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Fox News James Rosen, criminal ‘co-conspirator’?
Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, calling him a criminal ‘co-conspirator’
The Justice Department, already under fire for seizing AP phone records, also viewed e-mails of Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen, calling him a criminal ‘co-conspirator’ for his reporting. Fox News responded: ‘We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what until now has always been a free press.’
The Justice Department obtained a portfolio of information about a Fox News correspondent’s conversations and visits as part of an investigation into a possible leak, The Washington Post reported Monday
— in the latest example of the government seizing records of journalists.
This follows the charge that the department secretly obtained 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 reportedly claimed there’s evidence the journalist in question — Fox News’ James Rosen — broke the law “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.”
That detail would potentially send the case into unprecedented territory. No reporter has been prosecuted for seeking information. Such cases often target the suspected leaker, but not the journalist who published sensitive or classified information.
Michael Clemente, Fox News’ executive vice president of news, defended Rosen in a statement issued Monday afternoon.
“We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” Clemente said. “In fact, it is downright chilling. We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”
Obama’s Gestapo..Snooped on Top Fox News Reporter..
A story posted by The Washington Post on Sunday Evening will stir new debate and review over the tactics used by the Obama administration to monitor how journalists interact with government sources.
The reporter in focus — James Rosen a top Washington Correspondent for Fox News.
The case begins back in 2009. The Post’s Ann E. Marimow:
When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.
They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.
Anonymous Cincinnati IRS official: “Everything comes from the top.”
A story in the Washington Post yesterday about the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati office, which does most of the agency’s nonprofit auditing, clearly contradicted earlier reports that the agency’s targeting of Tea Party groups was the result of rogue agents.
The Post story anonymously quoted a staffer in Cincinnati as saying they only operate on directives from headquarters:
As could be expected, the folks in the determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy.
“We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he left work late Tuesday afternoon. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. . . . That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”
The staff member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said that the determinations unit is competent and without bias, that it grouped together conservative applications “for consistency’s sake” — so one application did not sail through while a similar one was held up in review. This consistency is paramount in the review of all applications, according to Ronald Ran, an estate-tax lawyer who worked for 37 years in the IRS’s Cincinnati..
WASHPOST: Obama’s claim he called ‘act of terrorism’ Gives him Four Pinocchios…
WASHPOST: Obama’s claim he called ‘act of terrorism‘ Gives him Four Pinocchios…
President Obama, remarks at a news conference, May 13, 2013
Once again, it appears that we must parse a few presidential words. We went through this question at length during the 2012 election, but perhaps a refresher course is in order.
Notably, during a debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama said that he immediately told the American people that the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya “was an act of terror.” But now he says he called it “an act of terrorism.”
Some readers may object to this continuing focus on words, but presidential aides spend a lot of time on words. Words have consequences. Is there a difference between “act of terror” and “act of terrorism”?
The Facts
Immediately after the attack, the president three times used the phrase “act of terror” in public statements:
“No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”
— Obama, Rose Garden, Sept. 12
“We want to send a message all around the world — anybody who would do us harm: No act of terror will dim the light of the values that we proudly shine on the rest of the world, and no act of violence will shake the resolve of the United States of America.”
— Obama, campaign event in Las Vegas, Sept. 13
“I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished. It will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America.”
— Obama, campaign event in Golden, Colo., Sept. 13
Here’s how we assessed those words back in October:
Note that in all three cases, the language is not as strong as Obama asserted in the debate. Obama declared that he said “that this was an act of terror.” But actually the president spoke in vague terms, usually wrapped in a patriotic fervor. One could presume he was speaking of the incident in Libya, but he did not affirmatively state that the American ambassador died because of an “act of terror.”
Some readers may think we are dancing on the head of pin here. The Fact Checker spent nine years as diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post, and such nuances of phrasing are often very important. A president does not simply utter virtually the same phrase three times in two days about a major international incident without careful thought about the implications of each word.
The Fact Checker noted last week that this was an attack on what essentially was a secret CIA operation, which included rounding up weapons from the very people who may have attacked the facility.
Perhaps Obama, in his mind, thought this then was really “an act of war,” not a traditional terrorist attack, but he had not wanted to say that publicly. Or perhaps, as Republicans suggest, he did not want to spoil his campaign theme that terror groups such as al-Qaeda were on the run by conceding a terrorist attack had occurred on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Whatever the reason, when given repeated opportunities to forthrightly declare this was an “act of terrorism,” the president ducked the question.
For instance, on Sept. 12, immediately after the Rose Garden statement the day after the attack, Obama sat down with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes and acknowledged he purposely avoided the using the word “terrorism:”
KROFT: “Mr. President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word ‘terrorism’ in connection with the Libya attack.”
OBAMA: “Right.”
KROFT: “Do you believe that this was a terrorist attack?”
OBAMA: “Well, it’s too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but obviously it was an attack on Americans. And we are going to be working with the Libyan government to make sure that we bring these folks to justice, one way or the other.”
Assault weapons ban now unlikely to pass. What happened?
Assault weapons ban now unlikely to pass. What happened?
What’s behind this development? The assault weapons ban was unlikely to pass the Senate in any case, and had become so unpopular it risked taking down with it other gun control measures, such as new restrictions on weapons trafficking and a possible expansion of federal background checks.
In truth, it’s been clear for a long time that the assault weapons ban was doomed, notes Washington Post political blogger Chris Cillizza.
For one thing, the ban was just too controversial. Gun rights advocates argue that the difference between assault weapons and non-assault hunting rifles is largely cosmetic, and that banning guns based on style won’t make Americans any safer. In the proposed prohibition of an entire class of firearms many saw the beginnings of their nightmare of Washington coming after their guns.
For another, some Senate Democrats were uneasy about the ban. Reid was never behind it, and it made a number of Democrats from red states uneasy.
US Supreme Court to Weigh the Infallibility of Drug Detector Canines
by Garret Ean via FreeConcord.org
An article in the Washington Post that has been widely syndicated discusses how the collection of evidence by the use of drug detector dogs will be considered by the united states supreme court. Two cases are pending on the docket, both from Florida, which question the effectiveness as well as the constitutionality of canines for drug detection use. The article cites studies from the University of California at Davis in which 18 police canine teams were sent through a facility and tasked with finding hidden drugs. Though there were no drugs in the facility, 17 of the teams reported alerts. Barry Cooper, former police officer and producer of the Never Get Busted educational film series has discussed his own manipulation of police canines while he was working as one of the most successful narcotics interdiction detectives. Anyone who has owned a dog knows that their life revolves around serving their pack leader. There are no objective standards or testing done of the animals to demonstrate their effectiveness. In a 2005 case, former supreme court judge David Souter stated that the infallible dog “is a creation of legal fiction”.
Last year, the Florida supreme court had thrown out a case from 2006 which featured questionable probable cause for a search after a police dog sniffed and acted playfully. Judge Barbara Pariente wrote:
Courts often accept the mythic dog with an almost superstitious faith…The myth so completely has dominated the judicial psyche in those cases that the courts either assume the reliability of the sniff or address the question cursorily; the dog is the clear and consistent winner.
Franky, the chocolate lab, appears shocked. He was horrified to have recently discovered that his jovial excitement at the prospect of playing with his favorite ball was used as evidence to arrest amateur gardeners.
The reliability of drug detector dogs will always be tainted by the bias of the canine’s handler. Drug interdiction officers often become personally interested in finding larger quantities of drugs. Though the dog is a simple animal, its social awareness is in some ways more attuned than that of a human. It detects the subtle body language of its handler, and its desire to please them is the likely cause of most false alerts. Bearing this in mind, it would make more sense to have the drug detector dogs handled by individuals who are not personally invested in the drug war and who seek recognition among their peers for how much contraband they can confiscate. Previous supreme court cases have held that officers do not even need reasonable suspicion of illegal drug possession to initiate a drug dog sniffing of a vehicle during a traffic stop. Thus, the dogs are used without any accountability metric aside from that officers wanted to use them.
Grants and requests for canine unit funding by police continue to be popular despite their expense and unproven track record. There should be no surprise there, as many people would jump at the chance to be employed to play with a cute animal and occasionally give it cars and purses to sniff.
Related articles
- Will Supreme Court turn up its nose at dog sniffs? (news.yahoo.com)
- Supreme Court Considers Two Drug Dog Cases (huffingtonpost.com)
- Canine as a search warrant? SCOTUS to debate dogs vs Fourth Amendment (rt.com)
David Ignatius: Benghazi questions the administration must answer
By David Ignatius via The Washington Post
The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails. But Fox News has raised questions about the attack that deserve a clearer answer from the Obama administration.
Fox’s Jennifer Griffin reported Friday that CIA officers in Benghazi had been told to “stand down” when they wanted to deploy from their base at the annex to repel the attack on the consulate, about a mile away. Fox also reported that the officers requested military support when the annex came under fire that night but that their request had been denied.
The Benghazi tragedy was amplified by Charles Woods, the father of slain CIA contractor Tyrone Woods. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity that White House officials who didn’t authorize military strikes to save the embattled CIA annex were “cowards” and “are guilty of murdering my son.”
The Fox “stand down” story prompted a strong rebuttal from the CIA: “We can say with confidence that the agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi. Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”
So what did happen on the night of Sept. 11, when Woods, Ambassador Christopher Stevens and two others were killed?
MORE . . .
Related articles
- At Least Someone In The Mainstream Media Is Raising Questions On Benghazi (warnewsupdates.blogspot.com)
- DAVID IGNATIUS IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Benghazi Questions Deserve Answers. So what did happen in… (pjmedia.com)
- IN RESPONSE TO DAVID IGNATIUS’ BENGHAZI OPED that I linked earlier, Michael McConnell writes: Dav… (pjmedia.com)
- Is Benghazi Breaking Through the Media’s Wall of Silence? (pjmedia.com)
- Obama on Benghazi the hurricane: “We leave nobody behind” (hotair.com)
