Government Crackdown on Information From Whistleblowers to Journalists

Today we look at the U.S government's attempt to clamp down on the ability of the public to transmit or receive information that the government deems secret. In recent weeks, various government agencies have sought to punish people who they believed leaked classified information. Government agents have also sought personal files from those who they claimed possessed classified information and some intelligence agencies have tried to limit what information the public has access to.

Last week, the CIA fired analyst Mary McCarthy who the agency says had undisclosed contacts with journalists, including Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. Priest won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this month for a series of articles about how the CIA is running secret prisons overseas. McCarthy has denied disclosing this information to Priest or leaking any other classified information.

Congress is also considering legislation which would potentially revoke the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. The legislation would also greatly expand intelligence agency powers by permitting security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. And it was also recently disclosed that the CIA and the National Archives signed a secret agreement, which would permit the CIA and other intelligence agencies to withdraw from public access records it considered improperly declassified.

Also, earlier this month it was revealed that the FBI is seeking to go through the files of legendary muckracking journalist Jack Anderson in order to remove anything it regarded as classified or secret. Anderson died last December and his family is refusing to allow government agents access to 200 boxes of his documents which are housed at George Washington University. We will talk more about this later in the program. But first we turn to longtime First Amendment advocate and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff. On Tuesday, he spoke at an all-day conference on Presidential Powers sponsored by NYU's Center on Law and Security.

* Nat Hentoff, speaking on April 25, 2006.

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