ASSANGE UPDATE: JUNE 2023

 

JULIAN ASSANGE, who has been imprisoned for over four years at London’s maximum-security prison, Belmarsh, and prior to that was granted asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London and sequestered there for nearly 7 years  is now one step closer to being extradited to the United States to face a dog pile of legal charges filed under the 1917 “Espionage Act”. These trumped-up charges—Assange is not an American after all, so how can he be charged under a law meant for U.S. citizens? —are meant as a punishment and to send a message to others who may contemplate such journalistic ventures in the future. The American establishment sees Assange as an enemy and they wish to destroy him because he and the organization he founded, WikiLeaks, revealed their secrets of political malfeasance, election chicanery, wrong doings by elites, the military, politicos of all stripes--crimes that in another time the revelation of which would be seen as “necessary for the public good”.

TODAY, what the Washington establishment really wants is for Assange to die, to be whisked into the bowels of the U.S. prison system until either his health or despair overcomes him. They want him silenced. Beaten.

AND HIS OFFENCE? There's many: He exposed war crimes committed by American forces in the “Afghan War Logs”, and similar cases from Iraq including the infamous “Collateral Damage” video, leaked by Chelsea Manning. It is perhaps the most vivid and shocking evidence ever published by WikiLeaks. To be clear: Assange was its publisher. He was not a spy for Russia, nor had he hacked into government archives. He received leaked information from whistle-blowers in his role as a journalist. EXPOSING such illicit secrets is demonstrably in the public good and is necessary to maintain a healthy democracy.  He and his organization exposed the CIA’s illegal cyber-warfare program designed to spy on American citizens in the “Vault 7” revelations. 

 

Drawing by Gitmo "Forever Prisoner" Abu Zubaydah

WikiLeaks brought to light the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys at Guantánamo Bay’s detention centre. America’s role in the bombing and drone campaigns in Yemen came to light through WikiLeaks’s reporting. Assange gleaned from confidential sources how Hillary Clinton, then the American Secretary of State, was complicit in the overthrow of Honduras’ democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, in 2009. The sleezy story of huge  bribes “speaking fees” paid to Hillary Clinton from Goldman Sachs to the tune of $600,000 revealed how entwined the corporate and political sectors are in America. There are many other stories WikiLeaks has covered over the years. 

ASSANGE is charged with eighteen counts of violating the American 1917 Espionage Act”. The Act "... was intended to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment, to prevent insubordination in the military, and to prevent the support of United States enemies during wartime.” (Wikipedia) It also was used to curb dissident voices protesting America’s entry into WWI. It used the power of the Postmaster General’s office to confiscate pamphlets, newsletters, etc., deemed to hinder the war effort. Known and suspected foreign activists were arrested and imprisoned using the new powers under the Espionage Act. The socialist union organizer and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison under the "Sedition Act"* of 1918 (His sentence was later commuted by presidential decree.)  The Espionage Act was used with less frequency during WWII and infrequently thereafter, with exceptions such as the high-profile prosecutions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who were executed in 1953 for smuggling atomic bomb secrets to the USSR), and in the 1971 failed attempt to convict “Pentagon Papers” whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. The criminal activity orchestrated from the White House (breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrist’s office to gather material they could possibly use against him), angered the presiding judge who dismissed all charges against Ellsberg.   

 

DURING the Obama administration (2009-17), the Espionage Act was used to go after whistle-blowers in the nation’s security services and military. It was used more frequently under Obama than by any other U.S. administration up to that point. Chelsea Manning was charged with espionage in 2010, initially receiving a decades-long jail term (until her sentence was commuted by Obama in 2017). Similarly, WikiLeaks publisher,Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, was charged with “violating the Espionage Act by seeking classified information. Assange did not want to be at the mercy of a judicial system where the cards were stacked against him, so in London he requested asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy. He remained there until Ecuador (illegally under international law) withdrew their protection. Then he was sent to the maximum security Belmarsh prison where he waits to see if he will be deported to the United States to stand trial for espionage.  The case has been described as having significant implications for press freedom and First Amendment rights under the American constitution.

 

    Julian Assange in court behind glass partition

 MANY ASK: Without courageous whistle-blowers exposing wrongdoing in government and elsewhere, and without courageous journalists, and publishers willing to distribute such information, how will instances of government corruption and maleficence ever be addressed? After all, mea culpas are rare creatures in the worlds of politics and big business. 

The relentless persecution prosecution of Julian Assange by  U.S. and British governments, and the chilling effect this has had on whistle-blowers and publishers around the globe, calls to mind the spectre of a fourth estate, weakened and fearful of retaliation from authorities and, as a consequence, refusing to publish any whistle-blower disclosures in the future.

In 1971, the New York Times appealed in court to quash an injunction, made by the Federal Government, to cease publication of what came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers”. These records that Ellsberg had painstakingly photocopied (nearly 7,000!) came from a secret government report on the true history¹ of America’s involvement in Viet Nam. The court agreed with the Times’ lawyers—that the government had no right to stop a news organization from publishing leaked material that Ellsberg and his colleague Anthony Russo had uncovered. In his decision, Judge Murray Gurfein said he had

 

…rejected the administration's request for an injunction, writing that "[t]he security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.”

 

HOWEVER, the Court of Appeals reversed Gurfein’s decision and allowed the government’s injunction against publication to stand. But a similar case at the time in Washington D.C. ruled in favour of the Washington Post’s right to publish the “Pentagon Papers”. In turn, this discrepancy in rulings between the two lower courts brought the case before the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled in favour of press freedom and the press’s right to publish material that was in the public’s interest to know.

IN these censoress and restless times, it is difficult to imagine such a ruling happening today.

 

JULIAN ASSANGE may have only weeks, even days left before he is extradited to the United States to face charges of espionage and to begin what will amount to legal torture at the hands of America’s ‘justice’ system. His lawyers, just a few days ago, lost their appeal to the British High Court to dismiss the U.S. State Department’s extradition request for Assange to be sent to the United States for trial. He has one more appeal before the High Court and, as a last resort, may appeal to the European court of human rights, but both courts are unlikely rule in his favour. In the United States, Assange faces 175 years in prison for exposing government crimes, human rights violations and extra-judicial killings on the part of America’s political and military sectors. And for his ‘crime’ of revealing their sordid secrets, he will be sentenced to ‘death by a thousand cuts’ in courts of injustice and a lifetime to spend in a prison cell.

AS CHRIS HEDGES says in a recent column, if Assange goes down before the Kafkaesque manipulations of a legal system thoroughly corrupted by political agendas and corporate money, journalists everywhere can expect to be harried, even ruined by authorities, simply for doing their job and bringing to light government corruption and malfeasance wherever it lay.  The Assange story is  a shameful chapter in modern American history and the aftereffects of a guilty verdict will reverberate globally.   

 

“The extradition of Julian will be the next step in the slow-motion execution of the publisher and founder of WikiLeaks and one of the most important journalists of our generation. It will ensure that Julian spends the rest of his life in a U.S. prison. It will create legal precedents that will criminalize any investigation into the inner workings of power, even by citizens from another country. It will be a body blow to our amemic democracy...” (Chris Hedges, sheerpost.com June 17/22)

 

Cheers, Jake.

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* The 1918 Sedition Act  "...extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offences, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds." (Wikipedia)

 

 1. The "Pentagon Papers", officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defence Vietnam Task Force, is a United States Department of Defence history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

 

 

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