Antiwar.com has sued the FBI, demanding the release of records that the publication’s management believes the law enforcement agency is keeping on the 17-year-old online magazine. It’s a timely issue given recent revelations that the Obama administration allegedly seized Associated Press phone records earlier this year. AP has called the ongoing case a “serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news.”
Antiwar.com founder and managing editor Eric Garris, along with longtime editorial director Justin Raimondo, filed a lawsuit Tuesday at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization representing Garris and Raimondo in the suit, previous attempts to obtain the FBI files have failed. Garris and Raimondo were tipped off about the FBI files after obtaining a copy of a lengthy FBI memo in 2011.
The details in question come from a heavily redacted 94-page document. The suit alleges that the FBI has files on Garris and Raimondo. At one point, the FBI agent writing the April 30, 2004, memo recommends further monitoring of the website in the form of opening a “preliminary investigation …to determine if [redaction] are engaging in, or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to national security.”
Antiwar.com is an openly ideological publication, claiming to be “devoted to the cause of non-interventionism.” The publication is widely read and claims to be a popular news source for “libertarians, pacifists, leftists, ‘greens’ and independents alike,” as well as “many on the Right who agree with our opposition to imperialism.”
Writers for the publication frequently publish critiques of U.S. foreign policy, including scathing articles that lambaste U.S. drone strikes, the Guantanamo Bay prison and the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
The website’s founders maintain that their website is a legitimate expression of free speech and that they have been unjustly targeted for observation by the FBI.
“On one hand it seemed almost funny that we would be considered a threat to national security, but it’s very scary, because what we are engaging in is free speech, and free speech by ordinary citizens and journalists is now being considered a threat to national security and they don’t have to prove it because the government has the ability to suppress information and not disclose any of their activities – as witnessed with what is going on now at the AP and other things,”Garris said.
The Obama administration is alleged to have obtained AP phone records covering all of April and May 2012. It is not clear why the phone records were seized, but some posit that they are connected to an undisclosed case involving terrorism and national security.
The AP claims that the case demonstrates overreach by the Obama administration. “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” said AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt.
This sentiment has been echoed by the ACLU.
“Freedom of the press is a cornerstone of our democracy, whether it’s AP or Antiwar.com,” said Julia Harumi Mass, staff attorney for the ACLU in Northern California. “FBI surveillance of news organizations interferes with journalists’ ability to do their jobs as watchdogs that hold the government accountable.”
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