Yesterday, the New York Times had an editorial on Obama's attack on the press.
While the editorial focused on the intolerable limitations on journalists trying to cover the first military trial at Guantánamo under Obama (the editorial does not mention the equally abhorrent renewing of the Bush-era grand jury subpoena against its reporter James Risen), I would like to point out that the Administration is attacking the press from both sides because it is also engaging in a vicious retaliation campaign against sources by criminalizing their whistleblowing.
This toxic trend of shutting down both reporters and sources is at a minimum contrary to pledges of transparency and openness, and more dangerously, is contrary to the First Amendment and our democracy.
The flimsy explanation that the military gave for expelling seasoned reporters attempting to cover the trial of Canadian Omar Khadr--the reporters had published the name of a former Army interrogator who was a witness against him--is belied by the fact that the interrogator's name had been in the public domain for years. It's even in the Wikipedia entry on Omar Khadr!
As the Times editorial pointed out,
[t]he notion that the four reporters’ coverage posed any harm to national security was so absurd that it seemed trumped up.
The same can be said about the information allegedly "leaked" by Thomas Drake, accused "willful retention of classified information for the purposes of disclosure" stemming from his admittedly being a source for Baltimore Sun articles on the National Security Agency (NSA) billion-dollar waste on a secret surveillance program that trounced privacy rights of U.S. citizens and did not even work. (There was a cheaper, effective alternative available that protected privacy rights commensurate with the Constitution and numerous laws.)
Luckily, the banned reporters were reinstated, but no such luck for Mr. Drake. He has been criminally indicted under the Espionage Act and faces 35 years in jail. But he's a whistleblower, not a spy. Warrantless wiretapping and secret surveillance were one of the biggest scandals of my generation. We cheered its exposure. The Bush administration opened a criminal investigation into the sources for the Pulitzer Prize-winning article that exposed it--assigning 5 prosecutors and a dozen investigators at taxpayer expense. Millions of dollars have been spent on this pretextual investigation, which is how Drake originally got on the government's radar screen even though Drake was never a source for the New York Times story, and the people who have admitted to being sources have never been indicted (not that I want them to be).
The biggest scandals of the Bush adminiistration--torture, warrantless wiretapping, and being lied into the Iraq War--were exposed because of whistleblowers.
If the Obama administration insists on squeezing the press from both sides, punishing reporters and sources, the Fourth Estate (the only iota of accountability during the Bush years) will be even more incapacitated. Censorship is undemocratic, especially when it is being used to hide government mistakes and embarrassment, not legitimate state secrets such as troop movements or nuclear codes.
I urge you to read and sign the petition on behalf of Tom Drake, http://criminaljustice.change.org/.... He never gave classified information to a reporter. He is not charged with giving classified information to a reporter. And what he disclosed NEVER harmed the United States (nor is it even alleged that it did so); quite the opposite, he was trying to save our country from itself.