Obama's War on Journalism Goes Global
Naji Dahi
July 7, 2015
(ANTIMEDIA) The Obama administration’s war on journalism is now global. Der Spiegel, a prestigious, reputable, and trusted news magazine in Germany, reports the NSA (National Security Agency) has been spying on it.
To summarize: In the summer of 2011, Germany’s top intelligence officer was informed by the CIA station chief in Berlin that his deputy was leaking information to Der Spiegel. Bowing to CIA pressure, the deputy was reassigned to a different department within the BND (German intelligence). The German government and the BND did not inform anyone in the German parliament or those in charge of investigating such spying, a clear violation of German law. According to Der Spiegel:
“Officials in the Chancellery [government] weren’t interested in how the CIA had obtained its alleged information. They didn’t care to find out how, and to which degree, they were being spied on by the United States. Nor were they interested in learning about the degree to which SPIEGEL was being snooped on by the Americans. Chancellery officials…didn’t contact members of the Bundestag federal parliament sitting on the Parliamentary Control Panel, the group responsible for oversight of the intelligence services. They didn’t inform members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the agency responsible for counterintelligence in Germany, either. And they didn’t contact a single public prosecutor.”
To make matters worse, this disclosure comes after a Wikileaks revelation that the NSA was spying on German prime minister, Angela Merkel, as well as 69 other members of the German government.
That the NSA has been spying on German media might be stunning to many Germans, but this type of behavior is part of a long war that the Obama administration has waged on journalists. Journalists have received leaked information from members of the U.S. intelligence community, via Wikileaks.
In May of 2013, the U.S. Justice Department was caught wiretapping 100 telephone numbers belonging to the Associated Press. The Justice Department monitored the phone calls of journalists and editors for two months because they wanted to find the informant who leaked information about a plan to blow up a commercial airliner.
Award-winning New York Times reporter James Risen was cited for contempt of court because he refused to reveal the identity of his source(s) within the U.S. intelligence community. Eventually, the Justice Department relented and Risen did not serve jail time. He did not reveal his source(s).
The Justice Department was also caught “investigating” (spying on) Fox News Washington bureau chief, James Rosen. Rosen’s emails and phone were monitored and he was labeled a criminal co-conspirator. At issue was a classified document on North Korea that Rosen allegedly received from Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a former State Department arms expert. Dana Milibank of the Washington Post argued that “The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of. To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job…deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based.”
Finally, there is the ongoing criminal investigation of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. For the past five years, a federal grand jury has been working to determine whether charges should be brought against Wikileaks and its founder.
Both Der Spiegel and The Intercept suggest that the NSA’s spying was motivated by the fact that Spiegel has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government. According to The Intercept:
“Between about 2004 and 2009, the magazine published several scoops exposing controversial U.S. counterterrorism operations, such as the CIA’s extraordinary rendition of German Islamic extremist Mohammed Haydar Zammar to Syria, where he was subjected to torture at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. These reports triggered a political backlash in Germany and prompted a parliamentary committee to investigate the CIA’s practices.”
Following the first revelations of the NSA’s surveillance of PM Angela Merkel, Germany did nothing but voice its disapproval. Now that the spying involves 69 other members of the German government and Der Spiegel, however, the pressure is on the PM to do something. As the Daily Mail observed, “Conservative elements in government have played down the spying allegations in the past, but the latest raft of revelations may prove too large to sweep under the diplomatic carpet.”
This article (Obama’s War on Journalism Goes Global) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and theAntiMedia.org. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: edits@theantimedia.org.