The US government has come under growing criticism by rights groups for violating the nationâ„¢s press freedoms by seizing journalistsâ„¢ phone records as Washington defends the move under the pretext of protecting Ëœnational security,â„¢ Press TV reports.
The US-based Associated Press (AP) News Agency is protesting what it has described as a massive and unprecedented intrusion into its news gathering operations after it reported Monday that it had been informed by the Department of Justice that some of its phone records had been subpoenaed.
It is not yet clear what the Justice Department is trying to find in its ongoing probe, but citing confidential sources, AP had published news stories on US attempts, in collusion with the Israeli regime, to launch cyber attacks against Iran to sabotage its nuclear energy program using the Stuxnet virus.
Moreover, AP also believes the investigation may be related to one of its stories back in May 2012, describing CIAâ„¢s bid to halt a terrorist plot to plant a bomb on an airplane with a sophisticated new device, according to local press reports.
Meanwhile, US officials defended their actions against AP on Tuesday, claiming that news links by government sources constitute a threat to the countryâ„¢s national security.
Phone records from AP news bureaus in New York, Washington and Hartford were subpoenaed along with some of the home and mobile phone records of the new agencyâ„¢s journalists involved in reporting exclusive stories for the months of April and May of last year.
In an angry letter to Holder on Monday, APâ„¢s President Gary Pruitt described the Justice Department subpoenas as “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
Civil rights attorney Ron Kuby described the recent raid on AP new bureaus by justice officials as another chapter in the ongoing tension between the press’ right to find out things and the US government’s penchant for hiding secrets.
Å“The government has a right to classify information and people who come into contact with that information are not supposed to reveal it. It’s a crime to do so. And nobody has a big objection to that. But it’s the job of the press in a free society to try to find out the things that the government wants to keep secret and it’s the government’s job to keep them secret and that’s sort of the way the game is played,”. Kuby said.
The American Civil Liberties Union reacted to the development with statements, slamming the seizure of phone records to crack down on leakers as “an unacceptable abuse of power,” and emphasizing that the Obama administration has developed a pattern for prosecuting whistleblowers.
This is while the Obama White House has reportedly prosecuted more whistleblowers than all those prosecuted under previous administrations combined.
The most notable case is that of young Army Private Bradley Manning, who provided hundreds of thousands of incriminating US military and government documents to WikiLeaks.
Å“You contrast his truth-telling with the falsehoods of the Bush Administration that drove us to war in Iraq and killed God knows how many Iraqis and thousands and thousands of Americans,” said Kuby. Å“And nobody was ever prosecuted for those lies. Bradley Manning is being prosecuted for telling people the complete truth. So as a moral matter my sensibilities are very much with the whistleblowers and Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks and the people who want to see more information out there.”
Kuby, however, acknowledges that the US government does not appear to have entirely acted outside the law in the case against AP. He noted that it is common for governments to keep secrets both for national security and also to cover up embarrassing mistakes and failures.
MFB/MFB
This article originally appeared on : Press TV