NEW YORK -– On April 9, McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay reported that the Obama administration has “targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified ‘other’ militants” in drone strikes, a revelation thatcontradicts previous administration claims of pursuing only senior-level operatives who pose an imminent threat to the United States.
It was an investigative story clearly in the public interest, shedding new light on the government’s long-running targeted-killing program in Pakistan. But now Landay, a veteran national security reporter for the McClatchy newspaper chain, is concerned that the Obama administration could next investigate him in hopes of finding the sources for “top-secret U.S. intelligence reports” cited in the story. “Do I think that they could come after me?” Landay asked, in an interview with The Huffington Post. “Yes.”
“I can tell you that people who normally would meet with me, sort of in a more relaxed atmosphere, are on pins and needles,” Landay said of the reporting climate during the Obama years, a period of unprecedented whistleblower prosecutions. The crackdown on leaks, he added, seems “deliberately intended to have a chilling effect.”
Landay isn’t alone in that assessment, as several investigative journalists attest in“War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State,” a timely documentary directed by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation that premieres this week in New York and Washington. The film details the ordeals of four whistleblowers who turned to the press in order to expose waste or illegality.
“The Obama administration's been extremely aggressive in trying to root out whistleblowers within the government,” NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff says in the film. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, describing the secrecy required in her reporting for a profile of whistleblower Thomas Drake amid government prosecution, said the experience didn’t “feel [like] America, land of the free press.”
Drake, a former senior executive of the National Security Agency, says in the film, "it's extremely dangerous in America right now to be right as a whistleblower when the government is so wrong." He adds: "speaking truth to power is now a criminal act."
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Those men have been fired, prosecuted, or shunned because they spoke out. The government accountability advocates who have been forced to defend them, meanwhile, said they were worried the Obama and Bush administrations' aggressive actions against them have chilled future whistle-blowing.
"I've talked to a number of people who've made it clear ... that they are too afraid for their jobs," said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project On Government Oversight. "You have a combination of the fear of prosecution and this economy. If they lose this job, they might not be able to pay for groceries."
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"We perform a vital function in a democracy like the United States, the few there are of us, the few whistleblowers," Landay said. "The harder the government tries to control critical information, the more damage it does to the quality of our democracy."
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