Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights and Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about freeing Mahmoud Khalil for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Zeteo (6/12/25)

Janine Jackson: As we record on June 12, the official death toll in Gaza is…something that need not be of specific concern, given ample evidence that no number would, in itself, magically change the indifference of powerful bodies to the ongoing crime of murder, starvation, displacement and erasure of Palestinians by Israel, with critical US material and political support. UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said recently, without trying to compare his experience to that of Gazans, that he has started therapy to deal with his experience, just witnessing trauma on this scale.

But when people speak up about something that bipartisan US politicians and US corporate media support, that criticism becomes suspect, by which is increasingly meant criminal. So here we are with Columbia University graduate—or what Fox News calls “anti-Israel ringleader”—Mahmoud Khalil, charged with no crime, but detained since March.

Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, and journalist and researcher working on a new history of FBI national security surveillance. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: It’s always a pleasure to be back on CounterSpin.

JJ: There’s always a lot I could talk with you about, but, for today, I know that listeners with horrible news coming at them from all sides may have lost the thread on Mahmoud Khalil. What is the latest on his case, and how good is that latest news? What should we think about it?

CG: As of June 12, when we’re recording this, Mahmoud Khalil is still detained at the LaSalle Immigration Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana. It is a private immigration prison. If you go on their website, they talk about their commitment to family values, but the conditions there—you’ll be shocked to learn this—are not very good. I’m not sure what type of family values they’re talking about.

CBS (6/13/25)

Recently, a judge has ruled on a preliminary injunction that Mahmoud Khalil brought, asking that the immigration provision that [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio relies on, that gives the secretary of state the power to expel someone from the country if they pose a threat to US foreign policy, is unconstitutional as applied to [Khalil], enjoined Rubio from enforcing it against him, voiding the determination that Rubio made, as well as enjoining the Trump administration from enforcing what Khalil’s lawyers alleged, and what I think is not really just an allegation at this point, is a policy of arresting and detaining noncitizens who criticize Israel or support Palestinian rights. The judge has given the Trump administration until Friday to appeal, and has stayed his own order.

Of all the other similarly situated individuals in immigration proceedings over their pro-Palestine speech, the judges have granted them bail pending a final motion. Khalil submitted a motion for bail. It’s never been ruled on, and now the judge has issued this injunction that could potentially set him free, but has given the government until Friday to file an appeal, and it’s unclear, if the government files the appeal, if that will further stay his time in detention.

And Khalil is a father. His child was born while he was detained. He was not able to attend the birth of his child, and for an extended period he was denied a contact visit with the newborn child until a judge intervened.

And the thing we have to remember here, this is very difficult to keep track of, is that Khalil is really in two separate legal proceedings right now. He’s in an immigration removal proceeding, which takes place in immigration court, and immigration court is not part of the “Article Three”—that’s Article Three of the US Constitution—judiciary.

It is part of the Department of Justice. Immigration Judges work for Pam Bondi, the attorney general. You can appeal an immigration judge’s decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is appointed by Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and the attorney general can reverse or modify any decision of the Board of Immigration Appeals. So immigration court is basically a kangaroo court.

At the same time, he’s challenging the constitutionality of this detention, not the removal itself, but the detention as unconstitutional in federal court, with what’s called a federal habeas petition. And the habeas corpus, of course, goes back to before the Magna Carta, but it was enshrined as a basic human right in the Magna Carta, and he’s arguing his detention is unconstitutional.

And the reason for these two proceedings is that immigration courts are very limited in what they can do, beyond the sort of kangaroo court nature that I just described, where the attorney general is usually the party seeking the deportation, and the person making the decision works for the attorney general, and if the attorney general doesn’t like their decision, they can modify it. The Board of Immigration Appeals ruled during the Clinton years that once the secretary of state makes a determination that someone’s presence in the US has adverse foreign policy consequences, they can be removed from the country. There’s essentially no defense, and immigration judges cannot hear constitutional challenges or issues.

On the flip side, federal courts are barred from hearing challenges to the attorney general’s enforcement or commencement of immigration proceedings, but they are allowed to weigh challenges to detention. So Khalil and other similarly situated defendants are using the habeas remedy to challenge the constitutionality of the detention.

Guardian (3/13/25)

In Khalil’s case, it gets very complicated even further, because the government has brought two “immigration charges” against him. One is the claim that his presence poses a threat to our foreign policy. The other is that he misled immigration officials on his application by not mentioning he was part of a student group, which it’s unclear why that would affect his Green Card.

And there’s also allegations about when he did or didn’t work for the British government. He worked at the British Embassy, I think, in Lebanon, and the Trump administration is bringing that up, which I believe was disclosed on his application. And his lawyers have offered information refuting this charge, but the immigration judge has refused to hear it.

The immigration judge, by the way, not only works for the Department of Justice, she’s a former ICE employee. She’s refused to hear it on the grounds that she doesn’t need to make a decision on this, because she has the Rubio determination. And the preliminary injunction only applies, we think, to the Rubio determination, because the judge ruled in the previous ruling he was unlikely to prevail on a constitutional challenge to the misleading application charge.

So that’s sort of the convoluted legal situation we’re in. Khalil is in a removal proceeding in immigration court. He’s in a federal challenge to detention in federal court, and a federal judge has issued an injunction to enforcing the Rubio determination against him, but not the second charge, which an immigration judge has refused to rule on. Rubio’s saying it’s a sole removal basis. And that judge has also issued a stay giving the government time to appeal. So he remains detained even though his detention is likely unconstitutional, and a judge has found that he suffers irreparable harm by this detention.

JJ: I want to lift up a piece that you mentioned that we’re seeing, is that criminality, or the ability to be detained, has to do with something you do having “adverse foreign policy consequences.” I know that folks hear that and are like, “What? What do you mean? If the current administration has certain foreign policy objectives, and I disagree with them, that means if I speak out in opposition, I’m committing a crime?”

CG: So I think we have to remember, and this gets sort of pedantic, but Khalil is not charged with a crime, and the provision is not a criminal provision. It is a provision about whether or not you can be admitted into the US or removed from the US. So Khalil has not been charged with any criminal offense. They’re invoking a provision that says if your presence has adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States…

JJ: Your presence, OK.

Al Jazeera (3/23/25)

CG: …signs a piece of paper saying this is true, or it makes determination of it, you can be deported from the US. So this is not a criminal matter.

What does this provision even cover or does not cover is a really fascinating question. And the judge in the Khalil habeas case has stated that it’s unconstitutional as applied to Khalil, because no reasonable person would have notice that this provision could apply to domestic political speech or domestic speech.

He noted a number of instances when it was used in the ’90s by the Clinton administration, but they were all against people who were accused of criminal conduct in foreign countries. So you had a Saudi national who was accused of terrorism in Jordan; you had an alleged paramilitary leader from Haiti. You had a Mexican official who was accused of a number of crimes; but it was not someone who was in this country and engaged in political speech about a foreign government’s genocide, and therefore no reasonable person would have any notice that this statute could apply to their domestic speech.

JJ: I’m going to keep us short for today, although there are much, much and myriad things we could talk about, but you and I both know that once politicians take up an individual case—Julian Assange, Michael Brown, Mahmoud Khalil—we know that then news media bring out the microscopes. Is this really a good guy? How did he treat his mother? I’m seeing some parking tickets here. There might be some particulars to investigate.

There’s almost a vocational effort to make there be something specific about this person that makes it make sense that they are being targeted. And then the effect of that is to tell everyone listening, As long as you don’t do what this guy did, you’re going to be safe. Why is the Mahmoud Khalil case so important to folks who don’t even know who Mahmoud Khalil is, and don’t understand why it matters?

Chip Gibbons: “This is a case about whether or not we have a First Amendment right to criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide in Gaza, or support the human rights of the Palestinian people.”

CG: This is a case about whether or not we have a First Amendment right to criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide in Gaza, or support the human rights of the Palestinian people. The case is currently about an obscure Cold War immigration provision, and whether or not it can be used to deport a lawful, permanent resident, all of which has profound legal questions for individuals in this country who are immigrants or noncitizens. But at the end of the day, we should not believe this will remain only in the noncitizen realm.

The Heritage Foundation, who laid out a lot of the playbook about using deportations to target student activists, has made it clear their final goal is to equate all protests for Palestine with material support for terrorism. In the past, when we’ve seen immigration enforcement abuse for political policing, J. Edgar Hoover during the Palmer raids; the Los Angeles Eight, who were supporters of Palestinian rights who the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II administrations sought to deport, both of those cases preconfigure or forbode larger attacks of civil liberties that eventually affect everyone.

Which is not to say that we shouldn’t care about the rights of noncitizens; we should care about everyone’s free-speech rights.

But if you believe this is going to stay with Green Card holders or student visa holders, the goal is to take away your right to criticize a foreign apartheid state’s genocide, with the eventual goal of taking away your right to criticize US foreign policy. And this is the vehicle for doing it. It starts today, with the visa holders and the Green Card holders, but they will come for the natural-born citizens eventually, too, if they get away with this.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me back.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(Creative Commons photo: Diane Krauthamer)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone.

We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us.

Other Words (6/4/25)

Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

President Donald Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who has promoted right-wing conspiracy theories, is “one of Donald Trump’s most disturbing picks” who seems poised to use the office to go after journalists and other Trump critics, says Chip Gibbons of the civil liberties organization Defending Rights & Dissent.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about the Gaza First Amendment Alert  for the October 18, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: There is other news, of course, but we cannot avert our eyes from the genocide of the Palestinian people, and the spreading effects of that murderous effort—including the silencing of criticism or concerns from US citizens on US soil about actions being carried out in our name.

Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He’ll join us to talk about the things we’re not supposed to say and the lives we’re told not to care about—and why we must never stop saying and caring.

***

Democracy Now! (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases.

In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, one of very few humanitarian organizations working still in the region. A real accounting would also include, not just those that we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.

Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that

Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head. When a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print—too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, they make sense or, minimally, they’re not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to other people somewhere else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like antisemitism—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

Defending Rights & Dissent, online at RightsAndDissent.org, have started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He’s a journalist, researcher and a longtime activist. He joins us now by phone.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me back. I always say CounterSpin is one of my favorite shows to do, and it is so vital, with the sorry state of corporate media in this country, that we have outlets like yours, because we would never get our message out. Occasionally, occasionally, we break through, and BBC or the Guardian or whoever will call us up, but it’s pretty bleak out there.

Like everyone else, every day I see the horrible images and news coming out of Gaza, now Lebanon and, who knows, maybe Iran next. Pictures of people being burned alive while they’re hooked to an IV. Stories about people being forced to flee or be bombed, then bombed while they flee, then corralled into a refugee center, and then bombed some more. It’s really, really horrific.

And in the midst of this horror show, this genocide that is quickly spiraling into a regional war, with obviously Israel as the aggressor and our government as the financier of it, we’re witnessing this global tidal wave of repression against people who are saying, “Hey, wait a moment. Let’s not drop bombs on children.” Journalists who show us what it looks like to drop a bomb on children are being assassinated.

Defending Rights & Dissent (8/10/23)

The young people on college campuses who want to simply peacefully raise their voice are hit with police batons, or have false charges against them. Journalists who report on the ground are killed by snipers and drones in their house. They get text messages telling them that their families will be killed.

And every day, our Congress votes to spend more money to fuel this, and sends these ridiculous letters to the IRS or the DoJ or the FBI, whomever else, telling them to crack down.

And I do want to note that this is a global problem. On October 17, 2024, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Irene Khan, presented to the UN General Assembly her new report on the impact of the conflict in Gaza on freedom of expression globally. And Defending Rights & Dissent submitted testimony, and is cited in it. So this is a global problem, and you wouldn’t really know it from much of the corporate media.

Chip Gibbons: “”We cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.”

We started the Gaza First Amendment Alert as a project to compile together in one place—I won’t say all of the political repression in the US, because there’s so much it’s impossible to include it all, but the vast majority of it. So attacks on press freedoms, attacks on protest rights, attacks on civil society and attacks on transparency, we are documenting in one place in a biweekly newsletter.

Every congressional office on the Hill received an invitation to subscribe to this letter. I think the only thing more dismal in this country than our corporate media is our Congress offices. I’m sorry, I’m laughing out of despair. And we sent it out to journalists to receive. But there’s also been a really strong outpouring of support from people who work on these issues, from activists who have signed up to receive this newsletter, and have talked about how valuable it is.

And, for the most part, it is focused on the repression in the US. The one exception is we are—because Israel uses US weapons to do so—continuing to monitor Israel’s killing, detention, maiming of Palestinian journalists and international journalists.

The Nation (8/16/24)

And as you know, Janine, because FAIR endorsed this project this summer, Defending Rights & Dissent led a call of over 100 journalists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners, to call on [Secretary of State Antony] Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel, because we cannot say we are for press freedom when we are giving Israel the guns it assassinates Palestinian journalists with.

So the bulk of this newsletter focuses on domestic oppression in the US, but we will, every biweekly period, for as long as that happens, monitor the killing of journalists. I would love to have an issue that doesn’t have that in there because no journalists were killed. But in working on the first issue, I had to keep going back and updating the section on the killing of journalists, again and again, because Israel just keeps doing it.

We have seen college students engaging in protests. One of the big things we intended to cover on the inaugural issue was what took place on the anniversary of the war. On October 7, many college students and others who wanted to show their sympathy for the Palestinian victims, their opposition to the war, wanted to hold a protest or vigils. And there was a coordinated effort, that we show in the newsletter, to suppress this.

Campus Crisis Alert (10/23/24)

I get the Anti-Defamation League Campus Crisis Alert newsletter, which is a great resource on political repression in the US. They don’t intend it as such, but I use it as such. And police departments get that. I know, thanks to a FOIA request filed by Iain Carlos at Noir News, that the Chicago Police Department gets this newsletter.

And like every day for a month, they encourage you to call colleges and send them letters and tell them, “We know colleges love free expression”—I’m not sure we know that anymore—but “even protected expression can create a hostile environment. Even permitted protests can create a hostile environment.”

And they are abusing civil rights law, which is very important. Abusing antisemitism to claim they have to clamp down on political speech, and then telling them you need to put in place a policy for October 7 on how or if—”if” was a big one—you permit protest. And then, of course, encouraging them to cooperate with law enforcement when campus policies are broken about expression.

And many of these campuses have put in very draconian anti-speech policies, policies that would be unconstitutional in any other context, and, if they are public schools, are unconstitutional.

Guardian (9/18/24)

And I think one of the big victories the ADL got was they got the University of Maryland to try to prohibit an interfaith vigil of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, an interfaith vigil mourning the Palestinian victims of this genocide. And the school initially approved it, there was mass public pressure against it, and then the school put together a policy that stated that you could only have “expressive events”—this is a new phrase that we hear a lot: “Expressive events.” “Expression policy…”

JJ: Right—what?

CG: Yes, events where people are expressing themselves. And some people have noted, some of these policies, when you start talking about expression, could be really rather broad.

But you couldn’t have any “expressive events” that were not initiated by the school. And, of course, that is unconstitutional. And Palestine Legal and CAIR took them to court, and the court allowed the vigil to take place. I saw pictures of it. I read news reports that there were a hundred or so students having an interfaith vigil, recognizing people who were slaughtered in a genocide.

An the interesting thing to me was that same day, there was a pro-Israel vigil as well, to mark the Israeli victims and civilians killed on October 7. And there was a member of Congress speaking at it, Steny Hoyer. And we hear again and again about outside agitators on the college campuses, Hillary Clinton, and I think Mike Johnson, basically in agreement that these kids wouldn’t be upset about people being burnt to death in tents with US weapons if it wasn’t for outside agitators, or nefarious Iranian influence. Or one place I saw was Cuban influence. You really are bringing out all of the bad guys.

Wall Street Journal (5/12/24)

JJ: Castro from the grave.

CG: Castro’s ghost, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Putin, China. Really, all of the evil-doers, maybe, are behind it, apparently.

And yet, when I looked at the vigil, it looked like—I didn’t do an investigation of everyone’s identity, but it looked like University of Maryland students. Whereas the counter vigil seemed to have a lot of pro-Israel advocates and a member of Congress at it.

So I don’t like the idea of outside agitators. You are allowed to invite prominent figures to your school to speak in solidarity with you. But if there’s outside agitators on the campus, who are they, right? Is it the college kids, or is it the members of Congress coming to call for their repression and champion a genocide? I think I know the answer to that.

And so, again, we’ve seen schools like Cornell suspend international students, and put them at risk of being deported. Right before we were about to go to print—not print, it’s an email newsletter; I’m using print in the figurative sense—that decision was reversed, and the student had a victory. But another student at the University of South Florida had to return to Colombia, because they were suspended for political speech.

So that’s where we’re at as a country. And, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re going to have any shortage of news two weeks from now. In fact, we already have multiple stories that we are considering for the next issue, including the fact that—you’ll love this—the Heritage Foundation yesterday announced Project Esther, named after Queen Esther from the Bible, to allegedly combat antisemitism. But when you read the opening section of it, they’re talking about a network of “anti-Zionist,” “anti-American” Hamas supporters. So they really mean, as you know—I think most listeners know—they mean pro-Palestinian speech.

Intercept (2/21/24)

And we have members of Congress calling for—I mean, every week in Congress they send a new letter to a new agency, proposing some new bonkers act that they should take against Students for Justice in Palestine. This week, they want them to register under FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is, I mean, FARA is a very broad law. It’s a law I’ve thought a lot about, but it makes zero sense in this context. SJP are not agents of a foreign power. And if you’re claiming that they’re agents of Hamas, which is what this letter claims, from Chuck Grassley and Ted Cruz, they’ve got a lot bigger problems than the FARA statute.

So if someone were an unregistered agent of Hamas, which no one we’re talking about is, they would not even be indicted under FARA, or asked to register to FARA. They would be charged under the Material Support statute, under the Office of Foreign Assets Control sanction.

Earlier this week, we saw a Palestinian prisoner-support NGO sanctioned under OFAC, which has for decades been used to punish people for giving humanitarian aid in the Occupied Territory, to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism; has not been used in many cases against actual terrorism, but against people who have views the government doesn’t like, cases like Holy Land Foundation, Sami Al-Arian; Muhammad Salah, the grocer from Illinois who was tortured by the Israelis when he was giving aid, and then became the first person ever sanctioned by the US as a terrorist within the US, a US citizen, he had all his assets frozen.

You’ll like this, Janine. Judith Miller participated in his interrogation, and talked about it in one of her books, because the Clinton administration denied the Israeli government’s claims that Hamas was essentially based in Chicago, and she believed Israel. So in order to help them out, she went and met with this American citizen they were torturing, and she gave the interrogator questions. And then the interrogator asked them And then she later testified at his trial that he wasn’t tortured by the Israelis, because she was there, and Judith Miller would have noticed the torture.

JJ: She understood.

Well, listen, as I get older, I recognize that there is a value in simply collecting the harms. You think that everybody knows and everyone will remember, and it’s just not true. There is a value in collecting the harms that are being done, and in showing their coherence and their purposiveness. It’s not random, it’s targeted and it’s principled, in a way that we understand that term.

And there is also tremendous value in lifting up the dissent, the resistance, so that we can never think, later or right now, that everyone is complicit, that no one is speaking out, even if not everyone feels really comfortably placed to do so. Propaganda is weakened when we have other avenues of information and communication. And that seems to be what your work, and particularly this new project, is about.

CounterSpin (2/26/16)

CG: And the flip side of the “everyone is complicit” argument is, people use it later to evade accountability. I mean, how many times can people say, “Oh, that or this politician or journalists supported the Iraq War, but there was no one against the Iraq War.”

I went to my first protest against the Iraq War in September 2005. I was a sophomore in high school. There were hundreds of thousands of people there. And we were all more right than the New York Times and MSNBC and Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. Well, I think Dick Cheney knew what he was doing, but you know what I mean?

JJ: Yes. I was there too. Yeah…

CG: I know you were, I know you were. That’s, as I mentioned before, I first started reading FAIR back during the Bush years. Which we’re back in.

JJ: But the point is that some folks might say, “Oh, you’re doing a newsletter and you’re collecting instances of censorship and firing and repression, and that’s useful,” but it’s not just a collection, it’s also a tool. It’s also a way of speaking, yeah?

CG: Yes. And we’re definitely trying to get this newsletter to be a tool for journalists, to be a tool for congressional staff, to be a tool for other advocates. I mean, anyone can subscribe to it, and I think everyone can benefit from it. But we are doing extremely hard work behind the scenes to try to put it in front of people in the press, to try to put it in front of congressional offices, so they can’t say, “We didn’t know.”

Or they can use it as a resource. Because I know they’re getting the ADL stuff. I know they’re getting the Heritage Foundation stuff. We know police departments get that sort of stuff.

Al Jazeera (1/19/14)

And the other side is extremely well organized. I’ll never forget when I was in college, after the 2009 massacre/bombing/war in Gaza. I mean, I went and met with my congressman’s office, with just a staffer, with some other pro-Palestine activists. And the very first thing he says is, “We hear from AIPAC all the time. We never hear from you guys.”

JJ: Wow. That’s incredible. And that speaks to the need for organization and activism in this case.

And at the same time, we know that when we get organized, when we speak out, elite media will not necessarily hear that voice, or platform that voice.

And I’ll just ask you a specific question: FAIR and CounterSpin, we’ve noted a lot that corporate media cover election issues as though elections were something that happened to politicians, and not something that happens to all of the people that were affected. And with Gaza, with Palestine, with the genocide, the stakes can’t be higher. But how are you seeing Palestine covered as a campaign issue, and what would you do different there? What would you see differently there?

CG: I had to tune out most of the corporate media about a year ago, when I was watching CNN, and they ran this ad about Jake Tapper speaking truth to power. He says, “I have the greatest job in the world. I have powerful people on and ask them questions.” And then he came back from commercial break, he had a member of Congress on, and he goes, I don’t remember what member of Congress. He goes, “Oh, congressman so-and-so, students at Harvard just posted this on Instagram. Do you condemn it?” And I was like, “oh…”

JJ: And that’s news. Yeah.

CG: Speaking truth to power: When you have a member of Congress on, “will you condemn college students at Harvard?”

So it is interesting, because the way the media covers elections in its own right is its own problem. It’s just constantly pushing the candidates to be more warmongering. Maybe you saw that debate where the first question was, “Will you support a preemptive strike on Iran?”—a war crime. Will you support a war of aggression? Not a candidate answered it, I don’t believe. I believe they both gave nonsensical answers, because they had prepared opening remarks and they gave them.

Washington Post (10/22/24)

But again, there’s a real chance, and I say this because I’ve worked for a nonpartisan organization, but with that caveat, there’s real questions about how Biden’s blanket support for Israel will impact Harris’s electability. At the end of the day, the murder of Palestinian children is not merely an electoral calculation for the Democratic Party.

And I’ve seen some people in liberal and left circles sort of talk about this, it’s like, “Oh no, Biden’s making a bad electoral calculation,” and had zero humanity towards the Palestinian people, when the murder of the children should be stopped because we shouldn’t be murdering children. It’s not this sort of horse race. The horse race approach to genocide is just something I can’t stomach.

JJ: When I talk to people, they almost offer a Hail Mary, like: The students, the children will save us all; but who’s looking out for the students? Who’s looking out for the kids that somehow are going to save us from this war nightmare that we’re in? There are laws, there are policies, there are things that we can do besides saying, “Well, gee, I hope those kids aren’t too scared of going to jail. I wish ’em well.” Thoughts on that?

CG: Yeah, it is troubling. And if the students are all suspended and arrested and beaten up, they won’t be there to save us. So the student protestors need our solidarity, even if we don’t always agree with the choice of words, or always the choice of tactics. I mean, I was a college student once. I didn’t always make the best decisions.

But they’re out there trying to stop a genocide, in a society where 9/10ths of our Congress, 9/10ths of our local politicians and like 9.9/10ths of our media are all on board and fueling the flames. And they are getting beaten with batons. They’re getting arrested, they’re getting suspended, they’re getting deported. They don’t need our armchair expert analysis, they need our solidarity and our support, and they need us to get out on the streets too.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org, and that’s the place where you can get their Gaza First Amendment Alert. Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for joining us once again on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Gaza First Amendment Alert (10/16/24)

The official death toll in Gaza is now roughly 43,000 people, very conservatively. As the Lancet and others remind, armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence, including deaths from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases. In Palestine, the death toll is exacerbated by displacement; destroyed healthcare infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water and shelter; the inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNWRWA), one of very few humanitarian organizations working in the region.

A real accounting will also include not just those we don’t yet know are dead, but the maimed, the orphaned, the starved, the homeless.  Democracy Now! recently spoke with a doctor from Gaza who said that he wishes that “Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

The New York Times has deemed such images too graphic to print. Too horrific, in other words, to run alongside reporting that suggests, implies or outright states that those deaths are justified, make sense or, minimally, are not worth stopping eating your buttered toast about.

As media critics, we look to Palestinians to represent Palestinian views, but it’s crucial that we not see the present moment as something happening to Other People, Somewhere Else. The repression of simple anti-genocide calls, the censorship, the firings, the disinformation, the malforming of concepts like “antisemitism”—these are problems for all of us, about all of us, that will influence all of us forever.

Defending Rights & Dissent has started a project called the Gaza First Amendment Alert, which is going to come out every other Wednesday. Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, a journalist, a researcher and a longtime activist.  He led a successful campaign to defeat a proposed unconstitutional anti-boycott bill in Maryland.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Janine Jackson: The last several years have provided ample reason for public protest, and many people have been doing just that, including some who never had before. This country has a much-vaunted history of vocal public dissent, but we know that that is intertwined with a sadder history of efforts by the powerful to silence those voices.

As we move into 2024, and reasons to speak up and out go unabated, what should we know about our right to protest? What should concern us, or give us hope?

Chip Gibbons is a journalist, researcher and activist, and policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Well, thank you for having me back, and I can think of no better way to start the new year than with CounterSpin. Obviously, not a day goes by that I’m not thankful for independent media, but the last few months, I think, have stressed the importance of programs like yours, given the low-quality reporting coming out of the corporate media at a time when courageous journalism is most needed.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, thank you very much, and I absolutely concur.

I wanted to ask you about the landscape in general, but first maybe a little basic education. On RightsAndDissent.org, folks can find a kind of guide on challenges to protest, and also the importance of protest. Because sometimes you do still hear people say that people marching or boycotting should just “use proper channels,” that society has mechanisms to resolve every conflict within the rules that protest seems to break. Can you talk about the rights that we do have to public protest, and why those rights are so important?

CG: Sure. So at Defending Rights & Dissent, we like to say that we defend your right to know and your freedom to act. We oppose government secrecy and the government attempts to hide its own crimes, and we also defend the rights of the people to take to the streets, to call their members of Congress, to engage in dissent.

Dissent is vital to our democracy, and, I believe I’ve commented in the past, protest is the tool by which we realize our democracy, that we realize the democratic ambitions of our country. The right to protest is both a fundamental right, and it is a core tool for achieving other fundamental rights. Without the right to protest, we wouldn’t have made as much progress as we have on civil rights (and I know there’s a lot more progress to be made); we wouldn’t have made as much progress on women’s rights, on LGBTQ rights, on peace and disarmament (although that cause feels very far from being realized these days).

But what progress we have made has been through grassroots, from-the-bottom social movement, not from benevolent elites being, like, well, let’s grant the people their rights today.

JJ: It’s interesting, the view towards protest—not just among the public, but also in news media—where once a protest is 10 or 20 years in the past, it can become acceptable, but the protests that are going on today are somehow categorically different, and we should be challenging them. And then of course, it matters very much who’s doing the protesting and why.

CounterSpin (1/20/17)

CG: The civil rights movement is the quintessential example of that. You look at the media coverage of Martin Luther King and his protests during his lifetime, I mean, they accused him of inciting violence, they accused him of rioting. All the things they say about protestors today, you heard the same claims about, “Why are you disrupting things, why are you alienating people?”

And at the end of his life, he was an extremely unpopular person, including with many Black Americans. He did not have high approval ratings. And now we have a Martin Luther King holiday, rightfully so. We have a Martin Luther King memorial.

People who are trying to shut down protests or advance racism cite him, as well as people who are doing the opposite. He has entered the lexicon of great historical figures that everybody, no matter how comical what they’re doing is, cites. So I think that’s a really great example.

Look at the Iraq War. John Pilger died recently, and I was watching some of the interviews he did with journalists in the run-up to the war, and the way they’re attacking him. And 20 years later, they’d like to pretend that they were doing what he was doing.

JJ: And all is perspective.

We’ve sort of transitioned, I guess, into the challenges, because anyone who has been on a march calling for ceasefire, end of occupation in Gaza; calling for voting rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ; people have been in the street, just in this past year, quite a lot.

It’s often very transformative, and it makes you feel good, and you see your community.

But there also can be an element of fear involved, when you see just lines and lines of police, armed police, that are kind of girding you in, or when you’re being shoved around by law enforcement, and you can stand there, but you can’t stand here. Protest is not without some elements of fear and of difficulty.

And we see that there are legislators who like it that way. And that’s part of where the fight is, too. It’s not just in the street, but it’s also in the courtrooms and the capitals, as you say.

CG: Absolutely. And I did want to comment that I do believe in the transformative power of protests. I remember the first protest I ever went to, in 2005, against the Iraq War, and just showing up at the New Carrollton Metro station on a Saturday, and having to park in the overflow lot, and wait in this long line of people with anti-war signs. And you remember, if you were opposed to the Iraq War, they made you feel demonized and isolated. And to see 300,000 to 600,000 people who believed the same thing I believed about the war was really, really powerful, and really inspiring.

And I also think that politicians, when they see—they’ll never admit this—tens or hundreds of thousands of people taking the streets, it scares them.

I mean, look at US support for Israel. For decades, it’s been entirely unchallenged. Everyone goes along with it, or they get kicked out of public life. And you’ve had protests before; I’ve been to many protests against massacres in Gaza over the last 15 years.

But now you have these huge protests, very youthful in many cases, very vibrant, very disruptive. And I think it’s very challenging to people who have been in Washington for 30 or 40 years, and every year rubber-stamp the sending of aid to Israel.

Defending Rights & Dissent (10/12/23)

And I think it’s hard to talk about the future of dissent in this country this year without talking about what’s happening in Gaza, because that looms over everything. And we’re seeing a real outburst of protest around the ceasefire, around the occupation, around apartheid. And we’re also seeing a real heavy-handed attempt to demonize and repress these movements.

There’s always been what’s called a Palestine exception to free speech. Palestine supporters have been censored, jailed, spied on for decades. So this isn’t entirely new, but the level of public vitriol, where you have Congress passing resolutions condemning student groups, Congress passing resolutions that condemn university presidents, Congress calling on the FBI (this isn’t a resolution, these are just letters from individual members of the Congress) to investigate media outlets for these conspiracy theories that they had freelancers who—and mainstream ones, like New York Times; they’re not talking about small left-wing publications—were somehow involved in October 7.

It’s a really dark time, and I know a lot of people I talk to feel very strongly that the repression will backfire, because the movement is so strong, and people are so disgusted by what our government is complicit in. And I think that’s potentially true.

But I do have to caution: Before World War I, the left was very powerful in this country. The Socialist Party had members of Congress, they had mayors. And the repression of that war completely decimated them.

In the run-up to the Cold War, the FBI had all these internal files about how powerful they think the Communist Party is, that people are taking them seriously, that liberals work with them, that the 1930s were a pink decade or a red decade, and the FBI security apparatus is going to be like penicillin to the spread of the pink decade.

So a lot of the periods of repression have followed the left when it was at its strongest, not when it was at its weakest. And I’m not saying we’re going to be decimated, like we were during World War I or during McCarthyism, but I do think we should be cautious, that repression does have an impact, and it does follow popular movement successes.

And I do think part of the reason why we see this unhinged level of repression around the Gaza War—if you want to call it war; it’s more of a genocide—is because the atrocities that are being committed are so horrifying that even if you’re someone who doesn’t think Israel’s an apartheid state, even if you’re a centrist, it’s hard to watch and hear about hospitals being targeted, to hear about refugee camps being blown up, and not be morally repulsed by what you’re seeing.

And I do think that people know that, and that’s why they’re escalating the ratcheting up of oppression around the ceasefire protest. Because there’s no defense of bombing a refugee camp. There’s no defense of having snipers outside a Catholic church and shooting church women who are going to use the restroom. There’s not really a strong defense of this. You can either deny it, or try to shut everyone up.

CNN (1/10/24)

JJ: And I think you’re right to point out that, “well, we’ll all get through it because everyone’s feeling so strongly about it”—we do have to count up the losses.

And not everything is legislation. We had these business leaders saying, “I want a list of all of the student activists, so that I can make sure that no one ever hires them.” These are follow-on impacts that will absolutely affect some people’s lives. I agree that that’s important to keep in mind, and to be mindful of.

I’m going to switch you just a little bit, because I know it is something that you want to talk about. One of the tools of political imprisonment and silencing is forgetfulness: out of sight, out of mind. We have a deep problem in this country of once someone is behind bars, in one way or another, we don’t hear from them. Just materially, it’s difficult to get access to people. And then, also, there is kind of an acceptance that they must be guilty of something if they’re in prison, even if it is a political imprisonment.

And of course I’m talking about Julian Assange, and I know that many people think, oh, he’s not the only political prisoner, there’s a lot of other things going on. But there’s a reason that the Assange case is so important for people who are journalists, or people who care about journalism, as well as people who care about the public’s right to know. It’s not just any old case.

So let me ask you for a little update, because it seems like, oddly, things seem to be shifting, at least in terms of congressional support, maybe, for Assange’s case. What’s going on right now with him?

Intercept (10/24/23)

CG: So last year we saw the first congressional letter calling for the charges to be dropped against Julian Assange. It was led by Rashida Tlaib, and the entire expanded Squad signed on to it. It went to Merrick Garland. It was the first of its kind.

Later that year, a number of Australian parliamentarians visited the US, a real interesting cross section of the Australian political system, who had very different reasons for supporting freeing Assange–everything from, they felt like he was a political prisoner, to we work with the US national security state and our people are really angry about Assange, and you’re going to make it impossible for us to continue to help you. Full range of opinions.

And that spawned a second letter, a bipartisan letter, a bicameral letter, with both Republicans and Democrats on it, led by Thomas Massie and Jim McGovern. And that letter went to Biden, and there were both Republicans and Democrats on that one. All of the signatories of the original letter were on it. And you had a senator, Rand Paul, on it. And it’s really an interesting coalition, because there are libertarians I respect who have been very good on this issue. There are progressives who should be good on this issue and are getting better. And then there’s some of the MAGA people, who I don’t terribly care for, even a little bit, but they’re on the letters too.

So it’s a strange bedfellows moment, but it has really been pushed by the fact that you have every single civil liberties and press freedom group and major newspaper being like, “This is an existential threat to the future of press freedom.”

New York Times (11/28/22)

And you have to keep going to these offices and telling them, you, Mr. Progressive, you care so much about press freedom. You hate the threat to democracy Donald Trump was. Here’s what the New York Times and Reporters Without Borders say about what we’re doing to Julian Assange. How can you have any credibility on those other issues when you ignore this horrifying assault on the First Amendment?

And, again, it is an existential issue to press freedom. And it’s particularly troubling right now because, remember, Assange is going to be on trial for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at the war crimes that are taking place in Gaza. And, of course, Assange was the last one they went for, the journalist, the publisher, and that was crossing a Rubicon. But they went after the whistleblowers and the sources first. They went after Chelsea Manning, Daniel Hale—the drone whistleblower is still in prison.

So I would say this has even greater urgency, because you have people in the government right now who are dissenting about the Gaza War. You have people in the press who I think want to challenge some of these narratives. And then you have, at the same time, a government whistleblower in prison for exposing lies about the US drone programs, and a publisher they’re trying to extradite for exposing lies to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

We’ve always talked about the chilling effect these types of policies have, these types of persecutions have—I’m not going to call them prosecutions; they’re persecutions. And in a moment where we have an outbreak of dissent within the public, within the government, about this horrible war our government is part of, similar to what happened with Dan Ellsberg around Vietnam, similar to what happened to the War on Terror and people like Snowden and John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake. And we are going to London, the US is, in February to try Julian Assange’s final appeal, to try to bring him here. And Daniel Hale is still being held in the communications management unit.

What message does it send to the whistleblowers of today? And if WikiLeaks hadn’t been so repressed, what role would they be playing right now in this Gaza War?

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, I’m reading through the stuff on Assange. Of course the Espionage Act comes up a lot. Are there changes, policy changes or legal changes, that could prevent future cases like we saw?

CG: Absolutely. And we’ve worked with a number of offices over the years, including Tulsi Gabbard, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush (a range of offices, I know) around what we think is the best proposal to reforming the Espionage Act, was supported by the late Dan Ellsberg, who we lost and—

JJ: Much missed.

CG: I miss his counsel on this issue. That would raise the burden for what the government has to prove to get an Espionage Act conviction, as well as make sure the jury can hear about why the whistleblower or journalist did what they did, as well as allow a public interest defense, as well as limit the Espionage Act to people with a duty to protect classified information.

Washington Post (6/6/23)

So as the Espionage Act is written, if I read in the Washington Post that there’s classified documents that indicate Ukraine was involved in the Nord Stream Pipeline bombing, and I say, “Hey Janine, did you see that Washington Post article?”—I’ve technically broken the letter of the Espionage Act. Obviously, it would never be applied that way, but [the proposal would be] limiting it so it does not apply to journalists, publishers, members of the general public. And in those cases where it can be applied, it could only be applied to those who are engaged in harming the US deliberately, not whistleblowing.

And I don’t want to be counting my chickens before they hatch, but I do think it’s very likely—especially with Dan’s passing, and people wanting to commemorate that—we will see something put forward in the Congress this year that is similar to what has been proposed by Tlaib and Omar and Bush as amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. Probably shouldn’t have said that, but I guess I did.

JJ: It’s out there now. Well, and then—I said finally, but finally finally—what about just fortifying the right to protest generally? We’re seeing the efforts to criminalize protest of various sorts, from boycotting to marching in particular places. There are efforts, though, to shore up that fundamental right as well. I mean, we can do it, I think, by protesting, first of all. But are there efforts going on to support us in that fundamental right to speak up?

CG: It’s really difficult, because so many of the efforts are reactionary, in that people put forward bad proposals and we fight them. For years, Defending Rights & Dissent has tried to put forward proactive legislation enshrining the right to protest. But that gets kind of complicated, because we don’t want this to be the limit. We don’t want to inadvertently give the police like, “Whoa, this wasn’t in the bill. You can’t do this.” And, also, people are more motivated to defend a right that’s being lost than to affirmatively protect it.

JJ:  I understand.

Chip Gibbons: “Don’t let them intimidate you. Don’t be silenced. The First Amendment gives you the right to speak and act for your conscience.”

CG: But we have proposals at Rights & Dissent that you could pass in your local community, that would help to affirm the right to protest. It’s just, everyone is so focused on the defense, including us, that it’s difficult to be proactive. But if anyone is interested in that, get on the RightsAndDissent.org website and contact us.

JJ: Absolutely. And it’s at least a conversation. Part of the freedom just comes from the ability to talk about it, and to talk about what we want to do and what we should be able to do, and how we support one another in the various protests and dissenting actions that we’re taking, that we stay in communication with one another.

CG: Absolutely.

JJ: All right, any final thoughts, Chip Gibbons, as we go forward, bravely as we can muster, into 2024, asserting our right to protest and to dissent?

CG: Don’t be silent. Don’t let them intimidate you. Don’t be silenced. The First Amendment gives you the right to speak and act for your conscience. It gives you the right to come together with other Americans to collectively work to change the world, and make this a country that reflects our values. And we should never voluntarily surrender those rights.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. Chip Gibbons, thank you, as always, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

CG: Thank you for having me.

The post ‘Protest Is the Tool by Which We Realize Our Democracy’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

(image: Jewish Voice for Peace)

This week on CounterSpin: It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name.

Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message—as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.”

“Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the media’s role in the recent Republican primary debates.

The post Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Julian Assange (cc photo: Espen Moe)

Janine Jackson: If you’ve been following the case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder whose revelations about US wars and war crimes outlets like the New York Times published to great acclaim, you know that you haven’t been following it in, for example, The New York Times.

Major US outlets’ interest in Assange’s prosecution is hard to detect, as if they had no stake in a case which is not, at bottom, only about whether individuals can leak classified information, but whether journalists can publish that information at all. And it’s as if their readers had no stake in that decision either. 

Joining us now with the latest is researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director of the group Defending Rights and Dissent. He joins us by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: It’s always a privilege to be on your program. It is one of the most informative programs we have, and unfortunately, the number of quality hard-hitting journalistic programs that cover these issues dwindles sort of more and more every year. So you are a lifesaver for our republic.  

JJ: Thank you. Thank you very much. And this really is a case where it’s shocking, not just the way that media are not giving it the attention that it might deserve, but in particular the way that journalists who are themselves implicated; it affects them, you know? 

So the lack of interest or the kind of evident desire to sort of box off Julian Assange as not our kind is deeply disturbing. But I’ve asked you here to give us kind of the latest on the case. What’s going on?

CG: I’ll just note that for some of the appellate hearings in the UK, I was the credentialed correspondent for Jacobin. So I was there covering it. I joined kind of late.

But [UK Home Secretary] Priti Patel has agreed to sign an extradition request for Julian Assange. You had a district level trial of sorts—hearing, whatever you wanna call it in the UK—where the British Crown Prosecution Service, at cost to the UK taxpayer, represented the US Department of Justice on their extradition request. And then Assange, not paid for by the British taxpayer, not backed by the Department of Justice, obviously, put up his own defense as to why he should not have been extradited.

And they raised all of the obvious issues: Press freedoms, the political questions exception to extradition, and they had big experts come in like Daniel Ellsberg, Carey Shenkman, perhaps the biggest expert on the Espionage Act in the country, and the judge rejected all of those press freedom claims, but decided that if Julian Assange was extradited to the US, it would be oppressive given his mental health. 

And then the US came in and offered all of these assurances. Particular prison policies loomed very heavily in the decision. So the US gave assurances that had so many holes in them you could drive your car through and not just a car, a big truck. You could drive a big truck through these holes. 

But on top of that, even in the best case scenario assurances they were offering, they were talking about Julian Assange won’t be in solitary confinement, he’ll just be in administrative segregation, held for I think 22 hours a day at Alexandria Detention Center, a jail we’re very familiar with because Chelsea Manning has been in there. Jeffrey Sterling has been in there. Daniel Hale has been in there. 

And the description they gave under the United Nations Minimum Standards for Treatment of Prisoners, the Mandela Rules, Nelson Mandela Rules, constituted cruel degrading treatment and possibly torture. 

So even the best case assurance, you know, they were reassuring the UK they were going to torture him and a higher court vacated the lower court’s decision because they found the US so persuasive. The Supreme Court refused to hear it and then it was entered in this process where it went to Priti Patel, who’s the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom. 

It’s all political, right? But it was more openly political as opposed to this sort of legal cloak of a political persecution. And, you know, we could make these kinds of political arguments again. 

And Defending Rights, in a sense, has a very narrow mission. We’re a US-based group focused on the Bill of Rights in the US, but because of the implications of this, you know, we did something extraordinary for us. We submitted a letter to the Home Secretary outlining the case against extradition based on our twelve years of monitoring this case. 

We talked about how the NSA had put him in the manhunting database and encouraged countries to bring criminal charges against him. We talked about how the CIA had WikiLeaks declared a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” a phrase they invented just to persecute WikiLeaks. And, you know, we outlined all of that. 

So now she’s ruled he can be extradited. The UK government has said they would like to get him to the US in six months. That’s very unlikely to happen because now the Assange legal team can appeal on the issues around press freedom the original judge ruled against. So you’re sort of restarting the appeals process if the courts agree to hear them. 

And then even after that, you have a final court of last resort in the European Court of Human Rights, which is not part of the EU. I’m sure everyone’s thinking Brexit, how can that happen? It’s actually part of the Council of Europe. There’s apparently a lot of European supergovernmental organizations, more than I, as an American ever, ever knew of. And it’s interesting because obviously it’s independent, but the Council of Europe has a commissioner of human rights who wrote Priti Patel asking them not to extradite Assange because of the press freedom claims.

Nils Melzer (Medium, 6/26/19): “Once telling the truth has become a crime, while the powerful enjoy impunity, it will be too late to correct the course.”

Which is, you know, United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, every international human rights group, every US civil liberties and press freedom group, they’ve all made this case.

So it’s not surprising that the Council of Europe behaves more like the UN than it does the US Department of Justice and the sort of British security establishment.

One interesting thing that’s happening in Congress right now that you and I want to discuss is that Representative Rashida Tlaib has introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, Amendment 617, which would seriously amend the Espionage Act in a really comprehensive manner we’ve not seen before from other proposals, because it would so limit the scope of the Espionage Act so that it couldn’t apply to members of the general public with some specific exceptions, which would preclude prosecuting a publisher or journalist. 

And also, and this is a thing that gets really controversial and really riles people up, but is what I’ve wrote the most on, it also would give some due process protections to the Edward Snowdens, to the Chelsea Mannings and the Daniel Ellsbergs of the world by forcing the government to have to prove specific intent to harm national security. 

Right now, the language is “specific intent” or “reason to believe,” and that sounds like a high burden, but what they say, they say, “Oh, this was classified, and you know, you signed a statement that said if you ever released classified information, the sky will fall. And then you released it. You had reason to believe.” And then you’re barred from talking about what you released and why you released it. 

So to force them to prove that specific intent, it would also give someone indicted under the Espionage Act sections that apply here the right to testify about the purpose of their disclosures. 

Daniel Ellsburg famously was asked why did he release the Pentagon papers, and the judge shut him down and did not allow him to answer. And more recently with cases like drone whistleblower Daniel Hale, before the trial even begins, the prosecutor files a pretrial motion asking that Daniel Hale be blocked from mentioning, his words, not mine, his “good motives,” and the judge granted it. So Daniel Hale, if he had gone to trial, could not have mentioned his good motives. 

So this is a really, I mean, it’s a very wonky editing of US criminal procedure in one particular criminal statute. And I think people’s eyes rightfully glaze over with that…

JJ: But I think people can see the purpose of that. I think you’ve made clear what the difference would be if that information were allowed to be included. 

CG: Yeah, it’s a game changer, right? Because the government actually has to prove the whistleblower not just released the information, but did so intending to harm the US. I would remind people that Chelsea Manning, in her court martial, was charged with both Espionage Act violations and aiding the enemy, and military court marshals are not known for being very respectful of due process. 

The military judge found her not guilty of aiding the enemy because there was a higher intent provision and the government had to prove so much more. So the government would both have to prove actual espionage, this person wants to harm the country, and also they’d have to let them testify about why they did it. 

It’s not a perfect solution to prevent these prosecutions, but it would remove the immense procedural hurdles that rob a whistleblower of any basic constitutional due process rights when charged with the Espionage Act, and force the government to actually prove espionage, not whistleblowing.

JJ: All right then, we’re going to end it there, but just for now. We’ve been speaking with Chip Gibbons. He’s policy director of the group Defending Rights and Dissent, and you can follow their work online at rightsanddissent.org.  Chip Gibbons, thank you so much as ever for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

The post ‘It Would Force the Government to Actually Prove Espionage, not Whistleblowing’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

John Roberts

This week on CounterSpin: When disastrous things happen, like the US invasion of Iraq or the Supreme Court dismissal of basic human rights, the undercurrent of a lot of news media is: Why didn’t we see this coming? How could we all have gotten it wrong? It’s—to use a maybe overused term—gaslighting, in which elite news media spin a tale that everyone, all of some presumed “us,” were blindsided by: in this case, a John Roberts–led Supreme Court gutting multiple legally and societally established precedents. Clarence Thomas is an obvious factor in today’s Court, as is Samuel Alito—but the man ABC News characterized as a “mensch” is at the center of the web.

So if the 4th of July is an occasion to talk about US history and its relevance today, let’s go all the way back to July 2005, when the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court was just one day old. CounterSpin‘s Steve Rendall and Janine Jackson hosted a discussion with journalist Adele Stan, who’d just written a piece called “Meet John Roberts” for the American Prospect, and Elliot Mincberg, then legal director for the group People for the American Way. We hear that conversation again this week.

Julian Assange (cc photo: Espen Moe)

Also on the show: Former New York Times reporter James Risen wrote an op-ed for the paper in 2020, in which he said that he thought that governments—he was talking about Bolsonaro in Brazil, as well as Donald Trump—were testing unprecedented measures to silence and intimidate journalists, and that they “seem to have decided to experiment with such draconian anti-press tactics by trying them out first on aggressive and disagreeable figures.” He was referring to, preeminently, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who may now be extradited to the United States, where he stands accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. If you haven’t heard much lately about the case and its implications, that might be indication that the experiment Risen refers to is working. Researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons is policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent. He brings us the latest on Assange and why it matters.

The post Adele Stan & Elliot Mincberg on John Roberts, Chip Gibbons on Why Assange Matters appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.