The War on the First Amendment

With our society now so saturation bombed by decades of rampant militarism to the point where everything has become a cliché that invokes combat – the WAR on terror, the WAR on poverty, the WAR on drugs, the WAR on women etc. we now should be aware of the Obama administration’s WAR on the First Amendment. The War on the First Amendment specifically applies to the portion that establishes the freedom of the press. While truth-telling has always been an enemy of a secretive state determined to use all of the tools in the shed to suppress those who would expose criminality and corruption the open contempt for a free press under the loathsome Obama administration has surpassed that of either Bush or Nixon. The release of the latest version of the World Press Freedom Index by the non-profit watchdog group Reporters Without Borders shows that the U.S. rating is sinking faster than Obama’s phony reputation for transparency.  According to the report, our star-spangled, god-kissed, armed-to the teeth and spying on everything lemming colony now officially ranks at number 46. For a country that has been steeped in the false religion of exceptionalism where “we’re number one” often resonates like thunder this is another of those road signs that we are whipping past along the highway to Hell that is the descent into fascism.

The dismal ranking puts the U.S. smack dab in between Romania and Haiti but still well ahead of such bastions of state repression such as China (175), Egypt (159) and our two special Middle Eastern friends Saudi Arabia (164) and Israel (96). At this rate before much longer if left to the devices of Obama and his ilk as well as the scum running the NSA surveillance establishment like Congressman Mike Rogers we will be number one but in the truest Orwellian nature of The Homeland number one will actually be number 180 currently occupied by the African shithole Eritrea. Since ‘the day that changed everything’ on September 11, 2001 the crusade to profit off of the tragedy and to in the words of Obama buddy and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel – never let a good crisis go to waste. That day marked the official demarcation point from what was at once at least in theory a free and democratic society and allowed for the reset button to be hit on over two centuries of American history for the establishment of what will eventually become a full blown fascist dictatorship. We are well on our way there now.

The crushing of the freedom of the press (a precursor to the government going after free speech) is an essential chore for any authoriaraian/totalitarian state worth its salt. The Bushreich may have hated the press but never went to the extremes the way that the Barry and the boys have, particularly in the aftermath of the heroic whistleblowing of former government contractor Edward Snowden over the illegal activities of the NSA. Top U.S. political figures and career bureaucrats are openly calling for the ending of the freedom of the press including the aforementioned Rogers who has been the most visible point man for Leviathan and has his sights set on the hated journalist who Snowden went to in order to have his sacrifice serve as a desperate cry for help for the republic. Rogers, the former FBI thug that he is having the illicit power to rule over U.S. policy despite actually representing only a very small portion of the country overall from his safely gerrymandered Michigan Congressional district continues to escalate his rhetoric that will criminalize journalism. Rogers has been doing this by using Greenwald as his example, particularly evident with his interrogation of sitting FBI Director James Comey last week during a Capitol Hill hearing. The head of the House Intelligence Committee acting more like a Stasi officer than one who has sworn an oath of loyalty to uphold the Constitution led Comey in a methodical manner to make the equivalence that journalists who are being paid for their work are to be treated the same as regular thieves if their stories include public interest reporting on materials obtained by whistleblowers (transcript courtesy of Democracy Now which has a great interview with Greenwald and Scahill over their first piece on the NSA role in drone killings for the new media venture The Intercept):

REP. MIKE ROGERS: There have been discussions about selling of access to this material to both newspaper outlets and other places. Mr. Comey, to the best of your knowledge, is fencing stolen material—is that a crime?

JAMES COMEY: Yes, it is.

REP. MIKE ROGERS: And would be selling the access of classified material that is stolen from the United States government—would that be a crime?

JAMES COMEY: It would be. It’s an issue that can be complicated if it involves a newsgathering, a news promulgation function, but in general, fencing or selling stolen property is a crime.

REP. MIKE ROGERS: So if I’m a newspaper reporter for fill-in-the-blank and I sell stolen material, is that legal because I’m a newspaper reporter?

JAMES COMEY: Right, if you’re a newspaper reporter and you’re hocking stolen jewelry, it’s still a crime.

REP. MIKE ROGERS: And if I’m hocking stolen classified material that I’m not legally in the possession of for personal gain and profit, is that not a crime?

JAMES COMEY: I think that’s a harder question, because it involves a newsgathering function, could have First Amendment implications. That’s something that probably would be better answered by the Department of Justice.

The particular thing that Rogers who is a bully along the lines of Reinhard Heydrich is that he cannot tolerate it when a target fights back. Greenwald is notorious being an uncompromising reporter who relishes the fight, particularly against filth like the Michigan madman. In the DN interview Greenwald blasts Rogers, a man that none of the flacks, shills, careerists, stooges, suck-ups, sell outs, water carriers and lickspittles in the U.S. state corporate media ever call bullshit on for his constant stream of lies and accusations that he pulls out of his ass every Sunday morning (there is a reason why we are number 46)

"Well, first of all, Mike Rogers is a liar. He is outright lying when he says that I or any other journalist working on this case have sold documents or fenced documents. The one thing that’s missing from his accusations is any evidence, because none exists. And I defy him to present any. But that’s what Mike Rogers does. It’s who he is. He just lies and smears people, with no evidence.

"But I think the more important point than the fact that Mike Rogers is a pathological liar is the fact that this is part of a broader campaign on the part of the Obama administration, as Jeremy said, to try and either threaten journalists that they will be criminalized or outright criminalize them by prosecuting us for the journalism that we’re doing."

There are beginning to at least be some rumblings among alternative media sources that is breaking through in that if Greenwald's reporting is criminalized that it bodes very ill for all who would dare to take their First Amendment responsibilities seriously. This week there has already been a series of pieces that each in their own way acknowledge that the days of a free press in this decomposing place called The Homeland are limited if the thugs like Rogers, Clapper, Hayden, Holder and ultimately Obama himself are allowed to succeed in stomping down their jackboots on yet another of our once sacred civil liberties.