{"id":185773,"date":"2014-08-18T21:48:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T02:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/18\/yes-james-risen-has-a-legitimate-beef-with-barack-obama\/"},"modified":"2014-08-18T21:48:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T02:48:00","slug":"yes-james-risen-has-a-legitimate-beef-with-barack-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/18\/yes-james-risen-has-a-legitimate-beef-with-barack-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, James Risen Has a Legitimate Beef with Barack Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

What has been done to him is so egregious that Maureen Dowd actually wrote a decent column<\/a>, albeit it one that still contains gratuitous fashion references and a junior high school sensibility:<\/p>\n

Over lunch near the White House on Friday, Risen, dressed in his Men\u2019s Wearhouse shirt and khakis and his brown Ecco walking shoes, talked about having the sword of Damocles over his head, as the reluctant star of a searing media-government showdown that could end with him behind bars.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(See what I mean about the fashion bullsh%$?)<\/p>\n

Risen said he\u2019s not afraid that F.B.I. agents will show up one day at the suburban Maryland home he shares with his wife, Penny. (His three sons are grown, and one is a reporter.) But he has exhausted all his legal challenges, including at the Supreme Court, against the Obama administration.<\/span>

<\/span> \u201cI was nervous for a long time, but they\u2019ve been after me for six years so now I try to ignore it,\u201d he said, musing that he\u2019s already decided what he\u2019ll take to prison: Civil War books and World War II histories.<\/span>

<\/span> The Justice Department is trying to scuttle the reporters\u2019 privilege \u2014 ignoring the chilling effect that is having on truth emerging in a jittery post-9\/11 world prone to egregious government excesses.<\/span>

<\/span> Attorney General Eric Holder wants to force Risen to testify and reveal the identity of his confidential source on a story he had in his 2006 book concerning a bungled C.I.A. operation during the Clinton administration in which agents might have inadvertently helped Iran develop its nuclear weapon program. The tale made the C.I.A. look silly, which may have been more of a sore point than a threat to national security. <\/span>

<\/span> But Bush officials, no doubt still smarting from Risen\u2019s revelation of their illegal wiretapping, zeroed in on a disillusioned former C.I.A. agent named Jeffrey Sterling as the source of the Iran story.<\/span>

<\/span> The subpoena forcing Risen\u2019s testimony expired in 2009, and to the surprise of just about everybody, the constitutional law professor\u2019s administration renewed it \u2014 kicking off its strange and awful aggression against reporters and whistle-blowers.<\/span>

<\/span> Holder said in May that \u201cno reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,\u201d trying to show some leg and signal that his intention is benign, merely to put pressure on Sterling so that he will plead guilty before his trial.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can think of no more contemptible reason to go after a reporter then to save a bit of effort by prosecutors.<\/p>\n

This is the sort of crap that killed Aaron Swartz.<\/p>\n

How can he use the Espionage Act to throw reporters and whistle-blowers in jail even as he defends the intelligence operatives who \u201ctortured some folks,\u201d and coddles his C.I.A. chief, John Brennan, who spied on the Senate and then lied to the senators he spied on about it?<\/span>

<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s hypocritical,\u201d Risen said. \u201cA lot of people still think this is some kind of game or signal or spin. They don\u2019t want to believe that Obama wants to crack down on the press and whistle-blowers. But he does. He\u2019s the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I tend to agree. <\/p>\n

The Obama administration has been implacably hostile to reporting on the US state security apparatus, to a degree that would make Richard Nixon go, “What the f%$#?”<\/p>\n

Our security apparatus runs Barack Obama, not the other way around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What has been done to him is so egregious that Maureen Dowd actually wrote a decent column, albeit it one that still contains gratuitous fashion references and a junior high school sensibility: Over lunch near the White House on Friday, Risen, dressed in his Men\u2019s Wearhouse shirt and khakis and his brown Ecco walking shoes, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1142,970,1051,1129,1103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barack-obama","category-corruption","category-hypocrisy","category-journalism","category-secrecy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185773"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}