If Obama Is the Spy,Then It’s Not a Crime

The head of The Associated Press accuses him of being “false and a killer of freedom.” Why oversee everything? And no chic radicals complain.

This does not make him a dictator, but it comes close enough. And in any case, for Barack Obama to get to the White House by accusing his predecessor of being opaque and promising that the next four years would be characterized by sincerity and absolute transparency is terribly contradictory.

He has received the title of the worst enemy of the free press in the 167 years of U.S. history, and not from some enthusiastic supporter of the tea party this time, but from Gary Pruitt, the president of The Associated Press, the news agency that is king of the information world. The usual grievances were not behind the attack launched at Obama during the Inter-American Press Association General Assembly, however. Rather, it was anger and resentment over the National Security Agency’s covert operation in 2012, when it sieved through phone calls, emails and other forms of communication used by a large number of journalists from Pruitt’s agency. Surveillance began after a leak from AP regarding an attack, organized in Yemen by al-Qaida groups and intended to strike a trans-Atlantic flight en route to the United States. Surveillance was authorized by the White House to figure out how and who was successfully able to get past the official line by the president and secret service, according to which an immediate threat of attack on American soil did not exist at the time. If we hear Pruitt out, the interception of AP communications was not a surgical operation addressing a number of restricted objectives. It was, once again, “overbroad, sloppy and a fishing expedition into a wide spectrum of AP news journalism and journalists — most of whom had nothing to do with the issues in question here.”

The jabs do not stop here. For Pruitt, encouraging citizens to chose between a free press and national security is “a false choice,” capable of undermining democracy. “The actions by the Department of Justice could not have been more tailor-made to comfort authoritarian regimes who want to suppress the news media,” thundered AP’s number one, highlighting how the mere presence of a free and independent press “differentiates democracy from dictatorship; separates a free society from tyranny.” Behind his jab at Obama, there is, however, a carefully chosen time and place, more congenial than a precisely served vendetta: The stab was delivered in the middle of a U.S. press assembly that brings together not only American journalists, but also those from Latin American countries. And for this last bit: The news of the day, discussed until the moment we heard Pruitt, was a leak revealing that, in 2010, NSA spies also stuck their noses into the computers of Felipe Calderon, [then] current president of Mexico, and his entourage. The operation dubbed “Flatliquid,” a large portion of the information that emerged in the course of “Datagate,” is described in the files of the mole Edward Snowden.

And to make it doubly scalding, we can include the leaks from last September, from the Brazilian TV Globo, revealing that, in the summer of 2012, the NSA allegedly kept under surveillance Mexico’s current president, only a candidate at the time, Enrique Peña Nieto. And since the tapping took place during the term of President Calderon, who is considered to be very loyal to Washington, the scandal risks having more than a few repercussions — repercussions that Pruitt must have cautiously foreseen when he decided to add his accusations to the chorus of protests that are pouring onto the Obama administration, described as Big Brother not only by its enemies, but also its allies.