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• "I mean, you’ve got to hand it to the Obama administration. They’re far more clever than their predecessors in the Bush administration, but they’re carrying out exactly the same policy of snuffing out our most basic civil liberties and our most important press freedoms." 
• Former FBI Agent Confirms the Surveillance State Is Real.

Chris Hedges, Democracy Now!

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013 | The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges joins us to discuss what could mark the most significant government intrusion on freedom of the press in decades. The Justice Department has acknowledged seizing the work, home and cellphone records used by almost 100 reporters and editors at the Associated Press. The phones targeted included the general AP office numbers in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut, and the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery. The action likely came as part of a probe into the leaks behind an AP story on the U.S. intelligence operation that stopped a Yemen-based al-Qaeda bombing plot on a U.S.-bound airplane. Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and former New York Times reporter, calls the monitoring "one more assault in a long series of assault against freedom of information and freedom of the press." Highlighting the Obama administration’s targeting of government whistleblowers, Hedges adds: "Talk to any investigative journalist who must investigate the government, and they will tell you that there is a deep freeze. People are terrified of speaking, because they’re terrified of going to jail."

Full story (includes rush transcript)…

Related:

Former FBI Agent Confirms the Surveillance State Is Real, TruthDig

• A former FBI counterterrorism agent acknowledged this week on CNN that every telephone conversation that takes place on American soil “is being captured as we speak.”
• Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

• Apparently leaks which keep the public informed require "very aggressive action" -- but crimes which shatter the economy, leaving millions without homes and millions more without jobs aren't worth lifting a finger to investigate.
• An Itty Bitty Pity Party for the Associated Press

Richard (RJ) Eskow, Huffington Post

05/14/2013 | Apparently it never occurred to Attorney General Eric Holder that the Associated Press might be "too big to fail." If it had,then his Justice Department probably never would have investigated it.

The AP isn't just any news agency. It's the largest one in the United States and one of the three largest in the world, along with Great Britain's Reuters and Agence France-Presse. And it is, understandably enough, angry.

Full story…

Related:

An Itty Bitty Pity Party for the Associated Press, William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

• It's funny to me that the Associated Press is nailing itself to a cross because you've been victimized by the same laws, politicians and tide of history you've either blissfully ignored or gleefully promoted for so many years.
• The 'Undo-Everything' Congress: What the Press Doesn't See

• Over the past half- century, lawmakers have refused to fund public defenders' offices adequately. And, as it has become more conservative since 1963, the Supreme Court has refused to force them to do so.
• The Hypocrisy of 'Justice for All'

Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Lydia Howell

Clarence Earl Gideon after his release from prison in 1963, AP

March 13, 2013 | In the end, 50 years after one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Supreme Court, we tell ourselves that we are a nation of laws, and we praise ourselves for rulings like Gideon, and we extol the virtues of the Constitution in theory, but the truth is we are just lying to ourselves and each other when we pretend that there is equal justice in America.

You have a right to an attorney in a criminal case, even if you cannot afford one. The Supreme Court said so half a century ago. But today that precious right is systematically ignored or undermined.

Full story…

Related:

The Hypocrisy of 'Justice for All' Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company

• Bill reports on the hypocrisy of “justice for all” in a society where billions are squandered for a war born in fraud while the poor are pushed aside. 
• The next time you say the Pledge of Allegiance - remember: it's a lie. A whopper of a lie.
• The Legacy of Gideon v. Wainwright