Tuesday, May 14, 2013

And Then There Was Mediagate

The Omedia has tried in vain to ignore the unfolding scandals in Benghazi where the Obama administration got caught using the CIA to run an arms-running operation to arm Al Qaeda terrorists fighting to topple the Assad regime in Syria and the use of the IRS to target political enemies of the President, but  how will it ever be able to look at the Justice Department snooping through all of the phone records of the AP's reporters to learn who their government sources are? That's the latest bombshell disclosure to come out of Washington.

It all started when Republicans in Congress started complaining that national security officials within the Obama administration had been leaking classified counter-intelligence information in an effort to promote Obama's toughness on fighting terrorism. In response, the Justice Department obtained two months' worth of phone records for reporters working for the Associated Press. As the Washington Post describes the unusual move:
In a sweeping and unusual move, the Justice Department secretly obtained two months’ worth of telephone records of journalists working for the Associated Press as part of a year-long investigation into the disclosure of classified information about a failed al-Qaeda plot last year.
The AP’s president said Monday that federal authorities obtained cellular, office and home telephone records of individual reporters and an editor; AP general office numbers in Washington, New York and Hartford, Conn.; and the main number for AP reporters covering Congress. He called the Justice Department’s actions a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into newsgathering activities . . .
In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the AP’s president and chief executive, Gary B. Pruitt, said that the Justice Department sought information beyond what could be justified by any specific probe and demanded that the government return the phone records and destroy all copies.
“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt wrote to Holder. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.” . . .
Not surprisingly, the chief culprit behind the leaks at question is CIA Director John Brennan, who at the time was serving as Obama's chief counter-intelligence adviser at the White House. You may recall that Brennan was responsible for putting out phony information to the media immediately after the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, which could not have possibly taken place since the guy had been dead for about a decade. He's also the same guy who once ran the CIA post in Saudi Arabia which gave visas to 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. And he's the same guy who ran a company under contract with the State Department whose employees illegally accessed and tampered with Obama's passport file to scrub damaging information contained within it that Obama did not want to become public while Obama was a candidate for president and Brennan was serving as a national security adviser to his campaign.
Numerous senior government officials have been interviewed in connection with the investigation into the AP story. Among those questioned was John O. Brennan, who served as Obama’s counterterrorism adviser before becoming CIA director this year.
In his confirmation hearing in February, Brennan said he had cooperated voluntarily with the Justice Department and had been interviewed. He acknowledged speaking to former U.S. government officials who work as commentators on television news, but he denied sharing any classified information.
If this latest disclosure of unprecedented prying by the Obama administration into the media doesn't stir the mainstream media to begin providing the American people objective coverage of the actions of Barack Obama and the people who work for him, I don't know what will.

1 comment:

Flogger said...

Just one more predictable assault on freedom here in the USA. The complicity of the Mega-Media in carrying out the direction of the Government at least my life time goes back to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. We did of course have some Reporters back then who questioned the Governments version of events in Vietnam. The reporters referred to the official Press Releases as the 5 O'clock follies. Walter Cronkite had the courage to question the War in Vietnam.

I recall the lead up to Gulf War 2, the hype of yellow cake, and WMDs. The Mega-Media brought out a parade of "experts" to convince us Iraq was a serious threat to us.

We have: Fast and Furious, the Benghazi Shuffle, the IRS targeting certain groups, the various Organs of State Security investigating the Occupy Movement, and now the wire taps and/or phone taps of the AP.

We have the modern versions of Halderman, Erlichman, Mitchell, Dean, Liddy, and Hunt in power.

Our Justice Department has seen fit to ignore the corruption on Wall Street. Indeed the Motto of the Justice Department is Too Big to Fail too Big to Jail.

As long as we complain and do not try to upset the Oligarchy you might be left alone. Try to change or challenge the Oligarchy and you risk being a target.

Whistle blowers among them Julian Assange or Bradley Manning receive the full weight that the State can muster.