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Whistle-blowers: Obama no better than Bush

The lawyer-president in the White House - who ought to know better - is no different, if not worse, than George Bush. Despite all the hype about open government and during the election campaign saying that he would treat whistle-blowers differently, as Glenn Greenwald highlights in this piece "Climate of Fear: Jim Risen v. the Obama administration" on Salon, the White House through the Department of Justice is pursuing a New York Times journalist.

One would have thought that the Valerie Plame saga, and how WikiLeaks has shown up governments with all their secrecy, might have taught Obama something. It doesn't look like it.....and in the process of pursuing the journalist there is always the angle of intimidation lurking in the background.

"The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is. On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret.

The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers. It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War. The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source."

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