Politics

Jeremy Scahill: Obama's Vendetta Against the Press

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"You have the president of the United States," says Dirty Wars author Jeremy Scahill, "a constitutional law professor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, keeping a respected Yemeni journalist in prison seemingly because he committed the crime of doing actual journalism."

Scahill is particularly horrified by the case of Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was set to be pardoned and released by the government of Yemen until Barack Obama intervened in 2011. Major U.S. news outlets that worked with journalist—The Washington Post, ABC News, NBC News—have not said a thing about his case, says Scahill.

Scahill, whose searing, book-length expose of America's misdeeds in the global war on terror has been turned into an award-winning documentary of the same name (which goes into wide U.S. theatrical release this Friday), talks with Reason's Matt Welch about Barack Obama's inexplicable vendetta against individual journalists and whole news agences. 

About 1 minute.

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Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Jim Epstein and Fisher.

MUSIC: "Dramamine" by Podington Bear (http://podingtonbear.com/)