Barack Obama: The greatest threat to press freedom in a generation

“First he came for the whistleblowers and I didn’t speak up because I was a liberal….”

A conference called “Sources and Secrets” was held a few days ago at the Times Center in New York. The conference is described as “A conference on the press, government and national security.” It’s supported largely by left wing organizations and news outlets. At the meeting James Risen of the NY Times expressed an interesting opinion:

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

And he went on to this:

The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created “a de facto Official Secrets Act,” Risen said, and the media has been “too timid” in responding.

The media rolled over for Barack Obama long ago for two reasons. One, he is a democrat and two, because he is black. Obama has seized on that to abuse the power of his office.

What followed in the conference becomes amusing. Andrew Beaujon snarkily notes:

…Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, who announced that if he weren’t a paragon of journalistic detachment, he’d say “the persecution of James Risen is a scandal.”

Attorney Laura Handman observed that

…the U.S. Department of Justice’s new guidelines for accessing journalists’ records carve out a big space for the government to decide what constitutes “ordinary newsgathering.”

No sh*t.

Then the far left wing Obama water carrier Jeffrey Toobin sprang into action to defend his idol. He suggested that certain reporters, like Fox News reporters (like James Rosen) ought to be prosecuted. Toobin made no mention of harassing the parents of reporters.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has long wanted to crush those speaking freely of liberals, repeated her desire to limit who can be considered a journalist and without a doubt to destroy bloggers whose words displease her.

Liberals tend to dismiss inappropriate actions on the part of democrats right up until the monster comes for them. Now it has, but they can’t say they weren’t warned.

In 2011 Jane Mayer wrote:

When President Barack Obama took office, in 2009, he championed the cause of government transparency, and spoke admiringly of whistle-blowers, whom he described as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.” But the Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. Including the Drake case, it has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined. The Drake case is one of two that Obama’s Justice Department has carried over from the Bush years.

It’s gotten so bad that even the far left is complaining:

That our current government has been willing to fight for more than seven years — maybe all the way to the Supreme Court — to weaken legal whistleblowing protections tells a tale of our times. That it seeks to silence whistleblowers at a moment when their disclosures are just beginning to reveal the scope of our unconstitutional national security state is cause for great concern. That the government demands whistleblowers work within the system and then seeks to modify that same system to thwart them goes beyond hypocrisy.

This is the very definition of post-Constitutional America where legality and illegality blur — and always in the government’s favor; where the founding principles of our nation only apply when, as, and if the executive sees fit. The devil is indeed in the details.

Yet this regime will not hesitate to leak confidential information for political reasons:

From leaks about Osama bin Laden to those detailing cyberattacks on Iran, a disturbing pattern of publicly disclosing classified material to give Barack Obama a political boost is emerging. Under this president, our enemies don’t need spies.

The fact that the Allies in World War II had the ability to intercept and decode German and Japanese military transmissions, leading to critical military victories at Midway and elsewhere, remained a secret until long after World War II was over, and it didn’t matter who knew it. “Loose lips sink ships” was then more than a clever wartime slogan.

The pattern of national security leaks under this administration and its political exploitation of what should be secret has even liberal media flagship CNN wondering if “President Barack Obama’s administration can keep a secret — or in some cases even wants to.”

With a collapsing economy, rampant joblessness and mushrooming debt, foreign policy seemingly is the only place Obama can boast of any accomplishments.

Yes, Osama bin Laden was killed on his watch. Yet even there, critics say with much merit that the world’s most wanted man was killed while Obama was president, not because he was president.

We’re all too familiar with Obama’s very public celebration after the bin Laden kill, to the point of giving tours of the Situation Room and granting special access to information and people to Hollywood filmmakers. A 17-minute campaign flick was even made.

After the Bin Laden raid Joe Biden outed SEAL Team 6 and a couple of months later SEAL Team 6 suffered its greatest single loss ever.

The obsequious left wing media created this monster and now it hunts them. Obama’s website once read:

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

That’s gone now, of course. Remember DrJohn’s Law. Nothing Obama says can be accepted as truth.

Nothing.

I hope the words “I told you so” are able to penetrate prison walls.

H/T Daily Caller

image courtesy of thesleuthjournal.com

DrJohn

DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.

DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.

Except for liberals being foolish.