Reporting from Syrian refugee camps, impoverished African villages and throughout the U.S., the team of graduate student reporters found that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spends more on the delivery of the food than it does on the food itself, due to a deeply entrenched system of special interests and government bureaucracy. USAID spent more than $9 billion in taxpayer dollars from 2003 to 2012 on transportation and other logistics, or more than half of its food assistance budget, according to the investigative report.

By contrast, USAID spent $7.4 billion on the food, making it by far the largest and, experts say, most inefficient humanitarian aid program in the world.

The Medill National Security Reporting Project was done in collaboration with USA TODAY.

The findings are based on interviews with dozens of U.S. officials and experts, field reporting on three continents and an unprecedented Medill analysis of internal government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

The report, “Hunger Pains: The Problem-plagued U.S. Food Aid Program Faces an Uncertain Future,” is a comprehensive series of print, video and interactive stories. As part of its partnership with Medill, USA TODAY is also publishing a version of the multimedia project on USA TODAY, which also links to the Medill site.

“The students have shown what can go wrong and what has gone wrong, even in the most well-intentioned government programs — those designed to save the lives of the world’s most vulnerable populations,” said Josh Meyer, project leader and director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative, which awarded scholarships for the Washington-based reporting project.

The scholarships and the initiative itself are funded through a generous grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

“This project is a true public service in every sense of the word, and accountability journalism of the highest order,” Meyer added.

“USA TODAY was honored to play a role in the project,” said Susan Weiss, executive editor for enterprise and investigations. “The Medill students shed light on the little-watched area of U.S. food aid, learning critical data and investigative skills in the process.”

The student reporting team found that virtually every other aid-giving country and the United Nations, which helps coordinate them, purchases critically needed grains, oils and other commodities as close to a crisis or famine zone as possible. Many also give cash transfers or vouchers instead of sacks of food. This saves money and precious time getting aid to the young, the elderly, the sick and families in crisis.

But for 60 years, Congressional mandates — spurred by special interest lobbying — have required that most American commodities sent by USAID and its flagship food aid program Food for Peace, be purchased from U.S. suppliers and transported thousands of miles on U.S.-flagged ships, even when cheaper and faster alternatives exist.

The journey can take seven months; by then, the food may be rotted, infested or too late to be of much help.

“People [have] died waiting for the food to arrive because of the very long logistics chain that’s required to get the food all the way from the United States to the location,” says former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios. “And it’s very expensive to move food over that distance.”

Among the project’s other findings:

• USAID itself has fought for decades to overhaul the food aid programs. But most reform efforts have died in Congress despite bipartisan support from lawmakers and administrations, including the Obama administration
• Problems in the USAID food aid program extend beyond the special interest protections imposed by Congress. Experts, including some U.S. food aid officials and consultants, have criticized the nutritional value of some key products and the effectiveness of a global system of prepositioning warehouses designed to speed food to victims
• USAID also has been repeatedly blasted by the watchdog arm of Congress for lacking the kind of metrics it needs to determine whether its vast global network of food aid programs are working

“Hunger Pains” is the fourth in a series of annual investigative reporting efforts that are part of Medill’s National Security Journalism Initiative. The initiative was established in January 2009 to provide journalists with the knowledge and skills necessary to report accurately and innovatively on issues related to defense, security and civil liberties and to do so across all digital platforms.

For more information about this and other Medill National Security Reporting projects, please contact Josh Meyer at josh@northwestern.edu.

But saying that – or saying only that – would be a disservice to all of the committed and courageous journalists who have given their lives in pursuit of reporting from the most dangerous corners of the earth.

That is especially the case with Foley, a Medill grad who was kidnapped in 2012 while reporting from Syria. My former Medill colleague Steve Duke said it best on a Facebook post when he described James, his former student. “He was a brave, committed journalist who went into dangerous places so the rest of us could know what was going on,” Duke wrote.

A year before being captured in Syria, Foley was kidnapped in Libya. After his release, he wasted little time in getting back out on the front lines in search of the story – and the truth – even after acknowledging to an editor that some would think he was “crazy” for doing so.

I don’t think he was crazy at all. I think he was incredibly courageous, and the very embodiment of what it means to be a war correspondent. He was someone who risked his life to bear witness to the truth.

As such, I hope that Medill, and possibly other journalism and educational organizations will honor his life, and his death, with some form of commemoration. My humble vote: changing the name of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism Award to the Medill James Foley Medal for Courage in Journalism Award. The award is given to the individual or team of journalists, working for a U.S.-based media outlet, who best displayed moral, ethical or physical courage in the pursuit of a story or series of stories.

That is small consolation to his family, of course. But it would be an important symbolic statement that the Medill community values the kind of reporting that Foley and others like him have done.

Just this year, more than 30 reporters have been killed for being journalists, with many others killed or injured in the line of duty, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Many thousands of other journalists face similar risks in conflict zones around the world every day.

The best person to speak for Foley and his commitment to journalism is Foley himself. Fortunately for us, he took the time to address the circumstances of his first kidnapping, and the lessons he learned from it, in a very frank talk at Medill in 2011. Read about it here.

Foley, a 2008 Medill grad, was emotional that day as he recounted his 44-day ordeal in prison cells in Libya to a packed audience in Evanston as part of the Gertrude and G.D. Crain Jr. lecture series.

Especially remarkable was that Foley agreed to publicly discuss his experience just two weeks after his release. He was contemplative and brutally honest about his time reporting from Libya for Boston-based GlobalPost about clashes between rebel groups and Libyan armed forces battling for control of key cities.

Previously a teacher, Foley switched to journalism in part because his brother was in the Air Force. He said he was also a frustrated writer who wanted to see the world. He said he wanted to tell the American public the real stories about war and where American taxpayer dollars were being spent in the name of protecting them.

At Medill, he took classes on national security reporting and even attended the same weekend “Hostile Environment” training seminar that I take my Washington-based students to, so they can begin the process of learning how to minimize the dangers of reporting from the field.

Foley liked embedding with U.S. troops, but that wasn’t enough. He decided that to get the real story, he had to cover the Libyan revolution by mingling with rebel groups as they advanced on government forces 500 miles southeast of Tripoli.

While doing so, Foley and three other journalists were shot at by Libyan troops in the frontline town of Brega. While three of them were taken captive, the fourth — South African photographer Anton Hammerl — is believed to have been killed in the gunfire.

“Our story is a very cautionary tale,” Foley, then 37, conceded. “We made a lot of mistakes.”

Foley told the audience that day that his Medill training, as well as his field experience, taught him that the critical aspect of covering conflicts is to be mentally strong. That came in handy, not only during his time in prisons and  after media organizations and humanitarian groups successfully pressured Libyan authorities to release him and the other two journalists.

Despite his time spent in Libyan prisons, Foley said he wouldn’t stop reporting on conflicts.

“I told my editor I know this is crazy but I want to go back to Libya,” he said. “But emotionally I am nowhere near ready.”

“Feeling like you’ve survived something—it’s a strange sort of force that you are drawn back to,” Foley was quoted as saying about his Libya experience in news reports today.

Foley was back on the front lines soon enough, covering the conflict in Syria, where he wanted “to expose untold stories,” the BBC reports. The circumstances of how he was taken into custody, and by whom, are still cloudy – at least publicly. His family has asked for privacy during this impossibly difficult time.

Conclusive evidence that Foley had in fact been murdered by ISIL was still being pursued Wednesday. But his mother, Diane Foley, posted a statement on the “Free James Foley” Facebook page in which she implored the kidnappers to spare the lives of the remaining hostages, including at least one American journalist.

On a more personal note, she added, “We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people.”

During his talk at Medill, Foley said his Libya experience taught him another important lesson, one that is especially relevant today with the news of his death. He said the loss of a fellow journalist had made the recovery process a lot more difficult for him.

“Every day I have to deal with the fact that Anton is not going to see his three kids anymore,” he said of the South African photographer. He told the hushed crowd that day that he believed conflict zones can, indeed, be covered safely.

“This can be done,” he said, “but you have to be very careful.” “It’s not worth losing your life,” he added. “Not worth seeing your mother, father, brother or sister bawling.”

Two influential advocacy organizations have issued a must-read report on how large-scale U.S. surveillance is not only harming journalism and the public’s right to know, but also undermining the rule of law by creating a chilling effect on lawyers trying to do their jobs in the national security realm.

That’s quite a strong and sweeping statement, but the 120-page report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union backs it up in great detail, including interviews with more than 90 journalists, lawyers and both current and former government officials.

The joint report, released on July 28, is titled, “With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy.”

It says the broad and deep surveillance that is occurring, largely out of public view, and government secrecy overall are undermining press freedom, the public’s right to information, and the right to counsel. These are all human rights essential to a healthy democracy, the groups say, and government actions are “ultimately obstructing the American people’s ability to hold their government to account.”

Many journalists writing about national security issues, as well as lawyers and others involved in the system, have been forced to adopt elaborate countermeasures in order to keep their communications, their sources, and other confidential information secure in light of what the groups say is an “unprecedented” level of U.S. government surveillance of electronic communications and transactions by the National Security Agency and other U.S. agencies.

“The work of journalists and lawyers is central to our democracy,” said report author Alex Sinha, the Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU. “When their work suffers, so do we.”

Here’s a link to the news release announcing the report, and here’s the report itself, which can be downloaded for free. Hard copies also can be purchased.

The report isn’t the first to conclude that journalists are finding that surveillance is “harming their ability to report on matters of great public concern.’’

But in its interviews with key journalists, the report reveals good detail on the topic, in its section on The Impact of Surveillance on Journalists, and in another on US Surveillance, Secrecy, and Crackdown on Leaks.

Among those quoted is Steve Coll, a noted author of national security books who is also a staff writer for The New Yorker and the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. “Every national security reporter I know would say that the atmosphere in which professional reporters seek insight into policy failures [and] bad military decisions is just much tougher and much chillier,” Coll says.

That’s not surprising, given all of the revelations about NSA spying in the wake of the massive leaks of classified information about such programs by Edward Snowden. But it is very disconcerting, especially the linkage between the surveillance and media efforts to practice the kind of accountability reporting that is so essential to a democracy.

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest adds that by making it harder for reporters to do their jobs, the government “makes the country less safe.”

“Institutions work less well, and (secrecy) increases the risk of corruption,” Priest said, adding that, “Secrecy works against all of us.”

The report concludes that the chilling effect also has been significant on government officials, and details numerous deterrents put in place to discourage leaks, such as leak investigations and prosecutions, over-classification of documents and preventing officials from having contact with the media. Another significantly detrimental program: the “Insider Threat Program” that essentially requires employees to turn in colleagues who they believe may be leaking state secrets.

One of the most eye-opening aspects of the report is its section on The Impact of Surveillance on Lawyers and Their Clients. This is a part of the controversy that has received far less media coverage than the Obama administration’s crackdown on journalists, but it is especially disconcerting. The report says that the widespread surveillance has sowed deep levels of uncertainty and confusion among lawyers over how to respond to it, “perhaps even more so than the media.”

“Part of that uncertainty derives from the widespread sense that we have yet to learn the full extent of the government’s surveillance powers, and what steps the intelligence community is taking to avoid scooping up attorney-client communications,” said the report. “Part may also reflect the unsettled legal landscape regarding whether attorneys who are surveilled have legal recourse.”

The report found that large-scale surveillance programs endanger lawyers’ ability to communicate confidentially with clients, especially when the government takes an intelligence interest in a case. That’s a problem because failure to meet those responsibilities can result in lawyers facing discipline through professional organizations, or even lawsuits.

The surveillance programs also make it more challenging for lawyers to defend their clients, because they rely on the free exchange of information to build trust and develop legal strategies. “Both problems corrode the ability of lawyers to represent their clients effectively,” the report said.

“As with the journalists, lawyers increasingly feel pressure to adopt strategies to avoid leaving a digital trail that could be monitored. Some use burner phones, others seek out technologies designed to provide security, and still others reported traveling more for in-person meetings,” said the report. “Like journalists, some feel frustrated, and even offended, that they are in this situation. ‘I’ll be damned if I have to start acting like a drug dealer in order to protect my client’s confidentiality,’ said one.”

Said one lawyer specializing in international dispute resolution who was granted anonymity in exchange for being candid: “I found it shocking to think that the U.S. is doing this [surveillance]—and I was at DOJ before.”

Sinha, the report’s author, said, “The US holds itself out as a model of freedom and democracy, but its own surveillance programs are threatening the values it claims to represent. The US should genuinely confront the fact that its massive surveillance programs are damaging many critically important rights.”

To its credit, the report has a robust section on the Government’s Rationale for Surveillance, and it spoke in-depth with some key current and former officials, all of whom staunchly defended the surveillance as being both lawful and necessary to protect the nation from its many enemies.

“These programs are important, vital and lawful,” argued Bob Deitz, who served as General Counsel for the NSA from 1998 to 2006, in an interview with the report’s authors.

The authors did not conclude one way or another whether the programs fall within the letter of US statutory law, whether intelligence officials have engaged in willful misconduct or whether oversight has been adequate, saying such questions fall outside the scope of their report. “However, our research strongly suggests that the US did not design the programs with protection of human rights foremost in mind,” they wrote.

Perhaps most important, the two groups issued a list of recommendations, many of which are similar to those issued in the past year by the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations that have been sharply critical of the government’s surveillance.

It calls on the Obama administration and Congress to end “overly broad or unnecessary” surveillance practices, protect whistleblowers and reduce government secrecy and restrictions on official contact with the media. Like other organizations, it also calls on the government to “stop prosecuting people who disclose matters of great public interest.”

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. | Earlier Insights columns

This past weekend, more than 1,500 investigative reporters from around the world descended on San Francisco to attend the annual conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors and hear from the best and the brightest about how to get better at their craft – including national security journalism.

Some may have gotten more than they expected from the keynote speaker, Lowell Bergman, including those who run IRE, the world’s largest grassroots organization for accountability journalism. (I’m on the IRE Board of Directors).

Lowell Bergman of the Investigative Reporting Program at University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism (Photo via Wikipedia)

That’s because Bergman, one of the best muckrakers of his – or any – generation, took us in the media to task for not doing more to help investigative reporters over the years. Without quibbling over our differences about what IRE has done for investigative reporting, and investigative reporters, I think Bergman made a lot of good and important points that are worth sharing with a wider audience.

Few journalists are in a better position to speak about the challenges of doing investigative reporting in today’s media environment, as well as yesterday’s – and tomorrow’s.

A former 60 Minutes and ABC News investigative producer, Bergman now teaches investigative reporting at the University of California, Berkeley, and does excellent work as a contributor to The New York Times, PBS’ “Frontline” documentary series and other media outlets through his Investigative Reporting Project. He also co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977, and had a brush with fame when Al Pacino portrayed him in 1999 movie “The Insider,” based on his reporting on the tobacco industry and CBS News’ reprehensible treatment of a key whistleblower.

As Bergman, 68, noted at the outset of his speech, “I’m here today to tell you that we’ve been living under an illusion.”

“We thought that after the Bush-Ashcroft-Gonzales years that Barack Obama and Eric Holder were our friends,” said Bergman. “They are not. While the president has said he supports whistleblowers for their ‘courage and patriotism,’ his Justice Department is prosecuting more of them for allegedly talking to the press or ‘leaking’ than all the other presidents in the history of the United States.”

Nothing new or shocking there. But Bergman went on to speak eloquently about how such strong-arm tactics to control information are being cheered on by those who run multinational corporations involved in bribery, exploitation of workers and manufacturing deadly products. My IRE Board colleague David Cay Johnston did a great column about Bergman’s broader message about why investigative journalism is needed to hold those in power accountable.

Bergman also sharply criticized the media for not pushing back harder against the Obama administration and its war on national security reporting, and in particular for not coming to the aid of reporters like James Risen of the New York Times.

James Risen

Risen, as I’ve written about here before, is the star investigative reporter who is the subject of a prolonged Obama administration campaign to put him in prison for publishing classified information, in his case in a 2006 book, “State of War,” about a secret U.S. counter-proliferation against Iran’s nuclear program that went awry. The administration has subpoenaed Risen not once or twice, but three times in an effort to compel him to testify – and name the source of information he used in his book.

In each case, Risen has steadfastly refused, stating that he was merely doing his job trying to inform the public about critically important national security issues. (It should also be noted that everyone, especially the government, knows Risen’s source is former CIA officer Jeffrey A. Sterling).

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Risen’s appeal of an earlier court ruling. That means he’s now in contempt of court, and a judge could order him off to prison at any time, and keep him there until he

Risen’s own paper had a good piece on the dilemma on the same day Bergman gave his speech, noting that while the high court’s decision “looked like a major victory for the government, it has forced the Obama administration to confront a hard choice. Should it demand Mr. Risen’s testimony and be responsible for a reporter’s being sent to jail? Or reverse course and stand down, losing credibility with an intelligence community that has pushed for the aggressive prosecution of leaks?”

The Times noted that the dilemma now facing the White House comes at a critical moment for an administration that came into office with the promise of putting a stop to some of the Bush administration excesses in the national security realm, especially excessive (and arguably illegal) surveillance and leak investigations targeting journalists and their sources.

The Times noted that whatever the Obama administration and its Justice Department does will send a powerful message – and a legal precedent – “about how far it is willing to go to protect classified information in the digital age.”

“If the government proceeds and pursues the subpoena, especially if Mr. Risen goes to jail or is fined at some intolerable level, it will deal a withering blow to reporting that runs against the government’s wishes,” Steven Aftergood, who studies government secrecy for the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists, told the paper.

During his speech before a packed lunchtime crowd at IRE, Bergman castigated journalism organizations, singling out IRE in particular, for letting their words speak for them when they should have been taking action – especially when the Obama administration conducts “the biggest dragnet in this nation’s history searching for our sources!”

Some of my IRE colleagues weren’t happy to hear that, and I don’t blame them. Some if not all, of the examples cited by Bergman were legitimate, but they date back years, or even decades, and include a largely unreported time when the organization allowed his 60 Minutes boss a platform to criticize him without allowing for his response.

But I know for a fact that recently, IRE as an organization has been trying to come up with ways to do more to protect reporters from Obama’s war on sources. That’s especially the case with Risen, particularly in recent months as his options appear to be increasingly limited.

But what is journalism organization to do? Bergman said it’s no longer enough to organize petitions, sign Friend of the Court briefs, make statements, meet with Obama administration officials and, of course, write impassioned articles about how wrong it is to go after a journalist like Risen simply for doing their job.

He told the rapt crowd that it’s time to “stand up’’ to the administration, in part by stopping the fawning coverage and refusing to attend the annual White House Correspondents Dinner. He also called on reporters to come to Washington to do another “Arizona Project,’’ like the one that Bergman worked on in 1976 that helped create IRE in the first place. Journalists came from far and wide to Arizona to finish the investigative project that Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was working on about organized crime, which got him killed by a car bomb.

Afterward, I asked Bergman to elaborate. What could reporters in Washington do? He said they should thoroughly investigate the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric H. Holder’s running of it – including the selective leaks to reporters that go un-investigated, the selective prosecutions that let corporations off the hook and the department’s failure to go after organized crime, financial fraud and money laundering cases.

He said he’d particularly like reporters to investigate how Holder has empowered DOJ’s National Security Division to engage in all sorts of overreaching activities.

Such an “Arizona Project” for Washington may never come to pass, not in time to help reporters like Risen, at least.

But in the meantime, Bergman asked all of us in the room to not only think like Jim Risen and engage in acts of civil disobedience when it comes to pushing back against the administration, but to stand up for him – literally.

“And so I ask you to take one small step, one small act, and stand up now and send a message to Jim Risen back in Washington, D.C. Let him know that he is not alone.”

“Let the Justice Department, let the White House and let all our colleagues in the media know that we, the reporters, who have dedicated ourselves to protecting the public interest, to digging deep, that we will stand up for our sources, for freedom of the press . . . because we are all Jim Risen!”

Looking around the room, at the multitude of standing reporters, was inspiring. What comes next, no one can say. But Bergman’s comments and his exhortation — however symbolic – were much appreciated.

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. | Earlier Insights columns

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has denied an appeal by The New York Times’ James Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter could go to jail sometime soon for refusing to identify a confidential source.

After Monday’s Supreme Court rejection, Risen said, as he has many times before, that he’s sticking with his decision to battle a subpoena – and possibly see the inside of a jail cell – rather than give up a source

“I will continue to fight,” Risen said in an interview with the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative on Monday afternoon.

Now that we’ve heard from Risen, it’s time to hear from another key player in the saga: Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

It’s no secret that the Obama administration has pursued leaks in national security cases far more aggressively than its predecessors. It has brought criminal charges in eight cases; all previous administrations combined brought a total of three.

In Risen’s case, the Obama administration has been clear that it wants to hold him in contempt of a May 2011 subpoena ordering him to testify in the criminal case against former CIA official Jeffrey Sterling.

Prosecutors have contended that Sterling gave Risen classified information about a botched counter-proliferation operation aimed at Iran called Operation Merlin for Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.”

In a legal brief, the administration told the nation’s highest court that “reporters have no privilege to refuse to provide direct evidence of criminal wrongdoing by confidential sources.”

That means that a lower court ruling stands, which holds Risen in contempt. It’s ultimately up to the judge, but Risen’s options appear to be limited – he can either talk or be held in contempt and, by extension, go to jail.

Monday’s ruling is only the latest in a long series of actions taken by the Justice Department to get Risen to talk. Holder’s prosecutors have been going after the reporter for six years now, and have issued three separate subpoenas to get him to cooperate.

But Holder himself appears to be trying to distance himself from the controversy, and from the Obama administration’s dogged pursuit of Risen and other journalists, by using some artful turns of phrase.

Some of the attorney general’s comments make him appear to be not only at odds with the administration’s aggressive posture, but almost in support of reporters like Risen and James Rosen of Fox News.

Last May, it came to light that the Justice Department portrayed Rosen as a potential criminal co-conspirator in another leak investigation into who gave him classified information about North Korea. Afterward, Holder told Congress that “the department has not prosecuted, and as long as I have the privilege of serving as attorney general of the United States will not prosecute, any reporter for doing his or her job.”

Last Tuesday, Holder went even further in a comment he made to reporters who were being briefed on leak investigations and related matters. The Justice Department agreed to release his comment as a formal statement, but stressed that Holder was not discussing any particular case.

Holder told the journalists that “as long as I’m attorney general, no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” according to media reports. That statement obviously went much further than Holder’s earlier comments because he was saying he not only wouldn’t prosecute reporters for doing their job, but he wouldn’t imprison them. That seemed to be a clear reference to reporters fighting subpoenas in connection with the prosecution of others – especially their sources.

Wait. What? How can the attorney general of the United States make comments like these at the same time his own Justice Department is, indeed, trying to hold a reporter in contempt for refusing to identify his source? Isn’t that what you’d call doing his job?

It’s worth noting that Holder’s comments last week came, suspiciously, just a few days before the Supreme Court was scheduled to take up Risen’s case. Was he trying to persuade the justices to not take the case and let his ever-so-sensitive Justice Department handle it administratively?

I can see why Holder might want to try and please his boss, the president, by having the Justice Department so forcefully go after reporters. And I can see why he might want to appear to the general public as being understanding, or even supportive of, reporters’ desire to do their jobs without fear of going to jail.

But it’s time for Holder to clarify his comments, and to specifically articulate whether he – and the administration – will continue to push for jail time for Risen. He should either drop the subpoena that he’s pursued for six years (or simply not pursue Risen’s testimony) or stop trying to make it sound like he’s supportive of the kind of reporting that Risen has been doing.

But he can’t have it both ways.

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors. | Earlier Insights columns

Below is an unabridged version of a backround brief for which I did extensive resarch on behalf of participants of the March 21, 2014 symposium, Sources & Secrets, which will be a gathering of top journalists, national security scholars and government officials to talk about the conflicts that arise when the state tries to protect its secrets and the media tries to report on them for the public good.

This briefing (Download PDF) covers the major legal issues that reporters confront when covering national security, and explains some of the key laws and regulations. Key topics:

• The use of the Espionage Act and other statutes to go after reporters’ sources
• The erosion of the reporter’s privilege in defending against subpoenas and other demands for  information
• Leak investigations aimed at national security journalists and their sources
• The Justice Department guidelines on subpoenas, including recent revisions
• The provisions and prospects of a federal media shield law
• The relevant provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act

→ Download PDF

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Nsji-meyer-kcrw-snowden-12-17-2013 by Medill National Security Zone on Mixcloud

Posted from Washington, Oct. 30, 2013

Two of the most credible advocacy organizations have just raised the stakes considerably in the drone wars controversy, contending that American airstrikes in Pakistan and Yemen have killed and injured many more innocent civilians than the U.S. government has acknowledged.

And Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch go even further in their respective reports (read them here and here), alleging that many of the attacks may have been illegal, and perhaps even war crimes.

In some cases, they contend, the US drone strikes and other airstrikes killed many suspected militants when capturing them was a feasible option, or when it wasn’t clear if civilians could be killed along with them. The result: women, children and even a 68-year-old grandmother gathering vegetables in the family fields were killed by powerful missiles fired from pilotless aircraft.

Here’s my most pressing question after reading the excellent reports: where has the media been, and why aren’t journalists also doing this kind of reporting in an effort to hold the government accountable for its top-secret drone program?

In their defense, some have tackled the story with varying levels of perseverance and success. But the reports by the two advocacy groups raise important questions that the media should be raising. So far, however, I haven’t seen much in the way of coverage, or follow-up. And that is deeply troubling.

The reports are worth reading in their entirety. But to summarize, Amnesty International did thorough, on-the-ground investigations of nine drone strikes in Pakistan in its “Will I Be Next?” report, interviewing witnesses and others. In its report, titled “Between a Drone and Al-Qaeda,” Human Rights Watch did essentially the same thing with six strikes in Yemen.

In all, Amnesty counted 29 people believed to be noncombatants as being killed in strikes in Pakistan, based on its investigation. According to its own probe, Human Rights Watch counted 57 civilian deaths in six strikes in Yemen, all but 16 of them in one deadly cruise missile attack in December 2009. (Most, but not all, of the strikes involved missiles fired from Predators and other drones).

According to media reports, the CIA had no comment and the White House had little to say, except that President Obama has already established more restrictive rules of engagement that have made it harder to kill civilians. Those new rules were announced in May, before most of the strikes examined in the reports.

US officials have insisted—before and after Obama’s speech—that the drone strikes are not only legal and necessary, but that they’re done with such precision as to virtually rule out civilian deaths.

The law is murky, at best, especially when the facts supporting their decisions are withheld because the information is classified. That too is troubling.

Perhaps Letta Tayler of Human Rights Watch put it best when she told a reporter that: “The U.S. should explain who it’s killing and why it’s killing them. We strongly suspect that their definition of ‘combatant’ is elastic and that they are stretching it beyond what international law allows.”

Hopefully the reports will spur the media to dig more deeply into this important story, and work harder to obtain the same kind of “ground truth” that the two organizations claim to have obtained—an objective and accurate assessment of the type and number of victims that refutes the official version emanating from Washington.

Reporters could start with some of the cases cited by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, including a July 2012 series of drone strikes that killed 18 male laborers, including at least one boy; some of them died as they gathered in a tent for an evening meal, others when they came to help the wounded.

One of the most jarring cases was the October 2012 death of 68-year-old Mamana Bibi in Ghundi Kala village, northwest Pakistan. In its report, Amnesty says she was killed in a drone strike that appears to have been aimed directly at her. Her grandchildren told Amnesty investigators that they watched as she was literally blown to pieces before their eyes. They also say they have never received any kind of acknowledgment that it was a US drone that killed her, no less any kind of compensation or justice for her death.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch said their investigations were hampered by the fact that the Obama administration refuses to provide even the most basic information about the strikes, including the justification for launching them.

As a result, “Amnesty International is unable to reach firm conclusions about the context in which the US drone attacks on Mamana Bibi and on the 18 laborers took place, and therefore their status under international law. However, based on its review of incidents over the last two years, Amnesty International is seriously concerned that these and other strikes have resulted in unlawful killings that may constitute extrajudicial executions or war crimes.’’

These are serious allegations. But Amnesty seems to have some justification in making them. Now it’s the media’s turn to see whose version of the truth is more accurate.

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

After decades of turning its critical eye to the lack of press freedoms in other countries, the renowned Committee to Protect Journalists today releases its first comprehensive report on working conditions in the United States — and it’s quite damning. (Read as PDF).

Essentially, just when you thought the Obama administration’s “war on national security reporters” couldn’t get any worse, CPJ comes along and describes in detail how the situation is actually far more dire than one might imagine.

The “CPJ Special Report” was authored by Leonard Downie, Jr., the former top editor of the Washington Post, and it is as important as it is scathing. Downie’s report is being released today and, while long,  it’s worth reading in its entirety — not just by reporters but by the public and certainly by lawmakers and other observers of the growing security state here in Washington.

That is, in part, due to the stature of the author as well as the organization that commissioned the report. Downie served with distinction as the Post’s executive editor for a remarkable 17 years, and remains a vice president at large at The Post. He is also the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors, (as do I), and is a founder of the grassroots nonprofit organization, which is dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting worldwide.

But what gives the report its moral authority is the people quoted in it. Downie and CPJ research associate Sara Rafsky spent months investigating the issue, and talked to dozens of key journalists, lawyers, scholars and government officials, and teased out of them some remarkably astute and candid observations.

I was one of the many journalists interviewed by Downie for the report, which CPJ commissioned after reading some of his earlier postings on the topic. The lead, or “lede,” as they say at newspapers, is that reporters and sources alike are so freaked out that their calls and emails are being read by the government that it’s having a tremendous chilling effect on how the media does its job of holding the government accountable on a wide range of issues, from warrantless wiretapping to constitutionally questionable drone strike to…well, you get the picture.

One of Downie’s particularly newsworthy observations is that the big media chill in the nation’s capital has spread far wider than the public is aware of, and is thwarting the public from getting information about an alarming array of stories and topics.

“U.S. President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but he has fallen short of his promise,” Downie writes. “Journalists and transparency advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to journalists.”

For all the details, click here: “The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America.’’

In his report, Downie delves into the topic of how the U.S. government tries to keep reporters in check by starting with the Watergate era, in which the Nixon administration’s telephone wiretaps were the biggest concern for journalists and sources worried about government surveillance. He notes in a related op-ed piece in The Washington Post that, “Except for the aborted prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg for the leak of the Pentagon Papers, criminal culpability or pervasive surveillance were not major concerns, especially after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974.”

But all that changed with the passage of the Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to Downie. Since then, we have seen “a vast expansion of intelligence agencies and their powers, the aggressive exploitation of intrusive digital surveillance capabilities, the excessive classification of public documents and officials’ sophisticated control of the news media’s access to the workings of government.”

As a result, he writes, “journalists who cover national security are facing vast and unprecedented challenges in their efforts to hold the government accountable to its citizens.”

Some are taking extraordinary precautions to keep their sources from becoming casualties in the Obama administration’s war on leaks, such as avoiding telephone conversations and email exchanges and arranging furtive one-on-one meetings instead. A few news organizations have gone so far as to set up separate computer networks and safe rooms for journalists trained in encryption, Downie writes.

Downie doesn’t disclose which media outlets are doing that kind of thing, and demurred when I asked him about it. But it’s safe to say that only the news media organizations with the deepest pockets — such as The Post and other big papers and television networks — will be able to pay for such measures. The vast majority of reporters covering national security will be stuck trying to operate in a world where they assume — and probably rightly so — that everything they say and do is being monitored by the government.

Some in the media praised CPJ for tackling the topic, including the dean at the Cronkite school, Christopher Callahan.

“The fact that the Committee to Protect Journalists felt compelled to investigate the U.S. government’s treatment of the press is a remarkable statement here in the home of the First Amendment,” Callahan said in a statement accompanying the report. “U.S. government tactics are increasingly impeding journalists’ work and placing a chill on newsgathering that could endanger our democracy.”

CPJ says its comprehensive investigation of threats to press freedoms under the Obama administration is its first on the U.S. The organization issues about a half-dozen special reports annually on the state of press freedom in selected countries.

So far in 2013, CPJ says, it has completed reports on  Burma,  China,  Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and Tanzania. The only time the United States has been the subject of a CPJ report was 19 years ago. That report was limited to attacks on immigrant journalists.

CPJ says it plans to send an accompanying series of recommendations to the Obama administration regarding press freedoms in the United States. I’m looking forward to reading them, and hearing from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and perhaps even Obama himself on the recommendations, as well as the report itself. It raises a lot of important issues that require their response.

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill in 2010, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Veteran intel journalist Jeff Stein has an excellent and very comprehensive report (PDF) about how dangerous it is to be a national security journalist these days, and it’s worth highlighting (and condensing with some of the best links).

Stein, who writes the SpyTalk blog and has written for The Washington Post and other media outlets, interviewed an impressive number of working journalists, media experts, lawyers and others for the Computing Now piece. He uses those interviews to show how the prosecutorial war being waged by the Bush and Obama administrations against reporters is actually worse than the general public knows.

When Stein joined The Post in 2010, the situation was already bad enough for an in-house lawyer to tell new hires to not write anything down that they didn’t want the government to see. “Not in your notes, and certainly not in emails,” he quotes the lawyer as saying. “Give your sources code names. Avoid talking about anything sensitive on the phone.”

And the kicker? “Go back to park benches and parking garages,” the lawyer said, in a reference to one of the paper’s main Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward, who famously met his “Deep Throat” source in an underground garage.

Currently, he says the protections afforded reporters back then are virtually non-existent now, especially because so much of their work is done electronically, where there is an easily retrievable record of it.  Stein says 37 states and the District of Columbia have press shield laws, varying in scope, that allow reporters to protect their sources. But Gregg Leslie, legal defense director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, tells Stein that they “only apply in state courts, and there is no federal shield law, so shield laws do not apply in any national security investigation, which will always be in federal court.”

The upshot is that federal prosecutors have wide leeway in getting subpoenas to track reporters’ emails and telephone calls and compel testimony in court. Stein cites some worrisome and well-known recent precedents, including Judith Miller and James Risen of the New York Times, and, more recently, investigations into some Associated Press reporters and James Rosen of Fox News.

But he says the groundwork for pursuing journalists was laid in 2003, when a federal judge in Chicago, Richard Posner, ruled that a group of authors writing a biography of an Irishman charged with terrorism had to turn over their tapes and notes.

“In swift progression, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began pursuing journalists for accepting leaks from whistleblowers concerned about government waste, fraud, and abuse,” Stein writes. “And in a truly disturbing development, it seemed like the gumshoes were now viewing reporters as criminal co-conspirators.”

Soon, one respected former television reporter, Mark Feldstein, was interviewed by the FBI as part of an investigation into whether officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Council, or AIPAC, Washington’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby, had trafficked in classified documents. They said they wanted access to research he was doing on a book about the late journalist-muckraker, Jack Anderson, especially the identity of any of Anderson’s former reporters “who were pro-Israel in their views or who had pro-Israeli sources,” according to Feldstein’s later testimony to a congressional committee. Feldstein refused, and told Congress that the FBI’s effort “suggested that the Bureau viewed reporters’ notes as the first stop in a criminal investigation rather than as a last step reluctantly taken only after all other avenues have failed.”

In quick succession came the Valerie Plame case, the Bush Justice Department’s consideration of prosecuting Risen and New York Times colleague Eric Lichtblau for reporting on the NSA’s secret eavesdropping program and then the federal investigation into the NSA’s Thomas Drake for being the source for the Baltimore Sun’s multipart series on the shortcomings of several massive surveillance programs costing billions of dollars. Prosecutors ultimately dropped all charges against Drake, but not before trying to put in him prison for violating the 1917 Espionage Act. A judge labeled their conduct “unconscionable,” but federal prosecutors have continued to use that statute in going after reporters and their sources.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was going after Risen again, for information about Iran in his 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.” But as Stein writes, Risen is far from the only journalist being targeted.  “We’re out for scalps,” a senior Justice official confided to Shane Harris, author of “TheWatchers,” a book about government surveillance programs.

A year later, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking classified information to journalists Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, Barton Gellman of The Washington Post and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. By then, the Justice Department was well into its investigation of Rosen, Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, after he broadcast a story, based on a top-secret document about North Korea’s nuclear strategy that referred to “CIA sources.”  In an affidavit, an FBI agent said there was “probable cause to believe” that Rosen was committing a crime—and that he was “an aider and abetter and/or co-conspirator” to alleged violations of the 1917 Espionage Act.

Stein also does a nice job of summarizing the chilling effect all of this has had on working journalists, and the media’s disdain for Obama’s new reforms aimed at protecting reporters and making sure leak investigations don’t go too far. “Reporters are frustrated, but the public is the loser when the press can’t get `the real story’ behind the government’s canned statements and evasions,” Stein writes.

And lest anyone think that things are getting any better, Risen’s case is not only still continuing, but he recently suffered a significant setback. He’s been ordered to testify in the criminal trial of former CIA official Jeffrey Sterling, who has been indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for allegedly leaking information to Risen. Last month, the federal appeals judge in Richmond, Virginia, ruled that Risen could not claim a reporter’s privilege under the First Amendment to avoid having to testify.

So, in short, the court has not only ruled that Risen must reveal his source, it has essentially ruled that committing an act of journalism could soon become an imprisonable offense.

Josh Meyer is director of education and outreach for the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Times before joining Medill, where he is also the McCormick Lecturer in National Security Studies. Josh is the co-author of the 2012 best-seller “The Hunt For KSM; Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,’’ and a member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors.