Medill Professor Ellen Shearer, who is a member of the ACOS executive committee and is also co-director of the Medill National Security Journalism Initative, said the standards represent a crucial move to ensure that journalists, especially freelancers, do not go into dangerous reporting situations without protections under the impression that editors and news directors expect the exclusive stories that lead to unnecessary risks.

The murders of American journalists last year by the Islamic State, notably the beheading of Medill alum and GlobalPost reporter James Foley, were the catalyst for the creation of the principles.

WASHINGTON — Islamist terror groups’ violent relationship with media goes beyond the killings they have shown the world on YouTube, a Reporters Without Borders study has found.

The report (https://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/rapport_daech_en_web.pdf) released on Jan. 4 by the advocacy organization shows a direct targeting of journalists from groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida, as well as the strict rules and regulations these terror organizations have for theirs own media.

Modern terror groups rely heavily on intimidation—which they try to achieve by capturing and ransoming or murdering journalists—and the wide dissemination of their messages through social media as well as through reports on video channels and magazines that they control.

“IS exists above all on – and thanks to – the Internet, via which it wages most of its information war,” the report said.

Public targeting of reporters, which al-Qaida did in 2013 on the cover of one of its magazines, is part of that war.

So is controlling the media.

Islamic State controls more than five television stations, a radio station and a magazine, the report says. In Somalia, al-Qaida affiliate Al-Shabaab took over 10 radio stations in 2010, censoring their content along religious lines. Al-Qaida publishes multiple magazines in multiple languages.

In 2015, 54 journalists were captured, according to the report. Local journalists are particularly vulnerable if they do not comply with Islamic State rules and can be “arrested” and executed, the report indicated.

Abducting journalists is as much a hope for ransom money as it is a display of power.

In 2014 Islamic State released a list of 11 “commandments” that itemize how journalists function under its authority, the first of which requires swearing allegiance to leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Journalists are allowed to work with Islamic State, but under last-word censorship.

Conversely, journalists who report on these terror groups or in areas that the groups control can be victims of government suspicion.

VICE News journalist Mohammed Ismael Rasool was one of those captured. He was released on bail from a Turkish prison last week. The Iraqi journalist was held for 131 days on terrorism charges while reporting.

The 141-page document serves as the official rulebook for the treatment and behavior of inmates held at the military prison (including WikiLeaks firestarter Chelsea Manning) and addresses everything from media contact with inmates to rules regarding their appearance and hygiene.

The FOIA request was intended to increase transparency regarding the U.S. Army’s regulation of USDB inmates held at Fort Leavenworth, to better inform the press about rules regarding their contact with prisoners and to shed light on the status of civil liberties within the prison’s walls.

You can view the entire document below:

During the talk with Medill undergraduates, From discussed the history of the contemporary Democratic party, political strategy and his analysis of the Democratic party’s prognosis in the battle for the White House in 2016. From’s book “The New Democrats and the Return to Power” serves as a historical guide to how the modern Democratic party came together, but he dedicated much of his current analysis to the party’s future and he pulled no punches.

From started off his evaluation of the Democrats’ current obstacles by calling out Democrats for prioritizing fancy campaign delivery mechanisms over a relatable platform.

“The truth is, despite all the talk about different ways to communicate, you know, no amount of money or technology or social media or campaign strategy or tactics can make up for a message that doesn’t connect with voters,” From said.

He went on to accuse Democrats of being too comfortable with their historic “demographic advantage” in presidential elections and not taking into account factors such as the potential flippability of the Hispanic vote and the recent Republican capture of the Asian vote. From emphasized the idea that “votes are not necessarily forever” and noted that President Barack Obama’s absence from the 2016 ballot could significantly impact the minority and youth votes for the worse.

From also underscored the importance of working to improve the economy vs. solely focusing on minimum wage. He cited an old friend’s success as a case study for this point, attributing the decrease in American equality observed under Bill Clinton’s presidential administration to national economic growth.

“The problem with the Democrats is you spend so much time worrying about the, uh, about passing out the golden eggs, you forget to worry about the health of the goose,” From explained.

Additionally, From said that members of his party must keep healthcare reinvention and modernization at the forefront of their considerations, since there is a correlation between the efficiency of federal services and the public’s faith in government.

“I learned at a very young age that government reform is not an advocation of liberal goals; it’s essential to achieving them,” he said. “Government is our vehicle for doing good things.”

Blue Force tracking is a term used in the military for a computer system that tracks where military forces – friendly (blue forces) and hostile – are located. A new website has taken that name and used it to explain its mission – to help Americans understand where its military forces are in a unique, nuanced way.

The point of Blue Force Tracker (www.blueforcetracker.com) is not to show where troops are physically deployed, but to give Americans a more informed understanding of where their members of the military are in terms of mindsets—how they think, how they live, why they do what the do, what it means to them—and what it means to all of us.

The site and a complementary mobile app were launched in July by Nolan Peterson, a 2012 alumnus of the Medill School of Journalism’s graduate program who had served as an Air Force officer—a special operations pilot with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

www.blueforcetracker.com

Peterson wants to show Americans what’s going on in the military here and abroad by using as writers those who have recently served in the military, experts and current members of the military as his reporting staff in addition to professional journalists.

Peterson also said people who have served in the military or abroad have a deeper knowledge because they’ve experienced the culture and the issues of conflicts. He said he noticed it in his own reporting—when he went to Afghanistan as an embed before joining the Air Force his perspective was different than when he returned as a veteran because “people were telling me more things that they wouldn’t tell a civilian journalist.”

“Using people with real-world experience has two advantages – your breadth of knowledge of the stories that are out there and your ability to get sources ” he said in an interview. “We wanted to leverage that to give journalism skills to people with real credibility about the topics they are writing about.”

Peterson said he’s guiding the veterans, active-duty military and experts to change their perspectives from opinion into news and analysis.

A few months of reading posts on Blue Force Tracker shows he’s making some real headway in his mission. I found the stories from veterans and active-duty military to offer knowledge and perspectives that helped me think about some issues such as in new ways.

Blue Force Tracker Assistant Editor James LaPorta, for instance, shared a play-by-play on a day in the life of his platoon in the southern Helmand Province of Afghanistan – a straightforward account of boredom interrupted by fierce fighting and danger, something most Americans cannot conceptualize.

Eric Chandler , flew F-16s for 20 years. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan and wrote about his fears of helping out at the Combat Support Hospital.

A sample of the headlines on the front page of Blue Force Tracker. (Sept. 29, 2014)

“I told myself I was busy flying high performance jet aircraft in combat. I couldn’t afford to be distracted. … In a word, I was afraid. I was afraid to go to the hospital. I didn’t want to see the broken bodies of my service buddies. And I was ashamed that I was afraid, which made it worse. Luckily, pilots are good at compartmentalizing. Especially me.”

This brief passage gives enormous insight into what pilots, and other service members, have to battle inside themselves while fighting the enemy.

One point, made again and again by active-duty contributors as well as recent veterans, is the disdain felt for the “thank you for your service” mantra that is heard everywhere — from airline personnel letting service members, if they’re in uniform, get on planes first, to lawmakers and politicians offering thanks as part of a political statement.

Joe Osborne, a Blue Force contributor who spent 15 years in the Air Force, including multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, made the point in writing about the death of Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, who was killed when, according to reports, “a Taliban member dressed as an Afghan National Army soldier shot the general and more than a dozen others at an Afghan compound on the outskirts of Kabul.”

“What we need to do, as a nation, is offer more than just thanks to service members. Instead, we need to remember them. We need to remember those still deployed, and we need to remember those who made the sacrifice, who volunteered to go where others would not dare.”

Another contributor wrote that “I have been talking a lot with my military peers lately, and I sense a rising tide of disappointment among veterans with those who have never served. Most people with whom we interact cannot even place Afghanistan or Iraq on a map, but they still have incredibly strong opinions about what we have tried to do there. We don’t understand why our fellow countrymen don’t care enough to learn about these place and the issues that affect them, so they at least have the faintest clue about what they are sending these young men and women off to endure.”

The anger is palpable, but the call to action for citizens – and for journalists trying to help inform and engage Americans on the important issues of U.S. security and military operations – is clear.

Posted Sept. 4, 2014

The second beheading of an American journalist by ISIS in two weeks may indicate that the Sunni militant group is targeting journalists in a particularly brutal form to show the world – and particularly President Barack Obama – its strength and influence, according to several experts.

“We’ve seen this before by drug cartels in Mexico, and now by ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq,” said Frank Smyth, executive director of Global Journalist Security, a firm that trains journalists to operate in hostile environments. “Journalists in such environments should no longer expect that their role as independent observers will be respected.”

In a video released Tuesday, Steven Sotloff, 31, was shown being beheaded by a member of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The White House said intelligence officials believe the video to be authentic.

On Aug. 19, ISIS released a video showing the beheading of James Foley, another American journalist freelancing for GlobalPost.com. Sotloff also was a freelancer who had written for Time magazine and Foreign Policy. In both videos, the journalists were kneeling, dressed in orange jumpsuits and being guarded by a black-clad and masked ISIS fighter wielding a knife.

“Journalists — every professional operating in violent environments — need to know that neither their roles nor their nationalities will protect them,” Smyth said. “On the contrary, the two back-to-back beheadings by ISIS of James Foley and Steven Sotloff suggest that journalists are being targeted because of their nationality, while their executions are being used to amplify ISIS’ message of terror around the globe.”

However, Phil Balboni, president of GlobalPost, said the murders of journalists may be more the result of the kind of conflicts occurring today in Syria and elsewhere – where journalists have to operate without protection of the U.S. military or local authorities.

“It’s the nature of the conflict that can lead to journalists being one of the few good targets of opportunity,” he said.

Delphine Hagland, the U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders, said the killing of journalists is now part of ISIS’ information war.

“The fact that they are targeting information providers is not new,” she said. “Many Syrian journalists have been threatened or killed if they didn’t follow” ISIS’ propaganda talking points when they wrote articles.

“There now is clearly a new level of violence toward foreign journalists and American journalists,” Hagland said.

Reporters Without Borders estimates that 40 professional journalists – 13 foreign and 27 Syrian – have been killed since March 2011.

Smyth said security training for journalists and others, including humanitarians operating in the same areas, must emphasize avoidance skills and situational awareness at least as much as how to navigate contingencies like hostile mobs or armed combat.

“Staying safe is very hard to do,” he said. “Journalists must be plugged in to various possible sources of information, and update it constantly. Journalists must also give themselves a wider margin of error than they might do in other circumstances.”

Hagland agreed that the situation in Syria has become more dangerous for journalists and as a consequence, “Syria is disappearing for news maps.”

“Who can still report on what is happening?” she asked, noting, “News coverage itself is a victim of the war.”

(More INSIGHTS columns).

Ellen Shearer is co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative, as well as the William F. Thomas Professor of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She teaches in the school’s Washington Program. Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York Newsday, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and held positions as senior executive, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.

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