Sunday, August 18, 2013

Time’s Senior National Correspondent Calls for Julian Assange to be Killed by Drone

Government Deals with Embarrassing Information By Targeting Whistleblowers … and Journalists Time Magazine’s senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald tweeted tonight: I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out [Wikileaks founder] Julian Assange What should we make of his statement? The bottom line is that it’s not Grunwald as an individual … it’s the mindset of the entire political class. Under both Bush and Obama, when bad government policy leads to bad results, the government manipulates the data … instead of changing policy. A logical result of that approach is that government has taken to protecting criminal wrongdoing by attacking whistleblowers. Remember, the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. Government employees also goes out of their way to smear whistleblowers, threaten reporters who discuss whistleblower information and harass honest analysts. As we noted last year: Wikileaks’ head Julian Assange could face the death penalty for his heinous crime of leaking whistleblower information which make those in power uncomfortable … i.e. being a reporter. Establishment figures – such as Andrew Sorkin and David Gregory – have also called for Glenn Greenwald (the reporter who broke NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s story) to be arrested. Journalism is not only being criminalized in America, but investigative reporting is actually treated like terrorism. The government admits that journalists could be targeted with counter-terrorism laws (and here). For example, after Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges, journalist Naomi Wolf, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and others sued the government to enjoin the NDAA’s allowance of the indefinite detention of Americans – the judge asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys.



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