Jeffrey Sterling was an attorney working for the CIA as the handler for a Russian covert agent whose mission was to subvert the Iranian nuclear weapon program by feeding them faulty designs for the electrical firing mechanism of a nuclear explosive device. James Risen is one of the most celebrated investigative journalists of the last 20 years.
Sterling informed Risen of the program he oversaw for the CIA. Risen dedicated a chapter in his book to it.
The Bush administration opened an investigation into the incident. Obama's Holder-led DOJ oversaw a criminal prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling.
At no point that I can find was Risen ever criminally charged for anything. For a period of several years, Risen fought a subpoena compelling him to testify, naming his source (Sterling had already been indicted). That subpoena was appealed all the way to SCOTUS and ultimately held up. Holder, who already had enough evidence to convict Sterling, ultimately backed off. Risen was never compelled to name his source.
To me, this is sort of an acid-test case. It is hard to imagine a more consequential singular leak than one that reveals a carefully-planned human-intelligence counter-proliferation mission against a hostile state. Sterling had a position that appears to have involved the utmost level of trust --- he wasn't a sysadmin disquieted by the documents he was uncovering, but an operations officer intimately familiar with and actively participating in the operation he revealed. There is a colorable argument that there should in a truly free government no state secrets. My sense is, if you think this leak was praiseworthy and the government's investigation "overreaching", as the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School writes here, you kind of have to sign on to that argument, don't you?
Two more thoughts:
First, Risen is a startlingly effective journalist, one of the best of his generation, up there on the leaderboard with Seymour Hersh. The lede of this piece sets up a narrative about a reporter persecuted by his own government. But (a) Risen wasn't prosecuted at all, and (b) his serious legal entanglements seem to involve a single case on his long resume, which resume is recounted at some length in this piece. The narrative effect is to suggest that the government fought as hard against his NSA and torture stories as they did against this one. But that's an argument that doesn't seem to be supported by evidence.
Second, more of a question: I've tried to read the indictments of all the leakers on the roster of the Obama administration leak prosecutions, often said to be the most zealous of any President. At one point in this piece, Coll states outright that the Holder DOJ had imprisoned "a half dozen" sources for journalists. That doesn't square numerically with the prosecutions that have been reported on, nor are most of those prosecutions about people who were sources for journalists (apart from Chelsea Manning).
This timeline shows 3 indictments for journalistic sources during the Obama administration (I'm not counting Kiriakou, who was his own source, and leaked CIA secrets during the promotion of a book he wrote, but even if I did, that's 4 indictments, not a half-dozen, and even fewer imprisonments).
So, back to my question:
Who are the half-dozen imprisoned journalistic sources Coll is referring to? I'm sure he's not just making it up!
FWIW: I have done some research here; I asked a similar question the last time the sound bite about Obama/Holder's leak prosecution zealousness came up:
Yes, the evidence would be every Espionage Act prosecution under the Obama administration. Which are more numerous than the total of every previous administration since 1917.
If you could justify how that's not worrisome that would be great.
If you read the link I posted upthread, I won't have to repeat my response to the claim that Obama is more zealous about the Espionage Act than his predecessors.
> It is hard to imagine a more consequential singular leak than one that reveals a carefully-planned human-intelligence counter-proliferation mission against a hostile state.
It is hard for me to get up in arms about Iran seeking a nuclear power program when:
* In the 1950s Iran had a democratic, secular parliament, which was overthrown and turned into a puppet dictatorship by the US and UK because Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil resources.
* The nuclear power industry in the US used to run magazine ads in the 1970s boasting about how they were "proliferating" nuclear energy to Iran ( http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/sh... ), with Henry Kissinger making statements about how we should encourage Iran to have nuclear power etc.
* At the end of the 1970's, despite the Savak secret police torturing and murdering secular left wing opposition to the dictatorship (with CIA help), Iranian nationalists still managed to rise up and overthrow the puppet dictatorship - with the main force being the religious right, partly because the government had killed off and driven into exile a lot of the secular left wing opposition.
* The US takes the Shah in and Iranians believe due to this are planning another coup. The US declares Iran an enemy and seeks a worldwide ban on arms import to Iran. The US sends Donald Rumsfeld to Iraq and begins arming Saddam Hussein to fight Iran and the Kurds. When a Kurdish uprising occurs in the north, the US lifts sanctions against Iraq and sends helicopters to Iraq so Hussein can gas the Kurds. The US continues to arm Hussein after gassing the Kurds. Decades later, the US sanctimoniously uses this as one of the reasons to invade Iraq. Then Reagan begins secretly and illegally arming Iran, so as to fund another illegal and secret war against the democratically elected government of Nicaragua.
* One of the major issues in Middle East nuclear proliferation is that Israel is a nuclear power in the region. All calls from Iran and other Middle East countries to address this in a broad peace plan or anti-proliferation plan are rejected by the US. The "only democracy in the Middle East" (which controls the West Bank but "democratically" forbids Palestinians there a vote in the Knesset, although some Russian Jew just off an airplane can move to a West Bank settlement and vote) is de facto a nuclear power and the US declares it can be and Iran and other Middle East countries can't be.
So it is hard for me to shed a tear that the US can't persecute its own press for reporting on its hypocritical, sanctimonious attitude towards Iran.
So then there are two possible positions you could have that would condone indiscriminate leaks to the press of counter-proliferation projects.
(1) You could believe that in a democracy there can never be secrets of any sort kept from the citizenry, or least, no such secrets can have decades-lived longevity; maybe it's OK to keep an "operational" secret for a few years, but by the time Risen got to it, the secret had to be revealed.
(2) You can believe that the prevention of proliferation of nuclear weapons is not a significant enough national interest to justify secrecy.
It's chilling how far those in power will go to silence even the possibility of dissent that honest journalism provides. In this case, the Obama justice department inherited a case from the Bush era and fought it all the way to the supreme court to get a journalist to incriminate his alleged source.
The information disclosed by Risen was already out there and the damage was done. That it embarrased a previous administration did not seem to matter. The DOJ seems to have wanted at least one head to roll in order to send a message to government insiders: "talk to the press at your own peril."
First, Eric Holder did not ultimately compel Risen to name his source.
Second, this wasn't a corruption or torture report, and the stakes weren't "embarrassment". The CIA turned a Russian nuclear engineer who fed to Iran flawed plans for the electrical firing mechanism for a nuclear explosive device. Risen learned about that from that Russian engineer's CIA handler, and after the NYT spiked a story he wrote about it, wrote a chapter a book about it.
It wasn't necessary to ultimately compel Risen to have a chilling effect on journalism, much like it wasn't necessary to ultimately imprison Thomas Drake for the rest of his life to have a chilling effect on IC employees who seek to expose waste, fraud, and abuse.
I agree with your perspective on the wisdom of Risen's reporting, but still think we should celebrate the heroic act of journalists protecting their sources even when they're on the hot-seat.
One doesn't necessarily have to be indicted or prosecuted for people to feel as though their rights are threatened. Needlessly forceful/aggressive FBI raids (Binney), wiretapping press organizations (AP), endless secret grand juries (WL), and border searches (Poitras) are all examples of the many ways USG has intimidated actual and potential whistleblowers and reporters.
>Second, this wasn't a corruption or torture report,
where nobody has been punished too despite the severity of the crimes.
>The CIA turned a Russian nuclear engineer who fed to Iran flawed plans for the electrical firing mechanism for a nuclear explosive device.
sounds like that story where "flawed" plans happened to be a great help to Iran nuclear bomb program and allowed for significant progress in the program. One can't not to wonder whether the "flaws" were real, just insufficient, flaws or just a cover up, and the real goal was to actually sell the info and speed up the Iranian program. With CIA and Russian double-agents you would never know. One would say "follow the money" but it is obviously impossible here. So the only thing left is just what the reporters do - shed the light. Undermining NPT - that is what actually happened, under whatever premises or covers - is among the largest threats to the world (incl. obviously US) security. Be it due to ineptitude or evil will - without bringing it to light there is absolutely nothing to prevent such things from happening again. This check on the rest of the powers is exactly what the "4th branch of power" exists for, and that is exactly why the rest of the powers so fighting it.
> silence even the possibility of dissent that honest journalism provides
The crime being prosecuted is not dissent. Dissent enjoys nearly unlimited legal protection in the U.S.
The crime being prosecuted is the disclosure of classified information by government employees. This is often accompanied by, but completely independent of, criticizing the government. We can and have prosecuted people for leaking secrets that made the government look good, i.e. people who divulged too much detail about the Bin Laden assassination.
If you voluntarily become an agent of the government, you voluntarily give away your right to criticize it without consequences. We haven't had a draft in a hell of a long time; there's really nothing wrong with that.
Stop equating dissent and disclosure of classified information. They are completely different things. You can criticize the government without sharing its secrets; you can share its secrets in a way that glorifies it.
You can't always intelligently dissent from what you are told by the government without an insider providing you details, however.
We don't even know what our own government is doing in our name. We need its secrets so we can hold them accountable to what we are actually willing to have happen.
Otherwise, we are mere passengers or rubber stamps for their bad behavior-- which is the case, currently.
Wow. The NYR reporting about the supine posture of the national press has been fantastic, and this is another example, one of the most revealing I've read.
Sterling informed Risen of the program he oversaw for the CIA. Risen dedicated a chapter in his book to it.
The Bush administration opened an investigation into the incident. Obama's Holder-led DOJ oversaw a criminal prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling.
At no point that I can find was Risen ever criminally charged for anything. For a period of several years, Risen fought a subpoena compelling him to testify, naming his source (Sterling had already been indicted). That subpoena was appealed all the way to SCOTUS and ultimately held up. Holder, who already had enough evidence to convict Sterling, ultimately backed off. Risen was never compelled to name his source.
To me, this is sort of an acid-test case. It is hard to imagine a more consequential singular leak than one that reveals a carefully-planned human-intelligence counter-proliferation mission against a hostile state. Sterling had a position that appears to have involved the utmost level of trust --- he wasn't a sysadmin disquieted by the documents he was uncovering, but an operations officer intimately familiar with and actively participating in the operation he revealed. There is a colorable argument that there should in a truly free government no state secrets. My sense is, if you think this leak was praiseworthy and the government's investigation "overreaching", as the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School writes here, you kind of have to sign on to that argument, don't you?
Two more thoughts:
First, Risen is a startlingly effective journalist, one of the best of his generation, up there on the leaderboard with Seymour Hersh. The lede of this piece sets up a narrative about a reporter persecuted by his own government. But (a) Risen wasn't prosecuted at all, and (b) his serious legal entanglements seem to involve a single case on his long resume, which resume is recounted at some length in this piece. The narrative effect is to suggest that the government fought as hard against his NSA and torture stories as they did against this one. But that's an argument that doesn't seem to be supported by evidence.
Second, more of a question: I've tried to read the indictments of all the leakers on the roster of the Obama administration leak prosecutions, often said to be the most zealous of any President. At one point in this piece, Coll states outright that the Holder DOJ had imprisoned "a half dozen" sources for journalists. That doesn't square numerically with the prosecutions that have been reported on, nor are most of those prosecutions about people who were sources for journalists (apart from Chelsea Manning).