“The attempt to criminalize WikiLeaks is clearly a leading prong in the Obama administration’s truly odious and dangerous war on whistleblowers.”
— Glenn Greenwald
(See: WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation widens.)
Postscript: Don’t forget to watch Greenwald’s 30-minute speech on media propaganda. It’s in three parts on YouTube. Here’s the beginning (you can skip the introductory speaker’s niceties and jump straight to the 4-minute mark), the middle, and the end. Incidental intelligence: He never once refers to his notes. He doesn’t have to. What he has to say, which is typically incisive and characteristically brilliant, is all there in his head.
June 11 — As to the Thomas Drake “Leak” Case: “[I]t seems clear that the Obama Administration misjudged the merits of its case against Drake, pursuing minor infractions with disproportionate zeal.”
That’s not Greenwald. That’s Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News, a blog of the Federation of American Scientists, “which reports on new developments in secrecy policy and provides direct public access to official records of policy value that have been suppressed, withdrawn or that are simply hard to find.”
June 18 — Two excellent NYT frontpagers today: One reports that the Obama administration is pressing its “unprecedented crackdown on leaks,” despite “the crumbling” of the Drake case. The other reports that, in the administration’s internal policy debate about the war in Libya, Obama rejected the views of top lawyers from the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and claimed that the U.S. is not engaged in hostilities there. Ludicrous, eh? What’s next? Pointing to an imperial scar?
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In his book, “Secrecy: The American Experience,” former Senator Daniel Moynihan argues that the problem is systemic. “Departments and agencies hoard information,” he says, “and the government becomes a kind of market. Secrets become organizational assets, never to be shared save in exchange for another organization’s assets…. The system costs can be enormous. In the void created by absent or withheld information, decisions are either made poorly or not at all.”
Even in a democracy, an ethos of secrecy gradually informs the very nature of government. Perhaps that is why history shows that democracies always fail. We see that America will be no different. Thank you for the interesting reports.