President Obama has overseen an unprecedented legal campaign against leaks of classified information with New York Times journalist James Risen now facing possible jail for refusing to testify in the trial of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling for a leak published…
Tag: Julian Assange
Laughing at Snowden’s Asylum Requests
The mainstream U.S. news media has been chuckling over the “irony” of NSA leaker Edward Snowden asking asylum from Latin American countries purported to suppress press freedom. But the smugness misses both the complex realities abroad and the U.S. government’s own assaults on…
Why Snowden’s Fate Matters
Exclusive: There’s an old saying that a reporter is only as good as his sources, meaning that there’s a need for people inside government who see wrongdoing to speak up. It is also a test of a democratic Republic whether truth-tellers like…
Fighting the Secrecy/Surveillance State
The emergence of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and now Edward Snowden represents just the tip of the iceberg of a popular resistance that is challenging the U.S. government’s excesses in secrecy and surveillance, a movement that Iceland MP Birgitta Jonsdottir discusses…
A New Front in War on Wikileaks
With Private Bradley Manning’s leak trial about to start and with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange still holed up in the Ecuador Embassy in London, “We Steal Secrets,” a new big-budget documentary purports to explain the controversy but has more the…
Hounding Julian Assange
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London rather than be extradited to Sweden to face sex-abuse accusations. But Assange’s ordeal reflects a larger and more troubling American hostility to truth-tellers who point the finger at…
Julian Assange’s Artful Dodge
Exclusive: Faced with extradition from London to Sweden to face sex-abuse allegations, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fled to the Ecuadorian embassy and asked for asylum, what ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern considers an artful dodge to avoid possible U.S. persecution.
Maligning Pvt. Manning
Classified documents allegedly leaked by Pvt. Bradley Manning have revealed the grim sometimes criminal truth about the U.S. government’s actions, and Manning has said that was his intent. But his own lawyers have portrayed him as a misfit, not a…
Robin Hood of the Information Age
The war on WikiLeaks continues with the U.S. government clamping down on the Web site’s funding sources and with its founder, Julian Assange, still in England battling extradition to Sweden. Sadly, the larger problem of a credulous news media parroting…
The Rise of Pro-Democracy Journalism
The old idea of journalism arming the people with facts they need for democracy to work has been betrayed by major U.S. news outlets, like the New York Times and Washington Post, which have instead aligned themselves with national power under…