PRESS FREEDOM IS EVERYONE'S FREEDOM
WHERE PRESS IS UNDER ATTACK FROM GOV'T EVERYONE'S FREEDOM IS JEOPARDIZED
4 July 2006

The freedom of the press is the freedom of the American people. Not its guarantor, not a metaphorical representation of freedom as an idea, not even merely a mainstay of a free system. A free and independent press is American liberty at work, building and defending itself against the slide toward secret or arbitrary exercise of power, as conceived within or beyond the legal process.

The government now complains it is inconvenient, making it more difficult to wage a war on terror, to have to coexist with a free press, that the press should be punished, disciplined and constrained. This is a complaint, and a natural one, from people whom our constitutional system requires to face the relentless competition of a free and independent press and the check on power which is the information mill that press provides.

But this complaint is, as always, disingenuous, given that the actions of the newspapers in question are not only protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but also given that their right to act against the wishes of government in publishing information related to national security is provided for by the Supreme Court's ruling on the publication in the 1970s of the so-called "Pentagon papers".

Officials in government call for punitive action against the press only and in all cases where the press has revealed legally questionable, undemocratic or possibly illegitimate government activity. Such actions, if we extend our memories back 15 years, to the Cold War, are actions long decried by the US as signs of tyranny.

That posture was written into American culture at the very founding of the republic, 200 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the form of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, without which the Bill of Rights could not be finalized and the Constitutional Convention would have remained paralyzed. It was necessary as a basic assurance that the liberty of the people would be maintained by something other than violent insurrection and the system governed by something other than executive caprice.

Now, in a mid-term election year, in which numerous polls suggest the majority party in both houses, also the party of the president, may well lose control, that party is whipping up a dubious anti-press furor. Dubious, because the "secrets" published were passionately and openly advertised byt he government itself, many times, and because in fact, there is nothing wrong, legally speaking, with publishing classified information. It is the leaking of that information by government officials which can in some cases rise to the level of a criminal act.

When Chicago Sun Times journalist Robert Novak published the name of an undercover CIA operative in the summer of 2003, he was not prosecuted for doing so. Even the government officials responsible for leaking the name have not yet been charged for doing so, despite the leak being a clear violation of federal law and a breach of national security.

Novak is protected by the nation's foundational freedom of the press, an unassailable right which means he enjoys the right to publish that information which is available to him. It is up to the officials sworn to uphold top secret status of classified materials to do so; if they fail, the material becomes public.

The Supreme Court has ruled that due to its vital role in perpetuating the freedom of the public and providing a check to government abuses, and due to the explicit prohibition of the First Amendment against "abridging" the freedom of the press, no "prior restraints" can be placed on media in the US. Such censorship would be unconstitutional and would be seen by the courts as an illegitimate exercise of executive or legislative power.

Now, the details: the New York Times and numerous other newspapers ran a story in late June which revealed that the Bush administration's program to monitor terrorist financial transactions, called Foreign Terrorist Asset
Tracking Center (FTAT), was using client information from SWIFT, the international body that regulates and enables wire transfers between banks.

SWIFT, for the record, is a necessary collaborator if the US is to carry out its monitoring international financial transactions between bank accounts. On its website, it openly advertises "SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities."

So, it is clearly unreasonable to expect that the one detail of the FTAT program newly reported, the active collaboration of SWIFT, was not a shock to those people who would be supsected of terrorist activity, who must —because it has already been announced by both the US government and by SWIFT— expect that these financial resources are monitored.

The FTAT program itself was first disclosed by President Bush on 25 September 2001, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden. In November 2001, the State Department held a public conference entitled 'Tracking Financial Assets of Terrorists', specifically orchestrated to highlight FTAT as a primary tool in the prosecution of the nascent "war on terror".

At that conference, the State Dept. publicly announced:

"Specifically, the Office of Foreign Assets Control has established a Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, or FTAT, as it's referred to. This new group housed at Treasury brings together all of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies for the purpose of sharing information and building a profile of the financial infrastructure of terrorism."

On 7 November 2001, the White House itself issued a press release titled "Terrorist Financial Network Fact Sheet, Shutting Down the Terrorist Financial Network". There, the White House itself reports: "The Treasury Department has established an inter-agency Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center, and mobilized financial investigators".

The office of the House Financial Services Committee told Sentido its chairman, Rep. Oxley (R-OH) has "referred the matter to the Justice Department" in order to evaluate the possible filing of criminal charges against New York Times editors, despite there being no law whereby such charges could be filed.

At least one senator has accused the newspaper of "treason" (a capital offense). On 29 June 2006, Rep. Oxley (R-OH), chairman of the House Financial Services committee, put forth a resolution condemning the New York Times for revealing this "top secret" program and endangering national security.

The resolution alleged the New York Times had "unnecessarily complicated efforts by the U.S. government to prosecute the war on terror and may have placed the lives of American citizens in danger both at home and in many regions of the world, including active duty armed services in Iraq and Afghanistan".

Whatever the political motivations, we must take seriously the fact that on this Fourth of July, we are facing a concerted assault on our vital free and independent press. It is important to note that revealing covert activities involving individuals' private information (protected under the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, and by corporate privacy contracts) is not an "unnecessary" detail; it is precisely the type of information the press is expected to track down and to publish.

The First Amendment already clearly states "Congress shall make no law ...
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press", so the validity of even
spending legislative time on a non-binding resolution attacking the press
for something it is specifically permitted under the Constitution, is highly
dubious at best, and very feasibly an attack on the foundational structure of our democracy.

Also during the month of June 2006, a House committee voted to revoke all funding for public broadcasting, which, through PBS and NPR, is one of the most serious sources of objective, investigative journalism. Freed of the profit motive, public broadcasting has long stood as a bastion of reliable, thoughtful reporting, often questioning the prevailing story told by government or by major interest groups.

As Americans, committed to the ideal and to the virtues of living in a free system, we must be sure to safeguard our own liberty by ensuring that our elected representatives do not take action against the free and independent press which enforces and fills out that liberty. We must remember and celebrate the fact that this unique press freedom gives the public the leverage it needs, intellectually and practically, to continue to govern the system of laws that serve a free society. [s]

• The Bill of Rights, Amendments 1-10 to the US Constitution
• State Dept.: "Tracking Financial Assets of Terrorists" (Nov. 2001)
• White House: "Terrorist Financial Network Fact Sheet, Shutting Down the Terrorist Financial Network" (7 Nov. 2001)
• State Dept.: "Update on Tracking the Financial Assets of Terrorists: One Year Later" (Oct. 2002)

CLIMATE OF SECRECY PUTS DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES IN BACK SEAT
24 April 2006

An insistence on near absolute secrecy threatens to undermine two vital elements of the security of the United States: 1) the democratic process itself, without which there can be no system to secure; 2) the intellectual dissent which is necessary to enforce truly reasoned thinking in planning of operations and information analysis. [Full Story]