U.S. air carriers advised to comply with China air zone

from usatoday

BEIJING (AP) — The United States advised U.S. carriers to comply with China's demand that it be told of any flights passing through its new maritime air defense zone over the East China Sea, an area where Beijing said it launched two fighter planes to investigate a dozen American and Japanese reconnaissance and military flights.

It was the first time since proclaiming the zone on Nov. 23 that China said it sent planes there on the same day as foreign military flights, although it said it merely identified the foreign planes and took no further action.

China announced last week that all aircraft entering the zone — a maritime area between China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan — must notify Chinese authorities beforehand and that it would take unspecified defensive measures against those that don't comply. Neighboring countries and the U.S. have said they will not honor the new zone — believed aimed at claiming disputed territory — and have said it unnecessarily raises tensions.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement Friday that the U.S. remained deeply concerned about China's declared air identification zone. But she said that it is advising U.S. air carriers abroad to comply with notification requirements issued by China.

On Wednesday, Psaki had said the U.S. government was working to determine if the new rules applied to civil aviation. But she said that in the meantime, U.S. air carriers were being advised to take all steps they consider necessary to operate safely in the East China Sea region.

In Beijing, the Ministry of Defense said the Chinese fighter jets identified and monitored the two U.S. reconnaissance aircraft and a mix of 10 Japanese early warning, reconnaissance and fighter planes during their flights through the zone early Friday.

"China's air force has faithfully carried out its mission and tasks, with China's navy, since it was tasked with patrolling the East China Sea air defense identification zone. It monitored throughout the entire flights, made timely identification and ascertained the types," ministry spokesman Col. Shen Jinke said in a statement on its website.

In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman, Army Col. Steve Warren, said when asked about China's statement, "The U.S. will continue to partner with our allies and will operate in the area as normal."

Japanese officials declined to confirm details of any flights, but said routine missions in the area were continuing.

"We are simply conducting our ordinary warning and surveillance activity like before. We have not encountered any abnormal instances so far, therefore we have not made any announcement," Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters in Tokyo.

The United States and other countries have warned that the new zone could boost chances for miscalculations, accidents and conflicts, though analysts believe Beijing's move is not intended to spark any aerial confrontations but rather is a long-term strategy to solidify claims to disputed territory by simply marking the area as its own.

June Teufel Dreyer, who specializes in security issues at the University of Miami, said the Chinese government — while backing down from strictly enforcing the zone to keep a lid on tensions — is walking a delicate line because it is faced with strong public opinion from nationalists at home. Sending up the fighter planes Friday was aimed at the domestic audience, and China is likely to send planes regularly when foreign aircraft enter the zone without notifying Chinese authorities, she said.

"They will be 'escorting' the intruding planes, but they are not going to shoot them," she said.

The zone is seen primarily as China's latest bid to bolster its claim over a string of uninhabited Japanese-controlled islands in the East China Sea known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. Beijing has been ratcheting up its sovereignty claims since Tokyo's nationalization of the islands last year. However, there are questions whether China has the technical ability to fully enforce the zone due to a shortage of early warning radar aircraft and in-flight refueling capability.

The United States, Japan and South Korea all have said they sent military flights into the zone over the past week without notifying China. Japanese commercial flights have continued unhindered — although China has said its zone is not intended to have any effect on commercial flights not heading to China.

Dreyer said the U.S. and Japan have kept sending planes into the zone to make good on the message that they are ignoring it. "They have to do it more than once to show they are serious," she said.

Dreyer said the Chinese government may have miscalculated the strength of the international response to the establishment of the zone, but that China will hold its line in the long run.

"The Chinese government is not going to concede the substance," she said. "When circumstances are more conducive, they will try to enforce it more strictly in the future. This is a pattern we have noticed for decades."

Why is the ACA (Obamacare) so complicated?

from americablog.com

11/22/2013 8:00am by Gaius Publius 96 Comments

 

With the ACA (“Obamacare”) so much in the news, I thought I’d answer the obvious question — why is it so complicated?

I could offer a number of my own explanations, but there’s none better than Ari Berman’s. Writing at The Nation in the summer prior to the 2012 election, Berman profiles Jim Messina, Obama’s then-campaign manager.

It turns out that Messina was also the architect of Obama’s ACA legislative strategy. In a piece called “Jim Messina, Obama’s Enforcer” Berman writes about the passage of the ACA. It explains all you need to know, about the ACA, Jim Messina, and yes, his boss (Obama) as well. (If you want to jump to fixing Obamacare, go here.)

Let’s start with some context on Messina. Berman opens (my paragraphing and some emphasis below):

Jim Messina, Obama’s Enforcer

In March 2009 the Campaign for America’s Future, a top progressive group in Washington, launched a campaign called “Dog The (Blue) Dogs” to pressure conservative Blue Dog Democrats to support President Obama’s budget. When he heard about the effort, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who was regarded as the Obama administration’s designated “fixer,” called CAF’s leaders into the White House for a dressing down, according to a CAF official.

If the group wanted to join the Common Purpose Project, an exclusive weekly strategy meeting between progressive groups and administration officials, CAF had to drop the campaign. We know how to handle the Blue Dogs better than you do, Messina said.

Not wanting to sour its relationship with the White House at this early date, CAF complied, and the campaign quickly disappeared from its website. Despite Messina’s assurance, however, the Blue Dogs would remain a major obstacle to the realization of the president’s legislative agenda.

The hardball tactics used by Messina against CAF exemplified how the Obama administration would operate going forward—insistent on demanding total control, hostile to any public pressure from progressives on dissident Democrats or administration allies, committed to working the system inside Washington rather than changing it. … “It was a major harbinger to me, when Obama hired him, that we were not going to get ‘change we can believe in,’” says Ken Toole, a former Democratic state senator and public service commissioner in Montana [Messina's home state, where he worked for Senator Max Baucus].

That sets the stage and tells you a lot about Obama’s relationship with progressives, and Messina’s as well. As Berman elsewhere notes, the “Common Purpose Project” was what Jane Hamsher called the “veal pen,” a weekly meeting in which progressive organizations were wrangled (or bullied) to support administration policy goals instead of their own.

Now about the ACA:

At the beginning of the healthcare debate in 2009, many Democrats were justifiably concerned about the role that [Max] Baucus, chair of the powerful Finance Committee, would play in shepherding the Obama administration’s domestic policy priority through the Senate. Baucus had brokered the passage of George W. Bush’s 2001 tax cuts and 2003 Medicare prescription drug plan, and had spent the better part of the Bush presidency cutting deals with Republicans and infuriating fellow Democrats. …

Among Senate Democrats, only Nebraska’s Ben Nelson had a more conservative voting record on economic issues than Baucus. Moreover, Baucus accepted the most special-interest money of any senator between 1999 and 2005, and had at least two dozen staffers working as lobbyists on K Street, including for healthcare companiesadamantly opposed to reform.

Despite these obvious warning signs, Messina emerged as the leading advocate for his old boss during the healthcare debate and the top administration conduit to his office. … Messina told the Washington Post he regarded Baucus as a father figure. …

The administration deputized Messina as the top liaison to the Common Purpose Project. … During the healthcare fight, Messina used his influence to try to stifle any criticism of Baucus or lobbying by progressive groups that was out of sync with the administration’s agenda, according to Common Purpose participants.

“Messina wouldn’t tolerate us trying to lobby to improve the bill,” says Richard Kirsch, former national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the major coalition of progressive groups backing reform. Kirsch recalled being told by a White House insider that when asked what the administration’s “inside/outside strategy” was for passing healthcare reform, Messina replied, “There is no outside strategy.”

The inside strategy pursued by Messina, relying on industry lobbyists and senior legislators to advance the bill, was directly counter to the promise of the 2008 Obama campaign, which talked endlessly about mobilizing grassroots support to bring fundamental change to Washington.

But that wasn’t Messina’s style—instead, he spearheaded the administration’s deals withdoctors, hospitals and drug companies, particularly the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), one of the most egregious aspects of the bill. “They cared more about their relationship with the healthcare industry than anyone else,” says one former HCAN staffer. “It was shocking to see. To me, that was the scariest part of it, because this White House had ridden in on a white horse and said, ‘We’re not going to do this anymore.’”

When they were negotiating special deals with industry, Messina and Baucus chief of staff Jon Selib were also pushing major healthcare companies and trade associations to pour millions of dollars into TV ads defending the bill. …

I’ve cut liberally from that section so as not to quote too much, and there’s much more there. The whole piece is worth your time, but the ACA part starting with the phrase “At the beginning of the healthcare debate” is especially timely. Please do click through.

So why is the ACA is so complicated? Because the only customers that Obama, Messina and Max Baucus listened to during the entire process were “doctors, hospitals and drug companies, particularly the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA),” not to mention the for-profit health insurance industry itself. Not progressives, including House progressives, and not the grassroots base. Just the industries.

A public program that serves mainly private interests has to be complicated, if it wants to appear to be a public program. Once you decide on a Clintonian privatized plan, the only way to obscure your goal is complication. Otherwise, it’s just private insurance.

Fixing the ACA (“Obamacare”) from the left

This also explains why we have to fix the ACA from the left. What does “fix it from the left mean”? In my mind it starts with at least these two initiatives:

■ Offer Medicare as an option to ACA (Obamacare) customers.

 ■ End the health insurance industry’s exemption from anti-trust laws (yes, they’re exempt, and it’s the source of many of their abuses, like being able to lie in advertising).

At the moment, ACA and Medicare are competitors for the same people — U.S. health insurance customers. At some point one will encroach on the other’s territory and take over the other’s market. The for-profit health insurance industry would love to get at Medicare recipients. What greedy CEO (sorry, shareholder-minded job-creator) wouldn’t?

Whose side of that equation do you think Obama is on, yours or the industry’s? I’m guessing the industry’s. Whose side are you on? I’m guessing your own.

Care to help? Care to help today? Call your congressperson, while this is still news, and ask for a “Medicare option” now. Believe me, this is being discussed in many congressional offices. Senate phone numbers here.House phone numbers here. And thanks.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius

Tags: ACA, Bill Clinton, Congress, health insurance, NeoLiberal Dems, Obamacare

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Iran's Nukes: 2 Elephants in the Room

from huffpost

Posted: 11/22/2013 5:43 pm

You want Chutzpah? This is Chutzpah: an op-ed piece this week in the New York Timesby a prominent Israel journalist, Ari Shavit, lambasting George W. Bush -- not Barack Obama -- for the fact that Iran is on the threshold of becoming a nuclear power. Instead of going after Iraq in 2003, says Shavit, instead of fatally draining Americas's resources and prestige, Bush should have organized a coordinated coalition of powers to throttle a much weaker Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Where's the chutzpah? Well, for one thing, if you want to blame an American president for failing to prevent nuclear weapons being introduced into the Middle East -- and then passively accepting their presence -- the list of culprits begins with Dwight D. Eisenhower, and continues through just about every American president since.

The nuclear weapons we're talking about are not Iran's feared-but-not-yet-existing devices, but Israel's very real nuclear arsenal. Somehow Shavit, like most Israeli and American commentators analyzing the standoff with Iran, never gets around to the fact that Israel has had nuclear weapons for the past half a century.

The New York Times' Tom Friedman -- who also rarely mentions Israel's nukes -- points out that we're right to distrust Iran's assurances, because its government "has lied and cheated its way to the precipice of building a bomb." That's an excellent description of the tactics Israel used to obtain its nuclear arsenal. But it would never have succeeded without the willingness of so many leaders -- American and others -- to turn their back to what was going on.

For instance, in 1963-64, Argentina played a major role in providing Israel with 80-100 tons of uranium oxide ("yellowcake") vital for Israel's clandestine nuclear program.

Those secret Argentine shipments were quickly discovered by Canadian intelligence officials in 1964, who passed on the news to their British and American colleagues, who passed it on to their civilian leaders. That revelation cast strong doubts on Israel's claims that its nuclear program was completely peaceful.

So, what happened? "In response to U.S. carefully worried diplomatic queries about the sale, the government of Israel spent years dancing around any straightforward replies. The U.S. and its allies showed no appetite to seriously challenge Israel's on-going evasions.

Theirs was the continuation of an ostrich-like policy that began under Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s -- and continues to this day.

As Seymour Hersh chronicled in "The Sampson Option," in 1958 or 1959 America's U2 spy planes spotted what looked almost certainly to be a nuclear reactor being built at Dimona in southern Israel. Two analysts rushed the raw images to the White House, expecting urgent demands from the Oval Office for more information: this was, after all, a development that could initiate a disastrous nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

But there was absolutely no follow-up from the White House.

"By the end of 1959," writes Hersh, "the two analysts had no doubts that Israel was going for the bomb. They also had no doubts that President Eisenhower and his advisers were determined to look the other way."

France -- which is now in the forefront of nations demanding that Iran forswear the right to enrich uranium to its end -- was also secretly helping the Israel build its nuclear facilities.

When the Eisenhower administration finally acted indirectly -- leaking word of Dimona and France's involvement to the New York Times in December 1960, Israel's David Ben Gurion flatly denied the Times report.

He assured American officials -- as well as the Israeli Knesset -- that the Dimona reactor was completely benign. French officials guaranteed that any plutonium produced at Dimona would be returned to France for safekeeping (another lie).

The Eisenhower administration, however, had no stomach to take on Israel and its American lobby. Despite the continued reports of CIA analysts, Ben Gurion's denials went unchallenged.

That hypocrisy remains official American policy -- and mainline media coverage of Israel -- to this day: a wink and a nod about Israel's nuclear program. .

The hard nosed attitude is: Yeah, OK, the Israelis have nukes. But, what the hell. They're threatened with extinction by their neighbors, like that half-crazed Iranian-leader whatshisname? Amunjihad?, and terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas, eager to wipe Israel off the map.

The fact, however, is that Israel also has its share of political crazies, some of whom have been increasingly powerful over the last few years, crazies who have talked openly of using nuclear weapons on Iran, and continue to advocate a Greater Israel free of all Arabs. And as far as attacking its neighbors, Israel has invaded Lebanon twice over the past few years, swarmed into Gaza, bombed and carried out air strikes in Iraq and Syria,

But it's not just Israel's nuclear weapons that are only whispered about in Washington, there's another elephant in the room: the major force driving U.S. policy on the issue of Iran's nuclear program is not cool, rational logic, but the pro-Israel lobby.

Twenty years ago, at 60 Minutes we did a report on the most influential part of that lobby, AIPAC. Not a single sitting senator or congressman would talk to us on the record; though all agreed on the lobby's enormous power, second only to the NRA. (As if to prove the point, when our report aired, it generated more vicious calls and condemnation than any other report I'd ever done.)

Twenty years later, the issue of the pro-Israel lobby is still so sensitive that the New York Times' Tom Friedman, created a sensation of sorts by stating a fact that most mainstream columnists are still leery of tackling.

"Never," Friedman wrote, "have I seen more lawmakers -- Democrats and Republicans -- more willing to take Israel's side against their own president's. I'm certain this comes less from any careful consideration of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations."

For his efforts, Friedman's column was viciously and immediately attacked by the usual suspects, with the usual charges.

(MJ Rosenberg, who spent 20 years dealing with AIPAC as an aide to a senator and several House members, has also written several accounts of AIPAC's influence. "Initially," he wrote, "I felt like a voice in the wilderness.")

The bottom line is this -- whatever your view about Iran or Israel's right to nuclear weapons -- how can statesmen or reporters or anyone seriously discuss the current crisis over Iran when a key part of the dispute is officially hidden from view?

How can the U.S. and Israel deal with proposals for non-proliferation and a nuclear free Middle East when they still refuse officially to acknowledge that the region is not nuclear free -- and hasn't been for the past 50 years?

How can they discuss and vote on these issues intelligently when many of the congressional players are acting not for the good of the country or the Middle East but according to the wishes of a very narrow and partisan lobby -- whose influence many won't even acknowledge?

Barry Lando has just recently finished a novel "The Watchman's File" about the attempts of an American TV reporter to unravel the secret behind Israel's most powerful weapon (it's not the bomb). The book is available on Amazon in soft cover and Kindle edition.

 

Follow Barry Lando on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@barrylando

A Daring Swiss Bid to Stomp Out CEO Pay Excess

from billmoyers.com




November 19, 2013
by Sam Pizzigati
372
This article first appeared in The Institute for Policy Studies’ Too Much newsletter.

AP07080205197
Brady Dougan, CEO of Credit Suisse. (AP Photo/Keystone, Steffen Schmidt)


Something astounding is happening in Switzerland. For the first time ever, voters in a modern developed nation are going to be voting on whether to create what amounts to a “maximum wage.”

The vote will come Sunday, November 24, on a ballot initiative that bans any Swiss corporate executive compensation that runs over 12 times worker pay.

In effect, under this “1:12 Initiative for Fair Pay,” no Swiss company would be able to pay its top executives more in a month than the company’s lowest-paid workers make in a year.


Swiss 1:12 activists Cédric Wermuth and Mattea Meyer. Photo Credit: Too Much

Swiss corporations currently compensate their top execs more generously than any other nation in continental Europe. At pharmaceutical giant Roche, CEO pay runs 236 times the firm’s lowest wage. At Nestle, the divide spreads 188 times.

Gross margins like these four years ago caught the attention of activists in Juso, the youth wing of Switzerland’s Social Democratic Party. The activists sensed growing public outrage at a corporate pay system that has, as former Juso president Cédric Wermuth recently related, “greedy managers earning millions while other people earn too little for living.”

Juso decided to challenge corporate pay inequality head-on, through Switzerland’s “direct democracy” initiative process. Under current Swiss law, propositions that gain 100,000 signatures can trigger a national referendum.

The “1:12” initiative that Wermuth and his Juso vice-president Mattea Meyer organized would go on to gain broad union support and backing from Switzerland’s top two progressive parties, the Social Democrats and the Greens.

This past spring, the 1:12 effort filed enough signatures for ballot status — and Corporate Switzerland has been feverishly attacking the initiative ever since.

Any move to limit CEO pay to 12 times worker pay, charges SwissHoldings, the federation of Swiss-based multinationals, would constitute “a frontal attack on freedom” — and “prosperity,” too! If the measure passes, the SwissHoldings anti-1:12 manifesto declares, “almost all” of Switzerland’s 57 corporate giants “would be forced to restructure or move parts of their companies abroad.”

One Swiss lawmaker, Zurich’s Ruedi Noser, has ratcheted up the hysterics to an even higher level. A “yes” vote on the 1:12 proposition, he’s claiming, would turn Switzerland into the “North Korea of Europe.”

But Swiss society, 1:12 supporters counter, has functioned quite successfully in the not-so-distant past with quite narrow gaps between executive and worker compensation. In 1984, points out the Swiss Denknetz think tank, CEOs in Switzerland only averaged six times more in pay than average Swiss workers.


A 1:12 campaign flyer that traces Switzerland’s growing divide between average worker and CEO compensation.

Many Swiss today still remember those more equal times, one reason why headlines about 21st century executive paydays — like the $100.5 million Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan grabbed in 2010 — so infuriate the general public.

In 2007, Swiss chief execs nationwide averaged 56 times more than average worker pay. But big companies pay their execs far more, the Swiss trade union federation points out and these execs desperately want their gravy trains to continue. Nestle, the drugmaker Novartis and other Swiss companies have been bombarding their employees with letters decrying the dangers 1:12 poses.

Swiss corporate execs unleashed a similar political blitz earlier this year when corporate gadfly Thomas Minder, a successful entrepreneur, led a campaign to give shareholders more say over top executive pay — and ban executive new-hire and “golden parachute” bonuses.

Swiss multinationals bitterly opposed Minder’s proposal. But his initiative passed anyway this past March, with a stunning 67.9 percent of the vote.

Corporate interests don’t have to reveal how many millions they’re pouring into the campaign to kill the 1:12 initiative and some observers are estimating that initiative opponents may be outspending supporters by as much as 50 times.

Adding to the huge drumbeat against 1:12: official opposition from Switzerland’s Federal Council, the country’s ministerial cabinet. The Swiss media, meanwhile, have been overwhelmingly hostile as well.

“No major Swiss newspaper is supporting the 1:12 initiative,” Juso activist Mattea Meyer points out and only about 15 percent of major media coverage, she estimates, has been friendly to the pay cap effort.

Remarkably enough, given this deeply unequal political playing field, the 1:12 initiative has remained competitive in the opinion polls. In October, one survey had the measure in a virtual dead-heat, with 44 percent both pro and con.

Polling released last week does have the “no” side gaining ground and passage this Sunday, observers feel, remains a longshot. But however the vote goes, activist Cédric Wermuth stresses, egalitarians have made substantial progress.

“We’ve launched,” he notes, “a major debate about wage equality and a just income distribution, a subject regarded as taboo before.”

Advocates for the 1:12 initiative see their effort as part of a broader “strategic counter-project” to reverse top 1 percent-friendly rule changes that have made Switzerland so much less equal over recent decades and next steps are filling the Swiss referendum pipeline.

Among these next steps: an initiative to create a basic minimum income for everyone in Switzerland — at the equivalent of $2,800 a month — and campaigns to put in place both a stiff inheritance tax and a new tax on foreigners using Switzerland as a tax haven.

The Swiss 1:12 activists see themselves as part of a global effort and 1:12-like campaigns, they note proudly, have taken root in France and Germany.

“We stay in close contact with them,” says Cédric Wermuth, who currently serves as a member of Switzerland’s federal parliament.

The Swiss 1:12 activists are also staying in close contact with leading global egalitarian thinkers. They’ve hosted talks in Zurich, Basel and Bern, for instance, from the British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the impact of inequality on our daily lives.

The 1:12 effort, Wilkinson noted last week, has already made a major contribution — by helping the entire world understand that businesses “do not have to be organized as systems for the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power.”

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American 

We are in a real and growing retirement crisis

from youtube.com

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren

We are in a real and growing retirement crisis – a crisis that is shaking the foundations of what was once a vibrant and secure middle class. The absolute last thing we should be doing right now is talking about cutting back on Social Security. The absolute last thing we should do in 2013 – at the very moment that Social Security has become the principal lifeline for millions of our seniors -- is allow the program to begin to be dismantled inch by inch. Watch my floor speech on the retirement crisis today.

UK's reputation is damaged by reaction to Edward Snowden, says UN official

from theguardian

Special rapporteur on freedom of expression says he is alarmed at political response to revelations of mass surveillance

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Frank La Rue said the UK's reputation for investigative journalism was under threat from the government's response to Snowden's revelations. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

A senior United Nations official responsible for freedom of expression has warned that the British government's response to the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is doing serious damage to the UK's international reputation for investigative journalism and press freedom.

Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, said he was alarmed at the political reaction following the revelations about the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA).

"I have been absolutely shocked about the way the Guardian has been treated, from the idea of prosecution to the fact that some members of parliament even called it treason," said La Rue. "I think that is unacceptable in a democratic society."

La Rue's intervention comes as a delegation of the world's leading editors and publishers prepares for a "press freedom mission" to the UK to raise their own concerns about the British government's position.

Organised by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the delegation will arrive in January and include publishers and editors from five continents. WAN-IFRA says the mission is the first of its kind to the UK and has been prompted by growing concerns about UK government interference in press regulation and the political pressure on the Guardian. The delegation is expected to meet government and opposition leaders, press industry figures and civil society organisations.

"We are concerned that these actions not only seriously damage the United Kingdom's historic international reputation as a staunch defender of press freedom, but provide encouragement to non-democratic regimes to justify their own repressive actions," said Vincent Peyrègne, chief executive of the Paris-based WAN-IFRA.

The Guardian, and major media organisations in other countries, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by GCHQ and the NSA in June.

The articles have sparked a global debate on the scale and oversight of surveillance by the US and UK intelligence agencies. However, in the UK there has been growing political pressure on the Guardian, with calls for it to be prosecuted, a decision to call the editor, Alan Rusbridger, to give evidence to the home affairs select committee and a warning from David Cameron that he would take "tougher measures" against the newspaper unless it demonstrated "some social responsibility".

On Friday the New York Times voiced its concern over the political climate in the UK. In an editorial entitled "British press freedom under threat" it stated: "Britain has a long tradition of a free, inquisitive press. That freedom, so essential to democratic accountability, is being challenged by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron."

It pointed out that unlike the US, Britain has no constitutional guarantee of press freedom. "Parliamentary committees and the police are now exploiting that lack of protection to harass, intimidate and possibly prosecute the Guardian newspaper for its publication of information based on National Security Agency documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden … The global debate now taking place about intelligence agencies collecting information on the phone calls, emails and internet use of private citizens owes much to the Guardian's intrepid journalism. In a free society, the price for printing uncomfortable truths should not be parliamentary and criminal inquisition."

In an interview with the Guardian La Rue said the political fallout in the UK was unacceptable.

"When you are in public office you understand that the role of the press is to investigate things that are done right or things that are done wrong and make it known to the public. And if you are in office you know that you come under public scrutiny and public scrutiny comes with public criticism and you cannot use national security as an argument and much less challenge as treason something that is informing the public, even if it is embarrassing information for those that are in office."