Posted on 05/21/2013 9:59:39 AM PDT by Starman417
There is talk about Fox News reporter James Rosen being named as a co-conspirator for the crime of being a journalist.
A Fox News correspondent was accused in a Justice Department affidavit of being a possible criminal "co-conspirator" for his alleged role in publishing sensitive security information -- in a leak case that takes the highly unusual step of claiming a journalist broke the law.According to court documents, the Justice Department obtained a portfolio of information about Fox News' James Rosen's conversations and visits to the State Department. This included a search warrant for his personal emails.
The effort follows that by the department to secretly obtain two months of phone records from Associated Press journalists as part of a separate leak probe. The department in this case, though, went a step further -- as an FBI agent claimed there's evidence the Fox News correspondent broke the law, "at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator."
Obama's Department of Injustice has suggested that Rosen had solicited classified information:
In an application for a search warrant, FBI agent Reginald Reyes wrote that there was probable cause Rosen had violated the Espionage Act by soliciting classified information from Stephen J. Kim, a former State Department official. Reyes wrote that Rosen was an "aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" in leaking the information.According to the search warrant, which was posted by the Federation of American Scientists, Reyes wrote that Rosen may have committed a "conspiracy to violate" section of a law against leaking classified info, which he wrote was "punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment."
Reyes also wrote that the FBI had exhausted all other alternatives in the leak investigation when applying for a search warrant, short of asking Rosen to voluntarily provide his email communications.
It's clear that this is a political vendetta against Obama's enemies and it represents an abuse of the justice system as well as a suppression of journalistic investigation but let's harken back a ways. If Rosen's actions are a violation of the Espionage Act, several New York Times reporters should already have been imprisoned, if not executed.
If one searches for "NY Times reveals classified information" it will yield nearly 3 million hits.
Among them, two stand as the most egregious.
The first was the outing of the FISA program.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."
Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.
According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.
The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.
Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.
Obama has not ended the program- he has expanded and extended it.
The second, and worse leak was of the Bush program known as Operation Cannonball:
WASHINGTON — Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to make it easier for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.
The program was highly classified:
The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.
Mazzetti and Rhode informed us that it was going nowhere:
But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay.
And then they proceed to make the argument that the delay was Bush's fault, despite the political reality Musharraf was presenting.
Under pressure from Pakistan, the Bush administration decided in 2003 to end the American military presence on the ground. In a recent interview, Mr. Armitage said he had supported the pullback in recognition of the political risks that Mr. Musharraf had already taken. “We were pushing them almost to the breaking point,” Mr. Armitage said.The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 added another complicating factor, by cementing a view among Pakistanis that American forces in the tribal areas would be a prelude to an eventual American occupation.
To have insisted that American forces be allowed to cross from Afghanistan into Pakistan, Mr. Armitage added, “might have been a bridge too far.”
And they ended the article with an ominous warning:
“The United States faces a threat from Al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,” said Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation.“The base of operations has moved only a short distance, roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia.”
democrats did everything they could to hamper all of Bush's efforts in the war on terrorism.
They said Bush didn't care about catching Bin Laden. They said he took his eye off the ball.
Bush did predict that Bin Laden would be gotten by a US President:
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Pimp.
Just a shot across the bow. A warning to Fox to stop being partial to the pubs and not being deferential to the Obama administraion.
No, NYT reporters -should not- already be in prison for exposing that our external spy apparatus was secretly being used domestically, without warrants, even if it was Bush doing it. And those PATRIOT warrantless “national security letter” searches used by the FBI are utterly unconstitutional.
The reporters should be given a medal for it.
All of the blather as to how Bush was protecting us is exposed as silliness by the fact that under his term, legal muslim immigration exploded, along with a stampede of millions of Mexicans.
If he is so scared that terrorists are here that he needed to create the Nazi sounding named agency “DHS”, and unleash the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants, then how does it make sense to import a flood from the Mexico and the Muslim world?
He doesn’t get it both ways.
Making the argument that the reporters should have been imprisoned under Bush for seeking out and printing things they are hiding, is essentially carrying water for Obama.
He is making the same argument, trying to arrest reporters for conspiracy because they are pressing government workers to tell the truth about things.
I agree with you 100%. The Bushes were/are a N/E Liberal Disease that was inflicted upon the United States.
Bump for later read
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