James Goodale: “Obama Worse than Nixon” on Press Freedom

For those of you unaware, James Goodale was chief counsel to the New York Times when they published the Pentagon Papers.  In this excellent interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, he warns all Americans, in particular journalists, about the significance of the U.S. government’s prosecution of Wikileaks.  He notes that what Wikileaks did was no different from what the New York Times did back in the 1970’s.  They broke news that the powerful didn’t want exposed.  That is the heart and soul of journalism, and if that is criminalized, so will be the profession of journalism itself.  It’s a full on attack against free speech.  From the CJR:

James Goodale has a message for journalists: Wake up. In his new book, Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Goodale, chief counsel to The New York Times when its editors published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, argues that President Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was.

The Obama administration has prosecuted more alleged leakers of national security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, a course critics say is overly aggressive. Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a March op-ed that the administration “has a particular, chilling intolerance” for those who leak. If the Obama administration indicts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, Goodale argues, the president will have succeeded where Nixon failed by using the act to “end-run” the First Amendment.

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.

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 theTimes. 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.

The FBI destroyed its file on Punch Sulzberger, the former publisher of theTimes. What are your thoughts on that?

I think it’s absolutely outrageous that there was a file on the publisher of The New York Times, most probably for publishing the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers did nothing to damage national security. The claims that they did damage national security have turned out, in retrospect, to be so much hot air.

The more you learn about how things work, the more you realize how completely evil it all is.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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