05/20/13 – Peter Hart – The Scott Horton Show

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And thanks.
First of all, can you give us the latest?
Are you up to date on what we're finding out about the expansion of the Associated Press scandal to include this Fox News reporter?
And what else is going on with that?
Well, that actually looks like it's predating the AP investigation in a way.
It was about a piece that James Rosen wrote in 2010 about North Korea.
And on the face of it, it's not a very surprising story.
I remember when it came out at the time that, according to intelligence sources, North Korea would respond to increased or enhanced sanctions on their country with some sort of nuclear test.
That's kind of conventional wisdom that you respond to sanctions with some sort of military action.
I guess the tip-off to people inside the government was that he said that this was coming directly from CIA or intelligence information from inside North Korea.
There was a State Department intelligence report that day that was only shared with a limited number of people.
And so they were, I guess, looking to figure out how to find the source of Rosen's report.
And that's where they're looking.
The way they're doing that is by going through some rather distressing surveillance of Rosen's emails to find the contacts between him and this State Department official.
And it's a little unusual because usually the government will say, well, we have to look at the reporter's notes or notebooks or emails in order to find this government source.
The government seems to be saying in this indictment that they consider Rosen a co-conspirator because he talked to this source and said, you know, I'm really interested in information about A, B, and C.
That, if that pans out, and if that is the government's approach here, then we really do see a distressing uptick and increase in the pressure that this administration is putting on investigative journalists of all stripes.
All journalists go to their sources to try to tell them what kind of information they're intrigued by, they're interested in.
They put pressure on sources to try to get some of that information because they think it's valuable to the public.
And if the government is saying, by talking to those sources and by encouraging them to share information, you are guilty of a crime, then we have a real profound imbalance in, and I think a misunderstanding, of how the Constitution works.
So this could be very, very big.
And I think it, in a way, is separate from the AP investigation but indicative of the same kind of mentality, where the government's power is seemingly unchecked.
Well, now, I mean, this really is, I don't know, I want to say unprecedented.
How precedented is this?
I don't know that anyone's ever seen anything quite like this.
You know, you have had cases where journalists commit an act that could be considered criminal in order to get information, and that makes them culpable.
In the case of a reporter for the Cincinnati Inquirer, back in the 90s, they were doing an investigation of Chiquita Bananas.
He got a password to the voicemail system so he could access voicemails to hear some of the conversations and the messages that were left inside the company, you know, sort of the chain of command.
He, by doing that, broke the law.
That was the argument against him.
And, you know, this was a case not where a government was operating but a corporation was saying, you know, no, we can bring some kind of litigation against your reporter for breaking into or hacking into our voicemail system.
It didn't matter that he was given the password by a whistleblower.
So we have seen cases where the tactics of the journalists come into question.
In this case, though, it doesn't appear that Rosen did anything like that.
The government is just obsessed with figuring out who talked to a reporter about something that, frankly, doesn't seem all that important.
And in that way, it's very similar to the AP story where, you know, those of us on the outside who don't wield government power and can't threaten journalists or government employees, we can't figure out what exactly happened with this story that so greatly compromised national security or the security of Americans.
As, you know, Attorney General Holder is saying, one of the worst leaks that put American lives in danger.
Well, how?
Well, we read the story.
We don't see it.
And so I think this is the part of this saga, whether you're looking at AP or Rosen or any of the other cases, where you're trying to figure out exactly who the government thinks they're protecting us from.
And that, I think, is the fundamental question is to what lengths will they go to squash internal whistleblowers, to squash, by virtue of that, independent investigative journalism, and why are they doing this?
What is the evidence that the United States or American citizens were harmed or potentially harmed by any of these leaks?
So we have, I think, a very distressing example of wild government overreach in the service of making sure people don't talk to reporters and making sure reporters can't find anyone to talk to.
Yeah.
Well, you know what I don't understand?
Not that I'm trying to tempt them.
Don't get me wrong.
But why don't we have an official secrets act like they have in England?
Because as it stands right now, the leaker can get in trouble.
I mean, up until today, I guess.
The leaker can get in trouble for being a government employee and leaking classified data if he wasn't told to do it.
But the reporters always, you know, he's got the First Amendment rights.
It's not his fault that somebody gave him a document, and then he's got the right to report it.
Simple as that.
But if they want to criminalize publishing a classified document, certainly they could come up with a national security excuse that would override the First Amendment and just do it with a statute, no?
I think that's possible.
And I think this is the debate you get into with partisans over government power.
You know, during the Bush years, it's cliche at this point to say Democrats would be howling about some of the actions of the Obama administration if the shoe was on the other foot.
And I think these are the policies that we have to think about.
One of the realities of these kinds of cases is that when you poll the public about them, it's just not polling very high as a concern.
People don't follow these things that closely.
And if there was an effort to come up with more stringent legislation or even executive action in order to punish the publication of secrets or of classified information just the same way as you would punish a whistleblower, it's possible that it could pass without a lot of public outcry, without a lot of public debate, without a lot of public protest, depending on who's in power.
And I think that's the dangerous part of this.is being wielded by the so-called most transparent administration in history.
Well, how would it be wielded by an administration that did not want to be so transparent and did not want to pretend to be so transparent?
So I think that's the danger.
You have to hope that the constitutional values that we understand as part of being a unique part of the American experience are going to be sustained.
You know, when you have politicians in both parties talking about the threat to national security by publishing leaks, by publishing whistleblowers' information, then I think you run into a much more dangerous scenario where there would be bipartisan agreement to do something really egregious in this area.
And I think that's the danger right now.
You know, people have observed the AP story saying, well, you know, there are a lot of Republicans who are kind of sitting on their hands over this because it's not something that they consider all that important.
And there are a lot of Democrats who are sort of giving the White House a pass.
And I think that's the dangerous moment you're in when both parties agree that something has to be done.
And, you know, the people in Washington often talk about bipartisanship as the goal of public policy.
And, you know, to those of us who aren't part of that game, it certainly looks like a problem more than a solution.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've always said this.
I don't know why I haven't succeeded in coining this phraseology and understanding throughout the whole damn society, because it's so true that the centrists in American politics are the extremists.
They're not the moderates.
The moderates are the people on the fringes who want to stop killing people, stop lying, stop stealing and all this horrible violence.
The center, as it's defined in American politics, is Joe Lieberman and John McCain, the liberal Republican, the conservative Democrat, who agree on every horrible thing that could possibly inflict on people here or abroad or anywhere else.
Yeah, and I think it's one of the problems with the way mainstream journalism is set up.
It's just to elevate those voices because they are, quote, unquote, moderate, bipartisan, seeking consensus, all of that.
You know, consensus is what has delivered us all kinds of policies that I think most people would find, at the time and then much later, to be unwise.
And I should have said Obama instead of Lieberman, because Lieberman's gone, and Obama is a very conservative Democrat.
He's Bill Clinton.
He's exactly what I'm talking about.
Oh, yeah.
The centrists are the extremists.
Yeah, and the problem with this, I think, for people who observe politics, too, is that, according to the Republicans, Barack Obama is practically a socialist.
So it gives an illusion of debate in some ways, that you have Obama way off on one side and the Republican leadership way off on the other side, and in the middle there is some common sense.
Well, if you take a more rational view, that Obama is sort of a center-to-center right Democrat, then you understand that the field that we're playing on runs from the middle to the right in certain ways.
And issues like civil liberties and international affairs and war and peace, I think the left-right distinctions kind of get real blurry.
Yeah, it's like a football game between the 40-yard lines.
Exactly.
And now, here's the other thing, too, and I know you're a very polite person, so I don't want to try to trick you into assenting to a mean statement of mine, so I'll try to say it as nicely as I can, but isn't it the case that many of these people in the media are simply bad people?
For example, the bipartisan moderate consensus is that Julian Assange and Bradley Manning ought to be crucified.
The media rushes to say, oh, yeah, they're very different than us.
We like to check all of our facts with the White House first before we publish them, says the New York Times and the AP and the rest of them.
We're not like, you go and take Manning and take Assange and go ahead and nail them to the wall if you want.
That's not what we're doing.
Just leave us alone because we're in a different business.
Instead of being, you know, decent human beings and doing the right thing and sticking up for the Bill of Rights and sticking up for their own profession and standing up for Julian Assange, they've assented this far to, yeah, that's right, it's a conspiracy for Assange to accept Manning's documents, all right?
And now their goose is cooked.
And so, I mean, in a way we're all negatively affected, of course, but it's fun to see something terrible happen to the AP in a way, right?
Don't they deserve to have terrible things happen to them for being such – see, I started out moderate – for being so – for lacking goodness on the WikiLeaks issue?
Well, I think one of the points we made from the very beginning with WikiLeaks was that other media outlets should take at least the step of designating WikiLeaks a journalistic outfit, a media outlet.
And the reason that's important – and this sounds like, well, you're just naming something, who cares?
The reason that's important is that once you establish that they are doing journalism just like we are at the AP or just like we are at the New York Times or just like we are at Fox News, then they are afforded certain constitutional rights, either literally, explicitly, or implicitly.
And when you look at the stories that way, when you decide that, you know, I don't agree with what Julian Assange always says, I don't agree with the political point of view of his website, but he's publishing information the same way we are, then it makes it much more easier to have solidarity across different kinds of media outlets.
And reporters do this sometimes.
I remember the beginning of the Obama administration, there was this sense that they were freezing out some of the Fox News reporters, and other reporters in Washington, D.C. stood up in defense of the Fox employees and said, come on, they're reporters just like us.
They might have a different point of view, but it's not fair to treat them that way.
If journalistic institutions and individuals treated WikiLeaks the same way, and said, listen, I don't agree, but I will defend your right to publish important information.
In fact, in some cases, we will publish it at the same time in different ways, because we're relying on the same documents, New York Times.
When you decide to treat other media outlets as worthy of that kind of protection, I think it fundamentally tilts the balance of power back towards you, and back towards freedom of information, and away from government, and away from secrecy.
But when you toss a media outlet aside and say, you know, they're not like us, when you have people on television talking about a drone strike on Julian Assange, when you ignore the Bradley Manning trial, basically, when you ignore what is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in our country right now, when he speaks out in court to explain what motivated him, and you ignore that news.
When someone smuggles out a tape recording of him, and you realize that all of the conspiracy theories you heard about Bradley Manning are false, that he's an articulate, well-spoken critic of U.S. government policies, and that's what motivated him.
When you hear that, and you decide not to publish it, you're saying that certain kinds of journalists are over there, and the rest of us are over here.
That's fine, but when the government starts snooping into your emails, then what do you do?
You know, when the government started investigating you for committing the sin of journalism, you didn't stand up for someone else.
And now it's much more difficult for people to extend the same kind of courtesy to you, to extend the same kind of outrage in your direction.
I think that's the fundamental problem.
Whether they're good people or not good people, you know, we can put it different ways.
But the fact of the matter is, if you do not treat these infringements on freedom of information, freedom of the press, outside your house, when the problem comes inside your house, people are going to stand there and say, look, where were you on WikiLeaks?
When did you stand up for freedom of information then?
That, I think, is the problem for these media outlets.
And, you know, conspiratorially speaking, if you are the government looking to exercise this power, media outlets that do not stand up for one another are the best kind.
You can go after Fox, and other reporters might say, well, it's just Fox, it's not me.
Or go for AP, well, you know, I don't work there.
Then you start naming them, and you realize that they've been snooping around on all kinds of outlets.
And these are the powerful media outlets.
What happens if they go for someone with a lot less power?
That, I think, is the fundamental, the most, I think, frightening aspect of all of this.
And it's something that I think people need to guard against.
And you have to look at every infringement as an outrage.
Because it doesn't matter that, you know, I might not like this guy from Fox.
I might not like what James Rosen has to report most of the time.
But you have to stand up and say the government snooping around his e-mails because they don't like what somebody told them is outrageous.
And you have to stand up on that principle.
Right.
And now, isn't it a fun little, just tiny parentheses here, that the story was that the government knew good and well that the new sanctions were going to provoke another nuclear bomb test, and they did it anyway.
Ha-ha.
Oh, well.
But, yeah, so to get back to the actual case here of this guy, James Rosen from Fox.
He is, what's happened here, correct me if I'm wrong on the details here.
I want to make sure that everybody understands, especially me.
What the government did here, in order to find out who was talking to him, this Fox News reporter from the State Department, and letting him know these facts, this point of view, conclusion, their report, whatever it was.
They legally framed him as an unindicted co-conspirator.
They basically opened a criminal investigation into the reporter, just not really to nail him to the wall, but just to be able to get the State Department guy through him.
And yet they've set a precedent on the way now, is sort of what's going on here, am I right?
That's what it looks like.
And I think that's what people are scratching their heads, looking around for some precedent for this kind of government action at all.
We've always been told that the point is to find the leaker, and not to go after the journalist, and that they would exercise all the available options until they, up until the necessity of searching a reporter's email, phone calls, that kind of thing.
With the AP, they skipped over that step and said, well, we just went and got the phone records because we're going to find out what we need to find out that way, and we're not even going to give you the opportunity to challenge this, the Associated Press or anyone else.
Fox, it remains to be seen what legal battles have gone on between the government and Fox News Channel, News Corp.
And hopefully we can find out more about this, and perhaps the silver lining here is that the company has tried to defend its reporter vigorously.
One would hope that's the case, but it does seem to be.
The argument has always been that when you go after whistleblowers, the effect it has on journalism is that it just dries up your sources, because people are unwilling to speak to reporters because they're afraid that they're going to get caught.
So now you have to teach sources how to buy disposable cell phones, and to call sources on those, and make sure that they're not speaking to an office phone anywhere.
These are the lengths that people are going to have to go in order to preserve this flow of information between sources and investigative journalists without the government knowing about it.
You know what's funny?
It is kind of a pleasant surprise to me that – I mean, I would have just assumed that anybody who's doing real journalism on this level is being watched, if not by the criminal division of the FBI, by the intelligence division anyway.
You know what I mean?
My wife, Larissa Alexandrovna, she did the national security beat for a long time, and she might as well have been a spy herself for all the ducking and covering and secret messages passing around and whatever.
She went to ultimate lengths to protect her sources' identities and her communications with them, and to think that any of these reporters would just sit at their AP desk while they're calling people and getting – well, I don't know.
Like you said, in the case of the AP scoop, it's not like they were even really scooping anything other than the government's ability to spin it even better for them.
I mean, there's a very real possibility that the scandal in the AP story is that someone inside the government was speaking too loosely to a group of former government officials and perhaps some reporters about what the CIA was up to.
Now, we can only speculate, because on its face, that AP story says the government busted up a bomb plot, and it was a bomb plot that the government revealed the next day.
So what exactly is the harm to U.S. national security by revealing this a couple of hours before the government talked about it?
So these are these cases where it doesn't look like the infraction is all that considerable.
As you put it with the Rosen story, the North Koreans say they're going to retaliate in some way if sanctions are – if the sanctions get tougher on their country.
Well, of course they will.
History tells us that that would be the path that they would pursue.
So what justifies snooping around to try to find the, quote-unquote, leaker in this case?
Well, it sounds like a Nixonian level of paranoia.
We're just – we've got to clog all the lakes, Henry.
And I think it's the reality of the national security state post-9-11.
You know, I was just watching Robert Greenwald's new film, The War on Whistleblowers, where you look at the extent that the government will go not because they are afraid of a whistleblower sharing sensitive information that could harm the country.
There's no evidence that in any of these cases that's what's going on.
You're talking about whistleblowers who are alarmed that the NSA is breaching the fundamental constitutional rights of every American in a dragnet spying operation.
You know, this is the kind of thing the government doesn't want you to know because they don't want you to know it, not because it does some great damage.
You know, a whistleblower who says the Coast Guard, through faulty contracting practices, has unsafe boats out in the water.
The communications equipment is going to go bad if it gets wet.
You know, and this is somebody whose career is ruined because he spoke out and he spoke to a journalist.
These are not cases where our security or our rights are in breach.
In fact, it's exactly the opposite.
And the extent to which the government will go to shut down those avenues of communication and to harass those people is to send a message to them and to anyone like them that if you speak up, either internally or especially to a journalist, we will go after you.
And we will make your life miserable and we'll make the lives of the reporters you talk to miserable as well.
So, you know, right now we're in this, what hopefully is an era where there's going to be some pushback.
But you could just as easily imagine that we're at the beginning of this long slide down a hill where, in the name of national security, invoking the memory of 9-11, the government can make all kinds of claims and take all kinds of restrictive actions.
And the public is either going to be lied to or manipulated or emotionally blackmailed with the specter of 9-11 and another terrorist attack to say, listen, this is just the way we have to do business from now on.
I think that's the real scandal here.
You know, Rosen's story is his story.
The AP story is their story.
These, you know, in isolation are troubling.
As part of a larger trend, they're outrageous.
Right.
Well, and, you know, let's see.
Greenwald today at The Guardian is quoting a guy named James Goodale, a Democracy Now!
guest, as saying at least it's estimated that the Obama administration has classified 7 million documents in one year.
So the entire operations of the government basically are classified at this point.
And for the people to know anything about what the empire is up to is for them to be reading the leak.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's the problem with all of this is that, you know, big stories and small stories, I think, are treated the same way by the government when they're looking to pursue whistleblowers and to pursue investigative journalists.
It doesn't matter the scope of the story.
They're trying to send a message that don't dare speak out.
And that message is going to be heard.
There are very few people who work inside the government who are going to want to risk jail time, risk the end of their careers in order to try to tell the truth.
It's an extraordinary bar to set.
You know, you have to be willing to watch the FBI descend upon your house and leave with all the contents of your computers and your notebooks in order to tell a story that you hope will have some impact.
It's very difficult to expect very many people to behave that way.
And the lesson from the last four years in particular is, you know, we're going to find you.
Right.
Yeah, and it's not just, you know, these Democrats, this Obama administration.
It's not just, you know, more prosecutions.
And under the Espionage Act, like they're all traitors to the Russians or something for whistleblowing, more than all the other administrations combined.
It's now more than double all the other administrations combined.
It's absolutely out of control.
I'm sorry we're so short on time.
I'm not going to be able to ask you anything about Syria reporting at all, but I'm going to beg everybody to go read your website, FAIR.org, about it.
But can you tell us real quickly here in the next, say, minute and a half, about your piece, about the survey on opinions regarding the killing of civilians?
Everybody listen close to this.
The survey on killing civilians?
Yeah, wasn't that at FAIR.org?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Killing civilians is more popular than you'd think, especially among, oh, it wasn't by you, but still it's your website.
Especially among pundits.
Yeah, you know, we try to tally up all the examples of some of the examples of pundits, sort of bloodthirsty pundits calling for retribution and revenge and attacks on civilians.
And the interesting thing is that when you look at published polls around the world, this is not a very popular idea, and we're, I think, part of the propaganda system here is we're taught to normalize this idea that you need to want to go hit back or you need to want to go attack, whether it's Serbia or Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.
And the interesting thing is that most of the rest of the world doesn't feel this way, particularly in Muslim countries, where we are taught they are led around believing that they must attack in response to any offense against their god or their prophet.
As a matter of fact, the only people who are that bloodthirsty are the people who are on American television pretending to be pundits and newscasters.
Yeah, well, and it's amazing the discrepancy, too.
I mean, I think you won't be surprised, but you will be shocked if you go and read this piece at FAIR.org.
I mean, this is really something else on the blog there.
Killing civilians is more popular than you'd think, especially among pundits.
Yeah, shocked but not surprised, I think is the best way to put it.
Thanks so much for your time, Peter.
Great.
Thanks, Scott.
And I forget exactly his title, but he's the boss, I think, over there at FAIR.
Fairness and accuracy in reporting.
And they do really good work no matter who's the president, which is important, I think, you know?
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