Pentagon Papers lawyer on Obama, secrecy and press freedoms: 'worse than Nixon' | Glenn Greenwald

Career First Amendment and transparency advocate James Goodale sounds the alarm about the current president

(updated below)

In 1971, when the New York Times decided to publish the Pentagon Papers leaked to it by Daniel Ellsberg, it knew it was triggering a major fight with the secrecy-obsessed Nixon administration. As expected, the Nixon administration sued the NYT in an attempt to ban it from publishing the documents, but the US Supreme Court, in a landmark decision for press freedom, ruled the prior restraint unconstitutional. The paper's general counsel at the time, James Goodale, said that he counseled the paper to publish despite "the more likely scenario that everyone feared was the fact that they could have gone to jail," and he subsequently became an outspoken defender of press freedoms. He now has a new book entitled "Fighting for the Press" in which he argues, as the Columbia Journalism Review puts it, that "Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was."

The biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening. . . .

"The one case that is troublesome and is still out there as we speak is the case of James Risen, who was a journalist who was leaked national security information in respect to the warrantless wiretapping program, which was disclosed by The New York Times.

Antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it's cuckoo."

Well, I think it's very much the same thing. We have a leak of classified information. And by the way you've got to remember [Bradley] Manning's the leaker. Everyone says Assange is a leaker. He's not a leaker. He's the person who gets the information.

"So why we're so concerned about the prosecution of Assange is what he did is the same as what the Times did in the Pentagon Papers, and indeed what they did with WikiLeaks. The Times published on its website the very same material WikiLeaks published on its website. So if you go after the WikiLeaks criminally, you go after the Times. That's the criminalization of the whole process."

We'd be screaming and yelling and the journalists would be going crazy. And that doesn't speak well of journalists."

"President Barack Obama has seamlessly carried forward the main ingredients of Bush's war against the press. . . . There is no easy way to explain why Obama the president is so different from Obama the candidate on national security matters. . . . Whatever the reason, Obama became a national security hawk. . . .

"Obama is no better than Bush in many aspects of the war against the pressand in some respects he is worse. He has used the criminal system to plug leaks to the press in an unprecedented fashion. He has watered down a proposed federal shield law. He has asked a New York Times reporter to disclose sources. But there may be more anti-press action to come from the Obama presidency. Obama is presently pursuing Julian Assange for publishing information leaked to him by Bradley Manning. If he succeeds in this effort, he will have succeeded where Richard Nixon failed."

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