Obama War on Freedom of the Press

The NY Times reporter James Risen may be in jail weeks from now for refusing to reveal his sources in a case first involving George W Bush and then aggressively pursued by President Obama and Eric Holder. There is a petition in support of Risen, I invite all to sign it.  In an article in The Guardian, Rises says about Obama "He’s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”.  Those are pretty strong words, but a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists tells the tale, with nearly every journalist interviewed calling this administration the most hostile to the press in history.

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations.  

 “This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times.  

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote earlier this year, “it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.”  

“President Obama had said that default should be  disclosure,” Times reporter Shane told me. “The culture they’ve created is not one that favors disclosure.”  The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

Has Too Big to Jail Finally Been Overcome?

We finally have a felony conviction, aiding and abetting tax evasion, for the major bank Credit Suisse, but what are the penalties?  For starters the bank will be fined $2.6 billion, a fair hunk of change to be sure, but the CEO Brady Dougan said this in a press statement, so where's the beef?

Dougan said the settlement had had little impact on business. “We have found no instances where clients cannot do business with us,” he said. “Our discussions with clients have been very reassuring and we haven’t seen very many issues at all.”

So much for feeling too much pain, now does he go to jail?  Not a chance in my opinion, even if Switzerland extradited him which they won't. Then there's the matter of the tax evaders, Credit Suisse hasn't been required to reveal who they are so the IRS can collect taxes from them, as well as prosecute them.  That has Senators Carl Levin and John McCain puzzled too after they did all the investigative work that led to the conviction.

Senators Carl Levin and John McCain welcomed the $2.6bn fine of the bank announced Monday but said more needed to be done. Levin and McCain led the permanent subcommittee on investigations team that uncovered much of the wrongdoing at the bank.

In a statement, Levin said it was “appropriate” that Credit Suisse had been held criminally liable for aiding and abetting tax evasion – the first bank of this scale to held criminally liable for 20 years.

He said the fine struck “an important blow against tax evasion through bank secrecy”.

“But it is a mystery to me why the US government didn’t require as part of the agreement that the bank cough up some of the names of the US clients with secret Swiss bank accounts. More than 20,000 Americans were Credit Suisse account holders in Switzerland, the vast majority of whom never disclosed their accounts as required by US law. This leaves their identities undisclosed, with no accountability for taxes owed. The changes Credit Suisse has agreed to make to its practices are long overdue and welcome, but must be carefully monitored,” he said.

McCain said he was “gratified” by the Justice Department’s decision to require Credit Suisse to plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing. “In such cases, it is vitally important for all Americans to know that no financial institution is ‘too big to prosecute,’” he said. But he added that questions remained.

“Over the next few days, I look forward to reviewing this guilty plea closely to see whether it appropriately holds officers, directors and key executives individually accountable and whether the plea will be sufficient to help deter similar misconduct in the future,” he said.

In The Guardian story, they interviewed  John Coffee, Adolf A Berle professor of law at Columbia Law School, and he said.

“It is less than a severe sanction when no officers are indicted, when the settlement does not require the dismissal of any employees and where they do not get the names of these US customers,” he said. He said other regulators could take further action, the SEC could bar it from being a money manager, but that was not going to happen.

“Mary Jo White [chair of the SEC] does not want to inconvenience a major bank over a little thing like a federal felony conviction,” he said.

JP Morgan Gets a Record Fine

The serial financial offender JP Morgan is still trying to negotiate its way out of criminal liability for its misdeeds over the last decade, but finally the DOJ is through playing nice with criminals and while proposing a US record fine of $13 Billion, they refused to allow JP Morgan to do the standard "Admit No Guilt" settlement, and the DOJ may charge some of the big fish in the firm with crimes.

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (Reuters) - JPMorgan Chase & Co has reached a tentative $13 billion agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to settle a range of mortgage issues, a source familiar with the talks said on Saturday.
The tentative deal does not release the bank from criminal liability, a factor that had been a major sticking point in the discussions, the source said.
As part of the deal, the bank will continue to cooperate in criminal inquiries into certain individuals involved in the conduct at issue, the source, who declined to be identified.

JPMorgan is seeking a single settlement to resolve all claims from federal and state agencies over its mortgage-related liabilities stemming from the bust in house prices.

NSA Whistleblower

A man of principle, Edward Snowden claims to be the whistleblower who leaked documents to the Guardian voluntarily revealed his identity, opening himself to the unprincipled wrath of the Obama administration, who have shown unswerving dedication to persecuting whistleblowers. 

"I have no intention of hiding who I am because I have done nothing wrong."

The Obama administration has shown itself willing to aggressively pursue those who leak confidential information, and Snowden says that he fully expects to be held accountable for what he did, but he remains unapologetic.
"I am not afraid, because this is the choice I've made," he told The Guardian
Noting that he enjoys a relatively comfortable life - a stable career, a girlfriend with whom he lived in Hawaii, a close relationship with family - Snowden said he is "willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

Good for him, I hope millions of Americans stand up to support him.

What will they do with all those phone records?

What to do with all that data?  Fight terrorists?  Maybe.  Intimidate anybody they don't like?  Maybe that too.

Let's take an ambitious NSA employee and give him a list of all "sex for service" ads in Backpage and another list of all the phone numbers of people in the legislative branch, why heck just for grins let's check out the phone usage of FISA judge Roger Vinson and see who he's been calling lately too.  What do you think they'll find?  Who's going to stop them from doing just that?  Ron Wyden and the ACLU were right to warn darkly about the consequences of illegal spying.

Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a March 2012 letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that most Americans would “stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act.”
“As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows,” the senators wrote in the letter. “This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

The blackmail notion has occurred to other bloggers as well.

Blackmailing citizens critical of the government seemed like a distant hypothetical, until we learned that the IRS was auditing Tea Party groups and journalists were being wiretapped. Nefarious actors inside the government like to abuse national security programs for political ends, and that should make us all (even more) suspect of government spying.
Some government secrecy is necessary for national security purposes. But it’s justified based on our trust that the information will be used with care. With every passing scandal, the justification for these types of programs becomes more and more questionable.

 Should you be worried too?

Government Spying on Everybody

In a free and open society you take for granted that if you've done nothing wrong, the government will leave you alone.  Today in a story in The Guardian it was revealed that the NSA has a record of every phone call made through Verizon's network, and it's a certainty the other carriers are feeding the NSA too.  Ron Wyden has been warning about the existence of such a program, but he could not be specific because he would be revealing "Top Secret" information.  He said:

In a Senate floor speech in December, Wyden hinted at classified information he had received but could not share due to Senate rules that indicated the law “on Americans’ privacy has been real, and it is not hypothetical.”
“When the public finds out that these secret interpretations are so dramatically different than what the public law says, I think there’s going to be extraordinary anger in the country,” he told the Huffington Post the following month.

Well, I think he's right about the extraordinary anger part, but he did vote for the bill that authorized this action, as did most of his colleagues in congress in a huge betrayal of our civil liberties.  So my note to Congress is "You broke it, now you fix it".  The ACLU had this to say.

"Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability."

Be sure to let your representative in Congress know what you think about this.

Secrecy or Democracy?

According to the ACLU web page on government secrecy,

Simply put, government secrecy is incompatible with a healthy democracy. As U.S. District Court Judge Damon Keith said, "Democracies die behind closed doors."

The government tendency to classify everything grew legs under George Bush and if anything has accelerated under Obama, despite his promise of a more transparent government. In a recent blog post on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood writes,

he Inspector General at each government agency that classifies national security information is required by the Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 to review the agency’s classification program as part of an effort to combat overclassification.  Those reviews are now underway.  But if properly performed, they could put the Inspectors General at odds with senior officials at their agency who habitually overclassify.

But at the Department of Justice, “misclassification of material” is arguably attributable to the senior leadership of the Department, if not the White House itself.
On May 22, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote to Congress to formally acknowledge that four U.S. citizens had been killed in counterterrorism operations, including Anwar al-Aulaqi and three others.  The death of Al-Aulaqi (and all but one of the others) at the hands of U.S. forces had of course been previously reported and had long been implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by U.S. officials.
But remarkably, Attorney General Holder wrote that this information “until now has been properly classified.”
In other words, information that everyone around the world who cared to know had already known for years was, according to Attorney General Holder’s letter to Congress, “properly classified” until May 22, 2013.  The disconnect between objective reality and official classification policy could hardly be more apparent.

Given that Holder and Obama are maintaining their status as serial secrecy advocates, we'll have to see what the DOJ comes up with to combat the tendency.  I am not hopeful.

US brands whistleblowers as terrorists

The US is going over the top in pursuit of whistleblowers and the press as the military trial of Bradley Manning gets going, and as The Guardian reported:

On Monday Bradley Manning, the young man who leaked those diplomatic cables, goes on trial in a military court in Maryland. He has pleaded guilty to 10 charges which would put him behind bars for 20 years. But that is not enough for the US military that has levelled 22 charges against him, including espionage and "aiding the enemy", which carries up to life in prison without parole. At the time Manning released the diplomatic cables and military reports he wrote: "I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are. Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public." He hoped by releasing the cables he would spark "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms".
If the leaks laid bare the hypocritical claim that the US was exporting democracy, then the nature of his incarceration and prosecution illustrate the fallacy of its insistence that it is protecting both freedom and security at home. Manning's treatment since his arrest in May 2010 has involved a number of serious human rights violations.
At various times since his arrest he has been held in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours a day for five months in succession, held in an 8ft by 6ft cell, been forced to sleep naked apart from an anti-suicide smock for two months, and been woken up to three times a night while on suicide watch. Following an investigation, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Ernesto Méndez, last year argued Manning had been "subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

Meanwhile, the case against him indicates the degree to which the war on terror (a campaign that has been officially retired describing a legal, military and political edifice that remains firmly intact) privileges secrecy over not only transparency but humanity. This is exemplified in one of his leak's more explosive revelations – a video that soon went viral showing two Reuters employees, among others, being shot dead by a US Apache helicopter in Iraq. They were among a dozen or so people milling around near an area where US troops had been exposed to small arms fire. The soldiers, believing the camera to be a weapon, opened fire, leaving several dead and some wounded.
"Look at those dead bastards," says one pilot. "Nice," says the other. When a van comes to pick up the wounded they shoot at that too, wounding two children inside. "Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," one of the pilots says.

This administration has pulled out all the stops to preserve secrecy and stifle First Amendment rights, a poor path for a President who advocated greater transparency.  Meanwhile Eric Holder faces accusations of committing perjury when he testified that the free press was not being targeted criminally, but was discovered to have signed off on a warrant naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible co-conspirator in a leak case.

Freedom Of The Press?

The Department of Justice secretly obtained the phone records of the Associated Press in what the AP calls a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations.  The records were for a 2 month period and included the office, home and cell numbers of  individual reporters and editors as well as phones in various AP offices and the AP line at the House of Representatives.  The records would not have included the contents of the calls, but would have shown the phone numbers of people or agencies that reporters called, and could have included numbers of those who called reporters and the length of the conversations.  The records were from a year ago, and the world is only now learning that it happened.  The reason behind the tap is unclear, but prosecutors have been investigating how the AP learned of an al Qaeda plot in Yemen before it was public last year.
Reactions came from around the world, unanimously negative.

• The American Civil Liberties Union called the subpoenas "an unacceptable abuse of power."  “Freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy, and that freedom often depends on confidential communications between reporters and their sources.”
• "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of the Associated Press and its reporters," Gary B. Pruitt, president and chief executive of the Associated Press, said in a letter to Holder.
• The Guardian said  "Although Obama was elected on a liberal ticket in 2008 and again in 2012, his administration has mounted a sustained campaign through the courts and other means against whistleblowers, particularly in relation to what it claims are sensitive intelligence matters."
• House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) called the DOJ subpoena “very disturbing” in an article in The Hill.
• The National Press Club said "This appears to be a gross violation of press freedom," said National Press Club President Angela Greiling Keane, a Bloomberg News reporter. "If there's a good explanation for this, the public has a right to hear it promptly."
• 
  Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/05/13/5417366/national-press-club-requests-explanation.html#storylink=cpy
  Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement emailed to AP: "I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation.

Yeah, I want to hear it too.

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Bernie Sanders on Too Big To Jail

Bernie Sanders never rests, and now he is proposing we actually do something about the threats to our economy.  I hope he finally gets some support from the administration that seems more concerned with protecting the Too Big To Jail crowd.

Sanders said his bill would give Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew 90 days to make a list of commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and insurance companies that he deems too big to fail. One year later, the Treasury Department would be required to break up those financial institutions identified by the secretary.
“If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” Sanders said.

Rand Paul scores a victory

Almost everybody (except Ron Wyden and a smattering of Republican Senators) in Washington thought the filibuster by Rand Paul was a Don Quixote gesture, but he actually garnered quite a big score when he got a direct reply from Eric Holder of the DOJ.  The note was short and to the point. 
"It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: 'Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?'" Holder wrote Paul.
"The answer to that question is no."
Paul declared he was satisfied with Holder's note, adding on CNN "it took a root canal to get it" 

Bank Prosecution-Free Zone

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and the Senate Banking Committee are making a lot of noise about big banks never being prosecuted, but yet Eric Holder has not been moved to action.  What does it take to wake them up?  My own thought is that the inquiry should go to President Obama and he should justify his administrations acceptance of criminal money laundering for drug lords and other criminals.

Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was concerned that the size of some banks had made prosecuting them difficult because their downfall could damage the financial system and economy.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) contended that this claim suggested that "we have a prosecution-free zone for large banks in America."  "Does this create a fundamental concern about a fair system of justice across America?" he asked.

"Yes," responded Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) suggested the matter would not end at the close of the hearing, requesting the DOJ officials be summoned before the committee to explain their rationale for not pursuing criminal charges. Warner said he would take up the matter with the committee's chairman, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), who attended another hearing.

My thoughts?  So when does someone go to jail folks (Obama and Holder)?  I'm hearing lots of noise, but no action.

Another Day, Another Crooked Bank Deal

I don't know what it takes to ever get a banker felon sent to jail, they are still enjoying freedom to steal anything that isn't nailed down.  The Royal Bank of Scotland is the latest to get a $600 million fine from the DOJ.  In a rather disgusting piece of information, the guy who is supposed to be prosecuting them said

"These are extraordinary results, and our investigation is far from finished." said U.S. assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer. "Our message is clear: no financial institution is above the law."

Uh, yeah right, I don't see any of those crooks in jail.

Justice Denied, Too Big to Jail

I am appalled that this program is not on the front page of every newspaper and news program in the land and a major source of scandal for the Obama Administration.  I have detailed before how Jeff Merkley has demanded an explanation from Eric Holder about the "Too big to jail" policy at the DOJ, and so far has had no response.  This is a total breakdown in the rule of law in our country.

PBS Frontline "The Untouchables" program did an hour show detailing how the Obama Administration has disabled the rule of law for Wall Street.  As this article in Salon shows, it is now an official policy that no large bankers will go to jail.

"Rooted in historical comparison, it contrasts how the Reagan administration prosecuted thousands of bankers after the now-quaint-looking S&L scandal with how the Obama administration betrayed the president’s explicit promise to “hold Wall Street accountable” and refused to prosecute a single banker connected to 2008′s apocalyptic financial meltdown.
The piece by PBS reporter Martin Smith looks at how Obama has driven federal prosecutions of financial crimes down to a two-decade low. It also documents the rampant and calculated mortgage securities fraud perpetrated by the major Wall Street banks, who, not coincidentally, were using some of the profits they made to become among President Obama’s biggest campaign donors."

HSBC saga Part 2 Too Big to Jail

I received a reply from Jeff Merkley about my email on HSBC. I had sent him an Email on the subject on Dec 13, 2012 about HSBC getting a pass from the DOJ.  He was already working on the DOJ since he sent a letter to Eric Holder at the DOJ that same day wanting to know why they were not prosecuting the banksters.

He said, "I am deeply concerned that four years after the financial crisis, the Department appears to have firmly set the precedent that no bank, bank employee, or bank executive can be prosecuted even for serious criminal actions if that bank is a large, systemically important financial institution,” wrote Merkley.  “This ‘too big to jail’ approach to law enforcement, which deeply offends the public’s sense of justice, effectively vitiates the law as written by Congress.  Had Congress wished to declare that violations of money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, and a number of other illicit financial actions would only constitute civil violations, it could have done so.  It did not.”

I am gratified that he was on top of the issue, I wish that Earl Blumenauer and Ron Wyden were joining in the chorus.