The only company in the US constitution is the press.
Here is how important Thomas Jefferson thought the press was to government
"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them." --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787. ME 6:57
"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." --Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823. ME 15:491
Circumstantial evidence was used to convict Jeffrey Sterling for leaking evidence to James Risen at NYT.
It is OK to torture in the US and go on book tours, but if you tell the press, you go to jail for 30 months and have your life destroyed.
It is OK to leak stories that are favorable to the government, but raise the issues to congressional committees, and have the stories printed in a book first, then finally the NY times lets its journalist publish the stories, and you are a criminal. And the journalist, James Risen, was on the edge of a charge of espionage for 7 years, including all of Obama's term in office, for his journalism. Recall that Risen's story about surveillance of Americans was ready to print before the 2004 presidential election, which could have influenced the outcome of the election, and the NY Times submitted to the pressure of Condeleezza Rice to bury the story.
The founders were fundamentally concerned with power and how to control it. The oligarchs, corporations, military, security complex, etc. have the power and the people can't even know what chemicals are put into the ground through fracking. And the recent push to fast track the TPP and other "trade agreements", written by corporations, and secret to even most legislators, are giving away sovereignty. That means a Canadian mining company, for example, can do what ever they want in my community and I can't take them to court, or I have to pay they off if they are blocked from their extractivism.
Our political dialogue is about personalities and media flaps with almost no discussion of power.
Monday’s guilty verdict in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling on espionage charges — for talking to a newspaper reporter — is the latest milepost on the dark and dismal path Barack Obama has traveled since his inaugural promises to usher in a “new era of openness.”
Far from rejecting the authoritarian bent of his presidential predecessor, Obama has simply adjusted it, adding his own personal touches, most notably an enthusiasm for criminally prosecuting the kinds of leaks that are essential to a free press.
A direct attack on the free press is a direct attack on the principles of our government. I added the bold to tie it to the title of this diary.
Instead, as author Scott Horton explained to me a few weeks ago, Obama’s thinking on these issues was swayed by John Brennan, the former senior adviser he eventually named CIA director. And for Brennan and his ilk, secrecy is a core value — partly for legitimate national security reasons and partly as an impregnable shield against embarrassment and accountability.
The Sterling case was until recently an even more direct attack on a free press, as Obama administration prosecutors repeatedly demanded testimony from New York Times reporter James Risen, who wrote about the botched plot against the Iranian government that they charged Sterling with divulging.
The article is written by Dan Froomkin who was the only reason that I went to the WA Post every day years ago. He was fired from WA Post and now writes for The Intercept with Glenn Greenwald.
Years ago Glenn was called a civil liberties extremist. He thanked them for his attack and agreed with it. Now his strident writing years ago has come to pass and our country is attacking our core principles.
And for our own Thomas Drake who I now follow on twitter, along with his whistle blowing attorney Jesselyn Radack, and both of them seldom appear here on DK in the last year
And Thomas Drake, a former NSA official who provided classified information about mismanagement at his agency to a Baltimore Sun reporter, endured a four-year persecution by the government that the federal judge in his case called “unconscionable,” before prosecutors dropped all 10 felony charges and settled for a single guilty plea on a misdemeanor. The government’s message nevertheless was loud and clear. As secrecy expert Steven Aftergood told me: “In every significant sense, the government won, because it demonstrated the price of nonconformity.”
Here is the article
TORTURE IF YOU MUST, BUT DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES CALL THE NEW YORK TIMES
emptywheel, aka Marcy Wheeler and others have written about this travesty of justice.