Pete Hegseth's crackdown will help autocracy flourish |
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.
The criminalisation of journalism is part of a wide-ranging assault on freedom of expression moving ahead with frightening speed in the US and rest of the world. Dictators, in place or aspiring, from Ankara to Washington and Moscow to Delhi, offer the same mendacious reasons for targeting news gatherers by accusing them of posing a threat to national security.
Securing a monopoly of important and unimportant information is a fundamental weapon of state control, which 250 years ago the founding fathers of the United States renounced in keeping with the core principles of the age of enlightenment. Taking only developments in the last week, these principles are being subverted by the relentless suppression of criticism of the autocratic state being constructed by President Donald Trump.
The US War Secretary, Pete Hegseth, says that the Pentagon and the Department of Justice are establishing “a joint taskforce to identify and prosecute… unauthorised disclosures of sensitive” information to the press. In words that could have come from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Hegseth said “the security of our nation cannot be a bargaining chip for those who seek momentary headlines, [because] access to confidential and secret information is a sacred trust, and those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law”.
A few days earlier, federal law enforcement officers had visited the homes of New York Times reporters to serve legal documents requiring them to appear before a grand jury after they had written a story about Trump shifting from a Qatari-gifted Boeing 747 Air Force One aircraft to the previous presidential plane for unstated security reasons.
This does not seem like an Earth-shattering piece of information, but autocratic regimes are grossly over-sensitive to any unauthorised disclosure about their activities, regardless of whether or not these are anodyne or culpable. The newspaper also said that a senior FBI official contacted the newspaper to demand the presidential plane story not be published on security grounds that he refused to disclose, and also asked for the identity of the sources on which the article was based.
Optimists might counter that all US administrations have wanted to plug leaks and punish leakers, notably during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s when president Richard Nixon was in the White House. But the current clamp-down is far more serious because Watergate happened when the mainline US newspapers and television stations were at the peak of their power, fully capable of defending themselves. Since then they have been in decline, even before the internet platforms began to syphon off the advertising revenue that had previously financed the press. For the last 20 or more years, there has been a catastrophic diminution in the number and quality of news outlets in America and across the world.
When I was a correspondent in Washington in the 1990s, I would regularly look up reports in the big state newspapers from Louisiana to Rhode Island to find interesting stories that had for some reason not become part of the national news........