FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS UNDER IMMINENT ATTACK

 

Freedom of expression (and the right to dissent that goes with it) is the cornerstone of any democracy. If you are dropped by parachute into a place you know nothing about, you can immediately tell if it is governed by an authoritarian regime, because people will be afraid to talk about anything but the weather—and even then, there had better be no complaints. In authoritarian regimes, “nothing is wrong.” It’s business as usual, no matter what. Everything is hunky-dory…as long as it toes the official line. And if you don’t think so, there’s something wrong with you. You haven’t gotten with the program. You are, therefore, a “subversive” and need to be “re-educated”, or eliminated. Dissent, then, is a capital sin.

Because under authoritarian regimes, there is no left, right or center. There is only the official line—and whatever flag it happens to package itself in. Putinism in Russia, Castroism in Cuba, Orbanism in Hungary, Maduroism in Venezuela, Trumpism in America. No matter which flag they wrap themselves in, what they have in common is the alienation and repression of any view but their own—whatever it may be on any given day.

We Americans didn’t use to believe that was any way to live. We literally fought World War II, and accepted the terrible sacrifices made there during our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations,  as the necessary cost of defending freedom, a basic tenet of which—apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—is, again, the right to have, exercise and freely express our ideals and convictions, no matter whether they agree or not with those of the powers that be…or anyone else’s, for that matter.

The current US administration—and the party, and state and local officials who support and defend it, no matter what action it takes—does not believe in freedom of expression. Or rather, they believe in it on a narrowly limited basis. That is, they vehemently defend their own right to freedom of expression (in fact, to voice whatever bizarre insulting, violent or divisive idea pops into their heads) and that of anyone who slavishly agrees with them, but not anyone else’s. Indeed, they have repeatedly demonstrated that they will move to belittle, undermine, denigrate, attack and suppress any view that does not coincide one hundred percent with that of the party’s leader and the administration’s president.

It is no accident that the very first amendment to the Constitution of the United States that was passed and ratified is the one guaranteeing free expression to everyone inhabiting American soil. It is also the first of ten points  (amendments) included in what has since become known as The Bill of Rights. The list of basic civil rights guaranteed to everyone inhabiting US territory, and that are inalienable and inviolable by any other law or authority. Made law in December of 1791, freedom of expression is a two hundred thirty-four-year-old law and democratic tradition in the United States. And the mere fact that this administration feels (wrongly, illegitimately and illegally) that it is above obeying it, and somehow empowered to violate it, is a clear indication of the arrogance and authoritarian nature of the country’s current leadership.

The First Amendment is short, succinctly and brilliantly drafted, and crystal clear. It states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

In other words, in questions of conscience, point of view, beliefs and opinions, and the stating thereof, the state is, by authority of the Constitution, powerless to dictate anything to the people. And that is true not only for American citizens but for “the people” as a whole—all people, everybody within the boundaries of the US.

It should be noted that the current administration has repeatedly violated the spirit and letter of this constitutional guarantee. And in far too many cases, has gotten away with it.

As an inalienable right, we have not only come to expect it, but are also entitled to it, as a principle enshrined in the United States Constitution. Free speech is where all rights begin, the concrete foundation and starting point for open all political discourse, social critique, and the exchange of diverse ideas.

It is, then, no coincidence that concerns are growing by the day among small-d democratic Americans of all stripes who understand that, if one person’s right to freedom of expression (and hence, to freedom in general) is suspended or repressed, everyone’s right to free expression and conscience is vulnerable and subject to violation. It is a matter of precedent.

Concerns have grown exponentially regarding the status of free-speech rights since President Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025. This was already a matter of deep concern under Trump’s first administration, but the beginning of his second term has proved to be Trump on steroids, a bull in a china shop with his erstwhile “handlers” standing, arms folded, in the street, gazing impassively through the window as he lays the place to waste.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits Congress from enacting laws that abridge the freedoms of speech or the press. This protection extends to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment. Federal and state courts have consistently upheld broad free-speech rights. The only legal limitations to free expression are in regard to incitement (a principle clearly violated by Donald Trump himself during the infamous January Sixth Insurrection, in which he tried to overthrow the US government and remain in office as a de facto president), obscenity, and national security. Key legal precedents include Brandenburg v Ohio and New York Times v Sullivan, which establish the contours for permissible governmental regulation of speech. No such precedent exists when it comes to efforts by Trump to repressed criticism of his administration and the statement of facts that he denies.

It is worthwhile recapping some of the most blatant violations of free expression under the first Trump regime.

·      The Trump administration restricted press access to coverage of government activities by revoking reporters’ press credentials. One of the most high-profile cases was that of CNN’s Jim Acosta, a newsman of impeccable reputation, who was serving as the chief White House reporter for that major cable news network. Generally speaking, the first-term Trump White House consistently sought to cast itself as the “owner of the truth” and to label time-honored mainstream media outlets as “fake news.” Such actions raised profound concern about government retaliation against critical reporting, and the chilling effect it could have on journalistic independence. Indeed, that effect has more recently become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as major non-news corporations that have bought out the original owners of many mainstream media outlets have begun seeking to muzzle their own journalists to avoid multi-million-dollar lawsuits threatened by Trump and his political machine. Notably, the “taming” of CNN, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s silencing of the renowned paper’s editorial board are good examples, but certainly not the only ones.

·      Protest suppression has also been a growing part of the Trump regime’s efforts to silence critics. In June 2020, federal law enforcement forcibly cleared peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square near the White House. The excuse was that the square needed to be cleared to facilitate a presidential photo op. The incident drew widespread condemnation and prompted lawsuits alleging violations of free-speech and assembly rights. It also forced a major split between Trump and the then-head of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Millie, who refused an unconstitutional order from the president to use military force to clear civilians out.

·      President Trump and senior officials pressured social media platforms to remove content deemed unfavorable to the regime. They also threatened regulatory actions, and attempted to block critics on official accounts. However, The Knight First Amendment Institute v Trump established that blocking critics on Twitter from official accounts violated the First Amendment.

·      Whistleblowers from among federal employees and contractors who publicly criticized administration policies or exposed misconduct suffered Trump retaliation, including dismissal and prosecution. Notable cases involved whistleblowers in the intelligence community and public health sectors.

·      Lesser-known First Amendment violations during Trump’s first term include restrictions on scientific communication. Reports from agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have detailed instances in which employees were discouraged or barred from sharing scientific findings on climate change and public health, in a clear violation of academic and professional speech.

·      The regime also set limits on protest permits. Punitory actions included delays or denials of permits for protests on federal property, including the National Mall and outside federal courthouses. While the administration cited security concerns, its actions were clearly bent on suppressing dissent. At a state and local level, certain Trump-supporting states (Florida, Oklahoma and Tennessee spring to mind) enacted laws increasing penalties for protest-related offenses, broadening definitions of unlawful assembly, and granting immunity to drivers who injure protesters—a literal invitation to extremists to run protesters down. Such laws deter and discourage lawful protest and openly target social justice movements, thus flying in the face of the First Amendment.

·     The regime is also relentlessly attacking education and intellectual freedom. State legislatures and local school boards in conservative districts have passed measures limiting classroom discussion of topics such as race, gender, and history, citing concerns about "divisive concepts." Educators and advocacy groups point out that such actions infringe on academic freedom and student expression. The regime’s culture re-education efforts have also targeted libraries, imposing book bans in chillingly similar actions to those seen in every high-profile dictatorial regime throughout history—a practice tantamount to cultural erasure. Concretely, local governments in Trump-supporting areas have increased efforts to ban or restrict access to books addressing race, LGBTQ+ issues, and social justice, often in response to parental complaints. These bans have been challenged as violations of students' and authors' free-speech rights.

·      Other less-publicized moves by the Trump regime to suppress free expression include gag orders imposed on public employees. Specifically, city councils in certain conservative regions have slapped gag orders on public employees, restricting communication with the press and prohibiting comments on controversial local policies. Similarly, social and cultural activists and organizers in states such as Texas and Arizona report increased surveillance, harassment, and legal threats in response to their advocacy activities, particularly those critical of law enforcement or immigration policies. Some local governments have also limited or cancelled public forums and town halls addressing contentious issues. While these governments have cited security concerns or issues of “decorum”, it is clear that their actions are designed to   silence dissent.

While many of the both high-profile and lesser-known violations of free expression have resulted in lawsuits in which the defendants’ rights have been upheld, it is apparent that the regime’s purpose is to create nuisance suits that place significant pressure, expense and time constraints on their victims, who are subsequently forced to defend their inalienable rights in court, rather than being able to simply assume that they will be respected by what should be (but is not) a lawful and constitutionally respectful administration.

While most Americans have trouble wrapping their minds around what is happening, the regime’s strategy is clear to anyone who has experienced authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world. The overall chilling effect of consistent and progressive repression is that it creates a climate of caution, and discourages people from expressing dissenting views or participating in protests, particularly in areas where enforcement of speech restrictions is aggressive.

The situation has only grown more grave since Donald Trump returned to office at the beginning of this year.

·      Since January, the Trump administration has imposed new and ever more aggressive federal restrictions on protests. Increased limitations have been imposed on the issuing of permits for demonstrations near federal facilities. The protests of activists citing these restrictions as nothing more than moves to suppress anti-Trump dissent have fallen on deaf ears.

·      The Trump White House has intensified its efforts to control the narrative in the presidential press room by revoking the legitimate credentials of multiple journalists from outlets critical of the administration, thus hobbling these outlets’ ability to report on official events and briefings.

·      Executive orders have been issued to expand federal oversight on major social media platforms, often compelling them to remove content deemed “anti-government” or “incendiary”, when the materials suppressed are usually just run-of-the-mill criticism of the regime’s actions. Civil liberties groups contend that these measures have led to the removal of legitimate political speech from much of social media discourse.

·      In Trump’s new term, federal prosecutors under orders from regime rubber-stamp Attorney General Pamela Bondi have aggressively pursued government whistleblowers, using expanded interpretations of the Espionage Act to deter disclosures of official wrongdoing.

·      At a state and local level, Trump-supporting governments have enacted policies and practices that restrict free-speech rights. Some lesser-known incidents include campus speech restrictions: State legislatures in several pro-Trump states have passed laws restricting campus protests, and otherwise limiting the ability of students and faculty to voice dissenting opinions or to criticize government policies. This is particularly true at all levels, from federal to local, when it comes to foreign students. Under the Trump regime, these students, many of them from authoritarian-ruled countries, are now prohibited from experiencing what was once the pride of the United States—namely, the equal rights of any and all people inhabiting American soil. In the healthy cultural exchange that was once presumed in multi-national educational programs, these students now return home with the sad but authentic belief that there is no freedom of speech anywhere in the world and that the ideas of equality in America are a false narrative and a PR myth.  

·      Other authoritarian advances in education include book bans and curriculum control , with local school boards sweeping numerous books off of library shelves—a grim reminder of book-burning rallies in Nazi Germany before the Second World War—and imposing curriculum changes to eliminate materials perceived as “anti-American” or “anti-Trump” (which MAGA equates as one and the same thing), undermining academic freedom and access to diverse viewpoints.

·      Latest local violations of the constitutional right to free expression include local ordinances against free assembly. City councils in certain municipalities have enacted ordinances requiring prior approval for public gatherings, which have been used to deny permits for rallies opposed to local or federal policies. This is a chilling emulation of local practices under dictatorial regimes in other parts of the world.

·      Local media are also being targeted. Community radio stations and independent newspapers in some areas have faced selective licensing reviews, funding cuts and official advertising boycotts after publishing content critical of local officials aligned with the Trump administration.

We are, furthermore, seeing the development of patterns in governmental actions, and therefore, the institutionalization of repression under the Trump regime. For instance:

·      Use of security to justify authoritarian overreach. Both federal and state authorities frequently cite security concerns as an excuse to restrict the right to protest, the right of assembly, assembly, and media access to government activities.

·      Political dissent is also being specifically targeted, with official actions disproportionately affecting individuals and groups that express opposition to Trump administration policies or to local government decisions.

·     We are witnessing expansion of executive power, including increasing use of  executive orders and administrative regulations to enable swift implementation of speech restrictions. This tactic has often bypassed any legislative debate.

·      State legislatures and local governments have enacted laws and ordinances specifically designed to curtail speech in educational, civic, and media contexts.

These governmental actions have triggered a wave of lawsuits. Federal courts have sometimes issued temporary injunctions against certain protest restrictions and press credential revocations, citing First Amendment concerns. Nevertheless, the composition of the judiciary, which has been significantly altered by recent appointments, has led to mixed outcomes. Some lower courts are thus upholding new restrictive regulations, limiting, as such, access to free expression rights.

Legislative changes at the state level have prompted lawsuits from civil liberties organizations, resulting in ongoing litigation and appeals. But the process of overcoming these de facto hurdles for free expression are long, and have the effect of allowing the regime to get away with violating free speech by imposing impromptu restrictions and then letting the victims fight it out in court.

The expansion of executive powers and reinterpretation of existing laws have had a highly pernicious effect on constitutional guarantees, calling the real durability of free speech into increasing question. Legal scholars are voicing concern about the negative effect of court decisions that create precedents that narrow the scope of permissible speech in public spaces and educational institutions. The long-term implications are clearly nefarious.

Beyond legal battles, the damaging  actions by the Trump regime are creating polarization and mistrust of government institutions on the one hand and of media outlets on the other. Media critical of Trump administration policies, have faced diminished access and heightened scrutiny, hindering their ability to inform the public properly and fully. Civil society organizations have also experienced pernicious effects, with activists and community leaders expressing reluctance to engage in public discourse due to fear of retaliation or prosecution. Academic environments have suffered as well, with restrictions on campus speech, stifling debate and undermining the role of universities as forums for the exchange of ideas. The suppression of community media has limited access to alternative viewpoints, reducing the diversity of information available to local populations.

Overall, the erosion of free-speech rights undermines the ability of citizens to hold government accountable, to participate in policy debates, and to express dissenting views. If current patterns persist, the US risks a decline in civic engagement and a further weakening of democratic institutions, which are already languishing at unprecedentedly low levels.

This is all key in  the advancing authoritarian takeover of the United States. There is a clear reason why the first thing dictatorial regimes do is launch aggressive campaigns to muzzle the press, restrict assembly and discourage the expression of diverse ideas and ideals. The reason is that these are the foundation of a healthy democracy, and democracy is the nemesis of authoritarianism. Seen in this light, and judging by not only its words but also its actions, the ultimate goal of the Trump regime couldn’t be clearer.

 

 

BULLYING THE FREE PRESS

Last Friday, National Public Radio host Mary Louise Kelly reported that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had stormed out of an interview with her at the State Department because he was irritated by her questions regarding his failure to defend former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was the target of a smear campaign orchestrated by President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, prior to her removal from the post—an incident that is at the heart of current impeachment proceedings against the president.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

But before she could leave the building, a State Department aide escorted Kelly to a room where Pompeo was waiting for her. For the next several minutes, the secretary of state berated and swore at her for questioning him  about Ukraine, asking her if she really thought “Americans give a fuck” about Ukraine. In an attempt to humiliate Kelly, he had his aides bring a map with no names or writing on it and demanded that she point to Ukraine. To his chagrin, she did so without hesitation—despite the fact that, by any professional standard, she would have been justified in telling Pompeo to point to it himself.

Pompeo later accused Kelly of lying to him by saying there would be no questions about Ukraine. Kelly says she specifically told the secretary’s staff in preparation for the interview that Ukraine would definitely be on the docket. He also said she had told him their conversation after the failed interview would be off the record. Kelly denies this, saying she was merely led into the room and was told to turn her recorder off before Pompeo started dressing her down. Furthermore, it is worth considering that the journalist might well have considered herself to be under duress, given the situation. Nor is this the way that off-the-record negotiations work between interviewer and inteviewee. 

NPR anchor Mary Louise Kelly

Pompeo says he has nothing more to say about the interview. President Trump’s reaction has been to say that he doesn’t know “why NPR even exists.” It seems clear to me that both men think that public media should be at the service of the administration and the chief executive, not at the service of truth, professionalism and objective reporting in its task of informing the public.

Interestingly enough, I have a case in point of my own from a quarter-century ago. During the Clinton era, I was a stringer for several years for the United States Information Agency (USIA), a state-funded information-gathering organization that operated out of Washington from 1953 to 1999. When they first offered me the gig I almost turned it down saying that I was an independent free-lancer and didn’t want “to work for the government.” The assignment editor at the time, Andrew Lluberes, said I needn’t worry. The USIA was just like any other news agency. I should think of them as a kind of American BBC.

My one condition for accepting the assignment was that, as long as I got the facts straight, my work should never be subject to censorship.

The test came when I—like a lot of other American foreign correspondents—was investigating a lead about a chapter that was included in the training manual for the notorious School of the Americas, known today as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. Back in the seventies and eighties when I was covering the bloody machinations of various authoritarian regimes in South America for several newspapers in Britain and the US, the School of the Americas was fondly known among American and British correspondents as “Dictator School”, since it was hard to find a leading operative member of the region’s military regimes who hadn’t been through training at the US facility in Panama.

Washington long tried to sell the SOA as an American mutual training facility located in the Panama Canal Zone for military personnel from throughout Central and South America. It was, successive US administrations held, a training ground in the fight against communist subversion and terrorism. The school indeed imparted useful instruction on counterinsurgency, jungle warfare, survival, strategy and tactical planning. But it had been persistently reported that it also provided chillingly effective methodology for the application of physical and psychological torture of prisoners, as a means of collecting compelling intelligence. Indeed, when American civil rights groups and news professionals reported on the gross human rights violations being carried out by dictatorial regimes from Guatemala and El Salvador in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south, Latin American military men would scoff and say, “You think the United States doesn’t use torture? They literally wrote the book on it!”

But following the Reagan era, which, after the scrupulously human and civil rights-oriented administration of US President Jimmy Carter, re-opened the floodgates in South America to human rights abuses, the SAO came under scrutiny. The Reagan foreign policy for the region was a sort of point/counterpoint message that the region’s authoritarian regimes should start moving toward a democratic opening, but should first get left-wing “subversion” cleaned up, and for that, the US was willing to turn a blind eye.

That was the almost literal message that military leaders in Argentina, where I was based, received from Reagan’s envoy, National Security Adviser Jeane Kirkpatrick, almost as soon as Carter moved out of the White House and Reagan moved in. Placing Kirkpatrick in historical context, she was a staunch McCarthyite-style anti-communist who counseled Reagan to follow his own anti-communist political instincts and lend American backing to some of the bloodiest far-right military regimes that the Americas had ever known. She was said to be particularly fond of then-Argentine dictator General Leopoldo Galtieri, urging Reagan to side with the Argentine regime over Britain in the ten-week Falklands/Malvinas War. It would be  hard to separate her influence from Galtieri’s clear—but, as it turns out, erroneous—confidence that the Argentine dictatorship would have Washington’s support for a full-scale invasion of the British-held Falklands to back Argentina’s 150-year-old claim to the archipelago located off of the country’s Patagonian coast. This was a stance that was staunchly opposed by Reagan’s then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig.

Reagan security adviser Jeane Kirkpatrick

Kirkpatrick was also one of the Reaganites who favored the conspiracy to skim money off of US arms sales to provide backing for the extreme right-wing Nicaraguan Contras, a position which ran sharply counter to that of then-Secretary of State George Schultz, who argued that because of the gross human rights abuses carried out by the group, doing so would be “an impeachable offense”.

American philosopher and political activist Noam Chomsky once dubbed Kirkpatrick the “chief sadist-in-residence of the Reagan Administration” and pointed to both her hypocrisy and that of the administration in claiming to be “protecting democracy” by saving the region from communism, while actively supporting brutal military regimes that showed no respect for human rights or democracy. When four American Catholic missionary nuns were raped, beaten  and murdered in El Salvador by a paramilitary hit squad formed by five members of the country’s National Guard, Kirkpatrick backed the official story that the country’s dictatorial regime had had nothing to do with the incident, while adding that “the nuns weren’t just nuns.”

But in line with that hypocritical government policy, throughout the eighties, one after another of the former military regimes gave way to some form of more pluralistic government. And as a result, there began a kind of historical revision of the preceding years in which the victims of the former regimes were now governing the countries in question, and as such were digging back into the motives and methods by which dictators had ruled. In the process, the SOA came back into sharp focus.

And this was where I came in.

In October of 1996, the USIA assigned me, as special correspondent, to cover an Americas defense ministers’ conference held at the idyllic Llao-Llao Hotel Resort, located at the confluence of Lakes Nahuel Huapi and Moreno, within overland hiking distance from my home in Patagonia. (I can see the roof of the lodge-like hotel in the distance from my upstairs window). As soon as I got the gig, I decided that I would seek an occasion to question then-US Defense Secretary William Perry about information that was rapidly coming to light regarding “torture training” at the SOA.

In the timeline of the years leading up to this inter-American Defense Ministers’ meeting, a list of some 60,000 SOA graduates de-classified in 1993 was virtual confirmation that not only dictators but also death squad members and paramilitary assassins had received SOA training. Two bills were presented in the US Congress to cut funding to the school but neither ever made it out of the House. Both bills were introduced by Rep. Joseph Kennedy III. Despite their failure to pass, Kennedy did manage to secure requirement of a report on the school’s status with regard to the promotion of respect for human rights.    

In 1995, the House Appropriations Committee urged the Department of Defense to make greater efforts to inculcate staunch defense of human rights into SOA training. Not convinced as to the efficacy of this urging, Kennedy introduced a bill that year to completely pull the plug on the SOA and shut it down. It should be replaced, the congressman suggested, “with a US Academy for Democracy and Civil-Military Relations.” But that bill also stalled out while awaiting executive comment from the Clinton administration.  

Again in 1996, a congressional committee urged the Defense Department to promote effective efforts to incorporate human rights training into the regular curriculum of the school and to monitor the human rights performance of its graduates.

It wasn’t until September of 1996, that the Pentagon made training manuals from the School of the Americas available to the public. Those materials confirmed that tactics included in the manuals “violated American policy and principles.” Then Representative Nancy Pelosi said that the material released by the Pentagon had “confirmed (her) worst suspicions. Namely, that “US Army intelligence manuals, distributed to thousands of military officers throughout Latin America, promoted the use of executions, torture, blackmail, and other forms of coercion.” Among other things, she indicated, US taxpayer dollars had been used to promote tactics based on “fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions, and the use of truth serum.”

So, in early October, when Secretary Perry arrived in Patagonia for the inter-American meeting, the SOA’s heinous past was fresh news. And when Perry organized a Q and A session for American correspondents, I was quick to get my question about the SOA in at the outset. I was prepared for Perry, who was there for a conference on cooperation between Latin American and US defense administrations, to be upset by the questions and perhaps to tell me that it wasn’t the time or place to talk about the SOA, especially since I had identified myself as special correspondent for the state-owned USIA. And, indeed, he was shaken by my questions and my insistence. But there was no attempt to shut me up.

Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry

Instead, Perry called the materials “shocking” and said that even though the teaching of tactics that were in complete violation of human rights formed “only a small percentage” of the entire program, “that is not an excuse.”

“I want to emphasize,” I quoted him as saying, “that what was done was wrong and totally unacceptable.” He said that an effort had been made to destroy all copies of the manual except one kept by the Counsel General. And he added that the Clinton administration had launched an investigation to ensure that no other military instruction manuals approved by the Pentagon supported practices that violated human rights.

Clearly, this was a burning issue that placed the US, and successive administrations, in a bad light. And the SOA remained a thorn in the side of US democracy into the 21^st century, with continuing reports of its adherence to tactics that violated human rights. In fact, it wasn’t until 2013 that human rights researcher Ruth Blakeley indicated, following interviews with personnel from the SOA’s successor organization, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and anti-SOA protesters that “there was considerable transparency...established after the transition from SOA to WHINSEC. She added that “a much more rigorous human rights training program was in place than in any other US military institution.”

My point here is that, at no time was I bullied by Defense Secretary Perry, the Clinton administration or the USIA to desist from writing and filing the story. Nor was I chided by Perry or his people after the press conference for putting him on the spot. On the contrary, they took me as a professional doing my job and they responded with the professionalism of people paid to do the work of the government—not of the president. My story was published without a single edit.

There’s a lesson in here for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who, in seeking to bully journalist Mary Louise Kelly, has acted with the same mafia thug attitude to the interview with NPR as his boss did when he allegedly told his henchmen, Lev Paras and Rudy Giuliani, that he wanted career diplomat Marie Yovanovitch “taken out”. And as a ranking public figure, it is also clear that Pompeo has not only disrespected Kelly but has also perpetrated a direct attack on freedom of the press, by seeking to intimidate a reporter who asked him uncomfortable questions.

These are not attitudes that should be considered acceptable from leaders of a country that still stakes any claim whatsoever to being a democracy.