JamesRosentoStateDepartment:Why’dittake

James Rosen to State Department: Why’d it take nearly two years to arrest a Benghazi suspect who wasn’t hiding?

posted at 8:01 pm on June 17, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Via the Free Beacon, make sure to read Ed’s post earlier to understand just how openly Khattala, the jihadi nabbed by U.S. forces over the weekend, has been living in Libya since the Benghazi attack. He was a prime suspect from the very beginning; he gave multiple interviews to western media in the years since, all but taunting the White House to come pick him up. The criminal charges against him were filed more than nine months ago. Only this month, for some reason, did the military finally move in. How come?

Two possibilities. One: The political situation on the ground in Libya changed enough to make a U.S intervention possible. My theory of why Obama laid off initially was because he didn’t want the weak Libyan government to have to cope with a backlash from the local militias if American troops swooped in and kidnapped a big-name jihadi or two. As long as we could monitor Khattala and make sure he didn’t run, we could wait until the government was in a stronger position to make our move. Problem is, the government’s only gotten weaker over time; lately, Libya’s devolved into a classic military-warlord-versus-jihadis struggle for control of the state. The White House may have concluded that there’d never be a better time to move on Khattala.

Two: This is exactly what it looks like, i.e. Obama’s trying to stop the bleeding he’s endured lately on foreign policy over Ukraine and Iraq and the Taliban Five by seizing an easy victory. I’m old enough to remember when U.S. counterterror developments, especially “terror alerts,” were greeted by our liberal betters online as obviously political gambits by the Bush administration, designed to distract the public from more important matters. Questioning the timing was standard practice for the lefty blogosphere circa 2006. Today, of course, it’s the height of crankery to believe that a guy whose party is in deep trouble in the midterms, and who’s proved before that he’s not above well-timed executive action for electoral ends, might have given this order with an eye to putting some good news on the front page for once. That’s what Rosen’s getting at here. Jen “Promise of Hashtag” Psaki has no real answer, of course.

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Tags: Benghazi, james rosen, khattala, obama, psaki, State Department, timing

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Source from: hotair

NYTreportercallsObamaWHthe“greatestenemy

NYT reporter calls Obama WH the “greatest enemy of press freedom”

posted at 10:41 am on March 25, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Thus testifies James Risen, the New York Times reporter reviled by the Bush administration for his probes and exposés of highly-classified government efforts to curtail terrorism. Risen may have had his issues with the Bush White House over his scoops and his sources, but they apparently pale in comparison to what he’s experiencing under Bush’s successor. Speaking to a symposium on press freedom, Risen minced no words in describing the threat to journalists from the Barack Obama administration:

New York Times reporter James Risen, who is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, opened the conference earlier by saying the Obama administration is “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created “a de facto Official Secrets Act,” Risen said, and the media has been “too timid” in responding.

Toobin appeared on a panel that followed, moderated by Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak, who announced that if he weren’t a paragon of journalistic detachment, he’d say “the persecution of James Risen is a scandal.” The attorney Laura Handman noted that the U.S. Department of Justice’s new guidelines for accessing journalists’ records carve out a big space for the government to decide what constitutes “ordinary newsgathering.”

The panel mentioned Risen and Fox journalist James Rosen, who an FBI agent suggested was a “co-conspirator” in another leak investigation.

It wasn’t just that an FBI agent “suggested” that Rosen was a co-conspirator in espionage. It’s that the allegation was presented as part of a probable-cause warrant to conduct surveillance on Rosen — a move that required the approval of Attorney General Eric Holder, who has dodged questions about how that warrant request got approved.

Jeffrey Toobin and Obama administration lawyer Robert Litt tried to justify the war on reporters:

Robert Litt, the administration’s top lawyer for the national intelligence community, agreed with that statement. At the same conference, he likened reporting on national security leaks to drunk driving, arguing that we ban the practice despite the fact that there isn’t always a victim.

“Not every drunk driver causes a fatal accident,” he explained, “but we ban drunk driving because it increases the risk of accidents. In the same way, we classify information because of the risk of harm, even if no harm actually can be shown in the end from any particular disclosure.”

That’s why we prosecute the leakers, though, and not the reporters. Reporters do not take an oath to protect classified material, although they should exercise a lot more caution and discretion than Risen did in several instances at the NYT. That’s a matter of ethics, not law. The leakers are the criminals in this case, with some limited exceptions for true whistleblowing actions.

No one argued that the Bush administration went easy on journalists. We heard plenty of complaints about crackdowns on leakers during those eight years, some of which were more than justified in both crackdowns and complaints about them. However, until Obama took office, the federal government wasn’t swearing out surveillance warrants on reporters by accusing them of conspiring to commit espionage. The hostility to press freedom comes from the same impulse that limits other freedoms — to control the people through misinformation and a lack of accountability, so as to expand power even further. It’s not just in the area of press freedom that this administration has become the greatest threat in a generation.

Tags: Barack Obama, Eric Holder, First Amendment, James Risen, james rosen, nyt, press

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Source from: hotair