky Hager. "The sources believed the phone monitoring was being done to try to identify Stephenson's journalistic contacts and sources. They drew a picture of a metadata tree the Defence Force had obtained, which included Stephenson and named contacts in the Afghan government and military."
In 2009, Stephenson revealed how New Zealand soldiers were involved in human-rights abuses in Afghanistan. This came when they turned over prisoners to U.S. and Afghan authorites, who allegedly relied on torture.
He elaborated on that in a 2011 television interview, pointing out that he had located former prisoners who spoke openly about being tortured.
Attorney general cracked down on media
Meanwhile, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder has told the Russian government that if National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden is returned to America, he won't receive the death penalty.
Earlier this year, Snowden released details of the U.S. government's massive metadata-phone-surveillance program, which enabled it to track calls like the ones made by Stephenson.?
In a separate attack on press freedom, Holder justified the seizure of phone records from Associated Press on the basis of protecting the U.S.?This came after the wireservice revealed details about a CIA operation in Yemen.
President Barack Obama has since ordered the Department of Justice to review the way it addresses freedom of the media.
Amid all of this, U.S. lawyer and press-freedom advocate James Goodale told a Russian news service that Obama is the greatest threat to the media since Richard Nixon was president.
Goodale, who defended the New York Times after the leak of the Pentagon Papers, pointed out that Obama has pursued six leakers, including WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange. The Obama administration has also gone after a reporter, James Risen.
"If he?s pursuing Julian Assange as a co-conspirator and succeeds he?ll be worse than Nixon because Nixon tried to go after the New York Times and its reporters saying they were co-conspirators, but Nixon failed," Goodale added.
Read the full interview?here.
The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald has declared that Obama is already worse than Nixon. He told CNN that Obama has charged with more leakers under the Espionage Act than all other U.S. presidents combined.
Obama and the First Amendment
The irony is that Obama once taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.?
"I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the constitution," he declared in 2007.
The First Amendment of the U.S. constitution declares that Congress shall not pass any law that abridges freedom of speech or freedom of the press.
Obama has tried to paper over his administration's contempt for the First Amendment by publicly supporting a federal shield law, which will enable journalists to keep sources confidential.
But as the executive director of the First Amendment Center, Gene Policinski, recently noted, this comes just as the Justice Department is prosecuting Private Bradley Manning for disclosing information to WikiLeaks.
A Congressional version of the shield law would only offer this protection to people who gather news "for financial gain or livelihood". WikiLeaks is a nonprofit media organization, so this legislation wouldn't stop the government from throwing Manning or Assange into the slammer.
Both the Senate and Congressional versions would also exclude "agents of a foreign power" from coming under a shield law. This could have the effect of ruling out journalists for CBC, BBC, or news services owned by other governments.
Obama is starting to talk a good game about freedom of the media. But the reality is that any shield law will probably only protect journalists working for media outlets owned by large U.S. corporations.
For the most part, these reporters and editors are the least likely to get upset about the Obama administration's extrajudicial assassinations, attacks on foreign journalists, and eagerness to prosecute Snowden, Assange, and Manning.
After all, they have mortgages to pay, kids to put through college, and medical-insurance premiums that would cause some scribes in other countries to think twice before taking a major career risk.
U.S. journalists working for major media outlets have become part of the bourgeoisie and form a key part of Obama's constituency of supporters on national-security matters.
In the meantime, expect the snooping of the phone calls of foreign journalists like Jon Stephenson to continue unabated.
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