Pentagon Papers lawyer on Obama, secrecy and press freedoms: 'worse than Nixon' [View all]

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Pentagon Papers lawyer on Obama, secrecy and press freedoms: 'worse than Nixon'

Career First Amendment and transparency advocate James Goodale sounds the alarm about the current president



Let's talk about some of the challenges to press freedom now.


The biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening. . . .

"The one case that is troublesome and is still out there as we speak is the case of James Risen, who was a journalist who was leaked national security information in respect to the warrantless wiretapping program, which was disclosed by The New York Times.

"He's won his case, but most people are going to be surprised if he can win it on appeal. It's been sitting on appeal for a year. Now what's going to happen — if the shoe drops and we're back to Judy Miller, it means Risen goes to jail. And if in fact it doesn't turn out that way and it turns out well, we'll have the question of whether the government will go to the Supreme Court and we will always have the question whether it will turn out well for the next Risen. And who's behind this one? Obama."

Could you talk a bit about President Obama's approach to classified information and press freedom?

Antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it's cuckoo."


Could you compare what we see in the Pentagon Papers and what we see in WikiLeaks?

Well, I think it's very much the same thing. We have a leak of classified information. And by the way — you've got to remember [Bradley] Manning's the leaker. Everyone says Assange is a leaker. He's not a leaker. He's the person who gets the information.

"So why we're so concerned about the prosecution of Assange is what he did is the same as what the Times did in the Pentagon Papers, and indeed what they did with WikiLeaks. The Times published on its website the very same material WikiLeaks published on its website. So if you go after the WikiLeaks criminally, you go after the Times. That's the criminalization of the whole process."

So you think that if John McCain or Mitt Romney were the president and doing this, there would be a different response?

We'd be screaming and yelling and the journalists would be going crazy. And that doesn't speak well of journalists."

Read the entire excellent interview here. This is from somebody who has worked on press freedom and excessive government secrecy for his entire career, including during the Bush years when he told PBS: "I think that Bush is as anti-press as the Nixon administration [was]". But citing Obama's unprecedented war on whistleblowers, targeting of core journalism, and expansion of radical secrecy doctrines, he's now sounding the alarm that Obama is worse to the point where basic press freedoms and transparency are seriously threatened.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/goodale-obama-press-freedoms-secrecy-nixon