David Swanson, author and co-founder of War is a crime.org criticizes the Obama administration’s hypocrisy with regard to its handling of recently-leaked information about some of the administration’s controversial policies.
"It's a very
interesting situation to have the possibility of investigations of leaks by
presumably very high-ranking officials of news that the White House presumably
wanted leaked as they of course quite hypocritically brag about individuals
they've killed and assaults they've made on other nations while at the same time
denying in court that the program they are bragging about exists or that they
can publicly acknowledge it exists and so forth," Swanson said in a phone
interview with Press TV's U.S. Desk on Wednesday.
Swanson
continued that this showed the exposure of hypocrisy adding, "I'm not sure it's
a good policy for leaks to be prosecuted. It's a policy that this president has
developed and is now being applied by his opponents in the Congress to his own
administration. But it is a policy that goes against freedom of the press,
transparency of government and government of, by and for the people."
Swanson believes
that the United State's population should know what their government is doing in
their name. He added that he felt there was an "additional hurdle for decent
journalism in the United States which is already so corrupted by the monopoly
and the money and the access to power that have rendered it so useless that now
journalism is endangered from prosecution of essentially the exposure of
information on what our government is doing."
U.S. Attorney
General Eric Holder announced last week that he had assigned two U.S. attorneys
to lead criminal leak investigations into recent media reports about topics
including how drone attacks are approved at the White House and how a computer
virus attack was launched against Iran's nuclear program.
On the one hand,
the Obama administration is accused of trying to criminalize investigative
journalism, and on the other, it is accused by the Republicans of intentionally
leaking the information for political gain.
SM/HJ