Every so often reports surface about the Justice Department's prosecution of CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling--often due to the government's attempts to convince New York Times reporter James Risen to testify about his interactions with Sterling. The Times reported on the latest such efforts yesterday (5/25/11):

Federal prosecutors are trying to force the author of a book on the CIA to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about the agency's effort to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

Such efforts to get journalists to testify often lead media outlets to champion their First Amendment rights and the necessity of protecting valuable sources (though, as in the case of Judith Miller, the arguments are sometimes rather unconvincing).

The story Risen told--which the government thinks came from Sterling--is pretty fascinating. As the Times summed it up:

The chapter details an effort by the CIA in 2000 to disrupt Iran's nuclear program by sending a former Russian scientist to give it blueprints for a nuclear triggering device with a hidden design flaw. Mr. Risen portrayed the operation as botched, saying the agency may have helped Iranian scientists gain valuable and accurate information.

Now that sounds pretty damn newsworthy, right?  Well, you didn't read about it in the New York Times:

The material in that chapter did not appear in the New York Times. Mr. Sterling's indictment said that Mr. Risen had worked on an article about the program in 2003, but that the newspaper decided not to publish it after government officials told editors that such a disclosure would jeopardize national security.

I guess it would be a little awkward for the Times to spend much time championing Risen's cause. "We must defend our reporters' need to protect their sources for the sake of a story we didn't publish because the government told us not to" is hardly a stirring defense of journalistic freedom.

If James Risen's blogger critics were in kindergarten, as the New York Times reporter suggests, when he broke the story about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in 2005, then presumably they would have been in pre-K in 2004 when he first learned about the surveillance program. They would have moved up a grade as his paper sat on the story for a year (Extra! Update, 2/06), keeping news of the illegal spying under wraps until long after the 2004 elections.

Apparently Risen's critics were born sometime around 1999, when Risen was helping to railroad atomic scientist Wen Ho Lee with false spying charges (Extra! Update, 12/00).

There's been plenty of commentary about Monday's front-page New York Times story (6/14/10) announcing, "U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan."

Reporter James Risen's lead:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan War itself, according to senior American government officials.

Why this story appeared now was a question on a lot of people's minds, especially considering how Risen explained its timing:

American and Afghan officials agreed to discuss the mineral discoveries at a difficult moment in the war in Afghanistan. The American-led offensive in Marja in southern Afghanistan has achieved only limited gains. Meanwhile, charges of corruption and favoritism continue to plague the Karzai government, and Mr. Karzai seems increasingly embittered toward the White House.

So the Obama administration is hungry for some positive news to come out of Afghanistan.

Risen hasn't taken kindly to the criticism, as Yahoo!News reporter John Cook found out when he tried to interview him. Risen snapped at Cook:

The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories.... Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think.

Risen apologized for his outburst, explaining that he "didn't sleep well last night," thanks to all the criticism.

So what does the story mean, exactly? Some of the sleep-depriving commentary added some helpful context:

--The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder noted that Afghanistan's potential mineral wealth has been known for some time: "The story is accurate, but the news is not that new." He wondered if the story was really "a broad and deliberate information operation designed to influence public opinion on the course of the war."

--Paul Jay also commented on the fact that this was already known, and that the Times should have raised questions about a possible connection to the U.S. troop surge:

The problem is, what the NYT describes as "beyond any previously known reserves" and "the previously unknown deposits" were in fact quite well known--in 2007, well before President Obama made the fateful decision to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

--And economist Dean Baker responded to the idea, advanced in a Times follow-up story, that this discovery would amount to $38,482.76 for every Afghan. He wrote:

It would be useful to note that this is a gross number, it does not subtract the cost of extracting the minerals nor does it consider that these resources would likely be extracted over many decades.

The Obama Justice Department--or at least one of its top prosecutors--is cracking down on investigative reporting without regard for the First Amendment.

The first disturbing development was the indictment of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, whose leaks to the Baltimore Sun helped expose how the NSA's warrantless spying program deliberately failed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Now the same prosecutor who indicted Drake--William Welch, who stepped down from a prior post as head of the Justice Department's public integrity unit after botching the prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens (R.-Alaska)--has opened a new front against freedom of the press. Welch subpoenaed New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources for the account in his book of a CIA operation that may have given Iran important information about how to create a nuclear bomb in the course of trying to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear program. The New York Times reports today (4/29/10):

The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for the New York Times, received a subpoena on Monday requiring him to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter of his book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. The chapter largely focuses on problems with a covert CIA effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research....

The Bush administration had sought Mr. Risen's cooperation in identifying his sources for the Iran chapter of his book, and it obtained an earlier subpoena against him in January 2008 under Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey. But Mr. Risen fought the subpoena, and never had to testify before it expired last summer. That left it up to Mr. Holder to decide whether to press forward with the matter by seeking a new subpoena.

If a judge does not agree to quash the subpoena and Mr. Risen still refuses to comply, he risks being held in contempt of court.

The Times report alludes to the case of Judith Miller, who was subpoenaed by independent counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to reveal which Bush administration official had revealed that the Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent Bush critic, was an undercover CIA officer. FAIR encouraged Miller to cooperate with the prosecutor in that case, because no genuine public interest was served in protecting the identity of an official who had used classified information to punish a government critic.

In both the cases pursued by Welch, on the other hand, the targets are legitimate whistleblowers who revealed information that was of vital concern to the public. Risen has announced through his lawyer that he will fight the subpoena in court, and if he gets a judge who respects the First Amendment he should succeed. If Barack Obama and Eric Holder respect the First Amendment, meanwhile, they will rein in these disturbing efforts to squelch journalistic scrutiny of the state.

Even though "James Risen, David Johnston and Neil A. Lewis first told the world about waterboarding in May 2004," Dan Froomkin (WashingtonPost.com, 5/4/09) is having to argue that "that doesn't mean that the rest of us are as guilty as the people who committed the crimes--or that those who ordered those crimes should avoid accountability." While Newsweek's Jacob Weisberg and the Post's own Michael Kinsley are among those "arguing that the nation's collective guilt for torture is so great that prosecution is a cop-out," Froomkin has some "big problems with this argument":

While it's true that the public's outrage over torture has been a long time coming, one reason for that is the media's sporadic and listless coverage of the issue. Yes, there were some extraordinary examples of investigative reporting we can point to, but other news outlets generally didn't pick up these exclusives. Nobody set up a torture beat, to hammer away daily at what history I think will show was one of the major stories of the decade. Heck, as Weisberg himself points out, some of his colleagues were actually cheerleaders for torture. By failing to return to the story again and again--with palpable outrage--I think the media actually normalized torture.

Looking at journalists' "obligation to shout this story from the rooftops, day and night," Froomkin finds that, "instead we lulled the public into complacency."