Tag: war on whistleblowers

As Drone Whistleblower Daniel Hale Pleads Guilty, Advocates Warn of “Profound Threat” to Free Press

Press freedom, peace, and human rights advocates are rallying behind Daniel Hale, the former intelligence analyst who blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s drone assassination program, and who pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to violating the Espionage Act.

The Washington Post reports Hale, who was set to go on trial next week, pleaded guilty to a single count of violating the 1917 law that has been used to target whistleblowers including Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Reality Winner, and others.

Hale was charged in 2019 during the Trump administration after he leaked classified information on the U.S. government’s targeted assassination program to a reporter, who according to court documents, matches the description of The Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill. He is the first person to face sentencing for an Espionage Act offense during the administration of President Joe Biden.

As vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden contributed to the creation of whistleblower protections in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, while simultaneously serving in an administration that, while promising “a new era of open government,” relentlessly targeted individuals who revealed U.S. war crimes and other classified information.

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New York Times Writers May Have Deceived Readers in Stories About Project Veritas: Court

Writers for the New York Times may have spread deceptive claims about the nonprofit journalism group Project Veritas, a judge ruled this week.

In stories from 2020 about Project Veritas videos, writers Maggie Astor and Tiffany Hsu inserted sentences that were opinions despite the articles being billed as news, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood said.

“If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion,” Wood wrote in a 16-page decision denying the paper’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from Project Veritas.

“The Articles that are the subject of this action called the Video ‘deceptive,’ but the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel certainly apply to Astor’s and Hsu’s failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles, as they now claim,” he added.

At issue are five articles that Project Veritas alleges contained false and defamatory information. All five were about a 2020 video report from the journalism group on alleged illegal voting practices in Minnesota.

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DHS whistleblower who criticized the Obama administration’s handling of Islamic terrorism is found dead on a road side with a ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound’

Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney, who spoke out against his own agency during the Obama administration, was found shot dead in California. 

The Amador County Sheriff’s Office said that authorities responded to reports of a man lying on the ground with an apparent gunshot injury near Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth. 

Red State and Heavy said Haney had been missing since Wednesday, and that the gunshot wound was found in his chest.   

‘Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound,’ said authorities, according to the Washington Examiner. 

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Biden Continues Trump’s War On The Press

Biden’s divergence from the Obama administration’s less authoritarian position on the matter should not come as much of a surprise, since he took an absurdly hard line against WikiLeaks after the first publications of the earth-shattering Manning leaks in 2010.

“I would argue it is closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers,” Biden said of Assange at the time. “But, look, this guy has done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.”

It should also come as no surprise because, all things considered, this administration has not been much different from the previous one in terms of actual policy. The policy of regime change interventionism in Venezuela is the same. The policy of hawkishness toward China is the same. The policy of starvation sanctions against Iran is effectively the same. In a recent CNN interview Secretary of State Tony Blinken could not speak highly enough of Trump’s more incendiary foreign policy decisions like moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing the illegally occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

There are far, far more similarities between the Trump administration and the Biden administration than there are differences. As is consistently the case with US presidents, the narratives are different, the campaign platforms are different, the political parties are different, but the actual policies and behaviors remain more or less the same.

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“Free Assange” Demands Grow as Biden DOJ Says It Will Continue to Seek Extradition

Just a day after a coalition of press freedom groups urged President Joe Biden to drop his predecessor’s effort to prosecute Julian Assange, a spokesperson for the Department of Justice said Tuesday that the new administration intends to challenge a British judge’s rejection last month of the U.S. attempt to extradite the WikiLeaks publisher.

“We continue to seek his extradition,” Marc Raimondi, a spokesperson for the DOJ’s National Security Division, told Reuters just days before the Friday deadline to appeal Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s ruling, which denied the U.S. extradition request on the grounds that America’s brutal prison system would pose a threat to Assange’s life.

Charged by the Trump Justice Department in 2019 with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents that exposed U.S. war crimes overseas, Assange would likely face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison if the extradition effort is successful.

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