Why Worry About Press Freedoms? Weather and Sports Will Never Be Bothered.

(Haha. China's Great Firewall isn't such a strange notion now, is it?)

Salon's Glenn Greenwald is at his High Dudgeon Best, hyperlinking and boldfacing like there's No Tomorrow:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/14/wikileaks/index.html

 

Amazingly, the Obama administration is surpassing its predecessor when it comes to assaults on whistle-blowing and a free press.  As Politico's Josh Gerstein reported, "President Barack Obama’s Justice Department has taken a hard line against leakers. . . .'They’re going after this at every opportunity and with unmatched vigor,' said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists."  The New York Times similarly documented:  "the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks."  The Obama DOJ has launched nothing less thana full-on war against whistleblowers; its magnanimous "Look Forward, Not Backward" decree used to shield high-level Bush criminals from investigations is manifestly tossed to the side when it comes to those who reveal such criminality.   And they even revitalized an abandoned Bush-era subpoena issued to The New York Times' James Risen, demanding that he disclose his source for an article in which he revealed an embarrassingly botched attempt to infiltrate and sabotage Iran's nuclear program.

But if current reports are correct -- that the Obama DOJ has now convened a Grand Jury to indict WikiLeaks and Julian Assange -- this will constitute a far greater assault on press freedom than anything George W. Bush managed, or even attempted.  Put simply, there is no intellectually coherent way to distinguish what WikiLeaks has done with these diplomatic cables with what newspapers around the world did in this case and what they do constantly:  namely, receive and then publish classified information without authorization.  And as much justifiable outrage as the Bush DOJ's prosecution of the AIPAC officials provoked, at least the actions there resembled "espionage" far more than anything Assange has done, as those AIPAC officials actually passed U.S. secrets to a foreign government, not published them as WikiLeaks has done.

 

Anyway, it's not as though China didn't unblock the BBC's website after all the fuss about Liu Xiaobo was over, and They are certainly worse than Us.