WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange spoke publicly today for the first time since he was released in June from a London prison. Assange addressed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in France about his 14-year legal saga after publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange was freed after pleading guilty to a U.S. charge of obtaining and disclosing national security material. Democracy Now! broadcasts the first time the world has heard Julian Assange’s voice since he was arrested in 2019. “I eventually chose freedom over unrealizable justice after being detained for years and facing a 175-year sentence with no effective remedy,” says Assange. “I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today, after years of incarceration, because I pled guilty to journalism.”

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

Image Source: a.powers-fudyma – CC BY-SA 2.0

The liberation of the Australian journalist in late June closes an ordeal lasting fourteen years. On the other hand, it doesn’t lighten the responsibility of his persecutors. In this domain, Washington, London, and Stockholm have acted with the complicity of an institution supposed to speak truth to power and to protect the innocent—the press, for once, not very supportive of another journalist.

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Since 5 June 2024, courtesy of a ‘guilty plea’ agreement with the US Justice Ministry, Julian Assange is free. However, the global press has not let off a euphoric fireworks display that could have welcomed the return to normal life of any journalist having been locked up for fourteen years for having exposed war crimes.

The editorial ambiance was tinted with a strange reserve. “His actions had divided opinion”, noted the Guardian (26 June 2024), the principal daily of the ‘left’ in the UK, which had published several dozens of articles hostile to the WikiLeaks founder. Invariably, the portraits accompanying the happy outcome devoted considerable space to detractors: “a reckless leaker who endangered lives” (New York Times, 27 June), “a publicity seeker” (BBC, 25 June), “suspected of serving the interests of Moscow” (Franceinfo, 25 June), in short, a “shady character” (Le Monde, 27 June). For the French evening daily, this bad reputation is readily explained: “Julian Assange has not ceased to feed controversy”. A controversy that the journalists had themselves largely fed before describing it as a fact …

“… there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch”.

From this call to the murder of the ‘traitor’, thrown on Fox News in 2010 by the Democrat-registered commentator Robert Beckel, to editorials of dubious support, to the fake news of the Guardian with respect to a claimed collusion of Julian Assange with Donald Trump and Moscow in 2018, the incarcerated journalist has been able to appreciate all the nuances of the media malevolence.1 The dominant subject was no longer the message – the content of the WikiLeaks revelations and the raw reality of American power that they disclosed – but the personality and ethics of the messenger, indeed even his hygiene (Daily Mail, 13 April 2019).

One could readily forget that the marriages between WikiLeaks and the mainstream press were celebrated in grand style, because they were ephemeral and self-interested. At the time that the organization burst onto the global scene in 2010 in publishing classified documents entrusted to WikiLeaks by the whistleblower Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst, the windfall feeds antennas and columns for months. WikiLeaks then formed  strategic partnerships with some prestigious newspapers to amplify the revelations that were overwhelming for Washington: the criminal conduct of its army in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the hell of the Guantanamo prison or the unsavoury inner workings of American diplomacy.

Regarding this last issue, known under the label ‘Cablegate’, the New York Times, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde will profit amply with scoops drawn from 250,000 diplomatic cables. On 25 December 2010, the editorial of Le Monde acclaims Julian Assange ‘Man of the Year’. Each already knows that this source of explosive content was a threat to the monopoly of legitimate information claimed by the mainstream media, but there then exists a precarious peace based on a division of labour. WikiLeaks supplies authenticated raw material to the media which screens it, prioritizes it, then claims for itself the laurels. This media ignores nothing of the philosophy of Assange who, like other IT whizzkids of his generation, dreams of a new age which would abolish the intermediaries compromised with Power.

Moreover, on this Christmas Day 2010, Le Monde accompanies its praise with a label – “the most controversial personality of the planet”–which will adhere to the WikiLeaks founder and which will be dragged out whenever judicial proceedings will compel the media, between long stretches of indifference, to speak of the affair: “enigmatic and controversial ‘cyber warrior’” (Lexpress.fr, 19 May 2017), “controversial hero of a transparency somewhat murky” (Lepoint.fr, 7 September 2020), “controversial hero of free speech” (Agence France-Press, 10 December 2021, via Là-bas si j’y suis, 13 December 2021), “controversial figure at the center of conspiracy theories” (‘Complorama’, Franceinfo, 29 April 2022). ‘Controversial’: under its seeming objectivity, this irremovable stick-on adjective presents the peculiar property of adhering only to the shoes of the Western world’s dissidents.

However, for the media the stakes of the Assange case were crystal clear: in May 2019, the US charged him under the 1917 Espionage Act, thus threatening the entire profession with criminalization of journalism. His extradition towards the American prison system could have signaled the complete capitulation of the ‘fourth estate’. The former ‘clients’ of WikiLeaks resign themselves to oppose – without much enthusiasm – his being handed over to the US authorities.

The art of destroying a colleague

This ‘support’ will be systematically accompanied by qualifications, indeed of by denigration, as in this editorial of Le Monde, 26 February 2020:

Julian Assange behaved neither as defender of human rights nor as citizen respectful of the law. After 2011, he has flouted his commitments in publishing the American documents unredacted. He has subsequently refused to comply with a summons from Swedish police following two accusations of sexual assault. … Prompt to take on the secrets of democratic countries, Julian Assange shows himself less attentive with respect to authoritarian countries. He has worked for Russia Today, propaganda network financed by the Kremlin. In 2016, he has published documents stolen by the Russian secret services from the American Democratic Party in order to discredit its candidate, Hillary Clinton.

In other words, this journalist doesn’t reveal the ‘right’ secrets and short-circuits the professionals.

Such a fault also didn’t fly with Mediapart (14 April 2019), the main independent online journal in France. In defense of the Australian journalist published by the [self-proclaimed dissenting] news site, its founder and then director Edwy Plenel judges it opportune to insert the following passage:

There are many legitimate reasons to be indifferent to the fate of Julian Assange, arrested on Thursday 11 April by British police in the Ecuador Embassy where he has taken refuge for nearly seven years: the accusations of sexual violence coming from Sweden; his egocentric adventurism in the management of WikiLeaks which has alienated his colleagues; his ethical slide in the diffusion of raw documents, with no attempts at verification nor of contextualization; his shady complaisance, to say the least, with the Russian power and its geopolitical game.

In its modest contribution to the solidarity movement, [the fading press monument] Le Canard enchaîné (15 December 2021) knew how to find just words to rally new support:

Certainly, Assange is sometimes confused, ambivalent, irresponsible (as when unfiltered documents put lives in danger), disquieting (at the time of the US Presidential election, he confesses his preference for Trump).

By way of an international media campaign to demand the abandonment of the American legal proceedings, the most notable initiative took the form of a short ‘A call from newspapers for Julian Assange’:‘Publishing is not a crime’, signed in November 2022 by the five former international partners. Even in this gesture of solidarity, the newspapers’ directors reproach the political prisoner insofar as “unredacted copies of the cables were released” (Le Monde, 29 November 2022).

However, this reputation for irresponsibility in the publication of documents reveals itself unfounded. Some specialists in the affair, not least the Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, had clearly established that the fault was the responsibility of two contributors to the Guardian.2 Luke Harding and David Leigh had in effect published in a book the password that Assange had entrusted to Leigh to access the files in the context of their partnership.

This catastrophic negligence, however signaled at the time by WikiLeaks3, was never attributed to its authors. WikiLeaks attempted to prevent dissemination and informed the US State Department of the risk. Recognizing that the site Cryptome had published the raw telegrams on 1 September 2011, WikiLeaks did the same the next day, thus explaining that it wanted to warn as quickly as possible the people potentially in danger.

After the publication in July 2010 of the documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon claimed that the site had put human lives in danger (US troops, Afghan collaborators, informers) and that Julian Assange perhaps even had ‘blood on his hands’ (CNN, 29 July 2010). Alas, the US has not been able to furnish a single example, including during court hearings.4 Fourteen years later, this accusation, endlessly repeated, lives on. On 25 June 2024, star pundit Patrick Cohen celebrated the liberation of Assange on the TV show ‘C à vous’ (France 5) by saying that some “operatives on the ground … had paid with their life” after the revelations of WikiLeaks.5

The following day, the judge of the US Federal Court of Saipan (Northern Mariana Islands) set out the lack of professionalism of the French journalistat the hearing which ratified Assange’s guilty plea: “The government has indicated that there is no personal victim here. That tells me that the dissemination of this information did not result in any known physical injury”. In the media, the most mobilized against the circulation of fake news, this information has not generated an avalanche of corrections.

More than any other episode, the rape allegations have strongly contributed to isolating Assange. If they were complacently evoked by the press – [the French neocon satirical weekly] Charlie Hebdo ranted against this “rapist and mentally impaired Gandalf” (23 November 2022) – the journalists rarely acknowledge that it never went beyond the preliminary investigation stage. On the other hand, the investigation led by Nils Melzer, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, supports itself on “10,000 pages of reliable procedural files, correspondence and other evidence from a multitude of sources”; the jurist established that the ‘Swedish affair’ was a scheme contrived to neutralize the founder of WikiLeaks.6

Stefania Maurizi has done the same in her own work, drawing on the correspondence between British and Swedish prosecution services. With very rare exceptions (Jack Dion in Marianne, Anne Crignon in Le Nouvel Obs), the French press had generally ignored these two books. Among the three former French partners of WikiLeaks (Le Monde, Libération and Mediapart), no-one has mentioned their publication nor signaled the release of two documentaries devoted to the affair.7

Finally, often hinted at but never backed up, links with Russia thicken the cloud of rumors that pass for information about Assange. The meetings at the Ecuadorian Embassy with ‘some Russians’, as well as with Paul Manafort, director of Donald Trump’s first Presidential campaign, were a hoax. Launched by [Russophobe] Luke Harding in the Guardian, 27 November 2018, it was immediately taken up by Libération, which has never retracted it. Some Russian hackers furnishing to WikiLeaks some compromising emails concerning Hillary Clinton and the Democrat establishment? In spite of the assertions full of assurances from the media, it remains to be established. 8 Nevertheless, Julian Assange will be culpable of having “animated a broadcast for Russia Today” (Franc-Tireur, 3 July 2024), for sure? … Oh well, that neither. 9

The struggle against fake news and ‘conspiracy theories’, a grand civilizational cause of the liberal press, has suffered an eclipse each time that it was a question of Assange. The collaboration of the media in the persecution of the founder of WikiLeaks further discredits a profession at the end of its tether. And it further isolates the journalists of integrity.

Julian Assange had to plead guilty for having done his job. 10

Laurent Dauré is journalist and founder of the French Committee of Support for Julian Assange (Comité de soutien Assange).

A version of this article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Le Monde diplomatiqueunder the title ‘Les medias contre Julian Assange’. It has been translated (with gratuitous interpellations added) by Evan Jones, with permission of the author and of the publisher.

Notes.

1. Serge Halimi, ‘The Guardian’s Fake Scoop’, Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2019.

2. Stefania Maurizi, Secret Power: WikiLeaks and its Enemies, Pluto Press, 2022; French edition, L’Affaire WikiLeaks. Médias indépendants, censure et crimes d’État, Agone, 2024.

3. ‘Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords’, WikiLeaks, 1September 2011.

4. Ed Pilkington, ‘Bradley Manning leak did not result in deaths by enemy force, court hears’, The Guardian, 31 July 2013.

5. Cited by Fabien Rives, ‘Julian Assange calomnié sur France 5’ [Julian Assange defamed on France 5], Off Investigation, 4 July 2024.

6. Nils Melzer, The Trial of Julian Assange: A Story of Persecution, Verso, 2022; French edition, L’Affaire Assange. Histoire d’une persécution politique, Éditions Critiques, 2022. To read also, by the same author, ‘Julian Assange, unequal before the law’, Le Monde diplomatique, August 2022.

7. C/f the documentaries by Clara López Rubio and Juan Pancorbo, Hacking Justice (2021), and Ben Lawrence, Ithaka (2022).

8. Aaron Maté, ‘CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s own report undercuts its core Russia-Meddling Claims’, RealClearInvestigations, 5 July 2019.

9. The broadcast ‘’The World Tomorrow’ has been produced independently by the organization Quick Roll Production (created by Assange) and the British company Dartmouth Films; it has been sold to a dozen media outlets globally, including Russia Today. C/f Stefania Maurizi, op.cit.

10. Kevin Gosztola, Guilty of Journalism. The Political Case against Julian Assange, Seven Stories Press, 2023.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Laurent Dauré.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

It is only right that we all take a moment to celebrate the victory of Julian Assange’s release from 14 years of detention, in varying forms, to be united, finally, with his wife and children – two boys who have been denied the chance to ever properly know their father.

His last five years were spent in Belmarsh high-security prison as the United States sought to extradite him to face a 175-year jail sentence for publishing details of its state crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For seven years before that he was confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Quito awarded him political asylum to evade the clutches of a law-breaking US empire determined to make an example of him.

His seizure by UK police from the embassy on Washington’s behalf in 2019, after a more US-aligned government came to power in Ecuador, proved how clearly misguided, or malicious, had been those who accused him of “evading justice”.

Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world.

No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him and kidnap him off the streets of London.

Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers.

That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

Media no watchdog

Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to.

Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation.

For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars.

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies.

Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were finally withdrawn. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week.

In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on.

Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities.

The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger.

That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has even cursorily studied the background to the case knows.

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange.

And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.

Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right.

That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship.

Character assassination

It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.

Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower to stop him being locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism.

The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

For the record, so we do not forget, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes:

BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling.

Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge”, while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians.

This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling every approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website.

This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before.

Too little too late

The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination.

A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

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This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

As Julian Assange returns to his native Australia, press rights advocates warn that his case could cast a long shadow over journalists’ work to investigate and expose government secrets. The WikiLeaks founder has pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act as part of a deal with the Justice Department that lets him avoid further prison time following five years behind bars in the U.K. awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. He had been facing a possible 175 years in U.S. prison if convicted on all charges related to his publication of classified documents in 2010 that revealed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t think this is an unmitigated victory for press freedom, because we do still have this plea agreement in which Julian Assange essentially agrees that he has spent five years in custody for the kinds of acts that journalists engage in all the time,” says Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and previously the ACLU’s deputy legal director.

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

We speak with Australian Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, a prominent supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who says the publisher’s case is “a big deal” in the country that cut across political divisions. “It’s taken a really big campaign, a really big grassroots campaign by thousands of people in Australia — indeed, millions of people around the world — to bring this to the attention of politicians.” Assange landed in Australia Wednesday after pleading guilty to a single charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act, allowing him to avoid further prison time after years of legal jeopardy.

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

Julian Assange has landed in Australia a free man, reuniting with his family Wednesday after pleading guilty to one charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act as part of a deal with the Justice Department. The WikiLeaks publisher entered his plea on the Pacific island of Saipan, part of the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, which lets him avoid further prison time following five years behind bars in the U.K. awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. He had been facing a possible 175 years in U.S. prison if convicted on charges related to his publication of classified documents in 2010 that revealed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This case is an attack on journalism, it’s an attack on the public’s right to know, and it should never have been brought,” the WikiLeaks founder’s wife, Stella Assange, said at a press conference Wednesday. “Julian should never have spent a single day in prison. But today we celebrate, because today Julian is free.” We also play comments from members of Assange’s legal team, Jennifer Robinson and Barry Pollack, who said the use of the World War I-era Espionage Act to go after a publisher put press freedoms at grave risk.

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

Image by Samuel Regan-Asante.

One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus. That is, if you believe in final chapters. Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative. His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice. Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information. At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment. It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC). The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication. WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport. Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199. In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family. He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process. It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on. This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny. These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal. They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.” Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality. While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate. It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing. He gave the game away. He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom. It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled. While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment. The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

The post The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Julian Assange arriving at the federal court house in Saipan.

One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus.  That is, if you believe in final chapters.  Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative.  His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice.  Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family. He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

The post The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family.  He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Lifesize bronze sculpture featuring (L-R) former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former US soldier Chelsea Manning convicted of violations of the Espionage Act, on May 1, 2015 at Alexanderplatz square in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Tobias Schwarz) © AFP

There are some important takeaways from this gross dereliction of justice.

One: The rape allegations, that continue to appear in lazy media, were false, and this was attested to by the two women in the case. The allegations were a political construction between Sweden acting on behalf of the US. The United Kingdom abetted the US’s scheming against Assange. No western nations stepped forward to criticize the treatment. Graciously, president  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered asylum for Assange in Mexico.

Why was Assange being targetted? Because WikiLeaks has released scads of classified US military documents on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  diplomatic cables, and the devastating video Collateral Murder. When US citizen Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” for publication, he was charged with theft on top of espionage, but government chicanery caused it to end up in a mistrial. Whereas president Richard Nixon failed miserably against Ellsberg, Donald Trump and Joe Biden persevered and kept Assange under some form of lock-and-key.

Two: Assange is not guilty. He is guilty of journalism, which is not a crime. He did not commit treason against the US. He is an Australian citizen and not a US citizen. He did not commit espionage. Assange is not a spy and neither was he a thief. He is a publisher, and when WikiLeaks published the leaks, Assange was doing what the New York Times did when they published the “Pentagon Papers.”

Nonetheless, Assange is human. He has parents, a wife, and kids. Assange realizes that he was up against the state machinery of the US, UK, Sweden, and the collusion of Ecuador under president Lenin Moreno. Crucial was the unwillingness of pre-Albanese Australian administrations to fight for one of its citizens.

If the Deep State in the US can have its own president assassinated without consequences, then it can easily have a single person put in some form of incarceration for as long as it intends.

After years and years of incarceration — especially in the notorious Belmarsh prison, his health diminishing, missing his family — that Assange would have accepted the release terms of a rogue empire is completely understandable.

Three: Justice is all too often not just. Justice delayed is justice denied goes the legal maxim. Unfortunately, Assange is not an isolated example. Edward Snowden cannot return stateside. Seeing what has happened to Assange reinforces that the US government will mete out injustice to him.

Four: Monopoly media continues to evince that it is an organ of government and corporations. Why so? First, because they are instruments of power. Second, they found themselves all too often scooped by WikiLeaks on major stories.

Five: The bad: this is a blow to freedom of speech and the right of the public to know what their government is doing.

Six: More bad: it is too easy to demonize a hero, to torture a hero, and to do this even though there is a significant (although arguably not numerous enough) global movement in support of a hero.

Seven: Even more bad: people must keep in mind the other heroes out there who brought corruption, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity to the public consciousness and as a consequence face persecution, imprisonment, assassination, and whatever sordid punishments the machinery of rogue states can cook up. People like Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, George Galloway, conscientious objectors, truth tellers, resistance fighters, among others.

Eight: Assange is a hero. Heroes tend to be too loosely defined. Scoring a boatload of goals does not one a hero make, neither does crooning a hit song make one a hero, nor does attaining ultra wealth. Heroes are embued with a highly developed sense of morality and transcend themselves by working for the greater good of humanity and the world.

Nine: It is a Pyrrhic victory for Empire. Yes, Assange was brought to the point of having to confess guilt, but who knows what Assange and WikiLeaks will do for exposing crimes of state from here on.

Ten: Whatever Assange decides to do in the future, his decision is earned. He has already done so much for the people who want transparency and who want their governments held to account.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s court hearing in Saipan is set to make “this dot in the middle of the Pacific” the centre of the world for one day, says a CNMI journalist.

The Northern Marianas — a group of islands in the Micronesian portion of the Pacific with a population of about 50,000 — is gearing up for a landmark legal case.

In 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.

• READ MORE: Plea deal ends personal ordeal for Julian Assange, but still media freedom concerns, says MEAA
• Other Julian Assange reports

Assange is expected to plead guilty to a US espionage charge in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands today at 9am local time.

Saipantribune.com journalist and RNZ Pacific’s Saipan correspondent Mark Rabago will be in court, and said it was a significant moment for Saipan.

“Not everybody knows Saipan, much less can spell it right. So it’s one of the few times in a decade that CNMI or Saipan is put in the map,” he said.

He said there was heavy interest from the world’s media and journalists from Japan were expected to fly in overnight.

‘Little dot in the middle’
“It’s significant that our little island, this dot in the middle of the Pacific, is the centre of the world,” Rabago said.

Assange was flying in from the United Kingdom via Thailand on a private jet, Rabago said.

He said it was not known exactly why the case was being heard in Saipan, but there was some speculation.

“He doesn’t want to step foot in the continental US and also Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, is the closest to Australia, aside from Guam,” Rabago said.

Reuters was reporting Assange was expected to return home to Australia after the hearing.

Rabago added that Assange probably was not able to get a court date in Guam, and there was a court date open on Saipan.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

In 2019, the Trump administration charged Assange with 17 counts of breaching the Espionage Act, arguing that he conspired with Chelsea Manning, a former army intelligence analyst, who spent seven years in prison for leaking material to WikiLeaks. The American Civil Liberties Union has long advocated for the Department of Justice to drop the criminal charges against Assange.

Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, had the following reaction:

“This is a prosecution that should not have been brought. With today’s guilty plea, Julian Assange stands convicted of practicing journalism, and all investigative journalists now face greater legal peril.

“Exposing government secrets and revealing them in the public interest is the core function of national security journalism. Today, for the first time, that activity was described in a guilty plea as a criminal conspiracy. And even if the current Department of Justice stays true to its assurances that the Assange case is unique and will not provide a precedent to be wielded against other publishers, we can’t be confident that future administrations will honor that commitment.

“We’re grateful that today Assange will be on a flight to Australia, and not to Virginia to face trial and further punishment. The precedent set by this guilty plea would have been far more dangerous had it been ratified by federal courts. But make no mistake, the vital work of national security journalists will be more difficult today than it was yesterday.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

“Amnesty International embraces the positive news that Julian Assange has finally been released from UK state custody after five years of imprisonment, and that this ordeal is coming to an end for him and his family.

“We firmly believe that Julian Assange should never have been imprisoned in the first place and have continuously called for charges to be dropped.

“The years-long global spectacle of the US authorities hell-bent on violating press freedom and freedom of expression by making an example of Assange for exposing alleged war crimes committed by the USA has undoubtedly done historic damage.

“Amnesty International salutes the work of Julian Assange’s family, campaigners, lawyers, press freedom organizations and many within the media community and beyond who have stood by him and the fundamental principles that should govern society’s right and access to information and justice. We will keep fighting for their full recognition and respect by all.”

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

We discuss the plea deal and release of Julian Assange with press freedom advocate Trevor Timm. “Thankfully, Julian Assange is finally going free today, but the press freedom implications remain to be seen,” says Timm, who explains the U.S. espionage case against Assange, which was opened under the Trump administration and continued under Biden. Timm expresses disappointment that Biden chose to continue prosecuting Assange rather than demonstrating his stated support of press freedom. If convicted, Assange could have been sentenced to 175 years in U.S. prison, which Timm calls a “ticking time bomb for press freedom rights.”

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

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from Belmarsh Prison in London, where he has been incarcerated for the past five years, after accepting a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. After a decade-plus of legal challenges, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material for publishing classified documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan on WikiLeaks. The Australian publisher is expected to be sentenced to time served and allowed to return home, where he reportedly will seek a pardon. Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton describes learning of his release as “an amazing moment.” He speaks to Democracy Now! about Assange’s case and what led up to the latest developments, as well as what he expects will happen next.

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

The reported plea bargain between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the United States government brings to a close one of the darkest periods in the history of media freedom, says the union for Australian journalists.

While the details of the deal are still to be confirmed, MEAA welcomed the release of Assange, a Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance member, after five years of relentless campaigning by journalists, unions, and press freedom advocates around the world.

MEAA remains concerned what the deal will mean for media freedom around the world.

• READ MORE: The Free Julian Assange RSF campaign file

The work of WikiLeaks at the centre of this case — which exposed war crimes and other wrongdoing by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan — was strong, public interest journalism.

MEAA fears the deal will embolden the US and other governments around the world to continue to pursue and prosecute journalists who disclose to the public information they would rather keep suppressed.

MEAA media federal president Karen Percy welcomed the news that Julian Assange has already been released from Belmarsh Prison, where he has been held as his case has wound its way through UK courts.

“We wish Julian all the best as he is reunited with his wife, young sons and other relatives who have fought tirelessly for his freedom,” she said.

‘Relentless battle against this injustice’
“We commend Julian for his courage over this long period, and his legal team and supporters for their relentless battle against this injustice.

“We’ve been extremely concerned about the impact on his physical and mental wellbeing during Julian’s long period of imprisonment and respect the decision to bring an end to the ordeal for all involved.

Julian Assange boards flight at London Stansted Airport at 5PM (BST) Monday June 24th. This is for everyone who worked for his freedom: thank you.#FreedJulianAssange pic.twitter.com/Pqp5pBAhSQ

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) June 25, 2024

“The deal reported today does not in any way mean that the struggle for media freedom has been futile; quite the opposite, it places governments on notice that a global movement will be mobilised whenever they blatantly threaten journalism in a similar way.

Percy said the espionage charges laid against Assange were a “grotesque overreach by the US government” and an attack on journalism and media freedom.

“The pursuit of Julian Assange has set a dangerous precedent that will have a potential chilling effect on investigative journalism,” she said.

“The stories published by WikiLeaks and other outlets more than a decade ago were clearly in the public interest. The charges by the US sought to curtail free speech, criminalise journalism and send a clear message to future whistleblowers and publishers that they too will be punished.”

Percy said was clearly in the public interest and it had “always been an outrage” that the US government sought to prosecute him for espionage for reporting that was published in collaboration with some of the world’s leading media organisations.

Julian Assange has been an MEAA member since 2007 and in 2011 WikiLeaks won the Outstanding Contribution to Journalism Walkley award, one of Australia’s most coveted journalism awards.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday won the right to appeal his extradition to the United States. Assange’s lawyers argued before the British High Court that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that Assange would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain. Assange has spent more than a decade facing the threat of extradition to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years in prison for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is a victory for Julian Assange in that he lives on to fight another day, his case lives on to fight another day. But he’s not out of Belmarsh [Prison] yet, and he’s not in the clear yet,” says Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent. “This could still end in him being sent to the U.S. And the person who can stop this is Joe Biden and Merrick Garland.”

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

“We are heartened that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be allowed to appeal his extradition to the United States,” said CPJ President Jodie Ginsberg, in New York. “Assange’s prosecution in the United States would have disastrous implications for press freedom. It is time for the United States Department of Justice to drop its harmful charges against Assange.”

If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Assange’s lawyers have said that he faces up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, although U.S. prosecutors have said the sentence would be much shorter.

Last week, CPJ and partners sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland urging the Justice Department to drop charges against the Wikileaks founder.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

As things stand, the US Department of Justice is determined to get its mitts on Assange on the dubious strength of 18 charges, 17 confected from the brutal Espionage Act of 1917.  Any conviction from these charges risks a 175-year jail term, effectively constituting a death sentence for the Australian publisher.

The war time statute, which was intended to curb free speech and muzzle the press for the duration of the First World War, was assailed by Wisconsin Republican Senator Robert La Follette as a rotten device that impaired “the right of the people to discuss the war in all its phases”.  It was exactly in time of war that the citizen “be more alert to the preservation of his right to control his government.  He must be most watchful of the encroachment of the military upon the civil power.”  And that encroachment is all the more pressing, given the Act’s repurposing as a weapon against leakers and publishers of national security material.  In its most obscene incarnation, it has become the US government’s political spear against a non-US national who published US classified documents outside the United States.

The plea deal idea is not new.  In August last year, the Sydney Morning Herald pounced upon comments from US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy that a “resolution” to the Assange imbroglio might be on the table. “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador suggested at the time.  Any such resolution could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, subject to finalisation by the Department of Justice.  Her remarks were heavily caveated: this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other agency. “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.”

The WSJ now reports that officials from the DOJ and Assange’s legal team “have had preliminary discussions in recent months about what a plea deal could look like to end the lengthy legal drama”.  These talks “remain in flux” and “could fizzle.”  Redundantly, the Journal reports that any such agreement “would require approval at the highest levels of the Justice Department.”

Barry Pollack, one of Assange’s legal representatives, has not been given any indication that the department would, as such, accept the deal, a point he reiterated to Consortium News: “[W]e have been given no indication that the Department of Justice intends to resolve the case.”

One floated possibility would be a guilty plea on a charge of mishandling classified documents, which would be classed as a misdemeanour.  Doing so would take some of the sting out of the indictment, which is currently thick with felonies and one conspiracy charge of computer intrusion.  “Under the deal, Assange could potentially enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the US.”  Speculation from the paper follows.  “The time he has spent behind bars in London would count toward any US sentence, and he would be likely to be free to leave prison shortly after any deal has concluded.”

With little basis for the claim, the report lightly declares that the failure of plea talks would not necessarily be a bad thing for Assange.  He could still “be sent to the US for trial”, where “he may not stay for long, given the Australia pledge.” The pledge in question is part of a series of highly questionable assurances given to the UK government that Assange’s carceral conditions would not include detention in the supermax ADX Florence facility, the imposition of notorious Special Administrative Measures, and the provision of appropriate healthcare.  Were he to receive a sentence, it would be open to him to apply and serve its balance in Australia.  But all such undertakings have been given on condition that they can be broken, and transfer deals between the US and other countries have been plagued by delays, inconsistencies, and bad faith.

The dangers and opportunities to Assange have been bundled together, a sniff of an idea rather than a formulation of a concrete deal.  And deals can be broken. It is hard to imagine that Assange would not be expected to board a flight bound for the United States, even if he could make his plea remotely.  Constitutional attorney Bruce Afran, in an interview with CN Live! last August, suggested that a plea, taken internationally, was “not barred by any laws.  If all parties consent to it, then the court has jurisdiction.” Yes, but what then?

In any event, once on US soil, there is nothing stopping a grand volte face, that nasty legal practice of tagging on new charges that would carry even more onerous penalties.  It should be never forgotten that Assange would be delivered up to a country whose authorities had contemplated, at points, abduction, illegal rendition, and assassination.

Either way, the current process is one of gradual judicial and penal assassination, conducted through prolonged proceedings that continue to assail the publisher’s health even as he stays confined to Belmarsh Prison.  (Assange awaits the UK High Court’s decision on whether he will be granted leave to appeal the extradition order from the Home Office.)  The concerns will be how to spare WikiLeaks founder further punishment while still forcing Washington to concede defeat in its quest to jail a publisher.  That quest, unfortunately, remains an ongoing one.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Here is CPJ’s briefing on the legal battle to extradite Assange, the charges he would face in the U.S., and why his prosecution is worrying for journalists in the U.S. and internationally.

What are the charges against Assange?

The 18 indictments against Assange stem from WikiLeaks’ obtainment and publication in 2010 of some 400,000 classified U.S. military documents relating to its involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These leaks— the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history—included a video showing the 2007 killing in Iraq of two Reuters journalists by a U.S. military airstrike.

Prosecutors allege that Assange unlawfully published the names of classified sources and conspired with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain classified information.

Manning was convicted in 2013 on espionage charges and served seven years in a military prison before President Barack Obama commuted the remainder of her sentence in 2017. Manning was again jailed in 2019 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and freed in 2020, as the judge said her detention was no longer serving “any coercive purpose.”

Seventeen of the charges against Assange are under the 1917 Espionage Act, which has been increasingly used by the Department of Justice to prosecute whistleblowers, CPJ has documented. The other charge, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, is that Assange “encouraged” Manning to leak classified information.

If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Assange’s lawyers have said that he faces up to 175 years in prison, although U.S. prosecutors have said the sentence would be much shorter.

When did the U.S. government indict Assange?

The Justice Department in April 2019 unsealed an indictment accusing Assange of computer hacking under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing classified U.S. government material. In June 2020, the U.S. filed a superseding indictment against Assange that broadened the scope of the computer hacking charges.

While the leaks in question in these indictments were published while President Barack Obama was in office, his Justice Department notably declined to file charges against Assange due what it termed a “New York Times problem”—namely if it indicted Assange, a legal pathway would be created for the Justice Department to prosecute The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and other media outlets that published the classified logs. This could allow for the prosecution of any journalists who publish leaked documents.

What’s at stake for journalism?

CPJ has long spoken out against the prosecution of Assange and the implications for press freedom globally, and repeatedly called for the charges to be dropped, including in a 2010 letter to Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

While Assange’s controversial diplomatic and military leaks have named and endangered vulnerable journalists, U.S. prosecution efforts have been described as “holding a gun to the head of investigative journalism.”

The arguments used in the indictments against Assange could establish a legal pathway for the prosecution of journalists and severely weaken the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press. Journalists’ right to report on matters of public interest without fear of censorship or retribution could be harmed.

If Assange were found guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, it could facilitate the criminalization of investigative journalists’ interactions with their sources.

If Assange is extradited and prosecuted in the U.S. under the Espionage Act, it would allow the U.S. government to extradite any publisher of classified information from any country with which the U.S. has an extradition agreement. It would set a harmful precedent for governments worldwide, establishing a framework whereby states can pursue journalists through the courts, no matter where they are located.

Furthermore, the prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would be a gift to authoritarian leaders who could cite Washington’s example the next time they wanted to jail an irksome journalist or publisher.

How did Assange end up in the U.K.?

Assange sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden where he was wanted for questioning on allegations of rape and sexual assault, which he denied. Assange’s legal team feared he would be handed over for onward extradition to the U.S. for prosecution.

Assange’s lawyers told the British High Court this month that the Trump administration planned to kidnap or kill Assange to “sustain impunity for US officials in respect of the torture/war crimes committed in its infamous ‘war on terror’…”

After falling out with the Ecuadorian government, Assange was evicted from the country’s embassy in April 2019, arrested by the British police for skipping bail, and imprisoned, pending the conclusion of the U.S. extradition case.

What’s next?

The British High Court is not expected to rule on Assange’s final application to appeal until March at the earliest.

If successful, Assange will be allowed to appeal on the grounds that his extradition would be a breach of the extradition treaty between the U.S. and the U.K., which prohibits doing so for political offences.

If Assange loses at the High Court, he will have 28 days to file an appeal at the European Court of Human Rights, one of his lawyers, Jennifer Robinson, said during a briefing on the case. If Assange was granted provisional measures, it would prevent the U.K. from extraditing him until a ruling from the ECHR.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

At a critical hearing this week in London, lawyers for imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asked the British High Court of Justice to grant him a new appeal in what is likely his last chance to avoid extradition to the United States, where he faces a 175-year prison sentence for publishing classified documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, says the judges were receptive to their arguments that Assange could face the death penalty in the U.S. and that an extradition would set a dangerous precedent for press freedom. “If Julian is extradited and goes on trial under the Espionage Act, this is a case which is going to set precedent which criminalizes journalistic activity and will be used against the rest of the media.” A ruling in the case is not expected until next month at the earliest.

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

How, then, to justify the 18 charges being levelled against the WikiLeaks founder under the US Espionage Act of 1917, an instrument not just vile but antiquated in its effort to stomp on political discussion and expression?

Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp got the bien pensant treatment of the national security state, dressed in robes, and tediously inclined.  Prosaic arguments were recycled like stale, oppressive air.  According to Clair Dobbin KC, there was “no immunity for journalists to break the law” and that the US constitutional First Amendment protecting the press would never confer it.  This had an undergraduate obviousness to it; no one in this case has ever asserted such cavalierly brutal freedom in releasing classified material, a point that Mark Summers KC, representing Assange, was happy to point out.

Yet again, the Svengali argument, gingered with seduction, was run before a British court.  Assange, assuming all the powers of manipulation, cultivated and corrupted the disclosers, “soliciting” them to pilfer classified government materials.  With limping repetition, Dobbin insisted that WikiLeaks had been responsible for revealing “the unredacted names of the sources who provided information to the United States,” many of whom “lived in war zones or in repressive regimes”.  In exposing the names of Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious figures, human rights dissidents and political dissidents, the publisher had “created a grave and immediate risk that innocent people would suffer serious physical harm or arbitrary detention”.

The battering did not stop there.  “There were really profound consequences, beyond the real human cost and to the broader ability to the US to gather evidence from human sources as well.”  Dobbin’s proof of these contentions is thin, vague and causally absent: the arrest of one Ethiopian journalist following the leak; unspecified “others” disappeared.  She even admitted the fact that “it cannot be proven that their disappearance was a result of being outed.”  This was certainly a point pounced upon by Summers.

The previous publication by Cryptome of all the documents, or the careless publication of the key to the encrypted file with the unredacted cables by journalists from The Guardian in a book on WikiLeaks, did not convince Dobbin.  Assange was “responsible for the publications of the unredacted documents whether published by others or WikiLeaks.”  There was no mention, either, that Assange had been alarmed by The Guardian faux pas and had contacted the US State Department of this fact.  Summers, in his contribution, duly reminded the court of the publisher’s frantic efforts while also reasoning that the harm caused had been “unintended, unforeseen and unwanted” by him.

With this selective, prejudicial angle made clear, Dobbin’s words became those of a disgruntled empire caught with its pants down when harming and despoiling others.  “What the appellant is accused of is really at the upper end of the spectrum of gravity,” she submitted, attracting “no public interest whatsoever”.  Conveniently, calculatingly, any reference to the enormous, weighty revelations of WikiLeaks of torture, renditions, war crimes, surveillance, to name but a few, was avoided.  Emphasis was placed, instead, upon the “usefulness” of the material WikiLeaks had published: to the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden.

This is a dubious point given the Pentagon’s own assertions to the contrary in a 2011 report dealing with the significance of the disclosure of military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks.  On the Iraq War logs and State Department cables, the report concluded “with high confidence that disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq.”  On the Afghanistan war log releases, the authors also found that they would not result in “significant impact” to US operations, though did claim that this was potentially damaging to “intelligence sources, informants, and the Afghan population,” and intelligence collection efforts by the US and NATO.

Summers appropriately rebutted the contention about harm by suggesting that Assange had opposed, in the highest traditions of journalism, “war crimes”, a consideration that had to be measured against unverified assertions of harm.

On this point, the prosecution found itself in knots, given that a balancing act of harm and freedom of expression is warranted under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  When asked by Justice Johnson whether prosecuting a journalist in the UK, when in possession of “information of very serious wrongdoing by an intelligence agency [had] incited an employee of that agency to provide information… [which] was then published in a very careful way” was compatible with the right to freedom of expression, Dobbin conceded to there being no “straightforward answer”.

When pressed by Justice Johnson as to whether she accepted the idea that the “statutory offence”, not any “scope for a balancing exercise” was what counted, Dobbin had to concede that a “proportionality assessment” would normally arise when publishers were prosecuted under section 5 of the UK Official Secrets Act.  Prosecutions would only take place if one “knowingly published” information known “to be damaging”.

Any half-informed student of the US Espionage Act knows that strict liability under the statute negates any need to undertake a balancing assessment.  All that matters is that the individual had “reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the US,” often proved by the mere fact that the information published was classified to begin with.

Dobbin then switched gears.  Having initially advertised the view that journalists could never be entirely immune from criminal prosecution, she added more egg to the pudding on the reasons why Assange was not a journalist.  Her view of the journalist being a bland, obedient transmitter of received, establishment wisdom was all too clear.  Assange had gone “beyond the acts of a journalist who is merely gathering information”.  He had, for instance, agreed with Chelsea Manning on March 8, 2010 to attempt cracking a password hash that would have given her access to the secure and classified Department of Defense account.  Doing so meant using a false identity to facilitate further pilfering of classified documents.

This was yet another fiction.  Manning’s court martial had revealed the redundancy of having to crack a password hash as she already had administrator access to the system.  Why then bother with the conspiratorial circus?

The corollary of this is that the prosecution’s reliance on fabricated testimony, notably from former WikiLeaks volunteer, convicted paedophile and FBI tittle-tattler Sigurdur ‘Siggi’ Thordarson.  In June 2021, the Icelandic newspaper Stundin, now publishing under the name Heimildin, revealed that Assange had “never asked him to hack or to access phone recordings of [Iceland’s] MPs.”  He also had not “received some files from a third party who claimed to have recorded MPs and had offered to share them with Assange without having any idea what they actually contained.”  Thordarson never went through the relevant files, nor verified whether they had audio recordings as claimed by the third-party source. The allegation that Assange instructed him to access computers in order to unearth such recordings was roundly rejected.

The legal team representing the US attempted to convince the court that suggestions of “bad faith” by the defence on the part of such figures as lead prosecutor Gordon Kromberg had to be discounted.  “The starting position must be, as it always is in these cases, the fundamental assumption of good faith on the part of those states with which the United Kingdom has long-standing extradition relationships,” asserted Dobbin.  “The US is one of the most long-standing partners of the UK.”

This had a jarring quality to it, given that nothing in Washington’s approach to Assange – the surveillance sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency via Spanish security firm UC Global, the contemplation of abduction and assassination by intelligence officials, the after-the-fact concoction of assurances to assure easier extradition to the US – has been anything but one of bad faith.

Summers countered by refuting any suggestions that “Mr Kronberg is a lying individual or that he is personally not carrying out his prosecutorial duties in good faith. The prosecution and extradition here is a decision taken way above his head.”  This was a matter of “state retaliation ordered from the very top”; one could not “focus on the sheep and ignore the shepherd.”

Things did not get better for the prosecuting side on what would happen once Assange was extradited.  Would he, for instance, be protected by the free press amendment under US law?  Former CIA director Mike Pompeo had suggested that Assange’s Australian citizenship barred him from protections afforded by the First Amendment.  Dobbin was not sure, but insisted that there was insufficient evidence to suggest that nationality would prejudice Assange in any trial.  Justice Johnson was sharp: “the test isn’t that he would be prejudiced.  It is that he might be prejudiced on the grounds of his nationality.”  This was hard to square with the UK Extradition Act prohibiting extradition where a person “might be prejudiced at his trial or punished, detained, or restricted in his personal liberty” on account of nationality.

Given existing US legal practice, Assange also faced the risk of the death penalty, something that extradition arrangements would bar.  Ben Watson KC, representing the UK Home Secretary, had to concede to the court that there was nothing preventing any amendment by US prosecutors to the current list of charges that could result in a death sentence.

If he does not succeed in this appeal, Assange may well request an intervention of the European Court of Human Rights for a stay of proceedings under Rule 39.  Like many European institutions so loathed by the governments of post-Brexit Britain, it offers the prospect of relief provided that there are “exceptional circumstances” and an instance “where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.”

The sickening irony of that whole proviso is that irreparable harm is being inflicted on Assange in prison, where the UK prison system fulfils the role of the punishing US gaoler.  Speed will be of the essence; and the government of Rishi Sunak may well quickly bundle the publisher onto a transatlantic flight.  If so, the founder of WikiLeaks will go the way of other prestigious and wronged political prisoners who sought to expand minds rather than narrow them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The appeal to the High Court, comprising Justice Jeremy Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp, challenges the extradition order by the Home Secretary and the conclusions of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser who, despite ordering his release on risks posed to him on mental health grounds, fundamentally agreed with the prosecution.  He was, Varaitser scorned, not a true journalist.  (Absurdly, it would seem for the judge, journalists never publish leaked information.)  He had exposed the identities of informants.  He had engaged in attempts to hack computer systems.  In June 2023, High Court justice, Jonathan Swift, thought it inappropriate to rehear the substantive arguments of the trial case made by defence.

Assange’s attorneys had informed the court that he simply could not attend in person, though it would hardly have mattered.  His absence from the courtroom was decorous in its own way; he could avoid being displayed like a caged specimen reviled for his publishing feats.  The proceedings would be conducted in the manner of appropriate panto, with dress and procedure to boot.

Unfortunately, as things chugged along, the two judges were seemingly ill versed in the field they were adjudicating.  Their ignorance was telling on, for instance, the views of Mike Pompeo, whose bilious reaction to WikiLeaks when director of the Central Intelligence Agency involved rejecting the protections of the First Amendment of the US Constitution to non-US citizens.  (That view is also held by the US prosecutors.)  Such a perspective, argued Assange’s legal team, was a clear violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

They were also surprised to be informed that further charges could be added to the indictment on his arrival to the United States, including those carrying the death penalty.  To this could be added other enlightening surprises for the judicial bench: the fact that rules of admissibility might be altered to consider material illegally obtained, for instance, through surveillance; that Assange might also be sentenced for an offence he was never actually tried for.

Examples of espionage case law were submitted as precedents to buttress the defence, with Edward Fitzgerald KC calling espionage a “pure political offence” which barred extradition in treaties Britain had signed with 158 nation states.

The case of David Shayler, who had been in the employ of the British domestic intelligence service MI5, saw the former employee prosecuted for passing classified documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 under the Official Secrets Act.  These included the names of various agents, that the agency kept dossiers on various UK politicians, including Labour ministers, and that the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, had conceived of a plan to assassinate Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.  When the UK made its extradition request to the French authorities, they received a clear answer from the Cour d’Appel: the offence charged was found to be political in nature.

Mark Summers KC also emphasised the point that the “prosecution was motivated to punish and inhibit the exposure of American state-level crimes”, ample evidence of which was adduced during the extradition trial, yet ignored by both Baraitser and Swift.  Baraitser brazenly ignored evidence of discussions by US intelligence officials about a plot to kill or abduct Assange.

For Summers, chronology was telling: the initial absence of any prosecution effort by the Obama administration, despite empanelling a grand jury to investigate WikiLeaks; the announcement by the International Criminal Court that it would be investigating potential crimes committed by US combatants in Afghanistan in 2016, thereby lending gravity to Assange’s disclosures; and the desire to kill or seek the publisher’s extradition after the release of the Vault 7 files detailing various espionage tools of the CIA.

With Pompeo’s apoplectic declaration that WikiLeaks was a hostile, non-state intelligence service, the avenue was open for a covert targeting of Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.  The duly hatched rendition plan led to the prosecution, which proved “selective” in avoiding, for instance, the targeting of newspaper outlets such as Freitag, or the website Cryptome.  In Summer’s view, “This is not a government acting on good faith pursuing a legal path.”

When it came to discussing the leaks, the judges revealed a deep-welled obliviousness about what Assange and WikiLeaks had actually done in releasing the US State Department cables.  For one thing, the old nonsense that the unredacted, or poorly redacted material had resulted in damage was skirted over, not to mention the fact that Assange had himself insisted on a firm redaction policy.   No inquiry has ever shown proof that harm came to any US informant, a central contention of the US Department of Justice.  Nor was it evident to the judges that the publication of the cables had first taken place in Cryptome, once it was discovered that reporters from The Guardian had injudiciously revealed the password to the unredacted files in their publication.

Two other points also emerged in the defence submission: the whistleblower angle, and that of foreseeability.  Consider, Summers argued hypothetically, the situation where Chelsea Manning, whose invaluable disclosures WikiLeaks published, had been considered by the European Court of Human Rights.  The European Union’s whistleblower regime, he contended, would have considered the effect of harm done by violating an undertaking of confidentiality with the exposure of abuses of state power.  Manning would have likely escaped conviction, while Assange, having not even signed any confidentiality agreements, would have had even better prospects for acquittal.

The issue of foreseeability, outlined in Article 7 of the ECHR, arose because Assange, his team further contends, could not have known that publishing the cables would have triggered a lawsuit under the Espionage Act.  That said, a grand jury had refused to indict the Chicago Times in 1942 for publishing an article citing US naval knowledge of Japanese plans to attack Midway Island.  Then came the Pentagon Papers case in 1971.  While Summers correctly notes that, “The New York Times was never prosecuted,” this was not for want for trying: a grand jury was empanelled with the purpose of indicting the Times reporter Neil Sheehan for his role in receiving classified government material.  Once revelations of government tapping of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was revealed, the case collapsed.  All that said, Article 7 could provide a further ground for barring extradition.

February 21 gave lawyers for the US the chance to reiterate the various, deeply flawed assertions about Assange’s publication activities connected with Cablegate (the “exposing informants” argument), his supposedly non-journalistic activities and the integrity of diplomatic assurances about his welfare were he to be extradited.  The stage for the obscene was duly set.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The final day of a critical appeal for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is underway today at the British High Court of Justice, in what could be Assange’s last chance to stop his extradition to the United States. Assange faces a 175-year prison sentence for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the WikiLeaks founder’s health is reportedly deteriorating rapidly, his lawyers are arguing the case is politically motivated to target Assange for exposing “state-level crimes.” Meanwhile, U.S. lawyers are attempting to portray Assange as a hacker rather than a journalist. “It’s clear to everyone that Assange is a journalist. He revealed more criminality by the world’s most powerful country than anyone’s ever done in history,” says Matt Kennard, head of investigations at Declassified UK, who lays out the proceedings so far, what to expect from the British justice system and the precedent an Assange extradition would set for global journalism. “It will be a huge nail in the coffin for investigative journalism, for any kind of publishing of information that state powers don’t like, and it will be used by repressive regimes all around the world.”

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

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

The post Muckraking Journalism and The Progressive Magazine; Updates on Julian Assange appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

Photograph Source: Alisdare Hickson – CC BY-SA 4.0

On February 20 and 21, the High Court of Justice in London will conduct a hearing to decide whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal the court’s earlier decision to extradite him to the U.S. to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one for computer crime, with a Methuselan prison sentence of 175 years. This, even though Julian is not an American citizen (he’s Australian), and he was not under U.S. jurisdiction when the “crimes” were allegedly committed.

At the end of the two-day hearing the court could grant Julian permission to appeal, it could deny it, or it could postpone its decision to a later date. Or the two judges might have some other ruling up their puffy sleeves.

In the first instance, if permission to appeal is granted, whilst awaiting another hearing, Julian would most likely be returned to high-security Belmarsh Prison where he has been held for nearly five years under arbitrary detention in near-total solitary confinement, though he has been convicted of no crime. Belmarsh is known as Britain’s Guantanamo because of its torturous conditions as well as for its population of mostly alleged murderers and terrorists.

Julian, an award-winning journalist and publisher, a life-long promoter of peace, a nine-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, is quite obviously not in that category, though there are those who think he is. Most notable among these is former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who pronounced Julian “a darling of terrorist groups”, and defined WikiLeaks as a “nonstate, hostile intelligence service”.

The crime that Julian is essentially “guilty” of is revealing truths most uncomfortable to the ruling powers—practicing journalism as it should be practiced.

The second possible outcome of the upcoming hearing, denial of permission to appeal, could mean that within hours Julian would be shackled and placed on a U.S. military jet headed for Alexandria, Virginia. There his case will be heard by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where many residents work in national security (CIA, FBI, Department of Defense) or have a family member who does. The jury pool comes from this group and, not surprisingly, no one brought before this court under the Espionage Act has ever been exonerated.

Not only would Julian be denied a fair trial there, according to experts such as Nils Melzer, former U.N. rapporteur on torture, but he would not be able to use the defense that what he did was in the public interest, though clearly it was. The outcome there for Julian has virtually been decided even though his final appeal in Britain has not yet been heard.

What happens to Julian after a near-certain conviction by the federal court is that he will forthwith be sent to Supermax ADX Florence Colorado—or a comparable hell hole—which was described by a former supervisor there as being worse than death.

Possible stay of the extradition

There is one intervention that could at the very least delay Julian’s rendition to the U.S. if his appeal is denied: Julian’s lawyers will petition the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to become involved as a last resort. Julian’s case certainly falls within the scope of Rule 39, under which the court takes on a case if “the applicant would otherwise face an imminent risk of irreparable damage”. This would be Julian’s case in the U.S. where he would be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment—torture.

But there are also a few complications: it is not certain that Britain would respect the court’s decision, and if extradition has already taken place, the U.S. may very well not honor a decision made by a European court.

If (the big if) the plane bearing Julian has not yet left the tarmac in Britain, and the ECtHR has taken on the case in time, it’s probable Julian would be returned to Belmarsh to await the subsequent ruling. Bail has previously been denied, even for health concerns, because Julian is considered a high flight risk, and it’s doubtful bail would be granted at this point.

It’s possible that the judges will not hand down a decision on February 21, but postpone it. A delay would avoid a messy outcry from the increasing numbers of fervent supporters of Julian during an important election year for both the U.S. and Britain, when a virtual death sentence of a publisher would not look good for an incumbent or any candidate who condones the extradition yet touts “a democratic society”.

In any case, barring instant extradition, nothing short of a deus ex machina could prevent Julian from being returned to Belmarsh to await his appeal, intervention by the ECtHR, or a delayed decision on the right to appeal from the High Court.

Deus ex machina?

As improbable as it might seem, the suggestion of a deus ex machina did recently come onto the scene in the guise of former president Donald Trump. Donald Trump, Jr., one of his father’s chief advisors, recently said that based on what he knows now, he would be in favor of dropping the charges against Julian Assange.

Vivek Ramaswamy, former candidate in the Republican party primary, now a Trump supporter who throughout his campaign said he would pardon Julian on day 1, stated that in a recent meeting with Trump, when they discussed various issues, Trump said he would be amenable to pardoning Julian. Three other presidential candidates also want to see Julian freed: Jill Stein, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Marianne Williamson.

For a Trump pardon of Julian to happen, many factors would have to come into play here. Trump has previously flipflopped with regard to Julian, and may well do so again. “I love WikiLeaks!” he declared with great fervor in 2016, lauding WikiLeaks for having published internal emails of the Democratic National Committee showing it undermined Bernie Sanders’ chances of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee and instead installed Hillary Clinton.

But then Trump indicted Julian under the spurious 107-year-old Espionage Act and declined to pardon him during his last days in office. And, under Trump’s presidency, the CIA plotted to kill Julian. Perhaps now Trump wants to be seen as doing the right thing for Julian—or just gain the hundreds of thousands of votes of those who want to see that happen.

The possibility of Trump being elected and then pardoning Julian is of course very far from certain. If indeed it did happen, it couldn’t be before January 2025. By that time, unless extradited, Julian will have suffered yet another year in Belmarsh prison, where he has been held since April 11, 2019, on remand, at the bidding of the U.S.

Increasing demands for Julian to be freed

As Julian’s dire situation gathers more attention, voices from all around the world have risen up calling for his liberation. In a groundbreaking cross-party show of unity, members of Australia’s House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly (86 to 42) on February 14 for Julian not to be extradited but to be brought home. What was particularly significant here and welcomed by Julian’s supporters well beyond Australia is that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also voted in favor, after months of waffling.

“Enough is enough”, he kept saying, yet not insisting that the U.S. pardon and release his country’s most famous citizen. This despite the fact that Julian’s return is what nearly 80 percent of Australians want. Perhaps Albanese’s previous inaction was motivated by a recently signed juicy agreement with the U.S. to buy nuclear submarines, bringing the country yet more into the orbit of the U.S. as a strategic satellite in a geopolitically important part of the world.

In view of Albanese’s reticence, a multi-partisan group of Australian parliamentarians has been consistently acting on behalf of those constituents who want Julian freed. Recently they uncovered a ruling by the U.K. Supreme Court that could be the cog in the drive to send Julian to the U.S. According to the law, if a government stipulates that a country to which a person is to be extradited from Britain has given assurances that that person’s health or life won’t be threatened in the receiving country, then those “assurances” must be thoroughly investigated by a third party before extradition can take place.

And so the parliamentarians have written to British Home Secretary James Cleverly calling for a probe into the risks to Julian’s health should he be extradited to the U.S.

In the U.S., House Resolution 934, introduced by Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, calls for the U.S. to drop the charges against Julian Assange, stating that “regular journalistic activities, including the obtainment and publication of information, are protected under the First Amendment”. The Resolution has eight other co-sponsors from both parties and is currently before the House Judiciary Committee. While its passage there, then onto the floor of the Congress, then over to the Senate could be a lengthy route, its supporters hope that thousands of people will write to their representatives urging their support for this resolution, thereby bringing massive attention to Julian’s case and what it means.

Parliamentarians in France, where Julian also has a family, have called for Julian to be granted political asylum, though it’s questionable if this could be allowed if a demand for asylum has not been requested while the person is actually on French soil. Mexico and Bolivia have offered Julian asylum. Cities in dozens of countries have named Julian an Honorary Citizen.

The five major publications, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, and Der Spiegel, which had “partnered” with WikiLeaks in publishing thousands of files, signed an open letter on November 22 of last year calling for an end to the prosecution of Julian Assange They’re rather late to the game, even with that wishy-washy letter, having profited from enormous sales when the WikiLeaks files were released, then not only ignoring Julian, but criticizing him, often using lies and slander.

Julian’s importance has been acknowledged by hundreds of thousands of parliamentarians, human rights authorities, medical doctors, religious leaders (including the Pope), artists, teachers, trade unionists, legal professionals, journalists, students, writers all over the world who publicly demand his immediate release.

Nevertheless, the Americans and Brits may very well prevail, keeping Julian locked up for more years as he wastes away under the grueling prison conditions awaiting a final decision. Or they could prevail in having Julian sent to a supermax prison via the U.S. district court.

2 by 3 meters in Belmarsh

During the nearly five years Julian has been incarcerated in Belmarsh, he has been kept mostly in solitary confinement in a cell measuring 2 meters by 3 meters, for 23 hours a day, allowed to stretch his long legs in an enclosed concrete area for an hour. Food is budgeted at 2 British pounds ($2.50) a day per prisoner, with meals consisting of gruel, thin soup, and little else.

Julian has not seen sunlight since he entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 seeking asylum there, apart from the day he was dragged from the embassy, or the days he was driven in a van from Belmarsh to those court hearings he was actually allowed to attend in person—albeit enclosed in a glass box (as is often the case in British courtrooms).

Not surprisingly his health has been consistently declining. Julian has lost a lot of weight and is paler than any human should be. In 2021, during or before a court hearing, (it’s unclear) he suffered a mini stroke at the age of just 49. He has subsequently been diagnosed with nerve damage and memory problems, and may very well suffer a much more serious stroke.

Death is never far away in Belmarsh—when Julian’s father John Shipton visited his son there, he reported that three suicides and one murder had occurred in the prison just during the past month alone. Nor was death far away in the embassy, where plain-clothes and uniformed officers menacingly patrolled and surveilled the embassy 24/7.

While Julian was considered paranoid for believing the U.S. wanted to kill him, an exhaustive investigation by Yahoo News in September of 2019 revealed that the U.S. and British intelligence services conspired to assassinate Julian by poisoning him while he was in the embassy or shooting him on the street or else kidnapping him from there.

Psychological torture

Julian’s mental health has also suffered severely, as would be the case for anyone incarcerated for so long in such horrifying conditions, undergoing repeated legal proceedings to determine whether the equivalent of a death sentence—lifelong internment in a U.S. supermax prison— will be imposed.

In a supermax prison, and especially under “special administrative measures” that would most likely be applied to Julian, he would be completely isolated. At least in Belmarsh he can now have some visitors, though restricted, and, finally, some books and writing paper. In the U.S. prison he would be in a virtually empty cell, forbidden any contact with the outside world, or even fellow prisoners, and thus denied any support or motivation to keep on living.

The toll on Julian’s mental health has been so significant that when Nils Melzer visited Julian in Belmarsh in May of 2019 with two medical experts, he stated unequivocally that Julian showed all the signs of psychological torture. His excellent book, The Trial of Julian Assange, lays out the case in great detail.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser, the magistrate who officiated during Julian’s first hearing, recognized Julian’s psychological fragility, as described in evidence presented to the court. Although she ruled in favor of extradition based on the 18 points presented by the American lawyers (obtaining, receiving, and disclosing classified information), she ruled against extradition on the grounds that she was certain Julian would commit suicide if placed in a supermax prison.

It’s unlikely Baraitser was motivated by the milk of human kindness, as she refused bail, saying Julian would “abscond”, and, ironically, had him sent back to the same place where, testimony showed, he had seriously contemplated and possibly even attempted suicide. Moreover, subsequent hearings and a final ruling on the 18 points for which she supported extradition would mean Julian would never be released from any prison.

It is clear to many that the process—the relentless persecution and prosecution of Julian—is the punishment. Keeping him silenced, in a deathly dungeon, unable to do what has always been his passion—revealing truths so that we may all act upon them to make the world a better place—is clearly an eroding and fatal punishment.

A threat to the real criminals

Why this ongoing punishment has been inflicted on Julian is to completely break him down, physically and psychologically, without even having to impose the very questionable ultimate blow of locking him up in a supermax prison for 175 years. The 10 million documents Julian published on WikiLeaks earned the wrath of those politicians, officials, plutocrats, dictators, rulers, generals, corporate executives whose murderous, illegal deeds he revealed, whether war crimes, crimes against humanity, corruption, mass surveillance. Ironically none of the perpetrators of those crimes has ever been convicted, while the publisher who revealed them remains in prison.

Revelations have helped end torture in Guantanamo, for example, overturn corrupt governments as in Egypt, end wars, for example in Iraq, aided by the very disturbing Collateral Murder video showing U.S. soldiers in Baghdad joyfully shooting down civilians from an Apache helicopter. Julian has done more than anyone to uncover how governments, politicians, corporations, the military, and the press truly operate. It’s not surprising they want him silenced forever.

The possibility of Julian’s cranking up WikiLeaks to once again be the propaganda and lies-shattering, truth-telling online publication that it was makes him a huge threat to all those all around the world who are committing unseen—or even seen—and with impunity the same and even more nefarious crimes Julian earlier revealed.

During Julian’s incarceration and WikiLeaks slowdown, alternative journalists and bloggers have done heroic jobs of reporting what must be brought to light—in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, for example. But few, if any, has the capability to receive securely and completely anonymously major revelations from whistleblowers and then publish them for free for anyone anywhere in the world, as WikiLeaks did so successfully using a revolutionary method Julian invented and pioneered.

The two-day hearing beginning on February 20 will be the fourth time Julian’s case has been in court. The first time, under Judge Baraitser in the Magistrate’s court that denied extradition but upheld the Americans’ 18 points, was followed by a hearing before two judges of the High Court, ruling on the U.S. demand to appeal the extradition decision based on additional assurances. While highly unusual, if not illegal, to present new assurances at that point, the High Court nevertheless agreed to hear the appeal.

In December 2021 it overturned the denial of extradition, accepting the specious assurance by the U.S. that Julian would be treated well in a U.S. prison, unless, their worthless caveat stated, he did something to warrant changing that. Not only could such “assurances” be revoked, but they are unenforceable.

Assange’s lawyers then filed an application for a cross appeal to the High Court of the first court’s judgement as well as the Home Secretary’s decision to extradite. That application was denied by a single High Court judge.

Craig Murray (craigmurray.org), Kevin Gosztola (Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange), and the excellent Consortium News have done thorough reporting on all these hearings, while the brilliant investigative reporter Stefania Maurizi has followed Julian and WikiLeaks from the beginning, uncovering, as in a detective novel, the government forces arrayed against Julian and their treacherous tactics (Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies).

The right to an appeal will now be heard this February 20 and 21 by two High Court judges, Mr. Justice Johnson and Dame Victoria Sharp, who were recently announced. Sharp and her family have long and strong connections to Conservative party leaders, and Sharp’s recent ruling against a journalist, Carole Cadwalladr, in a libel case, was denounced by press freedom advocates for supporting the repression of public interest journalism. Previous judges ruling on Julian’s case have had equally questionable connections.

A case rife with illegalities

The illegalities in this case are numerous, as the bona fides of some of the judges suggest, and further underscore the fact that all along this case has not been about justice but politics. Among the many transgressions of justice and the rule of law figure initially the conditions under which Julian was kept in the Ecuadorian embassy, from which he could never step outside, even for a moment, even for urgent medical care, without risk of being whisked away and imprisoned.

He and his visitors, including his doctors and lawyers, had all their interactions with him filmed and ultimately sent to the CIA. Their electronic devices were confiscated during their visits, photographed, and that information was also sent to the CIA, thereby violating the rights of legal and medical confidentiality—to say nothing of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy—and potentially severely compromising Julian’s legal case.

Two lawyers and two journalists have filed a lawsuit against the CIA and Mike Pompeo plus UC Global, a Spanish security company that carried out the spying in the embassy, for these violations, and a federal judge in New York has agreed to let the suit go through, though any final decision will not be immediate.

An embassy’s premises are meant to be inviolable safe places for those seeking asylum there, yet British police, with the agreement of the Ecuadorian embassy under its newly elected government, dragged Julian—who is also an Ecuadorian citizen—from the embassy and locked him away in Belmarsh. They kept all his belongings, including his computers and legal notes. In Belmarsh he has been kept under conditions that violate any sense of human rights.

The original “crime” for which Julian was brought to prison was breaching bail when he went to the Ecuadorian embassy, rightfully fearing extradition from Sweden to the U.S. following subsequently dismissed—and fabricated—allegations of sexual assault in Sweden. Breach of bail in Britain carries a maximum penalty of a year’s incarceration, though in most cases it results in a fine or dismissal.

Yet Julian has been kept in Belmarsh well beyond that limit, never convicted of any crime, in clear violation of habeas corpus. Much of the irrefutable evidence presented by Julian’s lawyers—he did heavily redact documents before releasing them on WikiLeaks, not a single person was harmed because of the releases, Julian did not help Chelsea Manning leak classified documents—was indeed fallaciously refuted by the judges.

The Espionage Act, under which a journalist or publisher has heretofore never been prosecuted, was designed, as its name suggests, to prosecute those Americans working to undermine the U.S. war efforts by delivering national defense information to the enemy—espionage coming from espion, or spy, in French. Not only is Julian not an American citizen, and he was in Europe when he was publishing WikiLeaks, but the “enemy” to whom he was meant to have supplied classified information—information in the public interest—must ipso facto be any member of the general public anywhere in the world!

The U.S. First Amendment protects the publication of documents, even those that are classified. Moreover per extradition agreements between Britain and the U.S., a person convicted for political reasons—and the case against Julian is purely political—or who could face a death penalty in the receiving country, may not be extradited from Britain.

One of the most egregious transgressions of justice during Julian’s first hearing was the fact that the principal evidence against him was supplied by a diagnosed sociopath, Sigurdur Thordarson, who had been convicted of fraud, embezzlement, and crimes against minors, and who later recanted his testimony, saying he had been bribed by the U.S. to say what he did.

Though Julian’s defense in any impartial courtroom based on the rule of law would undeniably be upheld, he remains condemned, locked up, perhaps forever, with the uncertainty of his future a gnawing torture.

Groundswell of support

Thousands of people from all over the world plan to gather outside the Royal Courts of Justice where the hearing will be held on February 20 and 21 to support Julian, to demand that justice be done. As this is not a trial but a hearing to determine if an appeal against extradition can take place, it is unclear whether Julian will be present, though he has requested that he be allowed to be in court so he can confer with his lawyers. Though for most of his time in Belmarsh Julian was deprived of a computer—although he was once allowed one that had the keys glued—he has nevertheless played a major role in helping his lawyers prepare his legal case.

Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, mother of their two children, and one of his lawyers, has been travelling all over the world trying to convince world leaders, journalists, individuals why it’s in all of our interests that Julian be freed, that justice be upheld, that freedom of expression is sacrosanct, as is our right to know, and that governments must be held accountable.

There has been a groundswell of support for Julian as the court date approaches. Day X, as this date has been referred to in calls to action, has rallied even those who haven’t been active in Julian’s defense to protest in support of what may be Julian’s last attempt to be freed. From Boston to Buenos Aires, Sydney to Naples, Mexico to Hamburg, San Francisco to Montevideo, Denver to Paris, and well beyond, major demonstrations have been planned all across the world on February 20 and 21.

What’s at stake

What’s at stake for Julian is horrendous. What’s at stake for the rest of us is terrifying. If Julian is extradited and convicted under the draconian Espionage Act, the message will be that anyone anywhere in the world who says or writes anything that the U.S. considers against their interests can also be locked away forever.

While the U.S. seems to feel that extraterritorial jurisdiction is its right alone, other countries may decide to follow suit, picking off journalists or activists who don’t toe the government line. If a journalist and publisher is locked away forever for revealing truths, a clear message is broadcast, and even more journalists and publishers will self-censor, so the same fate isn’t rained down on them. And that ends a free and open press, that kills our right to know.

Today it is open season on journalists in many parts of the world, most egregiously in Palestine where some 120 journalists—and often their families as well—have been targeted and assassinated by the IDF of Israel. Increasing numbers of so-called news organizations unquestioningly publish government press releases essentially as news reports, to maintain access to those governments. Bloggers who write on Twitter or Facebook or other social media sites are frequently censored.

To understand what’s going on in the very complex world of today, we desperately need Julian Assange, with his analytical, erudite, prophetic mind, to reveal, assimilate, and interpret this precarious world so we might understand and act.

Some good news

The good news is that Julian has behind him his devoted family, travelling the world, speaking out for him. The excellent film “Ithaka” shows this in detail and very movingly. Julian also has behind him a dogged legal team of hundreds of lawyers and researchers looking for every possible way to secure his freedom.

And he has behind him the hundreds of dedicated supporters who hold weekly vigils whether in Piccadilly Circus or outside Belmarsh prison or in a square in Brussels or Berlin, or who join marches and rallies all over the world.

The other good news is that Julian is indefatigable. While incarcerated in the Ecuadorian embassy, under very difficult circumstances, during the last year often without Internet or telephone connections, Julian helped to publish 5 million documents, produced 3 books, launched more than 30 publications, and gave 100 talks. And he is extraordinarily resilient—few, if any of us, would be able to go through what Julian has, and to keep on going.

John Pilger, the brilliant journalist and filmmaker who recently passed away, said of his dear friend, whom he visited on several occasions in Belmarsh, “Julian is the embodiment of courage.” As Pilger was leaving the prison visitors room, he looked back at Julian. “He held his fist high and clenched, as he always does.”

The post What’s at Stake for Julian Assange—and the Rest of Us appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Karen Sharpe.

The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) has joined media freedom groups supporting Julian Assange, an Australian citizen whose unjust prosecution continues to undermine press freedoms and human rights.

In light of recent developments and mounting concerns over Assange’s deteriorating health, JERAA said in a statement it had urged the United States to drop all charges against Assange and facilitate his immediate return to Australia.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been the subject of relentless persecution by the US government for his efforts to expose war crimes and government misconduct.

• READ MORE: Other Julian Assange reports

Assange received a Walkley Award in 2011 for outstanding contribution to journalism through Wikileaks, which included the release of the 2010 “collateral murder” video and the publication of classified US diplomatic cables, shedding light on atrocities committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It is concerning that Assange faces up to 175 years in jail if found guilty of espionage charges — a sentence that would effectively silence whistle-blowers and journalists worldwide,” JERAA said.

The association said it believed that Assange’s indictment set a dangerous precedent and posed a grave threat to the fundamental principles of press freedom and freedom of expression.

‘Enough is enough’
JERAA commended Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for his support in calling for Assange’s release and said it echoed his sentiment that “enough is enough.”

PM Albanese’s recent vote in the federal Parliament for a motion demanding Assange’s return to Australia underscores the legitimacy of our demand. The motion, which received overwhelming support, leaves no room for ambiguity — it is time to bring Assange home.

The WikiLeaks 2010 “collateral damage” video.         Video: Al Jazeera

As the UK High Court prepares to rule on Assange’s appeal against extradition in a two-day hearing next week (February 20-21), and with Prime Minister Albanese’s continued efforts to advocate for Assange’s release, JERAA has urged the US to heed the calls for justice and drop all charges against Assange.

It is imperative that Assange’s rights as an Australian citizen be respected, and that he be afforded the opportunity to return home.

JERAA president Associate Professor Alexandra Wake said that while some members might not agree with all Assange has done in his life, it was clear that his work was central to our “understanding of press freedoms and human rights”.

“JERAA upholds the principles of a free and independent press. It is time to end the trial of global media freedom,” she said.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

In advance of Julian Assange’s next hearing in the UK courts ahead of his possible extradition to the US, Amnesty International reiterates concerns that Assange faces the risk of serious human rights violations if extradited and warns of a profound ‘chilling effect’ on global media freedom.

“The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the US and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too,” said Julia Hall, Amnesty International’s expert on counter-terrorism and criminal justice in Europe.

The US must drop the charges under the espionage act against Assange and bring an end to his arbitrary detention in the UK
Julia Hall, Amnesty International's expert on counter-terrorism and criminal justice in Europe

“Assange will suffer personally from these politically-motivated charges and the worldwide media community will be on notice that they too are not safe. The public’s right to information about what their governments are doing in their name will be profoundly undermined. The US must drop the charges under the espionage act against Assange and bring an end to his arbitrary detention in the UK.”

If Julian Assange loses the permission to appeal, he will be at risk of extradition to the US and prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917, a wartime law never intended to target the legitimate work of publishers and journalists. He could face up to 175 years in jail. On the less serious charge of computer fraud, he could receive a maximum of five years.

Assange would also be at high risk of prolonged solitary confinement in a maximum security prison. Although the US has offered ‘diplomatic assurances’ to the UK, allegedly guaranteeing his safety if imprisoned, the authorities’ assurances include so many caveats that they cannot be considered reliable.

“The US assurances cannot be trusted. Dubious assurances that he will be treated well in a US prison ring hollow considering that Assange potentially faces dozens of years of incarceration in a system well known for its abuses, including prolonged solitary confinement and poor health services for inmates. The US simply cannot guarantee his safety and well-being as it has also failed to do for the hundreds of thousands of people currently imprisoned in the US,” said Julia Hall.

Worldwide threat to media freedom

If Julian Assange is extradited, it will establish a dangerous precedent wherein the US government could target for extradition publishers and journalists around the world. Other countries could take the US example and follow suit.

“Julian Assange’s publication of documents disclosed to him by sources as part of his work with Wikileaks mirrors the work of investigative journalists. They routinely perform the activities outlined in the indictment: speaking with confidential sources, seeking clarification or additional documentation, and receiving and disseminating official and sometimes classified information,” said Julia Hall.

News and publishing outlets often and rightfully publish classified information to inform on matters of utmost public importance. Publishing information that is in the public interest is a cornerstone of media freedom. It’s also protected under international human rights law and should not be criminalized.

“The US’ efforts to intimidate and silence investigative journalists for uncovering governmental misconduct, such as revealing war crimes or other breaches of international law, must be stopped in its tracks.

“Sources such as legitimate whistle blowers who expose governmental wrongdoing to journalists and publishers must also be free to share information in the public interest. They will be far more reluctant to do so if Julian Assange is prosecuted for engaging in legitimate publishing work.

It’s not just Julian Assange in the dock. Silence Assange and others will be gagged
Julia Hall

“This is a test for the US and UK authorities on their commitment to the fundamental tenets of media freedom that underpin the rights to freedom of expression and the public’s right to information. It’s not just Julian Assange in the dock. Silence Assange and others will be gagged,” said Julia Hall.

Background:

The High Court in the UK has confirmed a two-day hearing on 20 and 21 February 2024. The outcome will determine whether Julian Assange will have further opportunities to argue his case before the UK courts or if he will have exhausted all appeals in the UK, leading to the extradition process or an application to the European Court of Human Rights.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

In Mid-December 2023, Charles Glass, the esteemed writer, journalist, broadcaster, and publisher visited with Julian Assange, an inmate at Belmarsh Prison in the U.K. Assange has been confined there since April, 2019. He is awaiting his final appeal to quash U.S. efforts to extradite him to face some of the same Espionage Act charges I was confronted with. Glass chronicles the visit in a recent piece in The Nation. His account took me right back to prison. Glass’s visit with Assange could have been a visit with me.

I fondly remember Charles Glass. He wrote to me while I was in FCI Englewood, the prison I was bound in after being convicted of violating the Espionage Act in 2015. He and others sent me a few of his books, notably Americans in Paris and Tribes with Flags. I was extremely grateful for such support. I had read them before, but reading from prison allows a different perspective, even on paths previously traveled. My prison eyes were reading them for the first time. In some ways, his visit with Assange was a similar overture of support for me and my experience in prison.

I make no attempts to compare myself to Julian Assange, but I know what he is going through and what he is facing. Glass’s statement that Assange’s “…days are all the same: the confined space, the loneliness, the books, the memories, the hope that his lawyers’ appeal against extradition and life imprisonment in the United States will succeed” also applied to me. But, what was particularly profound for me was reading about Glass’s experience as a visitor to someone confined to prison. For me, time with a visitor was a highly-desired oasis in the never-ending desert that is prison. It was the one time I could have a more substantial connection with the world outside the prison walls. Email and letters were always appreciated, but nothing could replace actual contact, or at least being in the same room as a loved one or supporter. The value of having a visitor cannot be understated, the other days fighting against the droll, oppression, and monotony of prison were all endured for the singular experience of a visit. I imagine that Assange has had the same longing anticipation of an upcoming visit, the one time in prison when you can be reminded that you are still alive, still human.

Glass deftly characterizes the prison where Assange is being held as “bleak,” and “inhumane”. I realized the same descriptors apply to the experience visitors must face. Visitors and inmates alike go through an emotional and offensive gauntlet just for the privilege of a visit in prison. For me, it was a painful and desired rollercoaster of emotions with the high of the visit and the low of the eventual parting at the end of it. It was always a struggle to resist having the visit tainted by the dehumanizing strip searches I had to endure before and after each visit. It was difficult to truly understand that my visitor went through a similar hell. Glass’s visit with Assange re-informed me of the other side of prison visit.

When visiting anyone in prison, inmate and visitor alike are faced with arbitrary rules with no real guidance or reason. It is a daunting task trying to comply with the rules when they change at the whims of the gate-keepers. I had a painful chuckle reading how the gate-keepers deemed books Glass brought for Assange as “fire hazards” and therefore not allowed. Belmarsh’s other restrictions on books, how they can be received, and how many an inmate can have are not dissimilar to the same arbitrary rules at FCI Englewood. There is no redress, no challenge of authority at this level. If you want the visit or the books, you have to follow the rules, whatever they are and however they are enforced at the time.

Whenever my wife Holly would visit, I could sense her effort to be strong for me and not give in to the hell she had to go through just to have time sitting next to me and holding my hand. Time and again she endured a gauntlet of nonsensical and punitively arbitrary visiting rules. Holly never knew if what she was wearing would be acceptable or if the body search would once again border on assault.  Approaching the prison on visiting day, she could only hope that the gate-keepers were having at least a good day and maybe save her some indignity. Some guards had well-founded reputations among inmates of being unnecessarily cruel, particularly with female visitors. I was also fortunate enough to be visited by other friends, including Norman Solomon from Roots Action. In many ways, I felt horrible that they had to endure such humiliation to come see me, prison is designed to prove to you that you don’t have much worth, if any. I imagine that Assange may have felt the same as he was visiting with Glass.

I always wondered what it was like for Holly and Norman waiting in the visiting room with other “free” people who had been successful in getting past the gate-keepers to visit with their inmates. Though strangers to each other, they shared an unfortunate commonality, hoping for nothing more than time with a loved one or friend. Regardless of their lives outside prison walls, each and every visitor has to hope that the system will at least allow for the simplest of human needs, time.

Somewhat shamefully, I found myself a bit jealous to read that Glass and Assange were able to be face to face during their visit. The setup in FCI Englewood was a bank of attached chairs, Holly and I could not face each other. Any motion to sit askew or move around in the chair to face each other could be grounds for ending the visit. Once I found Holly, we could have an embrace at the beginning and end, maybe a kiss. I rarely let go of her hand during the visits. Once together, a big chunk of time was spent deciding what to get from the vending machines. Then Holly would have to leave me to stand in line at the vending machines and then the microwave. The choices I had, if the gate-keepers bothered with restocking were not much different from the junk available to Glass to get for Assange. I know that Assange felt as I did, regardless of the food in the visiting room. It was leaps and bounds better than the food served any other time in prison.

Once the preliminaries were taken care of, we could get down to the visit. But, there was never time enough. There was never enough time to say or hear what you wanted or hoped. In prison, only during visits does time move faster. A final embrace and then getting in line for another strip search was how the visits with Holly ended for me. I felt lucky if she was in the first group of visitors who were escorted out, that way neither of us could see the pain on each other’s face from across the room. Glass’s visit with Assange ended pretty much the same way, the visitor is free to go outside, the prison goes back to his cell.

I encourage you to read Glass’s account of his visit with Assange. It is much more than merely the account of a visit with a person in prison, it is a representation of the Espionage Act and how it is being used by the U.S. government to silence and punish those who dare expose its wrongdoings and illegalities. Much like prison visiting rules, use of the Espionage Act is arbitrary and punitive, justice or security have nothing to do with it. We are all becoming prisoners to the whims of the gate-keepers who are using the Espionage Act to keep us ignorant and in line. With Assange’s extradition, freedom of the press, along with government accountability and a myriad of other supposed freedoms from government persecution are at stake. We will each find ourselves either the visitor or the visited if the current use of the Espionage Act is allowed to continue. Whether visitor or visited, the Espionage Act puts us all in prison. I was there with Charles Glass in that prison visiting room. Considering the stakes if Julian Assange is extradited, we all were.

This first appeared on ProgressiveHub.net.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey Sterling.

The post Exploring Press Freedoms: Updates on Julian Assange’s Extradition appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

In a New Year’s Day special broadcast, we air highlights from the Belmarsh Tribunal held last month in Washington, D.C., where journalists, lawyers, activists and other expert witnesses made the case to free Julian Assange from prison in the United Kingdom. The WikiLeaks founder has been jailed at London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019, awaiting possible extradition to the United States on espionage charges for publishing documents that revealed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rights groups say the charges threaten freedom of the press and put a chilling effect on the work of investigative journalists who expose government secrets.

The Belmarsh Tribunal, inspired by the Russell-Sartre Tribunals of the Vietnam War, has been convened several times in the U.S., Europe and beyond to press for Assange’s release. The December proceedings were co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and The Intercept’s Ryan Grim.

Members of the tribunal included:

Ewen MacAskill, journalist and intelligence correspondent (formerly with The Guardian)

*John Kiriakou, former intelligence officer for the CIA

Lina Attalah, co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr

Abby Martin, journalist and host of The Empire Files

Mark Feldstein, veteran investigative reporter and journalism historian at the University of Maryland

Ben Wizner, lawyer and civil liberties advocate with the ACLU

Trevor Timm, journalist and co-founder of Freedom of the Press Foundation

Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns, Reporters Without Borders

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

This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange.  While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various offshoots of his case have begun to grow.  The issue of CIA sponsored surveillance during his stint in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been of particular interest, since it violated both general principles of privacy and more specific ones regarding attorney-client privilege.  Of particular interest to US Constitution watchers was whether such actions violated the reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Four US citizens took issue with such surveillance, which was executed by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global and its starry-eyed, impressionable director David Morales under instruction from the CIA.  Civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler and media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, took the matter to the US District Court of the Southern District of New York in August last year.  They had four targets of litigation: the CIA itself, its former director, Michael R. Pompeo, Morales and his company, UC Global SL.

All four alleged that the US Government had conducted surveillance on them and copied their information during visits to Assange in the embassy, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment.  In doing so, the plaintiffs argued they were entitled to money damages and injunctive relief.  The government moved to dismiss the complaint as amended.

On December 19, District Judge John G. Koeltl delivered a judgment of much interest, granting, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss but denying other parts of it.  Before turning to the relevant features of Koeltl’s reasons, various observations made in the case bear repeating.  The judge notes, for instance, Pompeo’s April 2017 speech, in which he “‘pledged that his office would embark upon a ‘long term’ campaign against WikiLeaks.’”  He is cognisant of the plaintiffs’ claims “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

From that meeting, it is claimed that “Morales created an operations unit, improved UC Global’s systems, and set up live streaming from the United States so that surveillance could be accessed instantly by the CIA.”  The data gathered from UC Global “was either personally delivered to Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; and New York City by Morales (who travelled to these locations more than sixty times in the three years following the Las Vegas convention) or placed on a server that provided external access to the CIA”.

Koeltl preferred to avoid deciding on the claims that Morales and UC Global were, in fact, “acting as agents of Pompeo and the CIA”.  Such matters were questions of fact “that cannot be decided on a motion to dismiss.”

A vital issue in the case was whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue the CIA in the first place.  Citing the case of ACLU v Clapper, which involved a challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program, Koeltl accepted that they did.  In doing so, he rejected a similar argument made by the government in Clapper – that the injuries alleged were simply “too speculative and generalized” and that the information gathered via surveillance would necessarily even be used against them.  “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.”   If the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices “were unlawful, the plaintiffs have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling.”

Less satisfactory for the plaintiffs was the finding they had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with the publisher given that “they knew Assange was surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.”  The judge thought it significant that they did “not allege that they would not have met Assange had they known their conversations would be surveilled.”  Additionally, it “would not be recognized as reasonable by society” to have expected conversations held with Assange at the embassy in London to be protected, given such societal acceptance of, for instance, video surveillance in government buildings.

This reasoning is faulty, given that the visits by the four plaintiffs to the embassy did not take place with their knowledge of the operation being conducted by UC Global with CIA blessing.  In a general sense, anyone visiting the embassy could not help but suspect that Assange might be the object of surveillance, but to suggest something akin to a waiver of privacy rights on the part of attorneys and journalists aiding a persecuted publisher is an odd turn.

The US Government also succeeded on the point that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation to privacy regarding their passports or their devices they voluntarily left at the Embassy reception desk.  In doing so, they “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”  Those visiting embassies must, it would seem, be perennially on guard.

That said, the plaintiffs convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation to privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.”  The government even went so far as to concede that point.

Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the biggest fish was let off the hook.  The plaintiffs had attempted to use the 1971 US Supreme Court case of Bivens to argue that the former CIA director be held accountable and liable for violating constitutional rights.  Koeltl thought the effort to extend the application of Bivens inappropriate in terms of the high standing nature of the defendant and the context.  “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”  More’s the pity.

Leaving aside some of the more questionable turns of reasoning in Koeltl’s judgment, public interest litigants and activists can take heart from the prospect that civil trials against the CIA for violations of the US Constitution are no longer unrealistic.  “We are thrilled,” declared Richard Roth, the plaintiffs’ attorney, “that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.”  The appeals process, however, is bound to be tested.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Photograph Source: Paola Breizh – CC BY 2.0

Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.  For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant.  “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition.  Gather outside the court at 8.30 am on both days. It’s now or never.”

Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.”  (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)  Were that to take place, the organization’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917.  Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years.

The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals.  It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years.  That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information.

Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it.  As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”

In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.

The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offense and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty.  The defense team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request”.  History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.

On June 30, 2022, came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons.  While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system.  The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty.  A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.

What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks.  The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).

Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution.  The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”

An agonizing wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favored by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practicing barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favorite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.  Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.”  Good grief.

In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication.  “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.”  The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”

Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn.  Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing.  They did, though requesting that Assange’s defense team trim the appeal to 20 pages.

How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen.  Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner.  Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously.  For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.

The post Day X Marks the Calendar: Julian Assange’s ‘Final’ Appeal appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.”  (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)  Were that to take place, the organisation’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917.  Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years.

The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals.  It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years.  That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information.

Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it.  As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”

In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.

The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offence and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty.  The defence team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request”.  History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.

On June 30, 2022 came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons.  While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system.  The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty.  A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.

What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks.  The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).

Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution.  The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”

An agonising wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favoured by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practising barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.  Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.”  Good grief.

In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication.  “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.”  The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”

Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn.  Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing.  They did, though requesting that Assange’s defence team trim the appeal to 20 pages.

How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen.  Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner.  Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously.  For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post Media Censorship and Attacks on Press Freedoms: Genocide in Gaza, Julian Assange appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Kate Horgan.

At Westminster the other day the UK Secretary of State for Defence (Grant Shapps) made a statement on military deployments to the Middle East which included questions and answers about the situation in Gaza. It was an opportunity for Shapps with help of pro-Zionist MPs to distort the facts to ‘justify’ Israel’s appalling crimes.

The following exchanges are taken from Hansard which, for those who don’t know, is the official and “substantially verbatim” report of what is said in the UK Parliament.

Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP) commented: “It is important to repeat the denunciation of the death cult known as Hamas.”

Shapps replied: “The hon. Gentleman is right to stress the abominable, disgraceful, disgusting behaviour of Hamas.” [Shapps is Jewish]

Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con): “Those on both Front Benches seem to agree that Hamas must not remain in control in Gaza. Is any thought being given to how, once they have been removed, they can be prevented from coming back?” [Lewis is also Jewish]

Shapps: The easiest way to bring this to an end, as I hinted earlier, would be for Hamas, a terrorist organisation, to release the hostages that they have, to stop firing rockets into Israel in a completely indiscriminate way, which I think the whole House should condemn.”

Sir Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con): “The Houthis, who are attacking British and American cargo ships, and Hamas are basically two sides of the same coin. They are Iranian-funded, Iranian-trained and, of course, Iranian-guided terrorist groups that are publicly committed to the destruction of Israel…. I particularly welcome the UK’s deployment of drones to help locate hostages, including British hostages. In the days after 7 October, the Defence Secretary said: ‘No nation should stand alone in the face of such evil.’ Will he repeat that crucial support today and in the difficult days ahead? I thank him for his support. [Ellis is Jewish and also a member of Conservative Friends of Israel].

Shapps: My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right that no nation should stand alone. It is easy to forget how this all began, when the Hamas terrorist group thought it was a plan to go into Israel to butcher men, women and children, cut off heads and rape people.

Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con): “I applaud the decisive actions of my right hon. Friend and the Government to defend our strategic ally, Israel, against Hamas, but the grim reality on the ground right now is that Hamas continue to fire dozens of rockets at Israeli towns and cities. The Iran-backed terror group have fired more than 10,000 rockets since 7 October and show no sign of stopping their violent attacks against Israel. Will my right hon. Friend not only commit to continuing his support for Israel in defending itself against Hamas, but reassure the House that every possible step is being taken to counter Iran’s links across the region, which are causing instability?”

Shapps: “My hon. Friend makes an excellent point that the conflict would be over immediately if hostages were released and Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel—there would not be a cause for conflict. Indeed, that is the policy Israel followed for many years, hoping that, even though rocket attacks continued, Hamas would not take advantage of their own population by using them as human shields and building infrastructure under hospitals, schools and homes…. My hon. Friend is absolutely right to identify Iran as being behind this whole evil business.”

Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD): “It was reassuring last week, in answer to my question, to hear the Minister for Armed Forces, the right hon. Member for Wells (James Heappey) telling us that UK surveillance flights would not involve the use of intelligence for target acquisition. I also welcome the Secretary of State talking today about how information that would be helpful to hostage recovery will be passed to the so-called appropriate authorities. We have now heard two questions about the International Criminal Court. Will the UK pass any evidence that it gathers of any breaches of international humanitarian law by combatants in Gaza to the ICC?“

Shapps: “As the hon. Gentleman says, that question has been asked, and I have answered it a couple of times. The intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – ISR – flights are to look for British hostages and indeed other hostages. That is the information that will be gathered from those flights. Of course, if we saw anything else, we would most certainly alert our partners“. [But do they include the ICC? I think not.]

Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP): “Yesterday I asked the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), whether the UK Government were in a position to contribute to the International Criminal Court’s call for evidence in its investigation of potential breaches of international humanitarian law. He said: ‘Not at this stage, but we will continue to take note.’ Surely, if the UK Government are actively collecting drone and surveillance images of the war zone, the answer to that question should have been yes?”

Shapps: “I would have thought that the No. 1 concern would be to locate the British hostages, and that is where the surveillance work will focus.”

Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind): “The Secretary of State needs to be very clear with the House: 15,000 people have already died in Gaza, and 1,200 have died in Israel. Israel is clearly pushing the entire population southwards, if not out of the Gaza strip altogether. Is Britain involved in the military actions that Israel has taken, either physically or by providing information in support of those military activities? I think the House needs to be told. What is the long-term aim of British military involvement in Gaza?”

Shapps: “The simple answer is no, and I hope that clears it up. I am surprised to hear the right hon. Gentleman talk just about people being killed. They were murdered. They were slaughtered. It was not just some coincidental thing. I understand and share the concerns about the requirement on Israel, on us and on everyone else to follow international humanitarian law. When Israel drops leaflets, when it drops what it calls a “knock” or a “tap” and does not bomb until afterwards, when it calls people to ask them to move, when it issues maps showing where Hamas have their tunnels and asks people to move away from them, that is a far cry from what Hamas did on 7 October, when they went after men, women and children.”

Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab): “We have seen increased bombardment in southern Gaza after the pause. We are also seeing increased violence in the West Bank, supported by extremist settler Ministers. What talks is the Secretary of State having with Israel to stop the increase in settler violence in the West Bank?“

Grant Shapps: “I certainly will not be pulling my punches when I speak to my Israeli counterparts. The violence in the West Bank is unacceptable and it must be controlled—stopped, in fact. None of that, in any way, shape or form, separates us from our utter condemnation of how this whole thing was started in the first place with Hamas, but the hon. Lady is right about that settler violence.”

Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP): “Medical Aid for Palestinians has warned that Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and siege is making it impossible to sustain human life in Gaza. With 1.8 million civilians displaced and a lack of clean water and sanitation, it is just a matter of time before a cholera outbreak kills many thousands more. The Secretary of State has been unequivocal that the main purpose of surveillance is to help find hostages, which is fine, but for the fifth time of asking: if clear evidence is found of breaches of humanitarian law, will the UK Government share that evidence with the International Criminal Court?

Shapps: “The simple answer is that we will always follow international humanitarian law and its requirements.”

Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP): “It is absolutely right that those responsible for the crimes of Hamas are held to account in international law. But why is the Secretary of State so reluctant to give a clear, simple “yes” to the question whether the Government will provide any evidence of war crimes to the International Criminal Court? Is it because he has already seen such evidence? Is it because Israel has asked him to promise not to share such evidence? What is the reason?”

Grant Shapps: “I have already said that the United Kingdom is bound by, and would always observe, international humanitarian law.

The message we are supposed to swallow from this pantomime is that it’s all the fault of Hamas and Iran who “started the whole thing” on 7 October, and that Israel’s massacres, brutal occupation using military force, cruel blockade and clear intention of establishing Jewish sovereignty “from the river to the sea” over the last 75 years have nothing to do with it. It is clear that the UK will do everything to avoid upsetting Israel’s evil plan and calling the regime’s war criminals to account despite our solemn obligations under international law to do so.

And it is pointless for the likes of Shapps to keep repeating that Israel “has to follow international humanitarian law” when Israel has been in permanent breach of nearly all aspects of law for decades and treats international norms with utter contempt. Only today the regime announced approval of 1700 more ‘settlement’ homes in East Jerusalem which is Palestinian territory. And it continues to defy international law, escalating its crimes to the most abhorrent of all – genocide – because it is given cover by the US and UK. Perhaps the rest of us should properly label Israel’s genocide in Gaza as ‘US and UK-backed’. And the UK itself ignores international law if it happens to be ‘inconvenient’.

As for the constantly repeated claim the Israel has a right to defend itself, this is blatant misinformation. Israel is an illegal military occupier and aggressor committing never-ending war crimes on someone else’s sovereign territory. Its right to self-defence is practically zero in these circumstances. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has stated that “Israel cannot claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it occupies – from a territory that is kept under belligerent occupation”.

And notice how everything the Israelis dislike, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed” or “Hamas controlled”. Shapps is evidently well versed in the 116-page propaganda manual produced by The Israel Project (TIP) and written specially for those “on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”. Its purpose is to help the worldwide Zionist movement win the propaganda war by persuading international audiences to accept the Israeli narrative and agree that the regime’s crimes are necessary for Israel’s security and in line with “shared values” between Israel and the West.

This masterwork on deception attempts to justify Israel’s slaughter, ethnic cleansing, land-grabbing, cruelty and blatant disregard for international law and United Nations resolutions, and make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of persuasive language. It also incites hatred, particularly towards Hamas and Iran, and is designed to hoodwink Americans and Europeans into believing we actually share values with the racist regime, and therefore ought to support and forgive its abominable behaviour.

Readers are instructed to “clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas” and to drive a wedge between them. The manual features “words that work” – i.e. carefully constructed language to deflect criticism and reframe all issues and arguments in Israel’s favour. We are seeing it at work here with great success.

MPs who are Jewish are identified as such when it seems appropriate. Those, like Sir Michael Lewis mentioned above, who are signed-up Friends of Israel should, in my opinion, declare that interest in any debate on the subject. But I must emphasise that not all Jewish MPs are tools of the apartheid regime. We remember with admiration Sir Gerald Kaufman who was arguing for economic sanctions against Israel back in 2004. And during a debate on the Gaza war of 2008/9, he told the Commons: “The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians… My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza”.

He described Hamas as a “deeply nasty organisation” but said the UK Government’s boycott of Hamas had “dreadful consequences”, and he reminded the Commons that Israel had been created following acts of terrorism by the Irgun. He considered Iran a loathsome regime but, unlike Israel, “at least it keeps its totalitarian theocracy to within its own borders”.

As to why there are so many Israel lackeys in Westminster Kaufman said: “It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party. There is now a big group of Conservative members of parliament who are pro-Israel…. whatever the Israeli government does.”

Of course, it’s not just the Conservative Party. The corrupting influence of dodgy funding is also affecting Labour and the LibDems.

Remembering the victims of genocide

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Genocide Convention. As explained on the United Nations website:

Every 9 December the Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide marks the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – a crucial global commitment that was made at the founding of the United Nations, immediately preceding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By General Assembly Resolution A/RES/69/323 of 29 September 2015, that day also became the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.

At its landmark 75th anniversary this year, the Genocide Convention remains highly relevant. The 1948 Genocide Convention codified for the first time the crime of genocide in international law. Its preamble recognizes that “at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity” and that international cooperation is required to “liberate humankind from such an odious scourge”. To date, 153 States have ratified the Convention. Achieving universal ratification of the Convention, as well as ensuring its full implementation, remain essential for effectively advancing genocide prevention. The Genocide Convention includes the obligation not only to punish the crime of genocide but, crucially, to prevent it. In the 75 years since its adoption, the Genocide Convention has played an important role in the development of international criminal law, in holding perpetrators of this crime accountable, galvanizing prevention efforts, and in giving a voice to the victims of genocide.

How many parliamentarians in Westminster and Washington who blindly support Israel’s attempts to exterminate the Palestinians in Gaza and turn their homeland into rubble will publicly show respect for those victims of the apartheid regime’s genocide?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

This article was originally published as a newsletter from Ryan Grim. Sign up to get the next one in your inbox.

A quick request: If my book has arrived and you’re enjoying it, please give it a review. If you are not, well, please do not, I suppose.

And some news: The Intercept is proud to partner on the Belmarsh Tribunal at the National Press Club this coming Saturday, December 9, 2023. 

Inspired by the Russell-Sartre Tribunal of the Vietnam War, the Belmarsh Tribunal brings together a range of expert witnesses to call for the release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange as his potential extradition from the U.K. to the U.S. reaches its denouement, with his final U.K. court hearing expected in early 2024.

This D.C. sitting of the Tribunal will be co-chaired by Amy Goodman, the host of “Democracy Now!”, and by me. It’ll be livestreamed, and details are below. 

Members of the D.C. sitting of the Tribunal include Marjorie Cohn, professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild; Michael Sontheimer, journalist and historian (formerly Der Spiegel); Mark Feldstein, investigative correspondent and chair of journalism at the University of Maryland; Trevor Timm, co-founder of Freedom of the Press Foundation; John Kiriakou, former CIA intelligence officer; Rebecca Vincent, Reporters Without Borders; Ewen MacAskill, journalist and intelligence correspondent (formerly Guardian); Ben Wizner, lawyer and civil liberties advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union; Maja Sever, president of European Federation of Journalists; Ece Temelkuran, author; Lina Attalah, co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr, 2020 Knight International Journalism Award recipient; Sevim Dagdelen, member of the German Bundestag; and Abby Martin, journalist.

The Intercept invites you to book your place to attend in person or follow the proceedings online by visiting https://act.progressive.international/belmarsh.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

On Friday November 10^th after a determined, extremely well organized and hard-fought citizens-led campaign that began on November 27^th, 2022, the seaside city of Naples, Italy became the first major city in the world to formally confer honorary citizenship to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who awaits extradition to the United States from the confines Belmarsh Prison in England. The people of Naples like to believe it is a place where miracles happen, under the protective gaze of its patron Saint Gennaro and through the revolutionary will of its citizenry. And for a city dominated by the presence of NATO and the US Empire, it truly seems a miracle has again occurred as Napoli stands strongly for freedom of the press and free expression in the face of US repression in collusion with its British underling. With a new centrist mayor that pales in comparison to the previous Mayor Luigi De Magistris, who helped lead the campaign for Assange, it looked like this important, yet symbolic gesture was going to be almost impossible to achieve.

Napoli is the city where Masaniello revolted against what was then the Spanish kingdom in an insurrection that temporarily seized power from the ruling class and demonstrated the power that can be realized by the rebelliousness of the people when they are truly united in insurrectionary spirit. The story of Masaniello was recounted in historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s, Many Headed Hydra and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, by Marcus who visited Napoli last year to discuss the revolutionary and utopian spirit of the people from below and the anarchic and collective spirit of Pirates. Napoli is also the birthplace of pizza and is one of the most beautiful cities in the world as it sprawls along the volcanic coast from under the shadows of Mount Vesuvius and through the recently trembling Flegrean Fields. Napoli is also the reigning Italian football champion after a seemingly miraculous season. But there is a growing tension in the air.

The genocide being carried out by Israel and the United States on the Palestinian people is at the forefront of many people’s minds and in Italy street protests and school occupations in solidarity with Palestine and against the policies of the neofascist Meloni-led government are happening almost daily. The economy is in tatters with inflation making it extremely difficult for more and more people to make ends meet.  Climate change is unleashing weather chaos that is always more devastating and unpredictable.  In these dark times, the achievement by the #FreeAssangeNapoli committee was a moment of joy.

Stella Morris -Assange, Assange’s wife and international human rights attorney, was present to accept his citizenship, and Napoli is shining as a beacon to the world for freedom of the press and freedom of expression in the face of the tyranny of the United States government and its British counterpart. The current mayor, Gaetano Manfredi, presided over the ceremony which was also attended by the previous mayor and champion of justice Luigi De Magistris as well as former mayor and current councilman Antonio Bassolino who, with his counterpart Sergio D’Angelo, pushed this grassroots effort led by the #FreeAssangeNapoli committee.

The ceremony was held in the historic port side castle of Maschio Angioino.

The Palestinian community was represented in the audience with its leader and spokesperson Suleiman Mohammad Omar and others holding Palestinian Flags and at one point they led the crowd in a spontaneous chant of Palestina libera! Stella Assange Morris spoke about the intentional killing of 39 journalists (now more) in Gaza and the Israeli military’s intentional assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. She decried these direct attacks on the press as a method of silencing truth and any information getting out of Gaza and compared it to the persecution of Assange and Wikileaks by the US and British governments.

Cities and towns across Italy are mobilizing for similar initiatives and Assange is set to receive honorary citizenship in Roma, Italy in January of 2024. Napoli can be a model for cities everywhere that can join with the community of journalists, activists, intellectuals, artists and everyday citizens in lighting the torch for freedom for Assange and for true freedom of the press and freedom of expression around the world. Now more than ever before the crimes of the US empire are being laid bare before the eyes of the world as our collective resistance rises like never before.

The post Naples, Italy becomes the First Major City in the World to Grant Honorary Citizenship to Julian Assange appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Leonardi.

Sydney Morning Herald (5/12/23): “The time has come to end this sorry saga.”

As WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange has nearly exhausted his appeals to British courts against a US extradition order, Australia has ramped up its advocacy on his behalf. Six Australian MPs held a press conference outside the US Department of Justice on September 20 to urge the Biden administration to halt its pursuit of Assange (Consortium News, 9/20/23).

They came representing an impressive national consensus: Almost 80% of Australian citizens, and a cross-party coalition in Australia’s Parliament, support the campaign to free Assange (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/12/23). Opposition leader Peter Dutton joined Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in urging Assange’s release.

The day before, an open letter to the Biden administration signed by 64 Australian parliamentarians appeared as a full-page ad in the Washington Post. It called the prosecution of Assange “a political decision” and warned that, if Assange is extradited, “there will be a sharp and sustained outcry” from Australians.

Given what is at stake for freedom of the press in the Assange case, and the intensified pressure from Australia—a country being wooed to actively enlist in the US campaign against China by spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines and supersonic missiles (Sydney Morning Herald, 8/10/23)—we ought to expect coverage from the Washington Post, New York Times and major broadcast networks. But coverage of the press conference was virtually absent from US corporate media.

Prosecuting publishing

The US has been seeking to extradite Assange from Britain on charges relating to the leaking of hundreds of thousands of documents to international media in 2010 and 2011, many of which detailed US atrocities carried out in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and other human rights violations, such as the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay (Abby Martin, 3/10/23).

In 2019, President Donald Trump’s administration brought Espionage Act charges against Assange for obtaining and publishing leaked documents, a dramatic new attack on press freedom (FAIR.org, 8/13/22). Assange could face 175 years in a supermax prison if convicted under the Espionage Act, “a relic of the First World War” meant for spies (American Constitution Society, 9/10/21), and not intended to criminalize leaks to or publications by the press. The Biden administration has rolled back much of the legal mechanism used by Trump to attack journalists, but President Joe Biden has reaffirmed the call to extradite Assange.

The New York Times (11/28/10) published articles based on WikiLeaks‘ revelations, but pays little attention to Julian Assange’s persecution.

Assange also coordinated with international news outlets to publish other material known as Cablegate about the “inner-workings of bargaining, diplomacy and threat-making around the world” (Intercept, 8/14/23). Indeed, the New York Times (e.g., 11/28/10) published many articles based on the WikiLeaks documents, which had been sent to Assange by US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

US officials have repeatedly justified their case by charging that Assange put lives at risk; to date, no evidence has surfaced that any individuals were harmed by the leaks (BBC, 12/1/10; Chelsea Manning, Readme.txt, 2022). As the Columbia Journalism Review (12/23/20) admonished, don’t let the Justice Department’s

misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity.

In failing health after suffering a stroke, Assange has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019. He had sought asylum at the embassy in London in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden for questioning over sexual assault allegations, because Sweden would not provide assurances it would protect him from extradition to the US. Sweden dropped charges against Assange in November 2019 (BBC, 11/19/19), after he was in British custody.

International condemnation

Brazilian President Lula da Silva (9/19/23): “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished [for] informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”

A video (9/19/23) of Lula speaking at the opening of the UN General Assembly was widely circulated on social media. “Preserving press freedom is essential,” Lula declared. “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”

Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented about Lula’s reception at the UN (Twitter, 9/17/23):

It is really not normal for the hall at the UN General Assembly to break into this kind of spontaneous applause. The US has been losing the room internationally for a decade. The appalling treatment of Julian is a focus for that.

US media absence

Yet, with a few exceptions (Fox News, 9/20/23; The Hill, 9/21/23; Yahoo News, 9/21/23), none of this made the major US news outlets.

Business Insider (10/1/23): “The Assange issue is expected to be on the table during Albanese’s upcoming four-day visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden on October 25.”

Over a week later, Business Insider (10/1/23) ran a long piece that featured an interview with Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s half-brother. It pointed out that Assange had become an obstacle to US plans to involve Australia in its aggression toward China, quoting the PM. But the piece also hashed through a number of long-debunked claims, including one that reminded readers that Mike Pompeo once called Assange “a fugitive Russian asset” (FAIR.org, 12/03/18; Sheerpost 2/25/23), and another that repeated US assertions that WikiLeaks releases would put the US at risk.

The New York Times has been conspicuously absent from the coverage of Assange. Though the Times signed a joint open letter (11/28/22) with four other international newspapers that had worked with Assange and WikiLeaks, appealing to the DoJ to drop its charges, the paper has remained almost entirely silent on both Assange and the issues raised by his continued prosecution since then.

As FAIR pointed out, during the Assange extradition hearing in London, the Times

published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20).

There were no editorials on what the case meant for journalism. FAIR contributor Alan MacLeod noted that the Times seemed to distance itself from Assange and WikiLeaks, and its own reporting on the Cablegate scandal, coverage that boosted the papers’ international reputation.

Other opportunities for coverage have been missed by the Times. For instance, Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a letter (4/11/23), signed by six other members of the Progressive Caucus, calling for the DoJ to drop the charges against Assange. Tlaib cited support from the ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights & Dissent and Human Rights Watch, and many others, stating that his prosecution “could effectively criminalize” many “common journalistic practices.” The letter was covered by The Nation (4/14/23), the Intercept (3/30/23), Fox News (4/1/23), The Hill (4/11/23) and Politico (4/11/23), but the Times and other major newspapers were conspicuously silent.

When Assange lost his most recent appeal against extradition in June, a few outlets reported the news online (e.g., AP, 6/9/23; CNN, 6/9/23), but not a single US newspaper report could be found in the Nexis news database. (Newsweek‘s headline framed the news as a “headache for Biden”—6/8/23—rather than a blow for press freedom.)  The Times only vaguely referred to the news (Assange “keeps losing appeals”) two weeks later in a feature (6/18/23) on the late whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had criticized Biden’s decision not to drop the case against Assange.

The world is watching 

Australian Greens Sen. David Shoebridge (Common Dreams, 9/19/23) on Julian Assange: “The core crime he faces is the crime of being a journalist.” 

A huge collective breath is being held as the world watches to see what will happen to Assange, the most famous publisher on the globe. Will he be returned to his country and his family by Christmas, as the Australian MPs have requested? Or will Britain and the US continue to slowly execute him?

Assange’s case is expected to be discussed during Prime Minister Albanese’s current visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by Biden on October 25. MP Monique Ryan, part of the pro-Assange delegation, told news outlets: “Our prime minister needs to see this as a test case for standing up to the US government. There are concerns among Australians about the AUKUS agreement, and whether we have any agency” (Business Insider, 10/1/23).

As Common Dreams (9/19/23) quoted from the delegation’s letter:

We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States’ Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange…. It is well and truly time for this matter to end, and for Julian Assange to return home.

The post Australians Call to End Long Persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Robin Andersen.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

This left the 1% to cope with the crisis. Giant media corporations recruited ‘disinformation experts’ – savant guardians uniquely qualified to distinguish between rational and propaganda journalism. Their mystical powers are such that, working within profit-maximising, billionaire-owned, advertiser-dependent, government-subsidised media, they are nevertheless exposing ‘disinformation’ without the slightest trace of bias. If CEOs, ad department managers and others privately despise these truth-tellers fearlessly biting the many hands that feed, they are holding their tongues, presumably out of deep respect for their noble cause.

In all the endless blather about ‘misinformation’, you will see precious little recognition of the great Achilles’ heel of propaganda journalism, the characteristic by which it is instantly exposed, rooted in the fact that it has fundamentally different goals from rational journalism.

The goals of rational journalism are honesty, accuracy, completeness and clarity. Rational journalism will, of course, present the US-UK governments’ explanation for why they invaded Iraq, and it will present honest, credible, authoritative sources challenging that explanation.

Notice this claim to rational, honest journalism is not a claim to objective journalism. Judgment about which individuals and organisations are honest, credible and authoritative is a subjective one. We might insist that we are choosing credible sources based on rational, testable evidence, but rational thought is a subjective phenomenon that occurs inside a human head – it is not objective. Our reasoning might be faulty – we might simply be mad.

Rational, subjective journalism requires that you and I play our parts as honest, rational readers and viewers checking the claims and forming our own subjective opinions. We cannot take the arguments of purportedly honest, subjective journalists on trust – we have to do the work ourselves.

The goals of propaganda journalism are different: it aims to lead readers and viewers to a particular conclusion. In this case, honesty, accuracy and clarity are subordinated to the needs of persuasion. As for completeness, because it works against the goals of propaganda, it is not merely omitted; it is a threat to be attacked.

This, then, is how we can distinguish rational journalism from mere propaganda. The great Achilles heel of propaganda journalism is that:

• It necessarily combines meticulous, detailed, forensic analysis of the facts with vast, ‘inexplicable’, counter-intuitive gaps. The propagandist will collect every tiny detail in favour of the required conclusion but – as though mentally impaired – will ‘fail’ to notice any number of lounge-based elephants leading away from the desired conclusions. The aim is to present a clear-cut, black and white view of the world with no room for doubt.
• It will find reasons to attack anyone suggesting that this filtered, black and white version is incomplete. Any rational journalist interested in completeness, in doubt, will be attacked as an ‘apologist’, a ‘traitor’, a ‘Lord Haw-Haw’-type character undermining the nation’s moral and intellectual health with ‘disinformation’. Any other rational journalists who then seek completeness in responding to these first claims of ‘treachery’ will be accused of ‘treachery’ in the same way. It is a logical closed-circle – vital because, for a propagandist, victory is all that matters. The flourishing of rational debate is both a threat and a defeat.

Nils Melzer – ‘I Had Been Blinded By Propaganda’

In 2019, while working as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer – a highly experienced practitioner in the field of international law who was the Swiss Chair of International Humanitarian Law at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, and who is now Director of Law, Policy and Diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross – commented on Julian Assange:

Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women. Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure. Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him”. Go figure, once more.

Melzer added:

In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

Melzer, clearly an impeccable source on these issues, offered this opinion piece to The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Canberra Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek. The result:

None responded positively.

Why not? Because Melzer was dealing with The Medium, a state-corporate propaganda system that needed the Assange case to be presented in black and white terms to neutralise public support so the state could ‘deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide’.

This propaganda requirement is so important, so relentlessly pursued, that many state-corporate propagandists – people who genuinely imagine they are rational journalists – felt authentic revulsion for anyone interested in challenging the official narrative. As we found out, although no charges had been brought against Assange, and although he had not been convicted of any crime, to promote completeness by challenging the various claims was to be branded ‘a rape apologist’.

Regardless of the truth of the claims made against Assange, the very fact that expert, rational journalism seeking completeness was not only ignored, but was barred, was the great Achilles’ heel indicating that Assange was indeed the target of a state-corporate propaganda blitz. This automatically meant that, whatever the claims against Assange, The Medium was already guilty of a profound subversion of democracy, civilised debate and freedom, because it was acting as an agent of state, not as an impartial source of information. It was treating the domestic population as an enemy to be controlled and manipulated.

To summarise, then: when meticulous detail is widely combined with elephant-sized gaps, and when interest in completeness is widely denounced as ‘treachery’, or ‘immorality’ of some kind, this is the Achilles’ heel exposing a propaganda blitz.

‘La, La, La!’ The Medium Puts Its Fingers In Its Ears

In June we were one of a tiny number of outlets who supported women exposing the sexual abuses of high-profile former Observer columnist Nick Cohen in a front-page article published by the New York Times. Seven women told the NYT that Cohen ‘had groped them or made other unwanted sexual advances over nearly two decades. Four insisted on anonymity, fearing professional repercussions. In each case, The Times reviewed documents or otherwise corroborated their accounts’. This was not trial by media – the NYT report followed an internal investigation by Guardian News & Media, after which Cohen had left the Observer.

The contrast with the media reaction to the Assange allegations could hardly be more disturbing. The NYT’s report on Cohen was published on May 30. Our ProQuest media database search on June 15 of UK newspaper mentions after May 29 gave the following results:

Nick Cohen’ = 9 mentions

This was the sum total of interest in the entire UK press. The story was simply buried and was not covered by the Guardian or the BBC.

We were one of very few outlets to quote sexual abuse survivor Lucy Siegle:

In 2018, Freelance journalist and BBC One Show reporter Lucy Siegle – who wrote an Observer column on ethical living and launched the newspaper’s Ethical Awards – reported Cohen to the Guardian for groping her in the newsroom, but “nothing had happened”. Siegle described her 1 February 2018 meeting with senior Guardian management as “aggressive”, an “absolute car crash”, in which she felt “gaslit” and that they “basically spent half the time trying to diminish what I was saying and then the other half of the time sort of putting their fingers in their ears and almost going “la la la”.

‘La, la la’, pretty much sums up the reaction of the entire state-corporate Medium to the scandal.

Compare, again, the response to claims against comedian and dissident political commentator Russell Brand, accused of rape by one woman, and of sexual abuse by three other women. The Metropolitan Police subsequently reported that it had also received a ‘number of allegations of sexual offences’. The World Socialist Network (WSWS) commented:

The hysterical response to the Brand story in the media, with the Guardian and other nominally “liberal” newspapers far in the lead, undermines basic legal and democratic principles. It has pre-emptively judged Brand guilty, rendering him a pariah and jeopardising any chance of a fair trial if that were ever on the cards in the future…

Legal and democratic rights must be defended to put an end to the situation where public figures and artists can be torn down purely through maliciously intended allegations and gossip. It should not need explaining what enormous power this gives those with the most influence on the media and politics, and the injustice which can be wrought.

And indeed, anyone who has followed the Assange case will have been alarmed when Foreign Secretary James Cleverly commented publicly on the claims against Brand:

‘We have to be particularly careful when we listen to the voices of the people who are relatively powerless. Because we, I think, collectively have missed opportunities to do the right thing and intervene much, much earlier.

This, of course, strongly implied Brand’s guilt, helping to set the tone for the subsequent trial by media. One might, of course, wonder why such a senior Foreign Office politician responsible for British relations with foreign countries and governments was speaking out on claims targeting a British comedian and actor. After all, Britain’s Foreign Secretary did not comment on the Cohen sex scandal.

Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons media committee, wrote to the media platform, Rumble:

We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform.

To their credit, Rumble replied:

Today, we received a deeply disturbing letter from a committee chair in the UK parliament…

We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so.

Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble. We don’t agree with the behavior of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalize them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.

Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission. We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.

Dinenage has also written to TikTok, and also to GB News, commenting:

… it is concerning that Beverley Turner, who described Mr Brand as “a hero” and invited him to appear on her show, subsequently fronted GB News’s coverage of the allegations regarding Mr Brand on the morning of 18 September.

Tweeting over a letter he sent to Dinenage, US journalist Glenn Greenwald asked:

Since when do Western political officials have the power to impose extra-legal punishment on people for alleged crimes they’ve never been charged with? What gives US and UK officials the right to demand that tech companies remove or demonetize speakers?

No government ministers wrote to the Guardian Media Group demanding the demonetisation of Cohen’s articles. The BBC and Guardian, which failed even to report the Cohen scandal, have lavished coverage in dozens of news and comment pieces on the claims against Brand.

Once again, the Achilles’ heel of propaganda is clearly visible: meticulous claims with astonishing gaps – for example, the fact that the government is applying enormous pressure to silence Brand, though he has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime – while rational journalists seeking completeness are widely shouted down as ‘rape apologists’, exactly as they were in the Assange case.

Critics have argued that to suggest Brand is being targeted with a propaganda blitz is to dismiss the women’s claims as propaganda fabrications. This does not follow at all. It is quite possible, for example, that the claims are both true and being used by unscrupulous forces to silence Brand.

Critics have also asked why we haven’t commented on the plausibility of the women’s allegations – how can we doubt the claims of four women speaking independently? The Assange case, and especially Nils Melzer’s expert analysis of that case, convinced us that it is frankly absurd for people like us – and people like the many people passing instant judgment on social media – to affect to offer an informed opinion on these complex legal issues based on media reports and commentary.

Is Brand A Leftist?

As ever, nothing is allowed to interfere with the required, black and white version of events. Cover for the propaganda blitz has even been provided by the assertion that Brand cannot be the subject of an Assange or Corbyn-style blitz because he is not a left dissident at all.

Whether we call Brand a ‘leftist’ or not, the fact is that over the last decade he has done much to challenge and offend state-corporate power. This year, he has interviewed radical leftists like Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Aaron Maté. He has long and vocally supported Corbyn and Assange, and in the last couple of years he has interviewed Max Blumenthal, Edward Snowden, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Joel Bakan, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva and many others. This is important work giving a voice to leftists and environmentalists who are completely ignored by ‘mainstream’ media, when they aren’t being slandered and abused.

Brand has consistently challenged the official narrative on the Ukraine war. On YouTube last February, he conducted the first interview given by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh after Hersh had published his damning claim that the US was behind the Nord Stream 2 terror attacks in Europe.

As we documented, Hersh’s claims were either ignored, or at best ridiculed, by the likes of the Guardian, BBC and The Times as part of another suppression of dissent. Apply whatever label you like, the fact that Brand conducted this first interview with Hersh on YouTube, that he has 6.6 million YouTube subscribers, and that the video has been viewed 855,000 times, was a serious contribution to anti-war dissent.

The Hersh interview alone and the fact that Brand is consistently reaching a large audience with his dissent – former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook argues ‘He is possibly the most influential critic of capitalism in the English language’ – means Brand is certainly going to be targeted by the state-corporate propaganda system that successfully destroyed Corbyn’s political project, and Assange’s reputation, for fundamentally the same reasons.

Indeed, as we discussed at the time, Brand had already been subjected to a Corbyn-style, media trashing a decade earlier, involving pro-war big hitters like David Aaronovitch, then of The Times, and Nick Cohen. Brand’s high-profile, 2014 book, Revolution, described as ‘anti-capitalist’, sold 22,000 copies in the first 11 days and cited the likes of Noam Chomsky and David Graeber. It was targeted because of comments of this kind:

Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

The reason the occupants of the [elite] fun bus are so draconian in their defence of the economy is that they have decided to ditch the planet.’ (Brand, Revolution, Century, 2014, ebook, p. 345)

The reality is that ‘we live under a tyranny’. (p. 550) The US, in particular, ‘acts like an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied to’. (p. 493) Brand noted that 70 per cent of the UK press is controlled by three companies, 90 per cent of the US press by six, and ‘the richest 1 per cent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 per cent’. (p. 34)

On possibilities for radical change, Brand wrote:

Remember, the people who tell you this can’t work, in government, on Fox News or MSNBC, or in op-eds in the Guardian or the Spectator, or wherever, are people with a vested interest in things staying the same.’ (p. 514)

Anyone who has read Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, will know that dissidents reaching a massive audience with messages of this kind will certainly be subject to intense, escalating attacks from establishment media. Brand doesn’t need to be as radical as Assange, or as politically influential as Corbyn, to qualify. Even comparatively low-profile, UK academic dissidents like Piers Robinson, Tim Hayward and David Miller have been targeted with propaganda smears intended to silence them. The fact that Brand has recently interviewed the likes of right-wing Ben Shapiro doesn’t nullify his record on left dissent. Incidentally, the title of the video of that interview is: ‘Russell Brand & Ben Shapiro “Respectfully Disagreeing”.’

Conclusion

The discrediting and silencing of influential, anti-war dissidents is an extremely serious matter. In May, the Costs of War project, based at Brown University in the United States, estimated that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million. The authors of the report commented:

A 2018 survey of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees showed that more than 60% were traumatized by war experiences, including attacks by military forces, coping with the murder or disappearance of relatives, living through torture and solitary confinement, and witnessing murders, abuse, and sexual violence. More than 6% had been raped.

There is good reason to believe that the intensity of the 2002-2003 anti-war protests – not least the impact on Tony Blair’s political career – made it much harder for UK opposition parties and the UK government to support Obama’s planned war on Syria in 2013. Consequently, without British support, that formal, full-on US declaration of war did not happen.

This absolutely does not mean that anti-war voices should be afforded lenient treatment; it means the claims against them, and any counterclaims, must be subjected to careful scrutiny in a way that is fundamentally rational and fair.

If trial by media in a court of public opinion distorted by overwhelming propaganda is all it takes to silence leading anti-war voices seeking to restrain the rampant US-UK war machine, then that is simply not good enough.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

The Persecution of Assange. Image: JSC and AI Art Generator.

It’s long past time for the U.S. and U.K. to free Julian Assange. His flagrantly unjust incarceration is a global scandal, and the world is quite upset about it. Indeed, on September 19 at the United Nations, heads of state denounced this phony prosecution for the fraud and subterfuge it is – an assault on a free press, and an attack on Assange personally, for practicing journalism. For over four years, this publisher has been left to rot in a dungeon in Britain’s notorious maximum-security prison, Belmarsh. The reason? Well, they might not admit it, but U.S. sachems want him crushed for embarrassing them, by revealing the murderous criminality of the American military in Iraq and elsewhere.

Periodically, some world leader lets loose a geschrei of protest. “It is essential to preserve freedom of the press. A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way,” railed Brazilian president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to the assembled UN diplomats. Honduran president Xiomara Castro also denounced the official abuse of Assange. And on September 20, a delegation of Australian politicians brought a letter to Washington officials, demanding the U.S. drop its grotesque prosecution of Assange.

This is not the first time heads of state or other political bigwigs have urged American President Joe Biden to end Assange’s ordeal. Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has twice written Biden, imploring him to release Assange and rightly fulminating over the damage done to a free press by his incarceration. In late 2022, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan leaders called for the publisher’s freedom. Colombian president Gustavo Petro vowed on social media to “ask President Biden…not to charge a journalist just for telling the truth.” Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese also petitioned the U.S. on his Canberra constituent, Assange’s behalf. So far Biden appears unmoved.

But perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a politico like Biden, with roots in the Obama regime, to be anything other than rabid when it comes to hunting whistleblowers. With a detestation of sunlight that brings vampires to mind, Obama smashed all records for whistleblower prosecutions, more than all previous presidents combined, and the way his government went after NSA hacker Edward Snowden was unhinged. I mean, forcing the plane of a foreign president – Bolivia’s Evo Morales – to land in Vienna so it could be searched for Snowden, presumably hidden under a seat? Obama’s entourage had an attack of hysteria regarding leakers and no doubt that fit of the vapors included Assange among its causes. This history has got to have affected Biden. It is not therefore surprising that he seems impervious to the wider world’s judgment, as his ideas on this matter were doubtless formed in what can only be described as a bizarre environment.

So the U.S. is an outlier in the universe of public opinion. That’s because of Assange’s treatment at the behest of American mucky-mucks like Hillary “Can’t We Just Drone Assange?” Clinton, Mike “We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole” Pompeo, Donald “No Pardon for Assange” Trump and Joe “Prefers Napping to Pardons” Biden has been so cruel and abusive that, according to the UN special rapporteur, Nils Melzer, this progressively severe suffering inflicted on Assange constitutes torture. For heaven’s sake, the CIA even sketched plans to kidnap and assassinate him, while he hid out, for almost seven years until 2019, in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Later they tried to break his mind in Belmarsh, doping him up with psychotropic drugs, while no doubt hoping he would catch COVID-19 and die. But he didn’t. Assange has been through the wringer, but miraculously, he’s still with us. For this, the ingrates in the media don’t show proper appreciation. Assange’s sheer tenacity may yet win us back the press freedoms his demise – conviction and sentencing possibly to multiple lifetimes in jail or a prison death – would destroy.

How could Assange’s resilience and endurance accomplish this? Well, there are already tentative signs that the sworn enemies of a free press, the Washington elite, would like this whole blot on their collective reputation to dissolve. The Biden bunch’s ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, hinted back on August 14 at an exit from what they doubtless regard as their ugly dilemma: if only Assange would plead guilty to a lesser charge (why on earth should he plead guilty to anything? you naturally ask), then this whole mess could be resolved pronto. What this surprising avowal from a diplomat signifies is that possibly our imperial rulers have had enough of this persecution that has become a public relations fiasco. There is, of course, a much simpler solution: they could release Assange before the two British judges who will decide his fate convene. Or, if they don’t free him by then, those judges could rule in his favor, against extradition.

“It’s not really a diplomatic issue,” Kennedy said, “but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.” That would be to the 17 counts under the Espionage Act, the one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking and the possible 175 years of prison hanging over Assange like a sword of Damocles, if he is extradited to the U.S. But other regime honchos, like Secretary of State Antony “Russia Fought Nazis in WWII?” Blinken, consider Assange to be charged with “very serious criminal conduct.” So who knows if Kennedy just spoke for herself or if this was a trial balloon from saner heads in the Biden gaggle of hacks? But one would think any politician with a shred of self-preservation would hasten to disassociate him/herself from the ignominy of this shockingly unfair and revoltingly political prosecution.

Indeed, back on April 11, seven liberal Democratic congress members wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking him to drop the charges. “The prosecution of Mr. Assange,” they wrote, “marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act.” The fact that he was should convince any believer in a free press that that Act should be repealed. Now with Assange as in the past, its main purpose has been to squelch free speech. Enacted at the urging of one of America’s most mediocre presidents (to put it kindly), Woodrow Wilson, who used it to promote a needless bloodbath, namely World War I (not unlike the World War III that Biden flirts with), the Espionage Act was promptly used to arrest socialist Eugene Debs for protesting the war. Later, during the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, it clobbered the Rosenbergs and later still during the Vietnam War years Daniel Ellsberg, for leaking the Pentagon Papers.

The Espionage Act is an embarrassment and a disgrace to a free people. So are the charges against Julian Assange. Both the Act and the prosecution should be scrapped.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

The post Rethinking Fundamentals: The Important Lesson of Julian Bell’s Art History appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Carrier.

A delegation of Australian lawmakers has arrived in Washington, D.C., to urge the Biden administration to halt its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange. More than 60 members of Australia’s Parliament from across the political spectrum have called for Assange’s release. We speak to Australian Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, who co-founded the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group, about the growing Australian movement to free Assange and its implications for U.S.-Australia relations. Whish-Wilson warns that Assange’s extradition to the U.S. to stand trial on espionage charges is “something you would expect from a totalitarian regime” and would set a dangerous precedent for press freedoms around the world.

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

At the United Nations General Assembly this week, multiple world leaders voiced support for the imprisoned founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, including Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro. We air an excerpt of Democracy Now!'s exclusive interview with Petro, who calls Assange's continued incarceration “the greatest mockery of freedom of press … brought to bear by the country that built the concept.”

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

The post From Where Will the Breakthrough Come for Julian Assange?  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by B. Nimri Aziz.

The post For Julian Assange and Chris Hedges appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ruth Ann Dandrea.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mitchel Cohen.

The United States is considering a plea deal that would allow WikiLeaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange to return to Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Monday.

U.S. Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy told the Morning Herald that there could be a “resolution” to Assange’s now-four-year detention in Britain. Assange, an Australian citizen, has been held in a London prison since 2019 while combating U.S. extradition efforts. He faces 18 criminal charges in the U.S., 17 of which allege violations of the Espionage Act.

Kennedy’s comments come weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rebuffed Australia’s calls to end the prosecution against Assange. After a July meeting with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong in Brisbane, Blinken said the whistleblower was “charged with very serious criminal conduct” for his role in publishing classified American government materials. The files Assange shared in 2010 included footage of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad that killed 18 civilians — including journalists — and hundreds of thousands of field reports from the Iraq War.

“There is a way to resolve it,” Kennedy said on Assange’s detention, adding that a plea deal would be “up to the Justice Department.” The Department of Justice declined to comment. The State Department did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“The administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [the prime minister’s] first state visit to DC in October,” Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, told The Intercept. “If one isn’t found we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

Dan Rothwell, an international law expert at Australian National University, told the Morning Herald that he believes a likely outcome would involve American authorities downgrading the charges against Assange in exchange for a guilty plea, while taking into account the four years he has already spent in prison.

In May, Kennedy met with a cross-party delegation of parliamentary supporters of Assange. “The U.S. and Australia have a very important and close relationship, and it’s time to demonstrate that,” Independent MP Andrew Wilkie said at the time.

Assange’s case has raised major press freedom concerns around the globe. “The United States is applying extra-territorial reach by charging Assange, who is not a US citizen and did not commit alleged crimes in the US, under its Espionage Act,” a group of former Australian attorneys general wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week. “We believe that this sets a very dangerous precedent and has the potential to put at risk anyone, anywhere in the world, who publishes information that the US unilaterally deems to be classified for security reasons.”

As part of WikiLeaks’ release of documents, Assange coordinated with outlets like Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde, the U.K.’s The Guardian, and the New York Times to release classified cables revealing the inner-workings of bargaining, diplomacy, and threat-making around the world. 

Assange has faced legal pressure since his mass documents leak in 2010; he sought asylum in Ecuador in 2012 and lost it before being imprisoned in London. In June, the Morning Herald reported that the FBI was seeking new information about Assange, disturbing the sense of optimism in Australia that had come from Kennedy’s meeting with lawmakers.

The ambassador’s latest comments have renewed hope from Assange’s family for a solution to the 13-year-long limbo he has faced.

“This is a sign that they don’t want this playing out in American courts, particularly during an election cycle,” Shipton told Sky News on Monday, “so the U.S. administration is really looking for an off-ramp here for what is an extremely, extremely controversial press freedom prosecution.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Prem Thakker.

Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, and Jodie Evans, co-founder of CODEPINK, have been arrested for blocking the entrance to the Department of Justice. Cohen and Evans arrived in Washington, D.C. to protest the US government’s prosecution of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, who has been indicted on 18 charges for the publication of the Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs, which uncovered war crimes, torture, and civilian deaths perpetrated by the US government.

“It’s outrageous. Julian Assange is nonviolent. He is presumed innocent. And yet somehow or other, he has been imprisoned in solitary confinement for four years. That is torture….He revealed the truth, and for that he is suffering, and that’s we we need to do whatever we can to help him, and to help preserve democracy, which is based on freedom of the press,” Ben Cohen said during the demonstration. “It seems to me that, right now, unless things change, and unless we change them, freedom of the press is going up in smoke.”

"Why do we have freedom of press? Because there needs to be someone reporting the truth about the violence of power….When you don't have freedom of the press and no one's telling the truth, it weaponizes your capacity to feel, to have compassion and empathy. Because if you don't have the full story and if your heart is being manipulated with lies, then we're all lost. How can we have peace in the world if we're just drowning in lies?" Jodie Evans said.

Cohen and Evans asked to enter the Department of Justice to discuss their attack on the freedom of press. Security guards denied them access. They proceeded to sit peacefully in the entrance until DC Metropolitan Police arrested them.

View photographs of the action arrest here, here, here, and here.

Members of Congress, world leaders, as well as major publishers, have urged the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Julian Assange due to the threat it poses to the First Amendment and press freedom.

The Obama administration declined to indict Assange because it would risk criminalizing basic journalistic activities that every mainstream media outlet engages in on a regular basis.

This month, UK High Court Judge Jonathan Swift rejected Assange’s most recent appeal, pushing him ‘dangerously close’ to extradition. The Australian government, where Assange is a citizen, is currently working through diplomatic channels to end Assange’s incarceration, while his legal team continues the appeal process.

Julian Assange is currently confined in Belmarsh's maximum-security prison in London and has been since April 2019. If extradited, he will face up to 175 years in prison.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Whistleblower Dan Ellsberg joined us after the Justice Department charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing U.S. military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Assange is locked up in London and faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited and convicted in the United States. Ellsberg died in June, and as we remember his life and legacy, we revisit his message for other government insiders who are considering becoming whistleblowers: “My message to them is: Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait ’til the bombs are actually falling or thousands more have died.”

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

Whistleblower Dan Ellsberg joined us after the Justice Department charged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for publishing U.S. military and diplomatic documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Assange is locked up in London and faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited and convicted in the United States. Ellsberg died Friday, and as we remember his life and legacy, we revisit his message for other government insiders who are considering becoming whistleblowers: “My message to them is: Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait ’til the bombs are actually falling or thousands more have died.”

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

The post Latest Developments in the Julian Assange Extradition Case / Honoring the Late Daniel Ellsberg and His Work appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Thursday's report—the latest update of an analysis originally published two years ago—makes clear that "the subversion threat is very much still alive." The number of "election subversion" bills introduced during the first four months of 2023 is roughly on par with the hundreds put forward in the early months of 2021 and 2022. Eventually, 56 of those anti-democratic proposals from the past two years became law in 26 states.

"Legislators are trying to make it harder for trusted election officials to do their jobs, and easier for partisan politicians to overturn the will of the voters."

Since former President Donald Trump launched his deadly coup attempt following his loss in the 2020 presidential contest, GOP-controlled states have enacted dozens of voter suppression laws and redrawn congressional and state legislative maps in ways that disenfranchise Democratic-leaning communities of color and give Republicans outsized representation, which could help the far-right secure minority rule for years to come.

In addition to impeding ballot access, Republican lawmakers are further undermining the country's procedural democracy by obstructing the administration of free and fair elections, the new report notes.

Researchers identified five forms of interference that increase the risk of "election subversion," which they defined as instances when "the declared outcome of an election does not reflect the true choice of the voters." The methods are:

• Usurping control over election results (three new bills introduced as of May 3);
• Requiring partisan or unprofessional election "audits" or reviews (25);
• Seizing power over election responsibilities (31);
• Creating unworkable burdens in election administration (104); and
• Imposing disproportionate criminal or other penalties (73).

"Legislators are trying to make it harder for trusted election officials to do their jobs, and easier for partisan politicians to overturn the will of the voters. While many may think this threat abated after the midterms, it most certainly did not," Maya Ingram, a senior policy development counsel at the States United Democracy Center, toldNBC News on Thursday. "In fact, legislators are coming up with new ways to interfere with elections."

Several Republican candidates who parroted Trump's incessant lies about President Joe Biden's 2020 victory lost in last year's midterms. But more than 210 others—including at least two who participated in the January 6 rally that descended into an attack on the U.S. Capitol—won congressional seats and races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, underscoring how election denialism is now entrenched in the GOP and poses a threat to U.S. democracy for the foreseeable future.

"The decisions being made in statehouses this year and next will help determine how the 2024 election is conducted," the report warns. "Many of these bills are designed to inject confusion and delays into the election process, which increases the likelihood of attempted subversion and can give rise to disinformation, further eroding public trust and confidence in election results."

"Although a few of the bills that we have tracked would explicitly allow state legislatures or other actors to overturn the will of voters—what we sometimes refer to as direct subversion—the vast majority do not," says the report. "Bills that indirectly make subversion more likely are far more prevalent. A more probable scenario is a relatively close election, followed by efforts to create confusion and doubt about the results. Partisan actors could then claim that the true will of the voters cannot be determined, and engineer the outcome of their choice."

Nevertheless, "this legislative session has seen an increase in bills pushed by election deniers that would nullify election results if certain conditions are met," the report continues. "These bills are closely related to some of the direct subversion bills that we've seen in the past, in that they would allow the will of the voters to be disregarded."

NBC News summarized how two pieces of recently unveiled legislation could wreak havoc:

Republican legislators in Texas proposed a bill—H.B. 5082—that would give state officials the authority to order new elections in counties whose populations exceed 1 million people if there is "good cause" to conclude that 2% of polling places ran out of ballots and did not receive replacements. Such counties—like Harris County, which includes Houston—are home to a large share of the state's Democratic voters.

Arizona Republicans introduced a bill—H.B. 2078—that would, if it is enacted, allow candidates, political party county chairs, and certain ballot measure state committees to request post-election investigations that, under the law, would result in audits by the secretary of state.

While such audits should, in theory, be straightforward affairs, critics of the Arizona bill, and bills like it, note that election deniers were on the ballot in secretary of state races last year in 12 states—including Mark Finchem in Arizona. While Finchem lost, the scenario prompted enormous concerns about how such an audit might be conducted with an election denier overseeing it.

"The decisions that states make today will determine how elections are run in 2024," Ingram told the outlet. "Even when these bills don't become law, they keep lies and conspiracy theories alive and sustain the election denier movement."

According to a survey conducted in early 2022 by the Brennan Center for Justice, one in six election officials nationwide have experienced threats related to their job, and 77% say they feel such threats have increased in recent years. This spring, the Brennan Center found that 11% of current election officials are "very or somewhat likely" to step down before November 2024.

The new report urges voters to "be awake" to the "persistent threat" of election subversion and calls on state legislatures to "focus their efforts on the nonpartisan administration of elections, protecting election officials, and respecting the will of the people."

"Until they do," it warns, "our democracy is still far too close to a crisis."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

A growing number of politicians, including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, are calling on the United States to drop its case against WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange, who has been locked up for four years in London’s Belmarsh prison awaiting possible extradition to face espionage and hacking charges for publishing leaked documents about U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among Assange’s supporters is Australian human rights attorney Jen Robinson, who has been a legal adviser to Assange since 2010. She joins us from London, where she calls for the case against Assange to be dropped and warns that continuing his prosecution “threatens free speech around the world.”

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

The FBI has reopened an investigation into Australian journalist Julian Assange, according to front-page reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald. 

The news that the FBI is taking fresh investigative steps came as a surprise to Assange’s legal team, given that the U.S. filed charges against the WikiLeaks founder more than three years ago and is involved in an ongoing extradition process from a maximum security prison in the United Kingdom so that he can stand trial in the United States. 

Assange is charged under the Espionage Act with obtaining, possessing, and publishing classified information that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes that themselves have gone unpunished. 

The Morning Herald reporting also comes amid heightened hopes in Australia that a resolution to the case, which has raised serious press freedom issues in the U.S. and abroad, was near at hand. The country’s ruling party has spoken in defense of Assange, as has the nation’s opposition party leader. In early May, a cross-party delegation of influential Australian lawmakers met with the U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, urging that a deal be struck to return Assange to Australia before U.S.-Australian relations were harmed further by the prosecution. 

The U.S. has otherwise complicated its relationship with Australia in recent weeks even as it seeks closer ties in order to compete with China in the region. Australia spent weeks preparing for Joe Biden to make a major visit to the nation in May, only to see him cancel the trip at the last minute to fly back from Japan to continue with debt ceiling negotiations. And this week, the U.S. also warned Australia that some of its military units may be ineligible to cooperate with U.S. forces due to their own alleged war crimes in Australia. It is not lost on the Australian public that Assange is being prosecuted for uncovering and publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

In May, the Morning Herald reported, the FBI requested an interview with Andrew O’Hagan, who was brought on more than 10 years ago to work as a ghostwriter on Assange’s autobiography. The FBI may have thought he would be cooperative because O’Hagan’s relationship with Assange soured; O’Hagan publicly criticized Assange as narcissistic and difficult to work with and published an unauthorized version in the London Review of Books instead. But O’Hagan told the Morning Herald he was not willing to participate in his prosecution. “I might have differences with Julian, but I utterly oppose all efforts to silence him,” he said.

In 2010 and 2011, in conjunction with major papers around the world, WikiLeaks published leaked documents and videos related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, evidence of war crimes, and other documents that exposed corruption on a grand scale. The disclosures helped trigger the Arab Spring, popular revolts against dictators across the Middle East and North Africa. 

The Obama administration considered prosecuting Assange but decided they couldn’t overcome “the New York Times problem”: They couldn’t figure out, in other words, how to prosecute him but not the Times. 

The case is now under the zealous guidance of Gordon Kromberg, a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia, though the reopening of the investigation suggests the government has doubts that its case will hold up in court. 

A coalition of major newspapers around the world has urged the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. Yahoo News reported that the Trump administration considered ways to kidnap or assassinate the journalist. 

The U.S. State Department was not immediately able to comment.

Update: June 1, 2023, 12:25 p.m.
The original headline of this story said the FBI has reopened a case “against Assange,” though the precise target of the FBI’s new investigation is not publicly known. The FBI relayed to O’Hagan that it wanted to interview him about his participation in Assange’s autobiography.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Grim.

Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky joined others earlier this year calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for over four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If he is extradited, tried and convicted, Assange faces up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Belmarsh Tribunal at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in January was organized by the Progressive International and the Wau Holland Foundation. We spend the hour airing excerpts.

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

The 235 year and ongoing settler-colonial Australian Aboriginal Genocide has been associated with about 0.1 million violent deaths and 2 million deaths from dispossession, deprivation and disease. Before the British invasion in 1788 there were 350-750 different Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal) tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered in a process of continuing Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide.

From a qualitative perspective the Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Ethnocide  was the worst in human history. The term “Aboriginal Genocide”  is not used by the ABC nor by numerous Australian commentators. A Search of the ABC for the term “Aboriginal Ethnocide” yields zero (0) results. Also ignored by the ABC, as UK and US lackeys Australians have invaded 85 countries with 30 of these invasions being genocidal.

The WW1 onwards settler-colonial Palestinian Genocide has been associated with 0.1 million violent deaths and about 2 million deaths from imposed deprivation. The first step that the world should insist on immediately is return of full human rights to all 15.5 million Palestinians, noting that half of them are children and three quarters are women and children. The per capita GDP is a deadly $3,500 for Occupied Palestine versus $55,500 for Occupier Apartheid Israel in gross violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Today all of Palestine and  parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria remain occupied. The 7 million Exiled Palestinians are cruelly excluded from returning to their multi-millennial homeland  and  from full human rights. The 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians are denied all human rights as set out in the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). 2 million Israeli Palestinians are subject to 60 Nazi-style, race-based discriminatory laws. A Search of the ABC for the term “Palestinian Genocide” yields zero (0 results).

There are detailed accounts comparing the Australian Aboriginal  Genocide and the Palestinian Genocide. There is massive censorship of the Palestinian Genocide and ongoing atrocities of Apartheid Israel in a Zionist-subverted, Zionist-perverted, and US lackey Australia. Indeed the ABC bans use of the term “Apartheid” to describe genocidally racist Apartheid Israel.

This massive and genocide-ignoring lying by omission is promoted by the pathologically mendacious and traitorous US Lobby and Apartheid Israel Lobby in Australia. Freedom of speech is crucial for democracy and societal advance – we must expose and oppose maltreatment and censorship of truth tellers.

I have published literally millions of words (overwhelmingly overseas) in 9 huge books, over 100 scientific papers, and hundreds of carefully researched and referenced humanitarian articles. Nevertheless for defending the human rights of Indigenous Palestinians, Indigenous Australians and other horribly violated peoples I have been rendered invisible in Australia in the last dozen years by traitorous Mainstream gate-keepers and false Zionist defamation in the interests of nasty foreign states (the US, UK and Apartheid Israel). I have been banned from Twitter and a Wikipedia entry about me has been removed.

However I have used my voice overseas to vigorously defend variously eminent Australian writers variously subject to abuse and censorship e.g. Julian Assange, Mike Carlton, Scott McIntyre, Dr Sandra Nasr, Yassmin Abdel Magied, Alan Seymour, Michelle Guthrie, Emma Alberici, Essam Al Ghalid, and Stan Grant. There are so many more censored voices.

Decent people must stand up and be counted. The core moral messages from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust – and from all WW2 holocausts, and indeed all genocides and holocausts – are “zero tolerance for racism”, “zero tolerance for lying”, “bear witness”, and “never again to anybody” with the latter including Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Palestinians.

However under either Labor or Coalition Australian Governments a Zionist-perverted and US lackey Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of neo-Nazi and genocidally racist  Apartheid Israel and hence of the evil crime of neo-Nazi Apartheid. Only the decent Australian Greens and a small number of other decent MPs support Palestinian human rights.

Journalists in particular  should “bear witness”  when fellow journalists  and writers are being targeted, vilified and  falsely defamed. Indeed on a per capita basis neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel is the world leader for the killing  of journalists. The core principles of Humanity are Kindness and Truth, but this is ever being perverted into Racism and Lying. Truth tellers are the guardians of the core ethos of Kindness and Truth.

Decent people must (a) bear witness, (b) support  truth tellers, and (c) call out and resolutely apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to all those people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries grossly violating the core ethos of Kindness and Truth. For details and  documentation see  Countercurrents, 25 May 2023.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gideon Polya.

At a time when the West has weaponised human rights, the United Nations body that promotes freedom of expression needs to rethink what it means.

Every year UNESCO (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation) marks World Press Freedom Day (WPFD) on May 3, with a particular theme and this year’s was its 30th edition.

UNESCO has mainly provided a platform through their WPFD to civil society groups that are funded by Western agencies to shape the free speech agenda.

• READ MORE: Other media freedom reports in the Pacific

With many countries in the Global South seeing these groups involved in so-called “colour revolutions” as a security threat, it is time UNESCO paid some attention to the views of its member states who are not of the Western alliance.

This year’s theme was “Shaping of Future Rights: Freedom of Expression as a Driver of all other human rights”.

UNESCO gave four special briefs in their website for campaign action on the day.

First of which is the “misuse” of the judicial system to attack freedom of expression.

Focuses on defamation
It focuses on the use of criminal defamation to silence journalists, but no mention at all about how the UK and US judicial systems are being used to silence Julian Assange of Wikileaks.

Yonden Lhatoo, the chief news editor of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post in a recent videolog made a powerful indictment regarding the Assange case.

“There is no limit to the insufferable hypocrisy of these gangsters in glass houses,” he said referring to the US, UK and Australian government action against Assange.

Safety of foreign journalists and those covering protests are two other issues, while the fourth UNESCO brief is about journalism and whistleblowing.

The 16-page UNESCO brief on whistleblowing talks about the new electronic means of leaks to media and publishing of such information.

It mentions “Pub/Leaks” and “Latamleaks” in Latin America but no mention of Wikileaks.

It also argues that whistleblowers and publishers must have guarantees of protection and that their actions do not lead to negative consequences, such as financial sanctions, job dismissals, undermining their family members or circles of friends, or threats of arbitrary arrest.

US views Assange as ‘hacker’
But no mention whatsoever about Assange’s case including Western financial institutions blocking donations to Wikileaks.

The document seems to distance itself completely from this case because the US considers Assange a computer hacker not a journalist.

The brief talks about the benefits to society from whistleblowers that “allow people to get information and evidence of acts of corruption, human rights violations, or other matters of unquestionable public interest” but no direct reference to war crimes, that Wikileaks exposed through whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

Unfortunately, today, it is okay to talk about war crimes if the Russians are doing it but not when the Americans, NATO or Australians are involved.

In June 2019, the Australian Federal Police raided the newsroom of Australia’s national broadcaster ABC after it exposed Australian forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan.

They took away the laptops of some journalists in an attempt to trace the whistleblowers describing the action as a “national security” operation.

Today, human rights arguments have lost credibility because of these double standards.

China’s human rights agenda
Thus, it is interesting to note how China is now pushing a new human rights agenda via the United Nations.

In July 2021, China succeeded in getting a resolution adopted at the 47th session of the UN Human Rights Council on development rights.

It affirmed that the eventual eradication of extreme poverty must remain a high priority for the international community and that international cooperation for sustainable development has an essential role in shaping our shared future.

The resolution was adopted by 31 votes to 14 against.

Interestingly, those voting against were 12 European countries plus Japan and South Korea.

Joining China in voting for it were Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba, Indonesia, Philippines and Fiji, plus several African and Latin American countries.

The vote itself gives a good indication of the new trends in the human rights agenda promoted by the Global South.

Issue of free speech
This brings us to the question of where freedom of speech stands in this human rights agenda.

Human rights according to this agenda are what is prescribed in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Providing clean water and sanitation to the people, a good education, developing and nurturing sustainable systems of agriculture to provide food security to people, protecting the environment and protecting communities from the impacts of climatic change, empowering women, providing proper housing and healthcare to people, and so forth.

Governments should be held accountable to provide these rights to people, but that cannot be achieved by the media always accusing governments of corruption, or people coming out to the streets shouting slogans or blocking roads or occupying government buildings.

Reporters need to go out to communities, talk to the people and find out how they live, what is lacking and how they think these services could be provided by governments.

Journalists could even become facilitators of a dialogue between the people and the government.

Marvellous concept on paper
Human rights is a marvellous concept on paper, but its practice is today immersed in double standards and hypocrisy.

Media has been a party to this.

In 2016-17, I was part of a team at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok to develop a curriculum to train Asian journalists in what we call “mindful communication for sustainable development”.

It was funded by UNESCO, and we used Asian philosophical concepts in designing the curriculum, to encourage journalists to have a compassionate mindset in reporting grassroots development issues from the peoples’ perspective.

We want to develop a new generation of communicators, who would not demand rights and create conflicts, but work with all stakeholders, including governments, to help achieve the SDGs in a cooperative manner rather than confrontation.

It is time that UNESCO listened to the Global South and rethinks why we need to have freedom of speech and for what purpose.

Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sri Lanka-born journalist, broadcaster and international communications specialist. He is currently a consultant to the journalism programme at the University of the South Pacific. He is also the former head of research at the Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) in Singapore. This article was first published in The Fiji Times on 3 May 2023 and is republished under content sharing agreement between Asia Pacific Report, USP Journalism and The Fiji Times.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

The post Why Julian Assange Stands at the Vanguard of Press Freedom appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Prabir Purkayastha.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has called for freedom for Julian Assange and denounced the lack of concerted efforts to free the journalist.

Lula spoke to a group of reporters in London Saturday while in town to attend the coronation of King Charles III.

Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has spent four years in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison while fighting extradition to the United States.

“It is an embarrassment that a journalist who denounced trickery by one state against another is arrested, condemned to die in jail and we do nothing to free him. It’s a crazy thing,” Lula told reporters. “We talk about freedom of expression; the guy is in prison because he denounced wrongdoing. And the press doesn’t do anything in defense of this journalist. I can’t understand it.”

“I think there must be a movement of world press in his defense. Not in regard to his person, but to defend the right to denounce,” Lula told the reporters. “The guy didn’t denounce anything vulgar. He denounced that a state was spying on others, and that became a crime against the journalist. The press, which defends freedom of the press, does nothing to free this citizen. It’s sad, but it’s true.”

Also, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday he too was frustrated over the continued detention of Julian Assange: "enough is enough."

"I know it's frustrating, I share the frustration," Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. from London for the coronation of King Charles III.

"I can't do more than make very clear what my position is, and the U.S. administration is certainly very aware of what the Australian government's position is. There is nothing to be served by his ongoing incarceration."

"Enough is enough, this needs to be brought to a conclusion, it needs to be worked through," said Albanese.

Assange has battled for years to avoid being sent to the U.S., where the journalist faces 17 charges of espionage because of WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of classified documents in 2010.

US prosecutors allege he published 700,000 secret classified documents which exposed the United States government and its wrongdoings in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wikileaks received the documents from Chelsea Manning.

Albanese said Australians cannot understand why the US would free the source who leaked the documents, Chelsea Manning, while Assange still faces life in prison.

President Joe Biden has been accused of hypocrisy for demanding the release of journalists around the world, while he actively seeks the extradition of Assange to face American espionage charges.

Assange faces a sentence of up to 175 years in a maximum security prison if extradited to the United States.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Common Dreams staff.

President Biden opened his speech at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner with an urgent appeal for the release of imprisoned journalists—and for increased global recognition of the vital importance of robust protections for a free press.

“Tonight, our message is this: Journalism is not a crime!” declared Biden, as he put aside the evening’s punch lines for a serious show of solidarity with jailed and persecuted journalists around the world, including Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has been falsely accused of espionage by the Russians, and Austin Tice, a kidnapped American journalist who is believed to be held by the Syrian government.

"The free press is a pillar—maybe the pillar—of a free society, not the enemy,” Biden told the assembled reporters, editors, TV anchors, and radio hosts. “You make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority—and, yes, even to laugh at authority—without fear or intimidation. That’s what makes this nation strong. So, tonight, let us show ourselves and the world our strength, not just by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

It has never been necessary to approve of a particular writer’s views or personal behaviors, or a particular publisher’s tactics, to recognize that, when the First Amendment rights of individual practitioners of the craft are threatened, the future of journalism is imperiled.

The statement was a welcome departure from the attacks on journalism that characterized the administration of Donald Trump, who claimed in 2019 that “the press…is the enemy of the people.” And it anticipated the participation of high-profile Biden administration members, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in events scheduled for Wednesday that will honor World Press Freedom Day.

Unfortunately, while Biden’s rhetoric is better than that of his predecessor, his approach to one of the highest-profile cases involving an imprisoned journalist maintains Trump’s line of attack. The Biden administration continues to seek to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on espionage charges stemming from the 2010 publication of evidence of “Collateral Murder” atrocities committed by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2019, Trump’s Department of Justice indicted Assange on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. DOJ lawyers then engineered Assange’s arrest in London on a U.S. warrant and proceeded to push for his extradition to the United States for a trial on charges that carry a potential life sentence.

Biden’s administration had the chance to end the government’s targeting of Assange. Instead, his Department of Justice has pursued the extradition effort just as zealously as did Trump’s.

Assange is, to be sure, a controversial figure. He has upset both Republicans and Democrats, initially by his uncovering secrets regarding U.S. military wrongdoing and his successful publication of that information—on the platforms of some of the world’s most prominent news outlets—and later by revelations regarding the Democratic National Committee that WikiLeaks circulated during the 2016 election campaign. Assange retains more than his share of critics in the United States and abroad, and they do not hesitate to recall allegations of personal misconduct—including those associated with a Swedish sexual-assault investigation that was eventually dropped.

But crusading journalists throughout history have invariably stirred controversy, and known disdain. President John Adams decried Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, an essential document of the American Revolutionary moment, as “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” A century after Paine’s death, another president, Theodore Roosevelt, dismissed Paine as “a filthy little atheist.” It has never been necessary to approve of a particular writer’s views or personal behaviors, or a particular publisher’s tactics, to recognize that, when the First Amendment rights of individual practitioners of the craft are threatened, the future of journalism is imperiled.

That’s what needs to be understood with regard to the U.S. government’s targeting of Assange. He was indicted because he publicly exposed details of troublesome activities that the government wanted to keep secret—which is another way of saying that he engaged in the practice of journalism. And because he did so, he now faces the potential for prosecution by the administration of a president who proudly proclaims that “journalism is not a crime.”

The fact is that prosecuting Assange on the charges that have been brought against him would criminalize journalism. As Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, has explained:

The prosecution of Julian Assange poses a grave threat to press freedom. Bringing criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information establishes a dangerous precedent that can be used to target all news organizations that hold the government accountable by publishing its secrets. Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations. The government needs to immediately drop its charges against him.

That is not an isolated view. Amnesty International, Pen International, Reporters Without Borders, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and other groups have decried efforts to extradite Assange and called for dropping the charges against him. So, too, have editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País, who argue that the targeting of Assange for prosecution under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

That’s long been the position of the International Federation of Journalists, the global organization that represents working reporters and editors. IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger says, “President Joe Biden must end the years of politically motivated prosecution of Julian Assange by finally dropping the charges against him. The criminalization of whistleblowers and investigative journalists has no place in a democracy.”

Biden is right when he declares that “journalism is not a crime.” Now, he must link words and deeds. The president and his attorney general need to end efforts to extradite Assange and take the steps that are necessary to drop the charges against the WikiLeaks publisher. These steps should have been taken as soon as Biden assumed the presidency in 2021. But, since that did not happen, Biden can and should set things right on World Press Freedom Day 2023.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by John Nichols.

Photograph Source: Jeanne Menjoulet – CC BY 2.0

However described, the shabby treatment of Julian Assange never ceases to startle.  While he continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison awaiting the torments of an interminable legal process, more material is coming out showing the way he was spied upon while staying at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.  Of late, the Spanish daily El País has been keeping up its exemplary coverage on the subject, notably on the conduct of the Spanish-based security firm, UC Global SL.

There is a twist in the latest smidgens of information on the alleged bad conduct by that particular company.  As luck would have it, UC Global was commissioned by Rommy Vallejo, the chief of Ecuador’s now defunct national intelligence secretariat, SENAIN, to give the London embassy premises a security and technological touch-up.

Vallejo may have sought their services, but seemed blissfully ignorant that he had granted the fox access to the chicken coop.  This access involved the installation of hidden microphones throughout the embassy by UC Global at the direction of its owner, David Morales.  Morales, it seems, was updating the US Central Intelligence Agency with information about Assange’s meetings with his legal team throughout.

Much of this was revealed in the trial against Assange conducted at the Central Criminal Court in 2020, though the presiding Judge Vanessa Baraitser seemed oddly unmoved by the revelations, as she was by chatter among US intelligence operatives to engineer an abduction or assassination of the WikiLeaks founder.

The link between UC Global and the CIA was the fruit of work between Morales and one of his most notable clients, the casino company, Las Vegas Sands.  Morales was responsible for supplying the owner of the company, the late billionaire magnate and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, with personal security.  In the merry-go-round of this field, one of those on Adelson’s personal security detail was a former CIA officer.

On December 20, 2017, Michelle Wallemacq, the head of operations at UC Global, penned a note to two technicians responsible for monitoring security at the embassy.  “Be on the lookout tomorrow to see what you can get… and make it work.”  The request was related to a scheduled meeting between Assange and Vallejo.  The theme of the discussion: to get the Australian publisher out of the embassy, grant him Ecuadorian citizenship and furnish him with a diplomatic passport.  This had a heroic, even quixotic quality to it: the grant of a diplomatic passport would not have necessarily passed muster; and the chances of Assange being arrested could hardly be discounted.

Eleven months prior to Morales passing on the tip that scuttled Assange’s escape plans, Morales was already chasing up his staff from one of Adelson’s properties, The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas.  One technician received the following: “Do you have status reports on the embassy’s computer systems, and networks?  I need an inventory of systems and equipment, the guest’s [Assange] phones, and the number of networks.”  He also warned his technicians to be wary “that we may be monitored, so everything confidential should be encrypted…  Everything is related to the UK subject… The people in control are our friends in the USA.”

On June 12, 2017, Morales, enroute to Washington, DC, requested his contact to activate a File Transfer Protocol server and web portal from their Spanish headquarters.  The portal in question: the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.  Material began being collected on Assange’s guests, eclectic and of all stripes: journalists, doctors, lawyers, diplomats.   Mobile phone data was also hoovered up.  After his Washington stop, Morales popped into Las Vegas Sands, where he met his eager “American friends” to reveal the information so far gathered about Assange.

Over this time, it becomes clear, in Morales’s own words, that “he had gone over to the dark side” and that “they were working in the Champions League”.  Emails sent on September 8 speak of offering “our information collection and analysis capability to the American client”.  Discussions with a UC Global technician focus on gathering information from the microphones in the embassy.  “The guest [Assange] has three rooms and uses two quite frequently…  We would have all the audio from there except in one room.”

On September 21, it was clear to Morales that they had gotten sufficiently mired in the business of spying on Assange to be wary of any potential surveillance from SENAIN.  “I would like my whereabouts to be kept confidential, especially my trips to the USA.”  Instructions are distributed to gather data on the embassy’s Wi-Fi network, photos of the interior and furnishings of the embassy, and any data on Assange’s primary visitors, notably any members of his legal team.

The recording of one meeting would prove critical to upending plans to get Assange out of the embassy.  Present Assange, his lawyer, now wife Stella Morris, Ecuadorian consul Fidel Narváez and Vallejo.  The date for the getaway was slated for December 25, with the plan that Assange leave via one of the ambassador’s cars which would make its way through the Eurotunnel to Switzerland or some designated destination on the continent.  “It’s very late,” wrote one of the technicians a few hours after the meeting’s conclusion to Morales.  “Because it’s so big, I put the file in a shared Dropbox folder.  Someone with experience in audio can make it more intelligible.” While Vallejo could be heard fairly clearly, the voices of Assange and Morris were “very muffled”.

Within a matter of hours, Morales had relayed the material to those “American friends” of his, greasing the wheels for proceedings that would culminate in Assange’s expulsion in 2019 and the indictment listing 18 charges, 17 of which are drawn from the Espionage Act of 1917.  The plan to leave the embassy was never executed.

There are two significant events that also transpired before Vallejo’s visit to Assange.  The first involved an advisor to the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister who is said to have had information about the plan regarding Assange’s escape.  He was assaulted by a number of hooded men at Quito Airport on his return from the United States.

On December 17, 2017 it was time for hooded assailants to turn their attention to the Madrid law offices of Baltasar Garzón and Aitor Martínez. Their target: a computer server.  The timing was ominous; both lawyers had just returned from meeting Assange in the London embassy.  The intruders proved untraceable by the Spanish police, despite leaving prints.

In hindsight, it does seem remarkable that Vallejo and SENAIN remained ignorant of the rotten apples in UC Global.  As things stand, Morales is facing a formal complaint filed by Assange in the Spanish National Court.  He is also facing an investigation for alleged breaches of privacy, the violation of attorney-client confidentiality, misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.  The presiding magistrate on the case, Santiago Pedraz, has requested the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to press the CIA in supplying information about the embassy spying.

Even better will be the abandoning of the entire proceeding, the reversal of the extradition order made in June 2022 by then Home Secretary Priti Patel, and a finding by the UK authorities that the case against Assange is monstrously political, compromised from the start and emptied of legal principle.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

A billboard van calling for an end to extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange waits at traffic lights in Parliament Square in London, England, on September 14, 2020. (Photo by David Cliff/NurPhoto)

There is a twist in the latest smidgens of information on the alleged bad conduct by that particular company. As luck would have it, UC Global was commissioned by Rommy Vallejo, the chief of Ecuador’s now defunct national intelligence secretariat, SENAIN, to give the London embassy premises a security and technological touch-up.

Vallejo may have sought their services, but seemed blissfully ignorant that he had granted the fox access to the chicken coop. This access involved the installation of hidden microphones throughout the embassy by UC Global at the direction of its owner, David Morales. Morales, it seems, was updating the US Central Intelligence Agency with information about Assange’s meetings with his legal team throughout.

Much of this was revealed in the trial against Assange conducted at the Central Criminal Court in 2020, though the presiding Judge Vanessa Baraitser seemed oddly unmoved by the revelations, as she was by chatter among US intelligence operatives to engineer an abduction or assassination of the WikiLeaks founder.

The link between UC Global and the CIA was the fruit of work between Morales and one of his most notable clients, the casino company, Las Vegas Sands. Morales was responsible for supplying the owner of the company, the late billionaire magnate and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, with personal security. In the merry-go-round of this field, one of those on Adelson’s personal security detail was a former CIA officer.

On December 20, 2017, Michelle Wallemacq, the head of operations at UC Global, penned a note to two technicians responsible for monitoring security at the embassy. “Be on the lookout tomorrow to see what you can get… and make it work.” The request was related to a scheduled meeting between Assange and Vallejo. The theme of the discussion: to get the Australian publisher out of the embassy, grant him Ecuadorian citizenship and furnish him with a diplomatic passport. This had a heroic, even quixotic quality to it: the grant of a diplomatic passport would not have necessarily passed muster; and the chances of Assange being arrested could hardly be discounted.

Eleven months prior to Morales passing on the tip that scuttled Assange’s escape plans, Morales was already chasing up his staff from one of Adelson’s properties, The Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. One technician received the following: “Do you have status reports on the embassy’s computer systems, and networks? I need an inventory of systems and equipment, the guest’s [Assange] phones, and the number of networks.” He also warned his technicians to be wary “that we may be monitored, so everything confidential should be encrypted… Everything is related to the UK subject… The people in control are our friends in the USA.”

On June 12, 2017, Morales, enroute to Washington, DC, requested his contact to activate a File Transfer Protocol server and web portal from their Spanish headquarters. The portal in question: the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Material began being collected on Assange’s guests, eclectic and of all stripes: journalists, doctors, lawyers, diplomats. Mobile phone data was also hoovered up. After his Washington stop, Morales popped into Las Vegas Sands, where he met his eager “American friends” to reveal the information so far gathered about Assange.

Over this time, it becomes clear, in Morales’s own words, that “he had gone over to the dark side” and that “they were working in the Champions League”. Emails sent on September 8 speak of offering “our information collection and analysis capability to the American client”. Discussions with a UC Global technician focus on gathering information from the microphones in the embassy. “The guest [Assange] has three rooms and uses two quite frequently… We would have all the audio from there except in one room.”

On September 21, it was clear to Morales that they had gotten sufficiently mired in the business of spying on Assange to be wary of any potential surveillance from SENAIN. “I would like my whereabouts to be kept confidential, especially my trips to the USA.” Instructions are distributed to gather data on the embassy’s Wi-Fi network, photos of the interior and furnishings of the embassy, and any data on Assange’s primary visitors, notably any members of his legal team.

The recording of one meeting would prove critical to upending plans to get Assange out of the embassy. Present Assange, his lawyer, now wife Stella Morris, Ecuadorian consul Fidel Narváez and Vallejo. The date for the getaway was slated for December 25, with the plan that Assange leave via one of the ambassador’s cars which would make its way through the Eurotunnel to Switzerland or some designated destination on the continent. “It’s very late,” wrote one of the technicians a few hours after the meeting’s conclusion to Morales. “Because it’s so big, I put the file in a shared Dropbox folder. Someone with experience in audio can make it more intelligible.” While Vallejo could be heard fairly clearly, the voices of Assange and Morris were “very muffled”.

Within a matter of hours, Morales had relayed the material to those “American friends” of his, greasing the wheels for proceedings that would culminate in Assange’s expulsion in 2019 and the indictment listing 18 charges, 17 of which are drawn from the Espionage Act of 1917. The plan to leave the embassy was never executed.

There are two significant events that also transpired before Vallejo’s visit to Assange. The first involved an advisor to the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister who is said to have had information about the plan regarding Assange’s escape. He was assaulted by a number of hooded men at Quito Airport on his return from the United States.

On December 17, 2017 it was time for hooded assailants to turn their attention to the Madrid law offices of Baltasar Garzón and Aitor Martínez. Their target: a computer server. The timing was ominous; both lawyers had just returned from meeting Assange in the London embassy. The intruders proved untraceable by the Spanish police, despite leaving prints.

In hindsight, it does seem remarkable that Vallejo and SENAIN remained ignorant of the rotten apples in UC Global. As things stand, Morales is facing a formal complaint filed by Assange in the Spanish National Court. He is also facing an investigation for alleged breaches of privacy, the violation of attorney-client confidentiality, misappropriation, bribery and money laundering. The presiding magistrate on the case, Santiago Pedraz, has requested the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to press the CIA in supplying information about the embassy spying.

Even better will be the abandoning of the entire proceeding, the reversal of the extradition order made in June 2022 by then Home Secretary Priti Patel, and a finding by the UK authorities that the case against Assange is monstrously political, compromised from the start and emptied of legal principle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Despite whatever charges Julian Assange may be accused of, it is well known that the WikiLeaks publisher was targeted for exposing the war crimes of the US government. In an upside-down Bizarro World, the screws are being ever so gradually tightened on Assange by the war criminals and their criminal accomplices. It is, in fact, a slow-motion assassination being played out before the open and closed eyes of the world.

— “The Slow-motion Assassination of Julian Assange“

The above was written in 2020. Little has changed. In the foreword to Guilty of Journalism by Kevin Gosztola, American journalist Abby Martin writes, “Assange was only publishing the leaks. He never committed any crime. He only published evidence of the crimes.” (p xiii)

Assange’s “crime” is exposing the crimes of the US; especially revelatory was the Collateral Murder video where US troops in an Apache helicopter gleefully gunned dead 12 civilians on a street in New Baghdad. The murderers remain scot-free. For exposing war crimes, Assange and Chelsea Manning have been punished.

Kevin Gosztola who has followed much of the judicial proceedings against Manning and Assange presents his knowledge of the cases, in particular that of Assange, in Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange (Seven Stories Press, 2023).

What is readily apparent is that the releases by WikiLeaks triggered a tsunamic vendetta. This has resulted in a brazen miscarriage of justice manipulated by a red-faced United States with the connivance of allied nation states such as Australia; Sweden; Britain; after a change of presidents, Ecuador; and the bystander nations of the world.

The US seeks to try Assange under the Espionage Act, a relic from WWI designed to control the release of information (see chapter 4). Yet, such a prosecution of Assange is hampered by the US Constitution, as the First Amendment protects the freedom of the press. Prosecuting a publisher/journalist would entail grave implications for journalism and publishing in the US.

The book’s title, Guilty of Journalism, is apt. It speaks to the legal perturbations to eliminate a perceived threat to the US’s full-spectrum hegemony. For a hegemon to operate unhindered, it must control the medium and its messages. Thus, the US asserts that Assange is not a journalist, this despite Assange being recognized as a journalist by the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, being a member of the International Federation of Journalists, being published in several media around the world, and having been awarded several prizes for his journalism. It is akin to blithely stating someone is not a lawyer despite having a law degree from a recognized law school, having passed the bar exam, having worked as a lawyer for several years, and having been celebrated for her accomplishments as a lawyer. It is patently a non sequitur to reject evidence purely on someone’s say-so.

The US government prefers to keep its sordid business in some dark corner under wraps. Assange and WikiLeaks, however, cast a light on the inner workings of governments. Many people hold a principle that states the people have a right to know what their governments are doing in their name.

The US persists in its claim that Assange is not a journalist. He is depicted variously as an anarchist or a hacker posing as a journalist. Ponder this: if a teacher hacks computer systems at home in the evening, is she no longer a teacher? Nonetheless, WikiLeaks publishes journalism and the monopoly media (Gosztola uses the term “prestige media” in his book) has even indulged in publication of the WikiLeaks‘s releases.

The US also holds that Assange is guilty of “aiding the enemy” and asserts that the information published by WikiLeaks would be used by enemies such as Al Qaeda.

Gosztola quotes Assange’s civilian defense attorney David Coombs: “No case has ever been prosecuted under this type of theory, that an individual by nature of giving information to a journalistic organization would then be subject to [aiding the enemy].” (p 51)

There seems to be a causal link missing in the chain of the US legal strategy: if the US personnel had not been committing undeniable war crimes, then there would have been no story to be published about it in the media. No war crimes, no story, then no need to fear alleged succor being provided to an enemy. A question then: who is primarily culpable in this chain of events?

Harvard professor Yochai Benkler found that there was no evidence “that any enemy had, in fact, used WikiLeaks.” (p 57) Nonetheless, Gosztola noted that judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had eased the burden of proof for prosecutors with her ruling that they need not show that information could potentially damage the US. (p 66)

Gosztola writes, “It does not matter who received the information. It does not matter if damage occurred as a result of the disclosure or publication of the information. It is all the same to DOJ prosecutors.” (p 79)

WikiLeaks was branded a “non-state hostile intelligence service” by then director of the Central Intelligence Agency Mike Pompeo. (p 87) One ought to consider the nature of the organization previously headed by Pompeo vis-à-vis WikiLeaks. Douglas Valentine wrote a book that lays out what the CIA is: The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. Sounds an awful lot like the pot calling the kettle black; except WikiLeaks is no kettle. “WikiLeaks has a perfect in document authentication and resistance to all censorship attempts.”

Besides, some might consider any claims by a character such as Pompeo to be rich given that he once chuckled: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole.”

A question: “Who to Believe: The CIA and Corporate Media or WikiLeaks?”

The criminality of the US government is such that its intelligence services considered assassinating Assange; spied on him while in asylum; relied on the testimony of a sociopath — Sigudur Ingi Thordarson, known for engaging in sex with underage boys — to fraudulently smear Assange; subpoenaed witnesses to appear before the fishing expeditions of a grand jury (for which Chelsea Manning was again imprisoned and fined daily for refusing to testify). They even deprived Assange of his razor so that when he was hauled out of the Ecuadorian embassy he appeared with an unkempt beard. (p 107)

If only stolen razors were the extent of the criminality of the US authorities, but Gosztola brings to light additional crimes in chapter 9: “Retaliation for Exposing Torture, Rendition, and War Crimes.” Guilty of Journalism seamlessly segues into the next chapter detailing what happens to those brave souls who expose the rampant criminality of the state. The US prison system, to be generous, is sorely lacking in decency for the humanity, health, and sanity of those housed within its walls.

Gosztola examines the behavior of the moneyed media and its lies of omission and commission. Assange and WikiLeaks were heavily criticized for putting lives at risk, but: “Notably, WikiLeaks never called attention to any names in the war logs, but prestige media did so, as they helped the US government stir panic, which distracted from the contents of the historical records.” (p 206)

Media allegations lacked evidence, and later the entire fiasco would morph into the prestige media’s discredited Russiagate conspiracy. (chapter 13)

Currently, Assange finds himself still incarcerated in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison in southeast London awaiting the outcome of an appeal against extradition to the US, where the deck will be stacked against him should he be sent there. In the US, Assange will be charged under the Espionage Act which, in actuality, is a contrived criminal indictment for exposing criminal acts.

Assange is one man, one man who has had the might of the American government and the supporting machinery of several nation states, who feel aggrieved and antagonized by the media exposures in WikiLeaks, arrayed against him. Assange is not alone. He is beloved by family and friends; he is backed by colleagues in WikiLeaks; he is vital to the readers of WikiLeaks missives; and he is supported by many independent media, attested to by Guilty of Journalism.

The irony and perversity of the vicious web in which Assange is entangled is laid bare in Guilty of Journalism. People who care about access to information, who want their governments to honor their constitutions and operate transparently, and who care about justice ought to read Guilty of Journalism, become further informed, and add their voices to justice for Julian Assange and to all the others who have sacrificed themselves to bring to light the corruption and crimes of governmental nexuses and the complicit prestige media.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

On the fourth anniversary of Julian Assange's arrest, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaibled six other progressive lawmakers in calling on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to "uphold the First Amendment's protections for the freedom of the press by dropping the criminal charges" against the Australian WikiLeaks founder and withdrawing the extradition request of the U.K. government.

Assange has been jailed at Belmarsh Prison in London since U.K. authorities forcibly removed him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2019. The 51-year-old publisher continues to fight his extradition to the United States, which the U.K. government approved last year.

Tlaib (D-Mich.) along with Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) on Tuesday joined media outlets, world leaders, and civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom groups that have decried U.S. efforts to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act.

Such organizations "have been emphatic that the charges against Mr. Assange pose a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity, and that a conviction would represent a landmark setback for the First Amendment," the Democrats wrote to Garland. "This global outcry against the U.S. government's prosecution of Mr. Assange has highlighted conflicts between... America's stated values of press freedom and its pursuit of Mr. Assange."

"We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution."

The lawmakers argued that prosecuting the publisher "for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America's credibility as a defender of these values, undermining the United States' moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange's prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities."

"Assange faces 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one charge for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion," they noted. "The Espionage Act charges stem from Mr. Assange's role in publishing information about the U.S. State Department, Guantánamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this information was published by mainstream newspapers, such as The New York Times and Washington Post, who often worked with Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks directly in doing so. Based on the legal logic of this indictment, any of those newspapers could be prosecuted for engaging in these reporting activities."

However, "the prosecution of Mr. Assange marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act," the letter highlights. "The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well."

"As attorney general, you have rightly championed freedom of the press and the rule of law in the United States and around the world," the document added, pointing to the U.S. Department of Justice's recently revised media regulations. "We are grateful for these pro-press freedom revisions, and feel strongly that dropping the Justice Department's indictment against Mr. Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S. is in line with these new policies."

"Every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home," the letter concludes. "We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution."

The Democrats' appeal to Garland coincided with similar demands from parliamentarians across the political spectrum in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, and was welcomed by groups that have long demanded Assange's freedom.

"As Julian Assange marks four years in Belmarsh prison and faces possible imminent extradition to the United States, it's more crucial for members of Congress to speak up now than ever before," said Rebecca Vincent, director of operations and campaigns at Reporters Sans Frontières, or Reporters Without Borders (RSF). "No one should face prosecution or the possibility of the rest of their lives in prison for publishing information in the public interest."

"As long as the case against Assange continues, it will be a thorn in the side of the U.S. government, and undermines U.S. efforts to defend media freedom globally," Vincent added. "We welcome Rep. Tlaib's leadership on this issue and encourage widespread support for her call on the Justice Department to drop the charges against Assange. It's time for the U.S. to lead by example by bringing this 12-year-old case to a close and allowing for his release without further delay.”

Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, similarly applauded the Michigan Democrat for her "courageous defense of the First Amendment."

"Defending the Bill of Rights is the responsibility of every branch of government," said Gibbons, "and we are proud to stand with those members of Congress who are joining with nearly every press freedom group and newspapers such as The New York Times, in calling on the Department of Justice to end its prosecution of Julian Assange."

Freedom of the Press Foundation's Seth Stern also commended Tlaib's "efforts to finally put an end to the unconstitutional prosecution of Julian Assange," stressing that "whatever one might think about Assange personally, there is no principled distinction between the conduct he is charged with and the kind of investigative journalism that has helped shape U.S. history."

"As long as the government claims the power to prosecute newsgathering, all journalists can do is hope prosecutors exercise restraint and don't come after them for doing their jobs. Journalists will surely tread more cautiously as a result," he warned. "No one who values the First Amendment should be comfortable with that, which is why every major press rights and civil liberties organization opposes Assange's prosecution."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

The post US/UK Seek to Silence Julian Assange and Free Press, Australia Says ‘Enough’ appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dave Lindorff - Ron Ridenour.

Photograph Source: Herder3 – CC BY-SA 3.0

“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”

– I.F. Stone

The US Congress and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, have what can only be regarded as a testy relationship.  Its various members have advocated and condoned his farcical prosecution, demanded his lifelong incarceration, even assassination, taking issue with his appetite for publishing unsavoury, classified details about the US imperium.  He who gives the game away on cant will be punished.

One shrill voice, touching on delirium, was Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, former Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman.  His response to the Cablegate release was more than a touch unhinged.  “WikiLeaks’ deliberate disclosure of these diplomatic cables is nothing less than an attack on the national security of the United States, as well as that of dozens of other countries.”

Lieberman thought the disclosure of such State Department treasure “an outrageous, reckless and despicable action that will undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people safe and to work together to defend our vital interests.  Let there be no doubt: the individuals responsible are going to have blood on their hands.”

On December 1, 2010, Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI) was also forthright before fellow House Representatives in arguing that both WikiLeaks and its founder “should be facing criminal charges; and his Web site, which he uses to aid and abet our terrorist enemies, should be shut down to defend our national security.”  Showing an astonishing latitude of muddled understanding, Miller urged the Obama administration to treat “WikiLeaks for what it is – a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens our security.”

The previous day, Arizona Republican Rep. Trent Franks bleated in the House that Assange had “provided a wealth of aid and comfort to groups that are at war with the United States of America.”  It was simply not possible for Franks to envisage that Assange might have engaged in an exercise of transparency.  “The reality is that his desire to promote himself has outweighed his concern for scores and perhaps hundreds of innocent lives that he has endangered with his reckless publicity in this kind of stunt in the guise of some greater cause.”

That libel, despite mountainous evidence to the contrary, much of it submitted during the trial proceedings at the Old Bailey in London, persists in the abominably drafted and dangerous Department of Justice indictment against Assange.

In time, the Russian canard filtered through the woolly-headed lawmakers, turning them into apoplectic seekers of revenge.  “Whatever Julian Assange’s intentions were for WikiLeaks,” opined Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner, “what he’s become is a direct participant in Russian efforts to weaken the West and undermine American security.”  To that end, he hoped that the “British courts will quickly transfer him to US custody so he can finally get the justice he deserves.”  Such is the call of the angry tribe on The Hill.

At times, the odd voice of defence has surfaced.  The problematic Rep. Dana Rohrabacher from California called Assange “a very honourable man”.  He is also alleged to have been President Donald Trump’s envoy in attempting to broker a failed pardon deal with Assange while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy.

In January 2021, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii urged Trump, in his last days, to “pardon Julian Assange as one of his final acts before leaving the White House.  The prosecution against the Australian was “a direct threat to a free press & freedom of speech for every American.”  In her response to Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy and subsequent arrest, Gabbard had this to say: “I think what is happening here is … some form of retaliation coming from the government, saying, ‘Hey, this is what happens when you release information that we don’t want you to release.’”

To target Assange was to get on “such a dangerous and slippery slope, not only for journalists, not only for those in the media, but also for every American that our government can and has the power to kind of lay down the hammer to say, ‘Be careful, be quiet and fall into line, otherwise we have the means to come after you.’”

The latest move by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) promises to be something more.  Tlaib has urged that fellow members put aside their differences and append their signatures in a letter to Attorney-General Merrick Garland urging him to drop the charges.  “I know that many of us have very strong feelings about Mr Assange, but what we think of him and his actions is really beside the point here.”  The instrument being used in prosecuting Assange was “the notoriously undemocratic Espionage Act”, one that “seriously undermines freedom of the press and the First Amendment.”

Tlaib acknowledged the views of press freedom, civil liberty and human rights groups, all warning “that the charges against Mr Assange pose a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity, and that a conviction would represent a landmark setback for the First Amendment.”

The letter also pays lip service to US self-interest: pardon the prisoner to burnish the reputation.  The prosecution of Assange’s journalism had greatly undermined “the United States’ moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities.”

Not even the long-winded nature of the words diminishes the fundamental wisdom and aim of the letter.  To date, signatures have been collected from Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush.  A spokesperson for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has stated that she will sign before the closure of the letter.  While it’s a start, it cannot come too soon for the ailing publisher and Belmarsh Prison’s most famous political prisoner.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

The post Inglorious Inertia: The Albanese Government and Julian Assange appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Since then, it is very clear, as with all matters regarding US policy, that Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a constipated, non-committal position.  “Quiet diplomacy” is the official line taken by Albanese and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a mealy-mouthed formulation deserving of contempt.  As Greens Senator David Shoebridge remarks, “‘quiet diplomacy’ to bring Julian Assange home by the Albanese Government is a policy of nothing.  Not one meeting, phone call or letter sent.”

Kellie Tranter, a tireless advocate for Assange, has done sterling work uncovering the nature of that position through Freedom of Information requests over the years.  “They tell the story – not the whole story – of institutionalised prejudgment, ‘perceived’ rather than ‘actual’ risks, and complicity through silence.”

The story is a resoundingly ugly one.  It features, for instance, stubbornness on the part of US authorities to even disclose the existence of a process seeking Assange’s extradition from the UK, to the lack of interest on the part of the Australian government to pursue direct diplomatic and political interventions.

Former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop exemplified that position in signing off on a Ministerial Submission in February 2016 recommending that the Assange case not be resolved; those in Canberra were “unable to intervene in the due process of another’s country’s court proceedings or legal matters, and we have full confidence in UK and Swedish judicial systems”.  Given the nakedly political nature of the blatant persecution of the WikiLeaks founder, this was a confidence both misplaced and disingenuous.

The same position was adopted by the Australian government to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), which found that same month that Assange had been subject to “different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorean embassy.”  The Working Group further argued that Assange’s “safety and physical integrity” be guaranteed, that “his right to freedom of movement” be respected, and that he enjoy the full slew of “rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention.”

At the time, such press outlets as The Guardian covered themselves in gangrenous glory in insisting that Assange was not being detained arbitrarily and was merely ducking the authorities in favour of a “publicity stunt”.  The conduct from Bishop and her colleagues did little to challenge such assertions, though the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did confirm in communications with Tranter in June 2018 that the government was “committed to engaging in good faith with the United Nations Human Rights Council and its mechanisms, including the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.”  Splendid inertia beckoned.

The new Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith, has kept up that undistinguished, even disgraceful tradition: he has offered unconvincing, lukewarm support for one of Belmarsh Prison’s most notable detainees.  As the ABC reports, he expressed pleasure “that in the due course of next week or so he’s agreed that I can visit him in Belmarsh Prison.” (This comes with the usual qualification: that up to 40 offers of “consular” support had been previously made and declined by the ungrateful publisher.)

The new High Commissioner is promising little.  “My primary responsibility will be to ensure his health and wellbeing and to inquire as to his state and whether there is anything that we can do, either with respect to prison authorities or to himself to make sure that his health and safety and wellbeing is of the highest order.”

Assange’s health and wellbeing, which has and continues to deteriorate, is a matter of court and common record.  No consular visit is needed to confirm that fact.  As with his predecessors, Smith is making his own sordid contribution to assuring that the WikiLeaks founder perishes in prison, a victim of ghastly process.

As for what he would be doing to impress the UK to reverse the decision of former Home Secretary Priti Patel to extradite the publisher to the US, Smith was painfully predictable.  “It’s not a matter of us lobbying for a particular outcome.  It’s a matter of me as the High Commissioner representing to the UK government as I do, that the view of the Australian government is twofold.  It is: these matters have transpired for too long and need to be brought to a conclusion, and secondly, we want to, and there is no difficulty so far as UK authorities are concerned, we want to discharge our consular obligations.”

Former Australian Senator Rex Patrick summed up the position rather well by declaring that Smith would be far better off, on instructions from Prime Minister Albanese, pressing the current Home Secretary Suella Braverman to drop the whole matter.  Even better, Albanese might just do the good thing and push US President Joe Biden and his Attorney-General Merrick Garland to end the prosecution.

Little can be expected from the latest announcement.  Smith is a man who has made various effusive comments about AUKUS, an absurd, extortionately costly security pact appropriately described as a war-making arrangement.  The Albanese government, having placed Australia ever deeper into the US military orbit, is hardly likely to do much for a publisher who exposed the war crimes and predations of the Imperium.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Private First Class Chelsea Manning received the harshest punishment any United States military officer or federal government employee has ever received for leaking classified information to the press. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over her court-martial, sentenced Manning to thirty-five years at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.

She was found guilty of six charges under the Espionage Act, five stealing charges, one charge involving the “wanton publication” of “intelligence,” multiple charges of “failure to obey an order or regulation,” and one charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Notably, Manning was acquitted of an “aiding the enemy” offense that carried a potential sentence of life in prison.

Manning was never charged with any conspiracy offenses, and, unlike the charges against Assange, military prosecutors did not accuse her of attempting to crack a password hash. Even with logs from alleged chats between Manning and Assange, there was scant evidence that Assange or any WikiLeaks staff attempted to enlist her to leak. Prosecutors only expressed disgust that she had independently chosen to become a source and shared more than 700,000 documents.

When Manning’s trial occurred in 2013, WikiLeaks was not yet designated a “hostile intelligence agency” by the CIA. However, by 2019, there was no longer division in the government over whether to treat WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity or not. The indictment plainly claimed, “To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, Assange recruited sources and predicated the success of WikiLeaks in part upon the recruitment of sources” in order to “illegally circumvent legal safeguards on information.”

Prosecutors at the Justice Department (DOJ) would like the public to believe that Assange posted a “Most Wanted Leaks” list to the WikiLeaks website in 2009 to solicit leaks from “insiders” like Manning, and Manning used it to determine which documents to provide to WikiLeaks.³

Yet, this conspiracy theory, which forms the basis of criminal allegations against Assange, was promoted by military prosecutors during Manning’s trial, and it was discredited by Manning’s own statement to the court and David Coombs, her defense attorney.

Despite Manning’s statement, DOJ prosecutors concocted their own conspiracy theory to further their political case. Central to this theory is the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

On May 14, 2009, WikiLeaks requested nominations from human rights groups, lawyers, historians, journalists, and activists for documents as well as databases from around the world that the media organization would work to expose.

The list, according to prosecutors, was “organized by country and stated that documents or materials nominated to the list must ‘be likely to have political, diplomatic, ethical, or historical impact on release.’” WikiLeaks suggested the information should be “plausibly obtainable to a well-motivated insider or outsider.”

With little to no evidence, military prosecutors called the list Manning’s “guiding light,” a characterization Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs directly challenged during his closing argument.

“It was WikiLeaks saying, look, tell us, humanitarians, activists, NGOs, fellow reporters, what do you want to know in your country? What in your country is being hidden from the public that you believe the public should know? Give us a list,” Coombs said.

“We are going to compile that list, and we are going to work to obtain that list. What does this sound like? Any journalistic organization that has like a hotline or anything else says, call us. You got a story. Call us. We’ll investigate.”

There were seventy-eight items on the list. As Coombs noted, military prosecutors were only able to “remotely” tie Manning to “four of the things on the list.” She could have used Intelink, which is a US intelligence network of top secret, secret, and unclassified databases, to search for specific items on the list. She did not.

DOJ prosecutors emphasized in their indictment that the list requested “bulk databases,” including Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia for US intelligence analysts. Yet Manning never released this database to WikiLeaks, nor did she release the complete CIA Open Source Center database or PACER database containing US federal court records, which were listed as “important bulk databases.”

Chat logs show Manning brought up the CIA Open Source Center on March 8, 2010, and a user, whom the government claims was Assange, replied, “That’s something we want to mine entirely.” But Manning never engaged in any attempts to download and transfer this database to WikiLeaks.

Manning released four sets that could be labeled “bulk databases.” She released the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the US State embassy cables in the Net-Centric Diplomacy database, and the database containing detainee assessments from Joint Task Force Guantánamo. None of those documents were on the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

DOJ prosecutors contended Manning’s searches on November 28, 2009, for “retention+of+interrogation+videos” and “detainee+abuse” matched up with the “Most Wanted Leaks” list. However, at the time, WikiLeaks was interested in obtaining copies of any of the ninety-two CIA torture tapes that were destroyed as well as “detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration.” It is far more plausible that Manning searched for abuse photos or torture videos.

Contrary to Manning’s version of events, DOJ prosecutors insisted that Assange convinced Manning to find the detainee assessment briefs and release them. FBI special agent Megan Brown, of the “counterespionage squad” at the Washington Field Office in the District of Columbia, wrote, “Manning asked Assange, ‘how valuable are JTF GTMO detention memos containing summaries, background info, capture info, etc?’ Assange replied, ‘Time period?’ Manning answered, ‘2007–2008.’”

Assange allegedly responded, “Quite valuable to the lawyers of these guys who are trying to get them out, where those memos suggest their innocence/bad procedure,” and added, “also valuable to merge into the general history. Politically, Gitmo is mostly over though.”

Yet in the messages Brown referenced, Assange never specifically asked Manning to provide the reports to WikiLeaks. He did not say whether WikiLeaks would publish the documents. He certainly did not solicit Manning to leak the detainee assessments. All Assange allegedly did was state his opinion that the documents were in the public interest.

Prosecutors attempted to link Manning’s disclosure of rules of engagement for US military forces in Iraq to the supposed “Most Wanted Leaks” list because it included “Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. Army Rules of Engagement 2007–2009.” They suggested Manning provided the files to WikiLeaks on March 22, 2010, after Assange allegedly wrote on March 8, “Curious eyes never run dry.”

Manning said she uploaded the rules of engagement with the “Collateral Murder” video on February 21, weeks before the alleged exchange with Assange.

One lesser-known Espionage Act charge against Manning involved the alleged disclosure of video showing the Garani massacre by US military forces in the Farah province of Afghanistan. An air strike killed at least eighty-six Afghan civilians on May 4, 2009. She was acquitted, a fact that poses a problem for the DOJ’s theory.

According to evidence presented during the trial, Jason Katz, an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory from February 2009 to March 2010, tried to help WikiLeaks and downloaded an encrypted file with the air strike video onto his work computer on December 15. Katz was unable to use a password-cracking tool to open the file.

WikiLeaks indicated on Twitter on January 8, “We need supercomputer time.” The media organization apparently had an encrypted file of the attack, but they were never able to decrypt the file.

Military prosecutors attempted to connect Manning to Katz. They claimed during their case that Manning’s earliest violations began on November 1, and Manning had provided the video to Katz to decrypt with a supercomputer. Although Manning searched and downloaded “Farah” files, the video Katz had did not match any of Manning’s files.

“Let’s go along with the government and its logic. Pfc. Manning hits the ground in Iraq in mid-November,” Coombs argued. “For whatever reason, [her] motive, I’m now going to use the 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ List as my guiding light. And I’m going to give something to WikiLeaks. I’m going to do it because I’m now a traitor. I’m now an activist.

“So what is the first thing I’m going to choose? What is the very first thing I’m going to give to WikiLeaks and say look, WikiLeaks, I’m for you? Well, I’m going to give you an encrypted video I can’t see. You can’t see. Guess what? We don’t have a password for it. By the way, you never asked for it. That’s not on your 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ list.”

Coombs suggested, “This is kind of like someone showing up to a wedding and giving you something that’s not on the list that you registered for. What do you think Pfc. Manning is doing at this point? According to the government, [she] is like, hey, you know what, I can go to the seventy-eight things that you want, but I don’t want to give you that stuff.”

Military prosecutors seem to have failed to persuade the military judge that Manning used the “Most Wanted Leaks” list as her guide. Lind’s “special findings” show she accepted evidence that Manning viewed a tweet from WikiLeaks on May 7, 2010, which requested a list of as many military email addresses as possible. This led Manning to compile a list of over 74,000 addresses for WikiLeaks. Except Lind did not find that WikiLeaks had solicited Manning to leak any of the more than 700,000 documents that were published.

When the first indictment against Assange was disclosed by the Justice Department on April 11, 2019, the response from some attorneys and advocates was mixed. It was widely viewed as “narrowly tailored” to avoid “broader legal and policy implications.”

The DOJ did not accuse Assange of hacking into a US military computer. He was accused of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” when he allegedly “agreed” to assist Manning in “cracking a password hash” to help her browse information databases anonymously.

DOJ prosecutors were already presented with evidence related to these allegations during Manning’s trial. Patrick Eller, a command digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, reviewed court-martial records for Assange’s defense. He testified during the evidentiary hearing in the extradition case in September 2020.

Eller found testimony from the US military’s own forensic expert that contradicted presumptions at the core of the computer crime charge. Password hashes are generally used to help authenticate users and passwords on a computer. Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash. According to Eller, at the time it was not “possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”

James Lewis QC, a prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked Eller if he agreed that Manning and Assange “thought they could crack a password and agreed to attempt to crack a password.” Eller told Lewis a hash was provided and that the account user that the US government associated with Assange said they had “rainbow tables for it.” (Using “rainbow tables” is one decryption method for cracking the hash by guessing different password values.) However, Manning never shared where she obtained the hash.

“The government’s own expert witness in the court-martial stated that was not enough for them to actually [crack the password],” Eller added. A user must also have a system file to complete an attempt at password-cracking. During the Manning trial, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that the “hash value” was included in the chat, but it was not the “full hash value.”

Major Thomas Hurley, who was on Manning’s defense team, asked if Manning would have needed more of the hash value to crack the password. Shaver replied, “I mentioned the system file, you would need that part as well.” (This was one of the two files Eller said were necessary for decryption.)

“So the hash value included in the chat wouldn’t be enough to actually gain any passwords or user information?” Hurley asked.

Shaver replied, “Correct.”

Eller’s statement submitted to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London was even more explicit.

Upon reading the indictment, it became clear that the technical explanation of the password hashing allegations is deficient in a number of ways which cast doubt upon the assertion that the purpose of the Jabber chat was for Manning to be able to download documents anonymously.

Jabber is the software Manning used to chat with the account allegedly associated with Assange.

Manning had already downloaded the Reykjavík cable, Guantánamo Files, Iraq War Logs, and Afghanistan War Logs before the alleged exchange on password-cracking occurred. “Routinely in the course of work,” according to Eller, she downloaded military incident reports to have “offline backups” in the event of “connectivity issues” with the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network that hosted the information.

“The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password-cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” he said. However, Eller acknowledged, “Manning had authorized access to these documents.” Eller showed that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, constantly tried to crack administrative passwords to install programs that were not authorized for their computers.

Jason Milliman, a computer engineer contracted to manage laptops at the base, testified during Manning’s court-martial that “soldiers cracked his password in order to install a program and then deleted his administrator account.”

As Eller asserted, Manning never would have tried to use a password hash to exfiltrate files for submission to WikiLeaks because she already had a way to anonymously access the files: a Linux CD that allowed her to bypass Windows security features.

Sgt. David Sadtler, a soldier in Manning’s battalion, testified that Manning proposed starting “some sort of hash cracking business.” The idea had already been done in the “open source world.” So “reimplementing it” made sense to Sadtler.

Eller concluded, “While she was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat, she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”

During the court-martial, military prosecutors underscored the fact that Manning exchanged messages with a user identified as “Nathaniel Frank,” a name the government believed was associated with Assange.

Assange attorney Mark Summers QC asked Eller multiple times if he found evidence that linked Assange to this account. “No, I did not,” Eller replied.

Summers asked if Eller was aware of the person who sat at the other end of whatever computer terminal “Nathaniel Frank” used. “Of course not. I could not have that personal knowledge,” Eller added.

Major Ashden Fein, a military prosecutor, said during the closing argument, “[Manning] was a determined soldier with a knowledge, ability, and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. And, Your Honor, [she] was not a whistleblower. [She] was a traitor—a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy and took deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it.”

The attacks on Manning’s character were nasty. In addition to questioning her loyalty to the United States, military prosecutors pejoratively labeled Manning an “anarchist” and a “hacker.” But missing from the prosecutors’ narrative of her acts was any explicit claim that she collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or that she engaged in a password-cracking conspiracy.

As Captain Joe Morrow, one of the military prosecutors, declared during her sentencing: “Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for [her] crimes. Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for the impact.”

Manning was not an insider or spy who worked for WikiLeaks to steal US government documents. She had whistleblower motives that inspired her to take action. That is an inconvenient truth for prosecutors, who are compelled to deny her agency to bolster their arguments.

In fact, submitting documents to WikiLeaks was not Manning’s first choice. As she recounted in her 2022 memoir, README.txt, “While I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Manning used landlines, mostly at Starbucks, to reach out to “traditional publications.” She contacted the Washington Post in January 2010. During her court-martial she testified that a reporter she spoke to at the Post had not taken her seriously. Next, she called the New York Times. No one responded to the message she left for the Times’ public editor. She considered going to Politico, but weather conditions hampered plans to travel to its offices in Arlington, Virginia.

WikiLeaks, as she put it in her memoir, was “the publication of last resort.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Gosztola.

Private First Class Chelsea Manning received the harshest punishment any United States military officer or federal government employee has ever received for leaking classified information to the press. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over her court-martial, sentenced Manning to thirty-five years at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.

She was found guilty of six charges under the Espionage Act, five stealing charges, one charge involving the “wanton publication” of “intelligence,” multiple charges of “failure to obey an order or regulation,” and one charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Notably, Manning was acquitted of an “aiding the enemy” offense that carried a potential sentence of life in prison.

Manning was never charged with any conspiracy offenses, and, unlike the charges against Assange, military prosecutors did not accuse her of attempting to crack a password hash. Even with logs from alleged chats between Manning and Assange, there was scant evidence that Assange or any WikiLeaks staff attempted to enlist her to leak. Prosecutors only expressed disgust that she had independently chosen to become a source and shared more than 700,000 documents.

When Manning’s trial occurred in 2013, WikiLeaks was not yet designated a “hostile intelligence agency” by the CIA. However, by 2019, there was no longer division in the government over whether to treat WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity or not. The indictment plainly claimed, “To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, Assange recruited sources and predicated the success of WikiLeaks in part upon the recruitment of sources” in order to “illegally circumvent legal safeguards on information.”

Prosecutors at the Justice Department (DOJ) would like the public to believe that Assange posted a “Most Wanted Leaks” list to the WikiLeaks website in 2009 to solicit leaks from “insiders” like Manning, and Manning used it to determine which documents to provide to WikiLeaks.³

Yet, this conspiracy theory, which forms the basis of criminal allegations against Assange, was promoted by military prosecutors during Manning’s trial, and it was discredited by Manning’s own statement to the court and David Coombs, her defense attorney.

Despite Manning’s statement, DOJ prosecutors concocted their own conspiracy theory to further their political case. Central to this theory is the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

On May 14, 2009, WikiLeaks requested nominations from human rights groups, lawyers, historians, journalists, and activists for documents as well as databases from around the world that the media organization would work to expose.

The list, according to prosecutors, was “organized by country and stated that documents or materials nominated to the list must ‘be likely to have political, diplomatic, ethical, or historical impact on release.’” WikiLeaks suggested the information should be “plausibly obtainable to a well-motivated insider or outsider.”

With little to no evidence, military prosecutors called the list Manning’s “guiding light,” a characterization Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs directly challenged during his closing argument.

“It was WikiLeaks saying, look, tell us, humanitarians, activists, NGOs, fellow reporters, what do you want to know in your country? What in your country is being hidden from the public that you believe the public should know? Give us a list,” Coombs said.

“We are going to compile that list, and we are going to work to obtain that list. What does this sound like? Any journalistic organization that has like a hotline or anything else says, call us. You got a story. Call us. We’ll investigate.”

There were seventy-eight items on the list. As Coombs noted, military prosecutors were only able to “remotely” tie Manning to “four of the things on the list.” She could have used Intelink, which is a US intelligence network of top secret, secret, and unclassified databases, to search for specific items on the list. She did not.

DOJ prosecutors emphasized in their indictment that the list requested “bulk databases,” including Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia for US intelligence analysts. Yet Manning never released this database to WikiLeaks, nor did she release the complete CIA Open Source Center database or PACER database containing US federal court records, which were listed as “important bulk databases.”

Chat logs show Manning brought up the CIA Open Source Center on March 8, 2010, and a user, whom the government claims was Assange, replied, “That’s something we want to mine entirely.” But Manning never engaged in any attempts to download and transfer this database to WikiLeaks.

Manning released four sets that could be labeled “bulk databases.” She released the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the US State embassy cables in the Net-Centric Diplomacy database, and the database containing detainee assessments from Joint Task Force Guanta?namo. None of those documents were on the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

DOJ prosecutors contended Manning’s searches on November 28, 2009, for “retention+of+interrogation+videos” and “detainee+abuse” matched up with the “Most Wanted Leaks” list. However, at the time, WikiLeaks was interested in obtaining copies of any of the ninety-two CIA torture tapes that were destroyed as well as “detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration.” It is far more plausible that Manning searched for abuse photos or torture videos.

Contrary to Manning’s version of events, DOJ prosecutors insisted that Assange convinced Manning to find the detainee assessment briefs and release them. FBI special agent Megan Brown, of the “counterespionage squad” at the Washington Field Office in the District of Columbia, wrote, “Manning asked Assange, ‘how valuable are JTF GTMO detention memos containing summaries, background info, capture info, etc?’ Assange replied, ‘Time period?’ Manning answered, ‘2007–2008.’”

Assange allegedly responded, “Quite valuable to the lawyers of these guys who are trying to get them out, where those memos suggest their innocence/bad procedure,” and added, “also valuable to merge into the general history. Politically, Gitmo is mostly over though.”

Yet in the messages Brown referenced, Assange never specifically asked Manning to provide the reports to WikiLeaks. He did not say whether WikiLeaks would publish the documents. He certainly did not solicit Manning to leak the detainee assessments. All Assange allegedly did was state his opinion that the documents were in the public interest.

Prosecutors attempted to link Manning’s disclosure of rules of engagement for US military forces in Iraq to the supposed “Most Wanted Leaks” list because it included “Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. Army Rules of Engagement 2007–2009.” They suggested Manning provided the files to WikiLeaks on March 22, 2010, after Assange allegedly wrote on March 8, “Curious eyes never run dry.”

Manning said she uploaded the rules of engagement with the “Collateral Murder” video on February 21, weeks before the alleged exchange with Assange.

One lesser-known Espionage Act charge against Manning involved the alleged disclosure of video showing the Garani massacre by US military forces in the Farah province of Afghanistan. An air strike killed at least eighty-six Afghan civilians on May 4, 2009. She was acquitted, a fact that poses a problem for the DOJ’s theory.

According to evidence presented during the trial, Jason Katz, an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory from February 2009 to March 2010, tried to help WikiLeaks and downloaded an encrypted file with the air strike video onto his work computer on December 15. Katz was unable to use a password-cracking tool to open the file.

WikiLeaks indicated on Twitter on January 8, “We need supercomputer time.” The media organization apparently had an encrypted file of the attack, but they were never able to decrypt the file.

Military prosecutors attempted to connect Manning to Katz. They claimed during their case that Manning’s earliest violations began on November 1, and Manning had provided the video to Katz to decrypt with a supercomputer. Although Manning searched and downloaded “Farah” files, the video Katz had did not match any of Manning’s files.

“Let’s go along with the government and its logic. Pfc. Manning hits the ground in Iraq in mid-November,” Coombs argued. “For whatever reason, [her] motive, I’m now going to use the 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ List as my guiding light. And I’m going to give something to WikiLeaks. I’m going to do it because I’m now a traitor. I’m now an activist.

“So what is the first thing I’m going to choose? What is the very first thing I’m going to give to WikiLeaks and say look, WikiLeaks, I’m for you? Well, I’m going to give you an encrypted video I can’t see. You can’t see. Guess what? We don’t have a password for it. By the way, you never asked for it. That’s not on your 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ list.”

Coombs suggested, “This is kind of like someone showing up to a wedding and giving you something that’s not on the list that you registered for. What do you think Pfc. Manning is doing at this point? According to the government, [she] is like, hey, you know what, I can go to the seventy-eight things that you want, but I don’t want to give you that stuff.”

Military prosecutors seem to have failed to persuade the military judge that Manning used the “Most Wanted Leaks” list as her guide. Lind’s “special findings” show she accepted evidence that Manning viewed a tweet from WikiLeaks on May 7, 2010, which requested a list of as many military email addresses as possible. This led Manning to compile a list of over 74,000 addresses for WikiLeaks. Except Lind did not find that WikiLeaks had solicited Manning to leak any of the more than 700,000 documents that were published.

When the first indictment against Assange was disclosed by the Justice Department on April 11, 2019, the response from some attorneys and advocates was mixed. It was widely viewed as “narrowly tailored” to avoid “broader legal and policy implications.”

The DOJ did not accuse Assange of hacking into a US military computer. He was accused of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” when he allegedly “agreed” to assist Manning in “cracking a password hash” to help her browse information databases anonymously.

DOJ prosecutors were already presented with evidence related to these allegations during Manning’s trial. Patrick Eller, a command digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, reviewed court-martial records for Assange’s defense. He testified during the evidentiary hearing in the extradition case in September 2020.

Eller found testimony from the US military’s own forensic expert that contradicted presumptions at the core of the computer crime charge. Password hashes are generally used to help authenticate users and passwords on a computer. Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash. According to Eller, at the time it was not “possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”

James Lewis QC, a prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked Eller if he agreed that Manning and Assange “thought they could crack a password and agreed to attempt to crack a password.” Eller told Lewis a hash was provided and that the account user that the US government associated with Assange said they had “rainbow tables for it.” (Using “rainbow tables” is one decryption method for cracking the hash by guessing different password values.) However, Manning never shared where she obtained the hash.

“The government’s own expert witness in the court-martial stated that was not enough for them to actually [crack the password],” Eller added. A user must also have a system file to complete an attempt at password-cracking. During the Manning trial, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that the “hash value” was included in the chat, but it was not the “full hash value.”

Major Thomas Hurley, who was on Manning’s defense team, asked if Manning would have needed more of the hash value to crack the password. Shaver replied, “I mentioned the system file, you would need that part as well.” (This was one of the two files Eller said were necessary for decryption.)

“So the hash value included in the chat wouldn’t be enough to actually gain any passwords or user information?” Hurley asked.

Shaver replied, “Correct.”

Eller’s statement submitted to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London was even more explicit.

Upon reading the indictment, it became clear that the technical explanation of the password hashing allegations is deficient in a number of ways which cast doubt upon the assertion that the purpose of the Jabber chat was for Manning to be able to download documents anonymously.

Jabber is the software Manning used to chat with the account allegedly associated with Assange.

Manning had already downloaded the Reykjavi?k cable, Guanta?namo Files, Iraq War Logs, and Afghanistan War Logs before the alleged exchange on password-cracking occurred. “Routinely in the course of work,” according to Eller, she downloaded military incident reports to have “offline backups” in the event of “connectivity issues” with the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network that hosted the information.

“The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password-cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” he said. However, Eller acknowledged, “Manning had authorized access to these documents.” Eller showed that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, constantly tried to crack administrative passwords to install programs that were not authorized for their computers.

Jason Milliman, a computer engineer contracted to manage laptops at the base, testified during Manning’s court-martial that “soldiers cracked his password in order to install a program and then deleted his administrator account.”

As Eller asserted, Manning never would have tried to use a password hash to exfiltrate files for submission to WikiLeaks because she already had a way to anonymously access the files: a Linux CD that allowed her to bypass Windows security features.

Sgt. David Sadtler, a soldier in Manning’s battalion, testified that Manning proposed starting “some sort of hash cracking business.” The idea had already been done in the “open source world.” So “reimplementing it” made sense to Sadtler.

Eller concluded, “While she was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat, she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”

During the court-martial, military prosecutors underscored the fact that Manning exchanged messages with a user identified as “Nathaniel Frank,” a name the government believed was associated with Assange.

Assange attorney Mark Summers QC asked Eller multiple times if he found evidence that linked Assange to this account. “No, I did not,” Eller replied.

Summers asked if Eller was aware of the person who sat at the other end of whatever computer terminal “Nathaniel Frank” used. “Of course not. I could not have that personal knowledge,” Eller added.

Major Ashden Fein, a military prosecutor, said during the closing argument, “[Manning] was a determined soldier with a knowledge, ability, and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. And, Your Honor, [she] was not a whistleblower. [She] was a traitor—a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy and took deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it.”

The attacks on Manning’s character were nasty. In addition to questioning her loyalty to the United States, military prosecutors pejoratively labeled Manning an “anarchist” and a “hacker.” But missing from the prosecutors’ narrative of her acts was any explicit claim that she collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or that she engaged in a password-cracking conspiracy.

As Captain Joe Morrow, one of the military prosecutors, declared during her sentencing: “Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for [her] crimes. Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for the impact.”

Manning was not an insider or spy who worked for WikiLeaks to steal US government documents. She had whistleblower motives that inspired her to take action. That is an inconvenient truth for prosecutors, who are compelled to deny her agency to bolster their arguments.

In fact, submitting documents to WikiLeaks was not Manning’s first choice. As she recounted in her 2022 memoir, README.txt, “While I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

Manning used landlines, mostly at Starbucks, to reach out to “traditional publications.” She contacted the Washington Post in January 2010. During her court-martial she testified that a reporter she spoke to at the Post had not taken her seriously. Next, she called the New York Times. No one responded to the message she left for the Times’ public editor. She considered going to Politico, but weather conditions hampered plans to travel to its offices in Arlington, Virginia.

WikiLeaks, as she put it in her memoir, was “the publication of last resort.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kevin Gosztola.

We continue our coverage of the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by looking at the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been jailed for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. One video released by WikiLeaks showed a U.S. helicopter gunship in Baghdad slaughtering a dozen civilians, including a Reuters journalist. Assange has been held in London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019 as he fights the U.S. campaign to extradite him to face espionage charges. If convicted, the publisher faces as much as 175 years behind bars. His legal fight is documented in the new film Ithaka that centers on Assange’s father John Shipton, who has been crisscrossing the globe to raise awareness of the case and the danger it poses to press freedoms. We speak with Shipton, as well as filmmaker Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s brother and a producer of the documentary.

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

Notes
Gabriel Shipton is Julian Assange’s brother, and a professional film producer. John Shipton is the father of Gabriel and Julian. Information about the documentary, and their U.S. speaking tour, can be found here. Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of ShadowProof. He has covered the Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from their beginning, as well as other press freedom and whistleblower cases dating back to Chelsea Manning. His new book on the Assange case, Guilty of Journalism, will soon be available from The Censored Press/Seven Stories Press March 7. Gosztola also writes at The Dissenter.

The post Guilty of Journalism: New Documentary Film Ithaka and New Book on the Political Case Against Julian Assange appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

The first time I was asked to comment publicly on Julian Assange and Wikileaks was on MSNBC in April 2010. Wikileaks had just released the Collateral Murder video. The video, leaked by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, was taken from the gunsight of a US Apache helicopter as the helicopter's crew killed 12 unarmed Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007. Two Reuters journalists were killed and two small children were severely wounded (the Apache's crew killed the children's father as he attempted to assist wounded civilians). For three years, until Wikileaks released the video, the U.S. military claimed a battle had taken place and that aside from the two journalists, all the dead were insurgents.

The Army declared the journalists killed in the crossfire. The wounded children were ignored, even though the Apache's crew had recognized at the time they had shot children. "Well, it's their fault [for] bringing their kids to a battle." the helicopter pilots said on the video minutes after shooting them. There had been no battle.

In the studio, the MSNBC host asked another veteran and me for our thoughts on the video. Her question was about the apparent shock American audiences were experiencing watching the brutal reality of the Iraq War. We were both incredulous that more than seven years into the war, such a video would be shocking. What did you think we were doing over there?

The effects on the First Amendment and press freedom will be severe if Julian Assange is extradited and successfully prosecuted.

I went to war three times. I have seen mothers with their dead children and have heard their cries in Arabic, Pashto, and English. Those cries were all the same. The hell of war that has consumed men, women, and children for decades and continues in unending forms is unimaginable to many of us. Even harder to swallow is knowing these acts of organized murder and mass suffering, perpetrated in our names, were not cruel accidents of war but the result of planned and deliberate policies.

The millions of victims of the US wars throughout the Muslim World are familiar with the violence of these wars. For Americans at home, such familiarity with the wars, their violence, and the consequences, did not exist. Julian Assange and Wikileaks helped to change that.

For publishing the victims of the wars and war crimes caused by the U.S. and the West, Julian Assange is being held in Britain's notorious Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the United States. Assange's harrowing captivity began more than 12 years ago when a US rendition forced him to seek sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. I had the privilege of meeting him there in 2014. That visit allowed me to thank him for his witness through Wikileaks for the millions of war victims ignored, unnamed, and rendered voiceless. Over a decade on, his mental and physical health is failing, and Biden, despite his commitment to press freedom, has yet to budge on a pardon.

New York Times Vietnam war correspondent Neil Sheehan said the Pentagon Papers taught him that secrets were not kept by a government to protect its people from adversaries but rather to protect the government's actions from the knowledge of its people. Perhaps this is the greatest crime that Julian Assange committed in the eyes of both Democratic and Republican governments: he dared to tell the American people what their government had done.

The effects on the First Amendment and press freedom will be severe if Julian Assange is extradited and successfully prosecuted. His persecution and torture already serve as a warning to journalists worldwide. And morally, Julian Assange’s imprisonment obstructs any reckoning we in the U.S. must do to contend with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their victims.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Matthew Hoh.

“The first casualty when war comes is truth,” U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California said in 1929, debating ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a noble but ultimately failed attempt to ban war. Reflecting on World War I, which ended a decade earlier, he continued, “it begins what we were so familiar with only a brief period ago, this mode of propaganda whereby…people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.”

Time and again, Hiram Johnson has been proven right. Our government’s impulse to control information and manipulate public opinion to support war is deeply ingrained. The past twenty years, dominated by the so-called War on Terror, are no exception. Sophisticated PR campaigns, a compliant mass media and the Pentagon’s pervasive propaganda machine all work together, as public intellectual Noam Chomsky and the late Prof. Ed Herman defined it in the title of their groundbreaking book, “Manufacturing Consent,” borrowing a phrase from Walter Lippman, considered the father of public relations.

One publisher consistently challenging the pro-war narrative pushed by the U.S. government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has been the whistleblower website Wikileaks. Wikileaks gained international attention in 2010 after publishing a trove of classified documents leaked from the U.S. military. Included were numerous accounts of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the killing of civilians, and shocking footage of a helicopter gunship in Baghdad slaughtering a dozen civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, on the ground below. Wikileaks titled that video, “Collateral Murder.”

The New York Times and other newspapers partnered with Wikileaks to publish stories based on the leaks. This brought increased attention to the founder and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, Julian Assange. In December, 2010, two months after release of the Collateral Murder video, then-Vice President Joe Biden, appearing on NBC, said Assange was “closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon papers.” Biden was referring to the 1971 classified document release by Daniel Ellsberg, which revealed years of Pentagon lies about U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.

With a secret grand jury empanelled in Virginia, Assange, then in London, feared being arrested and extradited to the United States. Ecuador granted Assange political asylum. Unable to make it to Latin America, he sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He lived inside the small, apartment-sized embassy for almost seven years. In April 2019, after a new Ecuadorian president revoked Assange’s asylum, British authorities arrested him and locked him up in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, often called “Britain’s Guantánamo.” He has been held there, in harsh conditions and in failing health, for almost four years, as the U.S. government seeks his extradition to face espionage and other charges. If extradited and convicted in the U.S., Assange faces 175 years in a maximum-security prison.

While the Conservative-led UK government seems poised to extradite Assange, a global movement has grown demanding his release. The Progressive International, a global pro-democracy umbrella group, has convened four assemblies since 2020 called The Belmarsh Tribunals. Named after the 1966 Russell-Sartre Tribunal on the Vietnam War, convened by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sarte, The Belmarsh Tribunal has assembled some of the world’s most prominent, progressive activists, artists, politicians, dissidents, human rights attorneys and whistleblowers, all speaking in defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

“We are bearing witness to a travesty of justice,” Jeremy Corbyn, a British Member of Parliament and a former leader of the Labour Party, said at the tribunal. “To an abuse of human rights, to a denial of freedom of somebody who bravely put himself on the line that we all might know that the innocent died in Abu Ghraib, the innocent died in Afghanistan, the innocent are dying in the Mediterranean, and innocents die all over the world, where unwatched, unaccountable powers decide it’s expedient and convenient to kill people who get in the way of whatever grand scheme they’ve got. We say no. That’s why we are demanding justice for Julian Assange.”

Corbyn is joined in his call by The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel–major newspapers that published articles based on the leaked documents. “Publishing is not a crime,” the newspapers declared.

Never before has a publisher been charged under the U.S. Espionage Act. The Assange prosecution poses a fundamental threat to the freedom of speech and a free press. President Biden, currently embroiled in his own classified document scandal, knows this, and should immediately drop the charges against Julian Assange.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Denis Moynihan.

Former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, famed linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky and others gave testimony Friday at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Washington, D.C., calling on President Biden to drop charges against Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks founder has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States. If convicted in the United States, Julian Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for publishing documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Friday’s event was held at the National Press Club and co-chaired by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. We spend the hour featuring compelling excerpts from the proceedings.

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

As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, DC, on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on US President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.

“From Ankara to Manila to Budapest to right here in the United States, state actors are cracking down on journalists, their sources, and their publishers in a globally coordinated campaign to disrupt the public’s access to information,” co-chair and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman said during her opening remarks at the National Press Club.

“The Belmarsh Tribunal… pursues justice for journalists who are imprisoned or persecuted [and] publishers and whistleblowers who dare to reveal the crimes of our governments,” she said.

• READ MORE: Other Julian Assange articles at Asia Pacific Report

“Assange’s case is the first time in history that a publisher has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” Goodman added.

“Recently, it was revealed that the CIA had been spying illegally on Julian, his lawyers, and some members of this very tribunal. The CIA even plotted his assassination at the Ecuadorean Embassy under [former US President Donald] Trump.”

Assange — who suffers from physical and mental health problems, including heart and respiratory issues — could be imprisoned for 175 years if fully convicted of Espionage Act violations.

Among the classified materials published by WikiLeaks — many provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning — are the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a US Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs, which revealed American and allied war crimes.

Arbitrary detention
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh Prison, for which the tribunal is named.

Human rights, journalism, peace, and other groups have condemned Assange’s impending extradition and the US government’s targeting of an Australian journalist who exposed American war crimes.

“That the extradition proceedings against Assange are an unexpected legal outcome — is a lie. Based on my experience as Ecuador’s foreign minister…the British government wanted to extradite him all along.” — @GuillaumeLong

Attend the Belmarsh Tribunal. https://t.co/1au3neo8FD pic.twitter.com/hwshaiiQzM

— Progressive International (@ProgIntl) January 19, 2023

In a statement ahead of Friday’s tribunal, co-chair and Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat said:

The First Amendment, freedom of the press, and the life of Julian Assange are at stake. That’s why the Belmarsh Tribunal is landing literally just two blocks away from the White House.

As long as the Biden administration continues to deploy tools like the Espionage Act to imprison those who dare to expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe.

Our tribunal is gathering courageous voices of dissent to demand justice for those crimes and to demand President Biden to drop the charges against Assange immediately.

Belmarsh Tribunal participants include Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, US academic Noam Chomsky, British parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn, former Assange lawyer Renata Ávila, human rights attorney Steven Donziger, and WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.

The Belmarsh Tribunal hearing in Washington DC on January 20, 2023. Video: Democracy Now!

Assange’s father, John Shipton, and the whistleblower’s wife and lawyer Stella Assange, are also members, as are Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola, Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights, Selay Ghaffar of the Solidarity Party of Afghanistan, investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel, and ACLU attorney Ben Wizner.

Former U.K. Labour Party leader @jeremycorbyn is in Washington for the Belmarsh Tribunal to advocate for Julian Assange’s freedom as he fights extradition from Britain to the United States.

“We’re standing up for the right to know. We’re standing up for journalism,” Corbyn says. pic.twitter.com/A4v6QbNSN0

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) January 20, 2023

First Amendment foundation
“One of the foundation stones of our form of government here in the United States . . . is our First Amendment to the Constitution,” Ellsberg — whom the Richard Nixon administration tried to jail for up to 115 years under the Espionage Act, but due to government misconduct was never imprisoned — said in a recorded message played at the tribunal.

“Up until Assange’s indictment, the act had never been used… against a journalist like Assange,” Ellsberg added. “If you’re going to use the act against a journalist in a blatant violation of the First Amendment… the First Amendment is essentially gone.”

Ávila said before Thursday’s event that “the Espionage Act is one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation in the world: an existential threat against international investigative journalism.”

“If applied, it will deprive us of one of our must powerful tools towards de-escalation of conflicts, diplomacy, and peace,” she added.

“The Belmarsh Tribunal convened in Washington to present evidence of this chilling threat, and to unite lawmakers next door to dismantle the legal architecture that undermines the basic right of all peoples to know what their governments do in their name.”

The Belmarsh Tribunal, first convened in London in 2021, is inspired by the Russell Tribunal, a 1966 event organised by philosophers Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre to hold the US accountable for its escalating war crimes in Vietnam.

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

In Washington, D.C., human rights and free speech advocates gather today for the Belmarsh Tribunal, focused on the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for publishing documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five major news organizations that once partnered with WikiLeaks recently called on the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. We speak to British MP and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is in Washington, D.C., to participate in the Belmarsh Tribunal, about Assange and freedom of the press. We also cover the state of leftism around the globe, from labor rights in the U.K. and Europe to the war in Ukraine, to political unrest in Brazil and Peru.

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

In Washington, D.C., human rights and free speech advocates gather today for the Belmarsh Tribunal, focused on the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the harsh Belmarsh prison in London while appealing extradition to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, Assange could face up to 175 years in jail for publishing documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five major news organizations that once partnered with WikiLeaks recently called on the Biden administration to drop charges against Assange. We speak to British MP and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is in Washington, D.C., to participate in the Belmarsh Tribunal, about Assange and freedom of the press. We also cover the state of leftism around the globe, from labor rights in the U.K. and Europe to the war in Ukraine, to political unrest in Brazil and Peru.

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

Photograph Source: Matt Hrkac – CC BY 2.0

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s vindication seems– maybe, perhaps, imaginably—achievable. It’s enough for me to publish my singular New Year resolution– not a wish, but a firm resolution– to more actively contribute to growing pressure to free Julian Assange, the mistreated, vilified and imprisoned, brave and brilliant founder of WikiLeaks.

It’s a finite issue, unlike negotiations to end a raging war or a global agreement on climate controls. Yet freeing Assange had appeared almost insurmountable not long ago. Whereas, given the painstaking pursuit to free Assange by a pitifully small coterie of determined supporters, some success may be at hand.

Their movement’s goal is clear: the U.S. government must drop its extradition order. Then, Assange should be released from Britian’s notorious Belmarsh prison,where he’s held only on a charge of dodging a bail hearing. Then, if faced with further legal action, his lawyers argue, he should be detained in his own country, Australia.

During these four years in Belmarsh, Assange’s situation looked bleak. Particularly because his struggle for justice was essentially ignored by the press and thereby by the public, including many human rights groups. The very newspapers which so righteously published WikiLeaks’ documents revealing Washington’s criminality in Iraq and elsewhere, maligned him. Then they abandoned the principle of press freedom which he represents. In 2019 when a new Ecuadorian leader revoked Assange asylum in their London embassy, British authorities forcibly removed Assange from the embassy and slapped him into Belmarsh prison. Then the U.K. government initiated hearings regarding Washington’s request for his extradition to the U.S. A series of challenges by Assange’s legal team yielded little hope of success.

With diminishing legal options, freedom of journalists and publishers to expose government wrongdoings became an increasingly louder argument for Assange’s release. That seemed to garner new attention. More journalists joined the free-Assange movement, perhaps realizing the implications that a successful indictment of Assange might hold for themselves.

A few weeks ago, the world heard Assange’s name after a decade-long blackout. Unexpectedly, on Nov 28^th those same press giants largely responsible for that blockade and for defaming Assange, decided to speak against his prosecution by U.S. authorities.

Their plea became headline news—as if the case was just discovered. The New York Times, joined by its peers in the U.K., France and Germany, published an open letter headlined “The U.S. government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”. Their brief statement made its appeal on the principle of press freedom. “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press. Holding governments accountable”, it said, “is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy.”

Too often, the same public who’d cared little about Assange’s fate or interpretations of press freedom which his prosecution raises, suddenly had a change of heart. The voice of those news giants is so frightening in its power to singlehandedly transform public opinion and government policies. Although we still don’t know how that appeal will affect Washington’s extradition order.

 I will not join those who applaud the media giants’ new posture. What we ought to refect on is the real source of this ideological change: the quotidian struggle to win his freedom, year-after-year, against seemingly impossible odds. It was not human rights organizations or our supposed-free press who did this. It was individuals. The changed public mood derives from painstaking efforts by a small group of lawyers, family, and media critics who themselves became unpopular and marginalized for their support of the imprisoned man. I have no doubt that the breakthrough represented in that highbrow open letter wouldn’t have been possible without the tireless, persistent educational and legal campaigns by that committed team.

I was aware, having followed their legal appeals and public events for more than a decade, of a remarkable by little publicized October 9^th London protest, perhaps a watershed in the campaign: more than 5,000 individuals linked hands, forming a human chain around the British parliament building to call for Assange’s release. A glowing, living example of support.

Not long before that, the film Ithaka was released – a video document of the campaign led by Assange’s family members, most notably his 76-year-old father John Shipton. (The elder Shipton’s eloquence and compassion are deeply moving.) During the U.S. tour portrayed in Ithaka, Shipton and Assange’s brother Gabriel often drew hardly more than a dozen listeners. (Audiences were larger in Europe and Australia.)

On December 1^st, the Australian government which had hitherto made no effort to aid Assange, indicated a new position. “Enough is enough”, proclaimed Australia’s recently elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

In recent weeks, celebrated press freedom campaigners like Daniel Ellsberg announced—“Indict me too”, since he himself had released government secrets. Guests who’d visited Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy learned that their phones and other items submitted to embassy security had been turned over the CIA; they are now suing former CIA director Pompeo along with others for violating their rights.

How much more is needed to force the U.K. and U.S. governments to reverse their policy and free Julian Assange? Given the apparently successful efforts of that slight but resolute group of supporters, we should be encouraged to personally lend our weight, however modest, for the final push.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by B. Nimri Aziz.

The post Julian, Harry, Meghan, et al. appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Howard Lisnoff.

As supporters of Julian Assange fear his extradition to the United States could be just weeks away, and President Biden faces growing pressure to drop espionage charges against Assange, we are joined for an exclusive joint interview with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and John Young, the founder of Cryptome.org, who have both asked the Department of Justice to indict them for possessing or publishing the same documents as the WikiLeaks founder. The Biden administration is asking the U.K. government to extradite Assange to the U.S., where he faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage and hacking charges for the release of documents that exposed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Ellsberg has revealed that he was in possession of confidential documents leaked by former military analyst Chelsea Manning and given to him as backup by WikiLeaks, and Young says he published some of the same documents days before WikiLeaks did. “If they succeed with Julian Assange, … we will not have a First Amendment,” says Ellsberg. “This accusation against Assange would be illegal against an American citizen, so we think it’s selective prosecution and it should cease,” adds Young.

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

December 8, 2022

Sent via email

Dear Attorney General Garland,

We, the undersigned coalition of press freedom, civil liberties, and international human rights organizations, write to express grave concern about the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal and extradition proceedings relating to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

It is more than a year since our coalition sent a joint letter calling for the charges against Assange to be dropped. In June, then U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the United States, a decision that Assange’s legal team is in the process of appealing. Today, we repeat those concerns, and urge you to heed our request. We believe that the prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would set a harmful legal precedent and deliver a damaging blow to press freedom by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers.

Since President Biden took office, his administration has emphasized the important role that a free press plays in American democracy and around the world. In October, the Justice Department made changes to news media policy guidelines that generally prevent federal prosecutors from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information used in news gathering. We are grateful for these revisions, and urge you to further affirm the importance of press freedom by dropping the Justice Department’s indictment against Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S.

It merits noting that the Obama administration refrained from indicting Assange, recognizing the serious blow that this would bring to media freedom and the First Amendment more broadly. Furthermore, the U.S. prosecution of Assange undermines the country’s ability to defend journalists against repression by authoritarian and other rights-abusing regimes abroad.

It is time for the Biden administration to break from the Trump administration’s decision to indict Assange – a move that was hostile to the media and democracy itself. Correcting the course is essential to protect journalists’ ability to report freely on the United States without fear of retribution.

We again urge you to protect democratic values and human rights norms, including freedom of the press, by abandoning this relentless pursuit of Assange.

Sincerely,

American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International
Center for Constitutional Rights
Committee to Protect Journalists
Defending Rights & Dissent
Demand Progress Education Fund
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fight for the Future
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Free Press
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Index on Censorship
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
National Coalition Against Censorship
Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
PEN America
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
RootsAction.org
Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

December 8, 2022

Sent via email

Dear Attorney General Garland,

We, the undersigned coalition of press freedom, civil liberties, and international human rights organizations, write to express grave concern about the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal and extradition proceedings relating to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, under the Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

It is more than a year since our coalition sent a joint letter calling for the charges against Assange to be dropped. In June, then U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel approved Assange’s extradition to the United States, a decision that Assange’s legal team is in the process of appealing. Today, we repeat those concerns, and urge you to heed our request. We believe that the prosecution of Assange in the U.S. would set a harmful legal precedent and deliver a damaging blow to press freedom by opening the way for journalists to be tried under the Espionage Act if they receive classified material from whistleblowers.

Since President Biden took office, his administration has emphasized the important role that a free press plays in American democracy and around the world. In October, the Justice Department made changes to news media policy guidelines that generally prevent federal prosecutors from using subpoenas or other investigative tools against journalists who possess and publish classified information used in news gathering. We are grateful for these revisions, and urge you to further affirm the importance of press freedom by dropping the Justice Department’s indictment against Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S.

It merits noting that the Obama administration refrained from indicting Assange, recognizing the serious blow that this would bring to media freedom and the First Amendment more broadly. Furthermore, the U.S. prosecution of Assange undermines the country’s ability to defend journalists against repression by authoritarian and other rights-abusing regimes abroad.

It is time for the Biden administration to break from the Trump administration’s decision to indict Assange – a move that was hostile to the media and democracy itself. Correcting the course is essential to protect journalists’ ability to report freely on the United States without fear of retribution.

We again urge you to protect democratic values and human rights norms, including freedom of the press, by abandoning this relentless pursuit of Assange.

Sincerely,

American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International
Center for Constitutional Rights
Committee to Protect Journalists
Defending Rights & Dissent
Demand Progress Education Fund
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fight for the Future
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Free Press
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Index on Censorship
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
National Coalition Against Censorship
Partnership for Civil Justice Fund
PEN America
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
RootsAction.org
Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Before coming to power, Australia’s current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese had made mention of wishing to conclude the Assange affair.  In December 2019, before a gathering at the Chifley Research Centre, he described the publisher as a journalist, accepting that such figures should not be prosecuted for “doing their job”.  The following year, he also expressed the view that the “ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” served no evident “purpose” – “enough is enough”.

The same point has been reiterated by a number of crossbenchers in Australia’s parliament, represented with much distinction by the independent MP from Tasmania, Andrew Wilkie.  In a speech given earlier this year to a gathering outside Parliament House, the Member for Clark wondered if the UK and Australia had placed their relations with Washington at a premium so high as to doom Assange.  “The US wants to get even and for so long the UK and Australia have been happy to go along for the ride because they’ve put bilateral relationships with Washington ahead of the rights of a decent man.”

The new Australian government initially gave troubling indications that a tardy, wait-and-see approach had been adopted.  “My position,” Albanese told journalists soon after assuming office, “is that not all foreign affairs is best done with the loudhailer.”

Documents obtained under freedom of information also showed an acknowledgment by the Albanese government of assurances made by the United States that the WikiLeaks founder would have the chance to serve the balance of any prison sentence in Australia.  But anybody half-versed in the wiles and ways of realpolitik should know that the international prisoner transfer scheme is subordinate to the wishes of the relevant department granting it.  The US Department of Justice can receive the request from Assange, but there is nothing to say, as history shows, that the request will be agreed to.

Amidst all this, the campaign favouring Assange would not stall.  Human rights and press organisations globally have persistently urged his release from captivity and the cessation of the prosecution.  On November 28, The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel published a joint open letter titled, “Publishing is not a Crime.”

The five outlets who initially worked closely with WikiLeaks in publishing US State Department cables 12 years ago have not always been sympathetic to Assange.  Indeed, they admit to having criticised him for releasing the unredacted trove in 2011 and even expressed concern about his “attempt to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.”

Had the editors bothered to follow daily trial proceedings of the extradition case in 2020, they would have noted that the Guardian’s own journalists muddied matters by publishing the key to the encrypted files in a book on WikiLeaks.  A mortified Assange warned the State Department of this fact.  Cryptome duly uploaded the cables before WikiLeaks did.  The computer intrusion charge also withers before scrutiny, given that Chelsea Manning already had prior authorisation to access military servers without the need to hack the system.

But on this occasion, the publishers and editors were clear.  “Cablegate”, with its 251,000 State Department cables, “disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.”  They had “come together now to express [their] grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials.”

Very mindful of their own circumstances, the media outlets expressed their grave concerns about the use of the Espionage Act “which has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster.”  Such an indictment set “a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

The same day of the letter’s publication, Brazil’s President-elect Lula da Silva also added his voice to the encouraging chorus.  He did so on the occasion of meeting the WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell, an associate of the organisation, and expressed wishes that “Assange will be freed from his unjust imprisonment.”

The stage was now set for Albanese to make his intervention.  In addressing parliament on November 30 in response to a question from independent MP Monique Ryan, Albanese publicly revealed that he had, in fact, been lobbying the Biden administration for a cessation of proceedings against Assange.  “I have raised this personally with the representatives of the US government.”

The Australian PM was hardly going to muck in on the issue of the WikiLeaks agenda.  Australia remains one of the most secretive of liberal democracies, and agents of radical transparency are hardly appreciated.  (Witness, at present, a number of venal prosecutions against whistleblowers that have not been abandoned even with a change of government in May.)

Albanese drew a parallel with Chelsea Manning, the key figure who furnished WikiLeaks with classified military documents, received a stiff sentence for doing so, but had her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama.  “She is now able to participate freely in society.”  He openly questioned “the point of continuing this legal action, which could be caught up now for many years, into the future.”

For some years now, the plight of Assange could only be resolved politically.  In her address to the National Press Club in Canberra delivered in October this year, Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson acknowledged as much.  “This case needs an urgent political solution.  Julian does not have another decade to wait for a legal fix.”  This point was reiterated by Ryan in her remarks addressed to the prime minister.

The telling question here is whether Albanese will get any purchase with the Washington set.  While enjoying a reputation as a pragmatic negotiator able to reach agreements in tight circumstances, the pull of the US national security establishment may prove too strong.  “We now get to see Australia’s standing in Washington, valued ally or not,” was the guarded response of Assange’s father John Shipton.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Potential scenarios proposed by the CIA and Trump administration officials included crashing into a Russian vehicle carrying Assange in order to grab him, shooting the tires of an airplane carrying Assange in order to prevent its takeoff, and engaging in a gun battle through the streets of London. US officials asked “their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed,” Yahoo News reported, on the basis of testimony by one former senior administration official. Senior CIA officials went so far as to request “sketches” or “options” detailing methods to kill Assange.

Some of the former officials interviewed by Yahoo News dismissed the planning as far-fetched. It was “unhinged and ridiculous,” according to one former CIA official; another former senior counterintelligence official characterized the discussions as “just Trump being Trump.” Nevertheless, at least one senior official noted that there were discussions of “whether killing Assange was possible and whether it was legal.”

According to a 2020 Grayzone report, UC Global—a Spanish-based private security company hired by Ecuador to protect its London embassy, where Assange was living—spied on Assange and his contacts for the United States. Its targets included Assange’s legal team, US journalists, a US member of Congress, and the Ecuadoran diplomats whom UC Global had been hired to protect.

US plans to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange have received little to no establishment news coverage in the United States, other than scant summaries by Business Insider and The Verge, and tangential coverage by Reuters, each based on the original Yahoo News report. An October 2021 New York Times article made passing reference to the CIA’s plot to kidnap or kill Assange, but noted this extraordinary point only as part of the argument made by Assange’s lawyers to oppose his extradition to the United States. The story received more coverage in the United Kingdom, including reports in the Daily Mail, the Guardian, and the Independent. Al Jazeera ran an extensive story addressing the question, “Why isn’t the CIA’s plan to kidnap Julian Assange making more headlines?” Among US independent news outlets, Democracy Now! featured an interview with Michael Isikoff, one of the Yahoo News reporters who broke the story, and Jennifer Robinson, a human rights attorney who has been advising Julian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010. Rolling Stone and The Hill also published articles based on the original Yahoo News report.

Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff, “Kidnapping, Assassination and a London Shoot-Out: Inside the CIA’s Secret War Plans Against WikiLeaks,” Yahoo News, September 26, 2021.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)

The post #8 CIA Discussed Plans to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by acTVism Munich.

The geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China is reshaping life in the U.S. territory of Guam, where the already-massive military presence is set to expand as the Pentagon builds up its capabilities in the Pacific. “We are directly in the line of fire,” says Julian Aguon, a CHamoru writer and human rights lawyer, who describes the build-up of U.S. troops and military infrastructure on Guam as “nothing less than cataclysmic” for the Indigenous people. Aguon also talks about the ongoing fight for independence in Guam, which he says the U.S. has thwarted for more than a century. “The U.S. is a country that prefers, routinely, power over strength and living over letting live.” Aguon is the author of several acclaimed books, including, “The Fire This Time: Stories of Life Under U.S. Occupation” and “What We Bury at Night: Disposable Humanity.” His most recent book, released Tuesday, is titled “No Country for the Eight-Spot Butterflies.”

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

Notes:
Kevin Gosztola is an independent journalist, and the publisher of ShadowProof.  He’s also the author of “Guilty of Journalism: the Political Case Against Julian Assange,” to be published in early 2023 by The Censored Press. Rebecca Vincent works at Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit organization that advocates for press freedom worldwide.

The post Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival and an Update on Julian Assange appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.