Rising Hegemon
Nice of the AP to notice what the rest of us have been complaining about for years.
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
...
...the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
And why exactly?
Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.If the U.S. had just dispatched a drone we'd have two constitutionally disturbing uses of power in one.
Give it another Administration or two and it'll happen.
4 comments:
You don't need to have an elaborate statistical formula to transform bake times just for a muffin . The right away step to necessitate is to get hold of recommendations.
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And Firedoglake has disappeared from the face of the earth this morning. Coincidence???.
Ever since people in the Nixon administration considered murdering Jack Anderson, the press should have been able to figure out that no administration is "your friend," and that currying favor in exchange for access ultimately makes one a stooge for that administration and for the national security state apparatus.
The AP, especially under Ron Fournier, kissed the ass of every Bush official possible, instead of going after them hammer and tongs during a time of extraordinary expansion of the powers of the national security state, so I'm not feeling quite as sympathetic as I might otherwise, just because they've been bitten by those expanded powers during Obama's administration.
AP wasn't an adversary during the Bush years, and had they been, had they pushed back against some truly dangerous usurpations of power by the Bushies, they might not find themselves being browbeaten by the Obamabots today.
Obama's just plain stupid to pursue these whistleblower and leak prosecutions. They naturally and inevitably lead to abuses of the rights of the press, and in doing so, Obama simply proves that he's become a stooge, too, of the national security extremists. But, let's not forget that the AP, along with a long list of other news organizations, set the stage for this by exhibiting far too much obsequiousness toward the Bushies.
this didn't seem to matter under georgee.
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