About that “record number” of Obama leak prosecutions:

[ucrdem]

We've all heard the claim that Obama has out-Cheneyed Cheney by doubling down on whistle-blower prosecutions. Oh the outrage! But apart from the fact that leakers are not "whistle-blowers," here's what that actually means:


1. The total number of Obama first-term leak prosecutions is six (6). Previous leak prosecutions: three. So technically, yes, the BO has prosecuted more leakers than all previous administrations combined, but all that says is that previous administrations had reasons not to pursue leakers.


2. Obama only calls attention to his leak prosecutions because Congress has accused him of leaking on purpose to flaunt his national security achievements -- like RW administrations do. How they love to accuse Obama of their own sins.


3. There’s no coordinated WH or DoJ policy of cracking down on leaks, and the prosecutions have originate from various sources:

The scattered bureaucratic background of the six cases appears to support the notion that they were not the result of a top-down policy. Two were handled by the Justice Department’s criminal division, while two others were developed by the national security division. A case involving a former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, started with an unrelated inquiry at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and ended up as a leak case by accident. And the case against Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst accused of delivering huge archives of classified documents to WikiLeaks, was a military prosecution that would most likely have been brought under any administration.

4. The reason Obama has succeeded where previous admins have failed-on-purpose is largely because of accidental developments like growing use of digital devices and policies set in motion during Bushler’s second term:

But a closer look reveals a surprising conclusion: the crackdown has nothing to do with any directive from the president, even though he is now promoting his record as a political asset. Instead, it was unplanned, resulting from several leftover investigations from the Bush administration, a proliferation of e-mail and computer audit trails that increasingly can pinpoint reporters’ sources, bipartisan support in Congress for a tougher approach, and a push by the director of national intelligence in 2009 that sharpened the system for tracking disclosures.

5. Last but not least, “Decisions about leak prosecutions are made by the Department of Justice,” not the White House, and five of these six cases have been pursued by agencies of the DoJ. The sixth, Manning's, is being pursued by the Army.


But that doesn’t get the outrage flowing, does it?


More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/politics/accidental-path-to-record-leak-cases-under-obama.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0