James Risen's - Pay Any Price

[Bernice Moore]

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137311742/...-leak-case

'Times' Reporter To Challenge Subpoena In Leak Case : NPR

[Bernice Moore]

** REPORTER RISEN MOVES TO QUASH SUBPOENA IN LEAK CASE


REPORTER RISEN MOVES TO QUASH SUBPOENA IN LEAK CASE

Attorneys for New York Times reporter James Risen yesterday asked a court to quash a subpoena requiring him to testify in the case of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who is accused of leaking classified information to Mr. Risen.

"Because the information sought by the Government is protected by the reporter's privilege under the First Amendment and federal common law, and the subpoena is part of an effort to harass and retaliate against Mr. Risen for writing things that were critical of the government, Mr. Risen respectfully requests that the Court ... grant Mr. Risen's motion to quash the grand jury subpoena and/or for a protective order," attorney Peter K. Stackhouse wrote (pdf).

Mr. Risen himself submitted a lengthy affidavit (pdf) reflecting on his own career, the function of investigative reporting in the national security domain, and the stakes involved in the Sterling case subpoena.

"I take very seriously my obligations as a journalist when reporting about matters that may be classified or may implicate national security concerns," he wrote. "I do not always publish all information that I have, even if it is newsworthy and true. If I believe that the publication of the information would cause real harm to our national security, I will not publish a piece. I have found, however, that all too frequently, the government claims that publication of certain information will harm national security, when in reality, the government's real concern is about covering up its own wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment."

His investigative reporting has made him a target for government retribution, Mr. Risen wrote.

"By publicly speculating about the possibility of prosecuting journalists, such as myself, under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful stories containing classified information, I believe that the Government was trying to intimidate journalists, like me, who publish stories that expose excessive government secrecy, illegality, or malfeasance."

"I believe that the efforts to target me have continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States."

"Any testimony I were to provide to the Government would compromise to a significant degree my ability to continue reporting as well as the ability of other journalists to do so. This is particularly true in my current line of work covering stories relating to national security, intelligence and terrorism. If I aided the Government in its effort to prosecute my confidential source(s) for providing information to me under terms of confidentiality, I would inevitably be compromising my own ability to gather news in the future. I also believe that I would be impeding all other reporters' ability to gather and report the news in the future."

"Based on my review of the Government's papers and the particular nature of the testimony the Government claims to be seeking, I have concluded that I cannot answer the questions the Government wants to ask me consistent with my obligation to maintain the confidentiality of my source(s)," Mr. Risen wrote.

The Risen pleading, portions of which were filed under seal, was accompanied by hundreds of pages of exhibits and attachments (large pdf), including declarations filed in support of Mr. Risen in 2008 by journalists Scott Armstrong, Carl Bernstein, Jack Nelson, and Dana Priest, and historian Anna Nelson.

In a separate response (pdf), attorneys for Mr. Sterling also opposed the government's motion to subpoena Mr. Risen.

A court hearing on the subpoena and the motion to quash is scheduled for July 7, 2011 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.


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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

The Secrecy News Blog is at:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

[Peter Lemkin]

James Risen's Painful Truths

October 16, 2014 by Norman Solomon

President Obama promised a "transparent" administration but the American people didn't know the transparency would go only one way, letting the government look at the people while blocking the public's view of the government, a reality described in James Risen's new book, reviewed by Norman Solomon.


No single review or interview can do justice to Pay Any Price the new book by James Risen that is the antithesis of what routinely passes for journalism about the "war on terror." Instead of evasive tunnel vision, the book offers big-picture acuity: focusing on realities that are pervasive and vastly destructive.
Published this week, Pay Any Price throws down an urgent gauntlet. We should pick it up. After 13 years of militarized zealotry and fear-mongering in the name of fighting terrorism, the book subtitled "Greed, Power, and Endless War" zeros in on immense horrors being perpetrated in the name of national security.
New York Times national security reporter James Risen, author of the new book, Pay Any Price.

As an investigative reporter for the New York Times, Risen has been battling dominant power structures for a long time. His new book is an instant landmark in the best of post-9/11 journalism. It's also a wise response to repressive moves against him by the Bush and Obama administrations.
For more than six years under threat of jail Risen has refused to comply with subpoenas demanding that he identify sources for his reporting on a stupid and dangerous CIA operation. (For details, see "The Government War Against Reporter James Risen," which I co-wrote with Marcy Wheeler for The Nation.)
A brief afterword in his new book summarizes Risen's struggles with the Bush and Obama Justice Departments. He also provides a blunt account of his long-running conflicts with the Times hierarchy, which delayed some of his reporting for years or spiked it outright under intense White House pressure.
Self-censorship and internalization of official worldviews continue to plague the Washington press corps. In sharp contrast, Risen's stubborn independence enables Pay Any Price to combine rigorous reporting with rare candor.
Here are a few quotes from the book:
"Obama performed a neat political trick: he took the national security state that had grown to such enormous size under Bush and made it his own. In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama's great achievement or great sin was to make the national security state permanent."
"In fact, as trillions of dollars have poured into the nation's new homeland security-industrial complex, the corporate leaders at its vanguard can rightly be considered the true winners of the war on terror."

"There is an entire class of wealthy company owners, corporate executives, and investors who have gotten rich by enabling the American government to turn to the dark side. But they have done so quietly. … The new quiet oligarchs just keep making money. … They are the beneficiaries of one of the largest transfers of wealth from public to private hands in American history."
"The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer."
"Of all the abuses America has suffered at the hands of the government in its endless war on terror, possibly the worst has been the war on truth. On the one hand, the executive branch has vastly expanded what it wants to know: something of a vast gathering of previously private truths. On the other hand, it has ruined lives to stop the public from gaining any insight into its dark arts, waging a war on truth. It all began at the NSA."
Fittingly, the book closes with a powerful chapter about the government's extreme actions against whistleblowers. After all, whistleblowing and independent journalism are dire threats to the secrecy and deception that fuel the "war on terror."
Now, James Risen is in the national spotlight at a time when the U.S. government is launching yet another spiral of carnage for perpetual war. As a profound book, Pay Any Price has arrived with enormous potential to serve as a catalyst for deeper understanding and stronger opposition to abhorrent policies.

[Magda Hassan]

In Plan for Risen Subpoena, Government Raises Sixth Amendment Interests of Jeffrey Sterling

December 16, 2014
The government has now submitted its explanation for the limited information it will seek from James Risen in the Jeffrey Sterling trial and pre-trial hearings.

It will ask him to confirm that:

• He has confidentiality agreement with his source or sources on the Merlin story (though they will not ask who those sources are)
  
• He authored the Merlin chapter of his book State of War, but also one article in which he explicitly and another the government claims he relied on Sterling as a source
  
• He worked with Sterling for one of those earlier stories in a non-confidential relationship
  

The government endorses holding a pre-trial hearing to find out the scope to which Risen is willing to testify.
The last line of the filing, however, suggests ExposeFacts may have correctly predicted their plan. The government raises the possibility Risen will refuse to answer Sterling's questions.

To the extent Mr. Risen may refuse to answer certain questions posed by defense counsel (who, of course, are not bound by the limitations placed on the prosecution by the Attorney General's authorization), the [pre-trial hearing] will allow the Court to address any resulting Sixth Amendment issues.

That is, the government envisions the possibility that their questions will introduce enough evidence to permit Sterling to ask for further answers, infringing on Risen's source relationship with other sources. This would then put Risen's alleged source in the position of demanding his testimony in an effort to stay out of prison.
Update: ExposeFacts reports from the court room that Judge Brinkema has called a January 5 hearing to sort out precisely how Risen will be asked to testify. His lawyer said the government will probably have to subpoena to get that testimony.

https://exposefacts.org/in-plan-for-rise...-sterling/