Here is the youtube in which Chris Hedges interviewed, on April 30, the journalist Richard Medhurst about Medhurst’s being punished-without-trial and threatened with up to five years of legal imprisonment of him under Section 12(1a) of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 because he had reported honestly about the wars in Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine. Also because he refuses to tell the police whom his unidentified sources are or give them his passwords so that they could then use his computer, mobile phone, and the other devices that they had seized and impounded from his abode in August 2024 in order for police to then deal with those people in the same way they’ve been dealing with him since August last year. The U.S.-UK-Israel empire used their Austrian Government to seize him and charge Medhurst, who is a Christian, as being a member of Hamas, so that Medhurst is now under investigation in both the UK and Austria as aiding terrorists for no other reason than his reporting on Palestine and Lebanon. In addition, his criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has made him a target who could potentially face up to 14 years imprisonment in the UK and another 10 years in Austria. Of course, he has not been convicted of anything, and he hasn’t even been charged with anything; and, so, actually throughout the U.S.-UK-Israel empire, a person can spend decades in prison without being convicted of anything at all.
This exemplifies that there are many reasons why both journalists and social scientists might be inclined to deceive their audiences. Sometimes a presenter’s employer selected and hired its employees for them to deceive the public in certain ways; but, also, the targeted public is sometimes a specific culture or group of believers who are aiming to have their group’s prejudices confirmed, and who aren’t interested in learning any truth that contradicts what the group believes. On all three sides of that — the employers, the employees, and also the audiences — some audiences – and also some employers – might be disinclined to approve of, or to employ, presenters who report truths that contradict what that group wants to believe. Lying is often required in order to succeed. There are many motivations for ‘news’-media and social ‘scientists’ to mislead or deceive their public. And the public, in such a culture of fear pervading, might be inclined to “go along in order to get along.”
On 19 October 2021, a Trump-supporter, “Liz Harrington” — through whom the former U.S. President Trump was then sending out tweets because of Jack Dorsey’s Twitter having cancelled and removed Trump’s account — issued, from Trump, a tweet, saying: “Isn’t it terrible that a Republican Congressman from Nebraska just got indicted for possibly telling some lies to investigators about campaign contributions, when half of the United States Congress lied about made up scams, and when Mark Zuckerberg, in my opinion a criminal, is allowed to spend $500 million and therefore able to change the course of a Presidential election, and nothing happens to them. Comey lied, Schiff lied, Crooked Hillary lied, McCabe lied, the two lovers, Peter and Lisa, lied. They all lied having to do with Russia, Russia, Russia, because they knew it was a SCAM — and they made up fairy tales about me knowing how badly it would hurt the U.S.A. — and nothing happens to them. Is there no justice in our country?” Perhaps all of what he said there was true — and, if so, then the U.S. Government is corrupt to so extreme an extent as to be entirely untrustworthy (no real democracy at all). In other words (and this has nothing to do with whether or not a person is or was a supporter of Trump): selective ‘justice’ is no real justice, at all; it is merely ‘justice’ that’s based upon at least one lie — and that is, instead, injustice. To apply justice — like to apply science — requires 100% truth, no compromises, no myths. This is the sound (scientific) reason why, in a U.S. trial, a witness is required to say, before testifying, that his/her testimony will be “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and the testifier can subsequently be charged with having lied-under-oath if anything in that person’s testimony becomes subsequently proven to have been factually false, about what that person had actually seen or heard, and known at the time of that testimony. In science, the demand is 100% truth, and anything less than that is instead mere propaganda. Selective ‘justice’ is no justice, at all. This is true not only nationally but internationally. Any science demands 100% truth. That’s what it strives for. When the Government instead SUPPRESSES truth, it is a police-state.
However, the master-lie — the post-1945 Big Lie that pervades ‘news’-reporting and ‘historical’ accounts — deserves to be identified and exposed first of all. This Big Lie is that the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel, are democracies. None of them actually is. All are rigid aristocracies, or “oligarchies.” Although the U.S., UK, and Israel declare themselves to be democracies, examples of their flouting international laws, and committing national atrocities, abound. On the level of international war crimes, the lie-based invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003 is one well-known example of that. Regarding a merely personal example, Julian Assange was in various forms of imprisonment by UK for over ten years without his ever having been convicted of anything except that in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for jumping bail (on sexual charges against him that even the alleged accusers themselves denied were true — the Government wanted them to lie in court, but they finally decided not to). And yet he went into solitary confinement (“23 hours a day locked in their cells”) in a super-max British prison, because the U.S. Government wouldn’t stop its demand that he be extradited to the U.S. (and killed here, instead of in Britain). His only ‘crime’ was his publishing only truths, especially truths that cut to the core of exposing the regime’s constant lying. So, this blatant and illegal injustice against an international hero (virtually everywhere except in the United States) is today one prominent disproof of the U.S. and UK lies to the effect that they are democracies. These and many other such examples in ‘the land of the free’, and in America’s and Britain’s ‘democracies’, during the post-1945 period, display the lie. On 26 September 2021, Yahoo News reported (based largely on reporting in Madrid’s El Pais on 5 January 2021) that the Trump Administration felt so embarrassed by some information that had been Wikileaked, they drew up detailed plans to kidnap Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to “rendition” him for possible execution by America. The plans, including “meetings with authorities or approvals signed by the president,” were finally stopped at the National Security Council, as being too risky. “Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred ‘at the highest levels’ of the Trump administration”, even without any legal basis to try him in the United States. So: the Trump Administration prepared an indictment against Assange (to legalize their extradition-request), and the indictment became unsealed or made public on the same day, 11 April 2019, when Ecuador’s Government allowed UK’s Government (assisted by the Israeli and Amrican billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who was Donald Trump’s biggest single campaign donor) to drag Assange out into UK super-max solitary-confinement imprisonment, and this subsequently produced lie-based U.S. & UK tussles over how to prevent Assange from ever again being able to reach the public, either by continuing his solitary confinement, or else by, perhaps, poisoning him, or else convicting him of something and then executing him. On 4 January 2021, a British judge, Vanessa Baraitser, in a 132-page decision, nixed Assange’s defense case: “I reject the defence submissions concerning staying extradition [to U.S.] as an abuse of the process of this court.” That conclusion was reaffirmed on 10 December 2021 in a 27-page ruling by England’s Chief Justice, Ian Burnett, Baron of Maldon. The BBC bannered “Julian Assange can be extradited to the US, court rules”. The lower court judge, and then the Chief Justice, in fact, arbitrarily abused Assange, by accepting at face value the promises by the Trump Administration not to drive Assange to suicide in the American prison-system (which British judges held to be barbaric compared to their own). Earlier, Judge Baraitser’s handling of Assange’s only ‘trial’, which was his extradition hearing (he never had a trial), was an absolute travesty, which would have been expected in Hitler’s courts, and which makes clear that UK’s courts can be just as bad as Nazi courts had been. However, the U.S. regime’s efforts to grab Assange continued on until 25 June 2024, when the Biden Addministration suddenly headlined “WikiLeaks Founder Pleads Guilty and Is Sentenced for Conspiring to Obtain and Disclose Classified National Defense Information”, and announced that they were setting Assange free, because Assange pled guilty (of what had actually been great journalism). The CNN news-report about that huge come-down from the Administration’s prior consistently hard-line policy against Assange indicated that the new, less-right-wing, Government in Australia (Assange being an Australian) was one of many factors that were giving Biden cold feet about the prospect of his feeding Assange to the U.S. intelligence community wolves who were hungry for him and might have made his destruction as bloody as possible. Perhaps Biden knew that the prior Trump Administration’s promises to treat Assange well were actually impossible for the ‘Justice’ Department and America’s spooks to fulfill on, and would thus end up making Biden himself look bad around the world. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the overwhelmingly compliant U.S. Congress, all are to blame for that dictatorial regime’s pursuit against this champion of truth-telling; and the same blame applies to the leadership in UK. Blatantly, both America and England lie in order to refer to themselves as being democracies. In fact, America has the world’s highest percentage of its residents in prisons (but recently El Salvador has taken over that title). It’s the world’s #1 police-state — especially because America’s empire covers much of the world. Is this because Americans are worse than the people in other countries, or is it instead because the thousand or so individuals (America’s billionaires) who collectively control the nation’s Government are, themselves, especially psychopathic? America has been scientifically examined more than any other country has, in regards to whether it is an aristocracy, or instead a democracy, and the clear and consistent finding is that it’s an aristocracy. And it clearly is that at the federal level. (Here is a video summarizing the best single study of that, and it finds America to be an aristocracy, because it’s controlled by the richest few; and here is a much more popular video, declaring America to be a democracy, saying that this is so because it’s capitalist and because no capitalist nation can even possibly be a dictatorship. Oh, Hitler’s regime wasn’t capitalist? Hirohito’s wasn’t? Mussolini’s wasn’t? They ALL were. But it is the latter video — the false one — that is the more-popular one.) And even Norway’s aristocracy was part of this scandal against Assange.
However, increasingly in recent times, people around the world have been coming to recognize these realities. Here are some examples of such findings from international pollings:
But, in any case (and even if the public don’t already recognize this fact): we cannot have truth in history, news-reporting, or any of the social-science fields, unless and until the reality that both the U.S. and UK (and, also Israel) are imperialistic dictatorships — aristocracies, instead of democracies — is publicly acknowledged, not hidden and lied-about (such as political ‘scientists’ and ‘journalists’ do), sometimes by philosophical debates about what the terms (“democracy” and “dictatorship”) even mean. That recognition within the social-science fields will be a prerequisite to those fields’ knowing historical truth, today. And knowing historical truth is the basis of all science. But in a police-state the truth is suppressed, instead of made public.
NOTE: except for the first paragraph here, this article was taken from my America’s Empire of Evil book.
A United States judge dismissed a lawsuit pursued by four American attorneys and journalists, who alleged that the CIA and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo spied on them while they were visiting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy.
“The subject matter of this litigation,” Judge John Koeltl determined, “is subject to the state secrets privilege in its entirety.” Any answer to the allegations against the CIA would “reveal privileged information.”
Few publications followed this case as closely as The Dissenter. It unfolded at the same time that the U.S. government pursued the extradition of Assange, making any outcome potentially significant.
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has been waging a legal battle for seven years against the Crown Prosecution Service to discover the truth about a CPS claim that it deleted a number of documents Maurizi has sought in a Freedom of Information request about the case of Julian Assange.
Now a judge on the London First-tier Tribunal has ruled that the CPS must explain to Maurizi what it knows about when, why and how the documents were allegedly destroyed. The Jan. 2 ruling was first reported by Maurizi’s newspaper il Fatto Quotidiano on Friday.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Europe’s foremost human rights body, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution on October 2 formally declaring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a political prisoner. The Council of Europe, which represents 64 nations, expressed deep concern at the harsh treatment suffered by Assange, which has had a “chilling effect” on journalists and…
When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.
The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers could also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.
During his tenure with Al Jazeera, for a time one of the funkiest outfits on the media scene, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation. Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr.
Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic. It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate, a measure that does little to encourage the fierce independence one hopes from either. Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.
With little wonder, Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck. Like so many of his craft, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist. This was stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. It ignored that most obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.
It is for this reason that Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917, intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.
In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) evidence of that ongoing fixation remained. Lazily avoiding the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online,” thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”
It was precisely this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange. Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.
Greste now wishes, with dictatorial sensibility, to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia. Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July, listing Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, as directors.
Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of Executive Director.
A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities. As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains, “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange-hue, a point well spotted by Mary Kostakidis, no mean journalist herself and not one keen on being straitjacketed by yet another proposed code.
Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism”. How will this be done? By showing accreditation – the seal of approval, as it were – from Journalism Australia. In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work. How utterly noble of them.
Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff. Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”
This is a shoddy business that should cause chronic discomfort, and demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate. Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment.
It was good to hear that voice again. A voice of provoking interest that pitter patters, feline across a parquet, followed by the usual devastating conclusion. Julian Assange’s last public address was made in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There, he was a guest vulnerable to the capricious wishes of changing governments. At Belmarsh Prison in London, he was rendered silent, his views conveyed through visitors, legal emissaries and his family.
The hearing in Strasbourg on October 1, organised by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), arose from concerns raised in a report by Iceland’s Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, in which she expressed the view that Assange’s case was “a classic example of ‘shooting the messenger’.” She found it “appalling that Mr Assange’s prosecution was portrayed as if it was supposed to bring justice to some unnamed victims the existence of whom has never been proven, whereas perpetrators of torture or arbitrary detention enjoy absolute impunity.”
His prosecution, Ævarsdóttir went onto explain, had been designed to obscure and deflect the revelations found in WikiLeaks’ disclosures, among them abundant evidence of war crimes committed by US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, instances of torture and arbitrary detention in the infamous Guantánamo Bay camp facility, illegal rendition programs implicating member states of the Council of Europe and unlawful mass surveillance, among others.
A draft resolution was accordingly formulated, expressing, among other things, alarm at Assange’s treatment and disproportionate punishment “for engaging in activities that journalists perform on a daily basis” which made him, effectively, a political prisoner; the importance of holding state security and intelligence services accountable; the need to “urgently reform the 1917 Espionage Act” to include conditional maliciousness to cause harm to the security of the US or aid a foreign power and exclude its application to publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.
Assange’s full testimony began with reflection and foreboding: the stripping away of his self in incarceration, the search, as yet, for words to convey that experience, and the fate of various prisoners who died through hanging, murder and medical neglect. While filled with gratitude by the efforts made by PACE and the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, not to mention innumerable parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, even the Pope, none of their interventions “should have been necessary.” But they proved invaluable, as “the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.”
The legal system facing Assange was described as encouraging an “unrealisable justice”. Choosing freedom instead of purgatorial process, he could not seek it, the plea deal with the US government effectively barring his filing of a case at the European Court of Human Rights or a freedom of information request. “I am not free today because the system worked,” he insisted. “I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”
When founded, WikiLeaks was intended to enlighten people about the workings of the world. “Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.” Power can be held to account by those informed, justice sought where there is none. The organisation did not just expose assassinations, torture, rendition and mass surveillance, but “the policies, the agreements and the structures behind them.”
Since leaving Belmarsh prison, Assange rued the abstracting of truth. It seemed “less discernible”. Much ground had been “lost” in the interim; truth had been battered, “undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship.”
Much of the critique offered by Assange focused on the source of power behind any legal actions. Laws, in themselves, “are just pieces of paper and they can be reinterpreted for political expedience”. The ruling class dictates them and reinterprets or changes them depending on circumstances.
In his case, the security state “was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation of the US constitution,” thereby denuding the expansive, “black and white” effect of the First Amendment. Mike Pompeo, when director of the Central Intelligence Agency, simply lent on Attorney General William Barr, himself a former CIA officer, to seek the publisher’s extradition and re-arrest of Chelsea Manning. Along the way, Pompeo directed the agency to draw up plans of abduction and assassination while targeting Assange’s European colleagues and his family.
The US Department of Justice, Assange could only reflect, cared little for moderating tonic of legalities – that was something to be postponed to a later date. “In the meantime, the deterrent effect that it seeks, the retributive actions that it seeks, have had their effect.” A “dangerous new global legal position” had been established as a result: “Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights.”
PACE had, before it, an opportunity to set norms, that “the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all”. “The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.”
A spectator, reader or listener might leave such an address deflated. But it is fitting that a man subjected to the labyrinthine, life-draining nature of several legal systems should be the one to exhort to a commitment: that all do their part to keep the light bright, “that the pursuit of truth will live on, and the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.”
WikiLeaks founder says he pleaded ‘guilty to journalism’ in deal for his release and calls for protection of press freedom
Julian Assange has said he chose freedom “over unrealisable justice” as he described his plea deal with US authorities and urged European lawmakers to act to protect freedom of expression in a climate with “more impunity, more secrecy [and] more retaliation for telling the truth”.
In his first public statement since the plea deal in June ended his nearly 14 years of prison, embassy confinement and house arrest in the UK, the WikiLeaks founder argued that legal protections for whistleblowers and journalists “only existed on paper” or “were not effective in any remotely reasonable time”.
Deception, lies and secrecy — including lies to cover secrecy — characterize authoritarian regimes. However, the politics of lying and official secrecy are no less common in democratic governments. For example, thanks to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg releasing the Pentagon Papers, the public learned of the truth about the Vietnam War: U.S. military officials were systematically lying to Congress…
WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has finally put an end to his 14-year-long judicial persecution by the United States and the United Kingdom, thanks to the prowess of his legal team and the tenacity of his family members, but also thanks to an assist from the British High Court and the support of millions of activists around the world. Fifty-thousand people, for example…
The sordid story on the CIA-backed operation against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange during his time cramped in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy continues to froth and thicken. US officials have persisted in their reticent attitude, refusing to cooperate with Spain’s national high court, the Audiencia Nacional, regarding its investigation into the Agency’s espionage operations against the publisher, spearheaded by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global.
Since 2019, requests for assistance regarding the matter, including querying public statements by former CIA director Mike Pompeo and former head of counterintelligence, William Evanina, along with information mustered by the relevant Senate Intelligence Committee, have been made to US authorities by judges José de la Mata and Santiago Pedraz. These have been treated with a glacial silence.
On December 12, 2023, the General Subdirectorate of International Legal Cooperation furnished the US authorities “an express announcement” whether such judicial assistance would be denied.
Spain’s liaison magistrate in the US, María de las Heras García, duly revealed that the tardiness to engage had been occasioned by ongoing legal proceedings being conducted before the US District Court of the Southern District of New York. As Courtney E. Lee, trial attorney at the US Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs explained, supplying Spain’s national high court with such information would “interfere” with “ongoing US litigation”. Hardly a satisfactory response, given requests made prior to the putative litigation.
The litigation in question involved a legal suit filed in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York by civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler, media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass.
In their August 2022 action, the complainants alleged that they had been the subject of surveillance during visits to Assange during his embassy tenure, conduct said to be in breach of the Fourth Amendment. The plaintiffs accordingly argued that this entitled them to money damages and injunctive relief from former CIA director Mike Pompeo, the director of the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global David Morales, and UC Global itself.
On December 19, 2023 District Judge John G. Koeltl granted, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss while denying other portions of it. The judge accepted the record of hostility shown by Pompeo to WikiLeaks openly expressed by his April 2017 speech and acknowledged that “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.”
The litigants found themselves on solid ground with Koeltl in the finding that they had standing to sue the intelligence organisation. “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.” The plaintiffs would “have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling” if the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices were found to be unlawful.
The plaintiffs also convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.” But they failed to convince Koeltl that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with Assange, given the rather odd reasoning that they were aware the publisher was already being “surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.” Nor could such an expectation arise given the acceptance of video surveillance of government buildings. Problematically, the judge also held that those surrendering devices and passports at an Embassy reception desk “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”
Sadly, Pompeo was spared the legal lash and could not be held personally accountable for violating the constitutional rights of US citizens. “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.”
In February this year, US Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant US Attorney Jean-David Barnea clarified the Agency’s line of response in a submission to Judge Koeltl. “Any factual inquiry into these allegations – whether they are true or not – would implicate classified information, as it would require the CIA to reveal what intelligence-gathering activities it did or did not engage in, among other things.” As the agency could not “publicly reveal the very facts over which it is seeking authorization to assert the State Secrets Privilege, it is not able to respond to the relevant allegations in the complaint or to respond to any discovery requests pertaining to those allegations.”
Richard Roth, an attorney representing the four litigants, found this reasoning bemusing in remarks made to The Dissenter. “From our vantage point, we cannot imagine how there is any privilege at all that relates to proprietary information of American citizens who visited the Ecuadorian embassy.”
In April, CIA director William J. Burns sought to further draw the veil in submitting a “classified declaration” defining “the scope of the information” concerning the case, claiming it satisfactorily explained “the harm that reasonably could be expected to result from the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.” For those in such lines of work, alleged harm has no quantum or sense of proportion.
Again, Roth was unimpressed, issuing a reminder that this case had nothing to do with “terroristic threats to destroy America that were uncovered through technology or a program that must never be disclosed or else the threat will succeed.” The case, importantly, concerned the CIA’s search and seizure of cell phone and laptop devices in the possession of “respected American lawyers and journalists, who committed no crime, and who have now stood up against the loss of liberties and the government’s intrusion into their private lives by copying the contents of their cell phones and laptops.”
As long as the Agency stifles and drags out proceedings on the grounds of this misused privilege, the Justice Department is bound to remain inert in the face of the Spanish investigation.
The First Amendment assures us of a right to free speech.
It does not, unfortunately, explicitly assure us of a right to not be lied to by our government and its various officials. Any hope of holding government officials accountable for their lies rests with the political process, in the voting booths and through the impeachment process, which themselves have become so ineffective as to offer little real hope of transparency, accountability or reform.
We have been lied to so much, for so long, and on every subject, by government officials of every stripe that political lies have become our norm. It says something about the sorry state of our nation and the low bar we have set for those we elect to represent us.
However, although there are few consequences for government officials who lie to the public, the Deep State continues to wage war on those who challenge its lies, half-truths and obfuscations.
The Deep State has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.
Activists, journalists and whistleblowers alike continue to be terrorized, traumatized, tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.
In an age of prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, this is a new kind of tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State, whose reach has gone global.
What happened to Assange was intended to send a message to anyone who dares to speak truth to power: don’t even consider it.
In true Orwellian fashion, the government would have us believe that it is Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war machine’s seedy underbelly.
This is how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.
Make no mistake: the government is waging war on journalists and whistleblowers for disclosing information relating to government misconduct that is within the public’s right to know.
Yet we desperately need greater scrutiny and transparency, not less.
Indeed, transparency is one of those things the shadow government fears the most.
Why? Because it might arouse the distracted American populace to actually exercise their rights and resist the tyranny that is inexorably asphyxiating their freedoms.
This need to shed light on government actions—to make the obscure, least transparent reaches of government accessible and accountable—was a common theme for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who famously coined the phrase, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Of course, transparency is futile without a populace that is informed, engaged and prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law.
Manning goes on to suggest that the U.S. “needs legislation to protect the public’s right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US government.”
Technically, we’ve already got such legislation on the books: the First Amendment.
The First Amendment gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Assange and Manning.
The challenge is holding the government accountable to obeying the law.
Yet this isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.
Following the current downward trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” is relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
Eventually, we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of the government.
All of us are in danger.
Partisan politics have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.
We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.
Never forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive, compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct, and don’t step out of line.
What the First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are individuals such as Julian Assange who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
After more than a decade of persecution, Julian Assange has returned home to Australia a free man. He almost didn’t make it. The FBI and the Pentagon considered every available means—legal and otherwise—to prevent Julian from winning his freedom. Chip Gibbons and Kevin Gosztola return to The Real News to discuss the inside story of Julian’s fight for freedom, and the monsters who tried to crush him.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network Podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And I’m Eleanor Goldfield, a journalist, filmmaker, and the co-host of the Project Censored radio show. And I’m really excited to be teaming up with Max to co-host this very special episode of the Real News Podcast today.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Before we get going today, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. We have a small but incredible team of folks who are fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today, it really makes a difference. Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, founder of WikiLeaks is finally free. On June 24th, Assange left Belmarsh Prison in London, a maximum security prison where he is been incarcerated for over the past five years, awaiting what many expected to be an extradition order to the United States. Assange then boarded a plane and was flown to the island of Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Western Pacific. There he was taken to a federal courthouse where he pled guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. As part of the plea deal, he was sentenced to time served in Belmarsh, and he was released to return home to his native Australia, finally, which he did on Wednesday, June 26th.
Eleanor Goldfield:
So firstly, there’s absolutely no question that Assange’s freedom is thanks to the tireless efforts of his family and tens of thousands of people around the world, including in no small part to our guests today who work to raise awareness and support for Julian. The US government deserves exactly zero thanks for this, much like with the case of Chelsea Manning. It is no evidence of benevolence or justice to free the person whom you wrongfully imprisoned such moments as these are evidence of the power of the people. Let’s take that time to celebrate and recognize this win, a sustaining reminder for the many fights that we have before us. Fights that Julian’s work has bolstered and illuminated. Indeed, Julian’s contributions to our movements are hard to quantify, as one of our guests on this show, Kevin Gosztola covers in his book on Julian called Guilty of Journalism.
There is no issue, be it government corruption, climate change, or the military industrial complex which WikiLeaks has not shed light upon and given us organizers and journalists and indeed citizens vital facts and fuel for both our struggle against oppression and our push to build a better future. At the same time, Julian’s work cannot easily be cast in a left-right paradigm. It’s far more elegant and indeed simple. It’s just about the truth and the right of we the people to know what governments do in our name as journalists, as organizers, as citizens, and really just human beings, we’re excited and relieved to know that Julian is free. And at the same time, we are intensely aware of what this case against Julian, and not least of all the guilty plea, mean for our dwindling access to a free press. Something that our guests will speak more to.
Maximillian Alvarez:
As Chip Gibbons journalist, researcher, and policy director of the nonprofit advocacy organization, Defending Rights in Dissent. And another one of our guests today wrote for Jacobin on June 27th. “There is zero question that Assange going free is cause for celebration. Assange is a journalist who exposed US war crimes. As a result of this work, he has suffered vicious and relentless persecution at the hands of the US government. Yet Assange’s freedom was attained in a bittersweet victory. Until the very end the US government refused to drop its claim that basic journalism can constitute a violation of the Espionage Act. A plea deal does not set a legal precedent, but the steep price extracted from Assange will undeniably have a chilling effect on journalism”. So what effect will the US government’s relentless persecution of Julian Assange and this plea deal have on journalism worldwide, the people who produce it and all of us who depend on it, and what effect will it have on the world we live in and how we live in it?
What effects has it already had? As this bitter, twisted, monumental 14 year saga comes to an end we want to take some time to not only walk through the latest news and the conditions under which Assange finally secured his freedom, but to appreciate what this all means. We need to also reflect on the real substance of the US government’s persecution of Julian Assange on what this case was “about” in the popular mind and what it was actually about and on what our response to all of it or lack thereof these past 14 years says about us, our media and the society we live in.
Eleanor Goldfield:
And to do that, Max and I have brought in two incredible guests who have covered and publicized this case and advocated for Julian’s freedom for years when so few others would. Kevin Gosztola is the author of Guilty of Journalism, the Political Case against Julian Assange and the editor of the Dissenter Newsletter, which regularly covers whistleblowing, press freedom, and government secrecy. He’s one of the few reporters to report on both Chelsea Manning’s Court Martial and the extradition proceedings against Assange. Kevin has also been a frequent guest on the Project Censored Radio Show and indeed Guilty of Journalism comes to you from the Censored press collaboration with seven stories. Chip Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights and Dissent, where he has advised multiple congressional offices on reforming the Espionage Act. He covered Assange’s extradition for Jacobin Magazine and he is currently working on a book on the history of FBI political surveillance for Verso books. Kevin, Chip, thanks so much for being here.
Kevin Gosztola:
Thank you.
Chip Gibbons:
My pleasure. My pleasure.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, gents, it really is an honor to have you both here on a rare occasion when we do have some good news, albeit we will get into the details of how good, how bad this news is. But after this 14 year long saga in which y’all have been fighting so hard, and of course Julian and his family have been fighting relentlessly against the onslaught they faced as Julian was persecuted by the United States government. This is indeed a cause for celebration, a moment to reflect, and we are going to talk about your impressions and larger reflections when we get to the end of this conversation here.
But I wanted to start where we are right now and jump right into the context of the news that people are hearing about over the past couple days and weeks. Now, back in February, Real News viewers watched our on-the-ground coverage from London, where the high court heard the Assange team’s request for permission to appeal his extradition order to the US where he faced 18 charges under the Espionage Act, despite not being a US citizen. So let’s quickly bring folks up to speed on how we got from there to here. Also, like I said, we want to take some time to get your larger takeaway thoughts and reflections at the end of the conversation but for now, tell us about where you were when you heard the news and what was going through your mind at that moment. So Chip, why don’t we start with you then, Kevin, we’ll go right to you.
Chip Gibbons:
Sure. So in February, Julian Assange’s defense team requested nine different grounds for appeal. I believe it was nine. Each of these grounds of appeal are tied to a specific point in UK Extradition Law or European Human Rights Law. But at the heart, what they were arguing was that Julian Assange was a journalist and that it violated who was being persecuted for exposing state criminality. He got the information from Chelsea Manning, a whistleblower, and that this was impermissible to extradite him to the United States. They raised a number of issues from the fact that it would violate his free expression rights to be tried for his journalism, for exposing war crimes, that it would be a political offense. And the UK US Extradition Treaty is very clear, you cannot extradite someone for a political offense. And they also made a number of arguments about the fairness of the trial he would receive, that he might be prejudiced as a result of his nationality, and that he might face the death penalty.
The UK judges heard these nine arguments and they rejected the vast majority of them as grounds for appeal. They found some very limited grounds for appeal. First, the lack of death penalty assurances. Under UK statutory law, you cannot be extradited if you will face the death penalty. Death penalty assurances are routine for the US because most of the world doesn’t share our belief that governments can kill their citizens. So they have to offer those types of assurances if they want to actually extradite people. The other two assurances came from comments that Gordon Kromberg, one of the lead prosecutors in the case made. Kromberg is a notorious figure. He was involved in the Daniel Hale prosecution. He was involved in one of the many attacks on Sami Al-Arian, a Muslim civil rights Palestinian civil rights activist, who has since been deported from this country thanks to the government attacks on him.
And he has a history of making really inflammatory anti-Muslim comments. I believe he’s also a very sort of die-hard Zionist who has a personal blog where he refers to the occupied Palestinian Territories, Judea and Samaria. And he just has a real history of making inflammatory remarks, which have led a lot of people to question why the US government lets him handle sensitive cases. He told the British courts in an affidavit that Assange would have a really fair trial in the US because he could challenge his indictment for violating the First Amendment, for violating the Fifth Amendment, saying the Espionage Act was too vague. And then he came in with, but of course the US government wouldn’t accept these arguments. And he listed, and this is where he made his mistake, he listed all of the areas where they would challenge them. Including that Julian Assange as a foreign national might not be entitled to First Amendment rights, at least with respect to national defense information.
And Julian Assange’s legal team seized on this. And they said, if he can’t rely on the First Amendment, that’s a free expression violation and he would be prejudiced as a result of his nationality. And these two UK judges couldn’t find anything in violation of freedom of expression for prosecuting Julian Assange for exposing war crimes. They said all but three of the charges brought against him had no free expression nexus. That’s of course not true. And of those three that did have free expression nexus, the information wasn’t in the public interest to share. But in spite of that, they said if he can’t have First Amendment rights as a foreigner, he would have his right to free expression violated and he would potentially be prejudiced as a foreign national. But they said he could appeal in those three grounds, death penalty, free expression, prejudice as foreign national, unless the US gave satisfactory assurances.
And the US has been allowed to give assurances in this case before to basically short circuit the legal process in the UK and get rubber stamps. And they literally told the US what to say. So I thought they were going to just rubber stamp this again. But they had a hearing. The defense agreed that Julian Assange, the death penalty assurance was sufficient. But they argued about this assurance the US gave where they said he could seek to rely on the First Amendment, but the US government said only a court could decide what were the scopes of the First Amendment. And that’s true, and they were a bit in a corner with that one. But they also refused to say that Kromberg wouldn’t even raise this argument about being a foreign national.
So it was a really hubristic thumbing of their nose at the British legal system, which from my standpoint of having sat through these hearings and having watched it for five years was ready and willing to rubber stamp the persecution of a journalist for exposing war crimes. But they just thumbed their nose at them over this last assurance. And we’ve learned from the Washington Post that the British lawyers who represent the US didn’t think they could win on this point. And at that point, they agreed to the plea deal in it. And I can talk more about what’s in the plea, but I’ve been talking for a long time and I want to let Kevin get a word in edgewise as they say.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Kevin Gosztola, hop in here, brother.
Kevin Gosztola:
All right. Well, thank you for laying that all out, Chip. I’ll go ahead and share where I was when I heard this news because I had an opportunity to hop on a live stream with Chip after I was informed of this unbelievable development. I must stress that I didn’t exactly think that Julian Assange would be walking out of Belmarsh prison this year or next year or the year after. My imagination or my ability to think that we could create the scenario where he would be a free man did not get to that point yet. And CIA whistleblower, former CIA officer John Kiriakou, gave me a phone call. Usually I call John Kiriakou because of who he was and who he has been, and invite him to come on a show and do a live discussion of developments with an Espionage Act prosecution or something related to government secrecy.
He was calling me and he was very serious. He said, “Have you seen the news?” And I was like, “What?” “It’s all over”. “What’s all over, John?” “Well just look at it, it’s everywhere”. I thought somebody had died, but nobody was dead. And in fact, it was the opposite. Something remarkable had happened, and Julian Assange had been able to break free from the clutches of this US government from, I believe, a security apparatus that would’ve been happy if he had died in prison. And we hopped on and did a quick reaction to it. And then I slowly processed what had taken place. And as I paid attention to the Assange legal team and their reactions, and then as we were treated to the reporting from the Washington Post based on insiders sources, it became clear that this case had collapsed. That in fact, it’s the fault of the US Justice Department that Julian Assange was free.
We created the space, the global movement undoubtedly created a space for plea deal negotiations. But it became clear to me that the reason they were not pushing forward with an extradition, and the reason why they had offered such a favorable plea deal, which we’ll get to those terms, is because they were now fearful of losing. There’s an email that’s referenced in this Washington Post report that says, “The urgency here has now reached a critical point”. This is from a Justice Department trial attorney. “The case will head to appeal and we will lose. It doesn’t get more evident than that. We overcame an unprecedented prosecution against Assange”. And we will get to the fallout, the aftermath.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both for contextualizing that. And I want to go even further back, and obviously as the saying goes, you could write a book about this, and, Kevin, you did. So I don’t want to try to force an entire book into this little space, but I want to get to some of the basics of the case. And, Kevin, I think that one of the things, like you and I have discussed before, that feels more shocking. To listeners who aren’t as familiar with the case as you are, is the role of the CIA, and as you pointed out the fault of the Justice Department here in taking up this case, I was wondering if, Kevin, you could talk about this and then Chip also with your expertise, talk a little bit about the basics of the case that was originally brought thanks to the CIA and indeed how that has gotten to us to this point where it did all fall apart.
Kevin Gosztola:
Yeah. And what you’re saying, it’s not some kind of kooky conspiracy theory that we’re making up. We’re not trying to do our own progressive left version of Infowars here. We have a Yahoo news report that was put out by Michael Isikoff, Sean Naylor, and Zach Dorfman that dug into, they had conversations with over 30 people. They were former officials from the Trump Administration. They were people who had a connection to US intelligence, presumably some of them at some point worked in offices at the CIA. Were in a position to know that there were discussions led by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, where war plans, it’s called War plans, they were sketched out to try and target Julian Assange as part of a pressure campaign while he was living in Ecuador’s London Embassy under political asylum. And he was there from June 2012, I believe, to April 11th, 2019 when he was arrested, expelled.
And the British police put him in a van and took him to Belmarsh Prison. And we learned in this article that they are discussing plans to kidnap, even poison, Julian Assange. And that they were willing to entertain the possibility of a rendition flight, basically, to try and get him outside of the embassy, put him on this plane and bring him to the United States. That created a panic inside the Justice Department. They don’t have indictments ready for Julian Assange, and they’re wondering what charges they’re going to bring exactly against him. And that spurs them to develop an indictment so that he doesn’t arrive on the shores of the US at some point in need of an arraignment hearing, and then the Justice Department would be caught with their pants down and have no indictment against Julian Assange ready to go. This would be an extra judicial act on the part of the United States.
So that’s important as the context for the charges that get issued. Mike Pompeo is a key player in labeling WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service, signaling that they’re going to try and destroy this media organization. And as I look at it, something that Chip can dig into deeper with his deep knowledge of the FBI is that I believe the CIA was willing to employ co-Intel pro-style tactics against WikiLeaks by turning people against each other. But the charges that get brought up first, we see a sweetening of the media landscape so that people will be malleable to the idea of the Justice Department prosecuting Julian Assange. They come forward with a computer crime charge, and they say that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to crack a password and help her move inside of a military computer anonymously. And then a month later, after everything has been laid so that they can create this narrative that Julian Assange was some sort of a criminal who went beyond being an ordinary journalist, they then reveal the 17 Espionage Act charges. And at that moment, the Press Freedom organizations, the human rights organizations, every single civil liberties’ organization understands they must take this seriously. There’s no applause for the US Justice Department showing restraint. The misguided attitude that some journalists and other players had beforehand, they aren’t using that logic anymore. They’re not justifying the Justice Department’s actions. And so I’ll let Chip continue from there.
Chip Gibbons:
Yeah. And the CIA played an incredibly important role, given that they plotted to kill and rendition him. As someone who is writing a book on the FBI, I want to also remind us that the FBI played a pretty strong role here. We know during the Obama years, they drafted potential charges against Julian Assange and that they argued that unless Julian Assange, this is the intelligence division, unless they charged him, there wouldn’t be a deterrent against this type of activity. And we know at one point, both the FBI and the CIA demanded a meeting with Obama. I’ve filed many FOIA requests with the FBI about WikiLeaks. I’ve gotten the response in the past that there was an ongoing legal process.
There is no longer an ongoing legal process so I’ve refiled that request, and I’ve sued the FBI over FOIA a number of times, and I’m prepared to do so in this case as well. So hopefully we find out what it is they sent over in 2013 to Obama in the charging documents and compare it to what they actually charged him with. I think we’ll find it’s the same case. So Julian Assange is indicted under eventually an 18 count indictment, one count of conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And then the remaining counts are brought under the Espionage Act. All of the charges are from [inaudible 00:22:56] in 2010 to 2011. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks received information from Chelsea Manning, a heroic…
Chip Gibbons:
… and WikiLeaks received information from Chelsea Manning, a heroic whistleblower about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the creepy criminal backroom dealings at the State Department as well as about the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. This information was newsworthy and they partnered with a number of media outlets, including mainstream ones who threw Julian under the bus as soon as they could, as well as more independent ones. There’s a really fascinating series of articles published between WikiLeaks, The Nation, and I believe it’s HaitiLibre about what the documents show about U.S. interference in Haiti, including that we tried to stop them from raising their minimum wage. You have just everything from U.S. soldiers massacring civilians, and covering up to U.S. interference in the Spanish judiciary process in order to prevent the prosecution of U.S. soldiers for murdering a Spanish photojournalist to just helping, I think Levi, a jeans corporations prevent Haiti from raising their minimum wage.
It’s an incredible document set. For this good act, Chelsea Manning was tortured and received, at that point, the longest sentence in history for giving information to the media. I think it might not have been as long as the Schulte sentence, but that was quite recent and quite complicated. Under the Espionage Act indictment, Julian Assange faces three unprecedented counts of pure publication, that is he posted the information on the WikiLeaks website. He faced four counts, I believe it was, of receiving national defense information. Of course, you can’t publish national defense information if you don’t receive it. He faced a number of aiding and abetting charges where they wanted to impose criminal liability on him for actions that Chelsea Manning took. I believe they actually had more aiding and abetting charges for Manning’s conduct, which was heroic other than Manning actually faced in her court-martial.
I believe she was only charged under 793E at the court-martial, and they… Was it more than? Other than espionage. They put in a whole range of other charges as well. He’s facing liability for what Chelsea Manning did. He’s facing liability for having information and he’s facing liability for publishing it, and there’s also a conspiracy count. In the final part of the prosecution where they take the plea deal, he pleads only guilty to the 793g conspiracy provision, which requires two or more people to plead to have committed other offenses under the Espionage Act. That conspiracy is brought under the conspiracy they allege in the criminal information, which is like an indictment, is that Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning conspired to break the Espionage Act.
Manning broke the provisions under the Espionage Act for giving information to someone unauthorized to receive it. Knowing he would publish it, Julian Assange broke the provision of receiving it. Then, it’s a little bit ambiguous to me as to whether or not they include the final publishing in the criminal information because the charge that Julian Assange faced for pure publication is also one of the aiding and abetting charges that Manning faced. They just list out the parts of the indictment, but they don’t give more information. The criminal conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act is that Chelsea Manning gave information to a journalist about war crimes knowing he would publish it. That journalist accepted the information and he received it. If you look at the statement of facts, and they were laying this case out in the courtroom in February, there’s this theory that WikiLeaks begins the conspiracy essentially by existing since WikiLeaks exists as a website that is willing to publish information at the hearing in February, the prosecutor stressed without the permission of the person who owns the information like, “Yes.” In investigative journalism, you generally don’t get the person’s permission, that they were inciting people to break the Espionage Act.
Believe also in the February hearing, inciting people or soliciting them to break the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They also make a deal about the fact that Manning and Assange are in contact to learn to transfer of the documents, and that Assange said to Manning when she said, “I have no more information,” curious eyes never run dry. I would love to take that before a non-Eastern District jury, if that’s what the conspiracy hangs on that very ambiguous line. Kevin, what is Julian Assange guilty of?
Kevin Gosztola:
He’s guilty of journalism. Actually, Chip, if you don’t mind… Also, Max and Eleanor, if you don’t mind me just coloring in some details that I know from the Chelsea Manning court-martial, which I believe are relevant. There was never any attempt by military prosecutors to argue that Julian Assange was part of some conspiracy or that Chelsea Manning was a co-conspirator with Julian Assange during that court-martial. I always thought that was worth raising as we see on the flip side that the Justice Department is accusing Julian Assange of working with Chelsea Manning. There wasn’t really ever this allegation of trying to help her move anonymously through military computers and crack a password. The reason being was because it is known that Chelsea Manning had access to those military databases. It doesn’t actually make sense. The allegation or the narrative in this prosecution never added up.
In fact, a lot of holes were poked in it by a former forensic military examiner. Actually, I think he still works. His name was Patrick Eller, and he was hired by the Assange legal team to give some really crucial testimony going over evidence from Chelsea Manning’s court-martial. It shows that she didn’t need help because her security clearance cleared her to be in these computers. In fact, the discussion about cracking a password, if you look at the record of the court-martial, it had more to do with the fact that soldiers in this particular unit in Baghdad were trying to install movies, music and software on their computers without being detected by their superior officers. That is they wanted to have unauthorized downloads and being able to crack a password on their computer to get through as an admin without somebody knowing was something they were interested in doing, so they didn’t get brought up on some kind of charge of violating the good order and discipline in the U.S. military.
That’s nothing that the Justice Department ever wanted to address or take seriously. I also should remind people that when this trial was unfolding in Chelsea Manning’s case, WikiLeaks did not have this stigma that develops within the U.S. Government and gets more intense past 2016 and 2017. There’s an actual Army counterintelligence document that treats it as a media organization, treats Julian Assange as a staff writer for a foreign media organization, and says that the documents that he has about U.S. military equipment that he’s handling with attention to the newsworthiness of the material in that document.
Yochai Benkler does a good job during Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, demonstrating to the judge and Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, Colonel Denise Lind, that, in fact, WikiLeaks is performing a role that is no different from the New York Times. We know that that becomes a reality for the Justice Department because all of the reporting from that time proves and indicates that the Justice Department was not comfortable going forward with charges against Julian Assange because it would endanger the editors and the publishers and reporters at these organizers that had partnered with WikiLeaks like the Guardian, Der Spiegel in Germany, El Pais in Spain, Le Monde in France and so on.
Chip Gibbons:
The conspiracy is incredibly weak that they were arguing. I sat in the courtroom in February and very few words were made about the password hash, which is weak on a technical level, but in terms of a legal one, it’s the strongest part of the government’s case because that type of conduct does not have a clear First Amendment protection that you can make it the way the other ones do. So much of it was just WikiLeaks exist and therefore, they’re liable for other people breaking the Espionage Act. I actually think the CFAA too. In the second superseding indictment, the third indictment they bring against them, they expand the narrative against them. There’s a whole section of overt acts that’s not clear if they’re under the Espionage Act or the CFAA or both. The overt acts are going on Democracy now to talk about Edward Snowden, which I hope is not a felony, giving talks, extolling the virtue of whistleblowing, which I hope is not a felony.
They label it continued attempts to recruit systems administrators that by Julian Assange, by talking about the importance of sources in journalism as well as saying if people have classified information, WikiLeaks will publish it. He did say that, that he is recruiting people and at this whole theory of recruitment and solicitation in the government’s indictment in the government’s theory. Apologist for the government’s case like to hone in on the password hashing. They like to hone in on some of the later stuff about LulzSec that’s in the third indictment. The password hashing came up in the court, but none of the other stuff did. It always was they have a website that says they will publish secret information and therefore, they are soliciting people to hack and steal national defense information. That’s really very dangerous.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to talk about a point that you all both raised, which is how the rest of the media contributed to making this narrative hold some water. In fact, the complicity of so many other media outlets, either in their complicit silence and refusal to talk about this or in their outright complicity in painting Julian Assange as somehow not a journalist in WikiLeaks as something other than a resource for journalistic material, trying to isolate and make Assange doing everything in their power, of course, to try to isolate Julian Assange and make this case make sense within those conditions. Now, I know you all have talked about this in past interviews, but I definitely think it bears revisiting and wanted to ask you all if we could just talk a bit about the role of the media and the public response to this, right? Because this case is 14 years old.
Fourteen years ago, I was working as a temp in a warehouse in Southern California in the Great Recession. I had no idea what the hell was happening with this. I fully admit that like so many others in the country for many years, I just felt like it was too big to wrap my head around. I also admit that the reports I would see from trusted media sources that painted this case as something that was too opaque, too heavily concerned with national security for me to have any worthwhile opinion on, I stepped back and had none on it. I wanted to ask you all if you could just say a bit about the role that the consent manufacturing apparatus played, including by outlets that would go on to win journalistic awards for using the content of the WikiLeaks.
Kevin Gosztola:
Yeah. We have to highlight the New York Times. We have to highlight the New York Times in particular, because they play a role in stigmatizing Julian Assange. They play a role in giving everyone a language for demonizing him. It’s executive editor Bill Keller who gives us this depiction of Julian Assange as a kind of bag lady who’s stinky and he doesn’t change his socks, and they promote that hacker stereotype as much as they can to create this image of an unreliable media partner. They go above and beyond to emphasize on and on that he is not an equal to the New York Times, that WikiLeaks and the New York Times are on a different level. They say that Julian Assange is a source, which is not true. Because to me, working in this space as long as I have, and I cover this for 14 to 15 years, my understanding of journalism is that the source is the originator of the documents.
The originator of the documents is Chelsea Manning. If Chelsea Manning had gone directly to the New York Times, in fact, she actually tried to do that. But if Chelsea Manning had handed over these documents to the New York Times, then that would be a source and a journalist relationship. Julian Assange is functioning as a publisher and editor of this new kind of media organization that wants to create a clearinghouse for government documents from governments all over the world. The New York Times is basically thumbing their nose at Julian Assange and refusing to be an equal. That creates an incredibly contentious relationship. We even see later that the New York Times goes behind the back, convinces the Guardian to pass along U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks is no longer willing to share with the New York Times because they don’t trust the New York Times. Part of the problem is that the New York Times holds this position in the media ecosystem of reviewing their national security and military stories with the U.S. Government sharing what they’re about to do.
WikiLeaks doesn’t believe that that’s how you should act if you are engaged in investigative journalism, if you are serious about this kind of reporting. There’s more to say about this back history, and I’m certain that Chip will get into it and color some more context. The other point that I want to raise before I give the floor back, before I share the floor with Chip here is to say that someone like Charlie Savage at the New York Times who contextualized what this president means, he was very clear that this was a chilling precedent for the press that Julian Assange had pled guilty, that the Justice Department was able to secure a plea deal. He mentioned that this would now be a deterrent for reporters and media organizations that were thinking about publishing stories in the national security arena about intelligence agencies and about the U.S. military.
The problem with that is, Charlie, you work for the New York Times. The New York Times withheld stories about Bush warrantless wiretapping in 2004. James Risen, very famously well-known case of this media malpractice tries to get this out before President George W. Bush’s reelection, and they don’t want to publish the story. They sit on this evidence of criminality and an abuse of power. Only by saying he’s going to include it in his book, State of War, do they eventually run a story. He shares the byline with Eric Lichtblau.
They reveal this. It’s a major, major scoop, but they sit on it. There was no threat of prosecution in that case that I’m aware. Yes, there were Justice Department people and FBI agents that went hunting for sources. In fact, it’s argued that NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake got caught up in that dragnet and trying to find somebody that they could hold responsible. They went after Thomas Tam for challenging the Justice Department’s endorsement of this illegal and unchecked mass surveillance. I just share that to illustrate that what we are experiencing now may not fundamentally change a whole lot. I know we’re going to have a larger discussion about what happens next after Assange, so I’ll give the floor back to Chip.
Chip Gibbons:
Kevin, your memory might be better here than mine, but in 2011, the New York Times published a lengthy insider account of working with Julian Assange that painted him in completely negative terms about what an uneasy relationship it was. I think it’s worth remembering what journalism was like in 2010, which is unfortunately what it’s like in 2024 as well. We had just come out of a period where there was little trust in the corporate media because they had all served as stenographers for the Bush administration. They cheered on the war in Iraq. They didn’t report civilian casualties properly in Afghanistan. They were not willing to speak truth to power, especially in the Iraq war. I think that was really… I was talking to a Italian newspaper reporter the other day, and she mentioned even 20 years after that, she’s in Italy, not in the U.S., people will cite the Iraq war media coverage is why they don’t trust the media.
That has had a huge impact people perceived the media. When WikiLeaks and Julian Assange come on the scene, they’re very courageous. Stefania Maurizi who wrote a fascinating book about her time working with WikiLeaks. She says, “Technology is part of the story, but courage is a huge part of the story.” Just seeing someone who was willing to stand up as a journalist to the U.S. national security state when all of these other people were acting as stenographers was really inspiring. I think they despise Julian Assange for that. Also, the New York Times view of journalism is you parrot what the Pentagon says, whereas Julian Assange’s view of journalism is if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth, sort of the I.F. Stone type perspective of journalism. They don’t recognize that as valid. They don’t recognize, “If you believe journalism can be used to speak the truth, to challenge injustice.” They don’t view that as journalism.
I think that’s a huge part of the story here. As a result, these media outlets were willing to throw Julian under the bus. I do think part of the reason why they came for Julian Assange and not for the New York Times and not for the Guardian, is because Julian Assange had that vision. WikiLeaks was challenging military policy. They were challenging U.S. foreign policy, what you might call imperialism and empire. I believe that’s why the U.S. Government came for them. Yeah. He’s challenging U.S. military policy, challenging U.S. foreign policy, where so many people in the corporate media view themselves in partnership with U.S. national security state. Sometimes they expose them in ways they don’t want to be exposed, but they don’t view themselves as on different teams.
Kevin Gosztola:
Well, is it okay if I just put an exclamation point on that? Because I think that’s such an important point to make. Because oftentimes, it’s been a criticism of Julian Assange that he didn’t do enough to recognize U.S. politics. Maybe he didn’t do enough to boost Hillary Clinton or understand that Democrats are the bulwark and they’re supposed to be able to fend off Republicans and you’re not supposed to take certain positions. He’s outside of the United States. He doesn’t understand US politics first and foremost, I don’t think, but he also is someone who is on the outside experiencing this oppression against him and WikiLeaks that is being carried out by both of these political parties.
Navigating it is a little bit like what people feel every day who don’t have a leader in any of these parties. More importantly, it is that fact that he’s willing to challenge U.S. empire and challenge the American Empire Project, if you will. I do see him as somebody who’s carrying on the kind of work that we’ve seen, the scholarly work that we’ve seen from people like Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Greg Grandin, Andrew Bacevich, and so on, and that his work is hard to swallow for these media people and for the U.S. Government for that matter, because he’s not controllable, and so…
Kevin Gosztola:
… because he is not controllable, and so that is the fear. I mean, the reason I think that this indictment, these charges had to be generated against Julian Assange is primarily because they knew that when they go to him to negotiate, he does not share their interests. So when you go to a New York Times editor or you go to a New York Times publisher and you say, “Well, we’re trying to do this, we want to counter Chinese influence in the Asia-Pacific region, so we need you to hold this back,” I don’t think Julian Assange is going to go along with that.
He’s going to make the case that what he has is in the public interest, and we need to expose the way in which the US is abusing foreign policy to justify human rights abuses, to justify the expansions of wars, that justify the destabilization of countries around the world. And you can’t tell him, “Oh, we’re engaged with great power competition, we’re engaged with trying to maintain US influence around the globe,” and have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks sit on a whole set of documents, and not include them in their complete archive.
Eleanor Goldfield:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, what you’re both speaking to is the tagline of WikiLeaks, which is, “We open governments,” and that’s not about whether the Democrats are doing this or whether the Republicans… It is, as I said earlier, it’s about the truth, and it is that elegant and that simple. But of course, since it is that, there has to be some kind of character assassination. And we saw this with Snowden too, like, well, and Lee Camp, the activist comedian has a joke about this, about how when Snowden came forward with his findings, it was basically like, “Oh, we have to scramble.” Like, “Oh, he didn’t graduate from college, right?”
And Lee Camp’s joke is like, “If your house is on fire and some dude walks by and says, ‘Hey, your house is on fire,’ are you going to react or are you going to turn to him and be like, ‘Hold on, did you not graduate college?’” Like, no, the point is over here that your house is on fire. And so the character assassination machine has to get rolling, because Assange and WikiLeaks have such a simple, and focused, and indeed elegant goal.
And I’d also like to point out that this is why critical media literacy is so important, so that you can read between the lines and see, “I don’t actually care whether Julian Assange showers regularly, like, what does this have to do with what WikiLeaks is doing, and why are they trying to highlight this? What are they trying to hide and shift my attention away from?” And of course, at Project Censored, one of the things that we really focus on is this critical media literacy, to understand how we’re being propagandized and lied to every single day by the very same outlets that threw Assange under the bus. And I mean, we could talk about this for the next several hours, but I want to get to what we’ve kind of been discussing a little bit, which is this plea deal, and y’all’s feelings on this plea deal, the good, the bad, and the ugly, as it were?
Chip Gibbons:
Can I just respond to something you said about sort of the character assassinations or changing the story to the whistleblower or the journalist thing? One of the most famous whistleblowers in US history is Deep Throat. He is the person who gave information to two Washington Post reporters that brought down the Nixon administration. Who was Deep Throat? Deep Throat was Mark Felt, the one of only two FBI agents to be criminally prosecuted for the counterintelligence programs. Between being prosecuted, which is, I believe, his defense was funded up by Nixon, and Reagan pardoned him. He was the massive campaigner for reviving the Hoover-like programs for defending them, including defending the illegal acts.
He had no concern, he participated in black bag jobs. Richard Nixon actually testifies in his defense, which is free legal break-ins, said, “Oh, actually, legal break-ins are normal in the executive branch.” Of course, Nixon would know that. His concern was not with democracy, it was with Nixon passed him up for a promotion he wanted to take over for Hoover. No one says, “Let’s throw out the Watergate reporting because Mark Felt is unlike Snowden, unlike Manning, unlike Assange, actually a really bad guy, who actually had done harm to our democracy.” But we don’t ever say that, nor should we. It doesn’t change that the Watergate reporting was correct.
Kevin Gosztola:
I’ll go ahead and jump in on the plea deal, and then Chip, you can go ahead and add to… What’s been on my mind, so one of the things that’s been out there in the ether about this plea deal is that it is a win for US intelligence agencies, and I have serious doubts about whether this is a victory. I think that it’s been spun that way by figures like former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, because they don’t want to admit that it failed.
I don’t think the end goal of prosecuting, putting all this time, energy, and resources tarnishing the US image that they wanted this to end in a plea deal, where Julian Assange was never put on trial. I do believe that the security agents, the intelligence agencies, military officials even who were offended by seeing their information published, certainly people at the State Department, because believe it or not, the State Department spokespeople were more aggressive in the last months in defending Julian Assange’s prosecution than the Justice Department itself, that I don’t think that they wanted to just see Julian Assange hop on a plane and fly home to Australia.
Okay, he made a pit stop in a US territory, but fly home to Australia, and be welcomed like it was a homecoming parade that he was given. There was jubilation from the Australian people. He got a phone call from Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, basically saying, “Welcome back to Australia,” it sounds like. So I don’t believe this was the outcome that they were hopeful for. I think this is the spin to cover up the fact that the Justice Department botched this case and failed to secure Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States. The other point that I believe is that this isn’t as much of a chilling precedent for free press, the plea deal is not. I think it’s an unmitigated victory for freedom of the press, freeing a journalist and ensuring that they don’t slowly continue to die in prison and to ensure that they survive.
Freeing a journalist from this persecution is always a victory for freedom of the press, whether we’re talking about it being an attack by China, Russia, Iran, the Israeli government, Turkey, you go down the list of offenders, India, Pakistan. Freeing somebody who is going through this kind of ordeal is always a victory, no matter what kind of chill, shock waves are being sent through the profession. But what’s the chilling precedent is the fact that the US government ever thought that it was okay to bring charges against Julian Assange, who is an Australian citizen, not a US citizen, somebody who is a foreign national, who the US Justice Department decided they should extraterritorially apply the Espionage Act to Julian Assange, even though he had never held a security clearance, he never signed a nondisclosure agreement, like any of the other whistleblowers who have been unjustly punished.
He had no allegiance to the United States that he was supposed to file the loyalty that he had to show to the United States, he never pledged to protect state secrets. So he was free, like any journalist or reporter, to do with the information whatever he pleased. Now, there might be ethical questions, there could be ethical considerations. We can have discussions about how media organizations handle material that they receive, but that’s not the law. Irresponsibly handling information does not mean that you’re now a criminal and you should be prosecuted by a government on that. We should all agree.
Chip Gibbons:
It’s really hard for me to figure out what the US government thought the end game was here. Part of me agrees with Kevin that they didn’t want a plea deal, and we saw in the Washington Post a story that there were people within the Justice Department who absolutely want to drop this case, and they were being stifled to doing so from higher-ups. Obviously, those types of leaks are self-serving. I do think in some ways, though, the indictment is such an egregious act of charge stacking that it’s difficult to not read it as an example of an attempt to coerce a plea deal. Most of these Espionage Act cases do end in pleas because of this. I’m not going to go through all 18 counts, but let me just, with the counts from the State Department cables, just to illustrate how this is charge stacking.
First, we have a charge that Chelsea Manning obtained the documents in violation of the Espionage Act and Assange is guilty under an aiding and abetting theory. Then, we have that Chelsea Manning had lawful possession of the State Department cables, and she unlawfully communicated them to Julian Assange, and Assange is guilty of this under an aiding and abetting theory. Then, we have Chelsea Manning, who in the previous count, just had lawful possession, now she has unauthorized possession of the same document set, and unlawfully communicated them to Julian Assange.
Then, we had Julian Assange receive the documents, and then we had Julian Assange publish them. These are just the counts from the State Department documents. We could go through this with the Iraq rules of engagement, the detainee assessment briefs, the significant activity reports, and everyone will be falling asleep, because this is pretty dry. So I do think, I too, I am stunned that they turned this into an 18-count indictment, especially when the final plea agreement, 793(g), encompasses almost all of this conduct, right?
The conspiracy between Chelsea, alleged conspiracy between Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, is just the rest of the indictment charges, and they hit him with the conspiracy charge and all these other charges. So I do think this was an abusive indictment to escalate the potential sentence. I think one theory for that would be to try to coerce a plea deal. I think one theory could be to try to game the sentencing, and I also think that there’s also a potential of a split jury verdict, because the aiding and abetting charges would be about what standard you hold Chelsea Manning to. It’s an open question, what the government has to prove to convict someone who’s not a government employee.
And on top of that, there is case law about the First Amendment, that when you have a pure speech issue, you have to prove a very high level of intent that has never been applied to these Espionage Act cases, because the government said there isn’t pure speech. But there’s three charges that I think the government could not get out of arguing for pure speech. And if you look at what the UK judges said, I mean, these are the three charges that they ruled undeniably had a free speech nexus, and I just decided the documents weren’t that interesting, and we don’t have that kind of balancing test. So you could have a real disaster if you took this to a jury. Of course, they were in the Eastern District, which is very stacked.
And so I don’t know, part of me thinks there are people in the FBI and the CIA who would’ve taken this to the very end, and part of me thinks there are… But I think there are also people in the political part of the Justice Department who wanted an exit ramp. I think the plea deal, I think the stacked nature of the charges could also be explained by the vindictiveness of the FBI and the CIA, or it could be this sort of standard practice in the US justice system of stacking charges against people to coerce pleas. I will say, I do think there was a schism between the career intelligence officials and the FBI, the career intelligence officials or career national security officials, and the Department of Justice National Security Division, the CIA, although they may be their own third block, since they were more interested in illegal activities than the prosecution, and sort of the more career- or the political-minded people, political appointees who just don’t want to touch this.
So what is the impact of this indictment? Kevin is 100% right in his assessment. The plea deal sets no legal precedent and the precedent that was set, the political precedent, the chilling precedent was set by the fact that the government brought this case in the first place, that they pursued it for five years, including appealing adverse rulings in the UK system. Remember, originally, a judge in the UK rejected the free expression arguments, but blocked the extradition based on the US prison conditions, which would’ve allowed the US to walk away but still claim a victory with the Espionage Act. And not just the five years in Belmarsh, but the seven years he spent in an embassy that a United Nations working groups said was arbitrary detention, the fact that a UN special [inaudible 00:59:56] said he was tortured.
I mean, you look at Julian Assange’s ordeal, and I don’t think anyone is eager to repeat it, any aspect of it. Yes, Kevin is shaking his head. Yeah, so I think the precedent was set by bringing the indictment, I think the precedent was set by punishment by process, and I think the precedent was set by 14 years of extralegal, extrajudicial warfare on Assange and WikiLeaks, and that precedent is very scary.
Kevin Gosztola:
Yeah, and I just want to quickly add specifically from the plea deal that Julian Assange’s legal team did an excellent job of winning him some inclusion of items that sweetened him pleading guilty to this felony charge, and I don’t actually presume that it’s going to make too much difference to his life in Australia. He was able to get a pledge in writing or a commitment in writing that there will be no criminal cases brought by the Justice Department, that they will not try to extradite him from Australia for the publication of any other documents that he obtained and published prior to the plea deal negotiations.
So he can never be prosecuted for publishing CIA hacking materials that were really the source of Mike Pompeo deciding that he needed to act out his revenge against WikiLeaks. Julian Assange will never receive an indictment for anything related to the Clinton campaign or DNC emails that were published in 2016, but of course, we already know that there weren’t really charges to bring, and there were First Amendment issues with indicting Julian Assange, because that’s what special counsel Robert Mueller determined during the course of his investigation.
And there’s no gag order, he can talk about his case openly. There’s nothing that he has to follow. There’s no restrictions, there’s no supervisory release in Australia, and he’s free to go back and be editor-in-chief or work in some capacity, helping WikiLeaks rebuild itself now that he is free from prison, which I think is another reason I believe the US national security state would be unhappy with Julian Assange walking free, because now, there’s more likelihood than ever that we’ll see a resurgence from WikiLeaks, that they will try to publish once again. And I’ll say this, that it’s my conviction, I believe this to be true, that the US government is not just upset about Julian Assange and the information that was published in 2010 and 2011. They don’t just want to destroy WikiLeaks and stop it from operating because of the documents that we have discussed briefly in this conversation today, but they are fearful of the next leak.
They are fearful of some kind of an organization that has such a high profile to convince and inspire whistleblowers around the world to pass along documents. And they have a long way to go to prove that people could securely submit documents and not have them intercepted by agents, and that people in the different security apparatuses throughout the world wouldn’t be able to find out those whistleblowers’ identities. They have work to do to prove that they are a credible place that you could turn to. And they also have competition. There are over 75 media organizations that now have secure submission systems. So they’re no longer the novelty that they were back in 2007, 2006, 2007, when WikiLeaks first came on the scene. But that being said, I think they will try to return, with or without Julian Assange, because they don’t want the United States to have the final say in whether WikiLeaks can operate and be a participant in journalism.
And we spoke about the media earlier. We spoke about the way that journalists have reacted to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, and just, I know we’ve been talking for a while, we’re probably going to start winding down, I’m kind of weaving in some of my larger takeaways before you put that question to me. But the thing that I think most of all is that journalists in the US prestige media were always reticent and afraid of showing too much solidarity for Julian Assange, too much solidarity for what WikiLeaks was going through, and that’s because they themselves don’t like what he did. He embarrassed them and the whole institution of journalism that they’re a part, they showed how much they rarely actually exercise their freedom of the press.
So here’s Julian Assange practicing freedom of the press to the fullest, being guilty of journalism, and here they are, actually limiting the kind of impact that they could have to effect change, to protect and preserve human rights, to ensure that there is wider democracy. So that’s how you see these frivolous debates that we were pulled into, that actually fed into the US Justice Department and their prosecution by saying things like, “Julian Assange is not a journalist,” or that it doesn’t matter whether you think Julian Assange is a journalist or not, it just matters that the First Amendment protects the acts of journalism.
But I insist and will forever insist that it was crucial to grapple over this and argue with people over this, because the Justice Department was trying to and successfully stigmatized Julian Assange as not being a journalist, so that they could persuade us that this Espionage Act prosecution was an exception to the rule. Part of getting the wheels going on this was to say, “Oh, don’t worry. We’re just going to prosecute him with the Espionage Act. It won’t be other reporters, it won’t be other journalists on down the line.”
And we fed into that. Anybody who ever allowed and ceded ground to the Justice Department by saying, “Yeah, okay, it doesn’t matter if you think he’s a journalist or not,” I feel like it made it easier for the Justice Department to continue on with their case. And so that’s why I was always frustrated with organizations like Committee to Protect Journalists that wouldn’t include him in their jailed journalist index, not because I’m opposed to the Committee to Protect Journalists, but because I really wanted to struggle with them over this.
And I was pleased that the Reporters Without Borders organization, Rebecca Vincent did some tremendous work for them as their International Campaigns Director, to observe the extradition proceedings. I was pleased that he was included in their list of detained journalists annually. I was upset and frustrated that Amnesty International wouldn’t classify Julian Assange as a prisoner of conscience. I felt that there were more things that organizations and media organizations could do, but I think that the reason why they were always reluctant to go as far as they should was because they were afraid to show this solidarity.
Chip Gibbons:
I’m fairly certain Defending Rights & Dissent, the organization I work for, was the only press freedom organization that was consistent in calling Julian Assange a journalist as well as a political prisoner. I’ve been in the meetings on the Hill with the big press freedom groups, and they would all go around in a circle and say, “We don’t think he’s a journalist,” or, “It doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t a journalist.” I would always say, when I was in public appearances, from a First Amendment standpoint, it doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t a journalist, but I think he’s a great journalist, which I do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and on top of that, just to throw in one additional critical media literacy layer here, is that it didn’t even have to go that far for so many of us. What we also got trapped in was this discussion of whether or not you like Julian Assange as a person, and what you think of his character, or what you’re told about his character, as if that supersedes our basic civil and human rights, that rights are rights, unless the guy’s an asshole, right? Then, suddenly, we can just throw our human rights out the window, and if we’re already engaging in that kind of discussion, we have already lost. And I think that that is one of many kind of takeaway lessons that we should really beat into our brains, moving forward, for all of us, so that I’m not asking everyone listening to this to whip yourselves for not being the best Assange advocate, but I am asking you to do better moving forward, and to learn.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But I am asking you to do better moving forward and to learn from this as we are all trying our best to do. And we owe so much to the work of folks like Chip and Kevin to showing us what was kept from us and what we in fact also obscured ourselves in the ways that we would participate in these discussions over these past 14 years. And gents with that, I wanted to kind of round out because we’ve kept you for a long time, and Eleanor and I could talk to you about this for eight more hours, but we know that we got to wrap things up and let y’all go. And so we don’t know exactly what comes next for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as y’all said, but of course, from here at The Real News, from Project Censored, from all of us, more than anything, we just hope that he and his family find some peace and healing after this incredibly hellacious ordeal.
But I wanted to ask you guys what comes next for you both and also what your reflections are after this saga has come to an end that frankly none of us expected even a couple months and weeks ago. And I’ll pose it to Chip and Kevin by way of a final thought here and what I’m trying to reflect on. Because one thing that I think is still very much an open question is, it’s not just that so many of us regular working people, citizens of the world, people who consume some news, who care to a reasonable degree but are also dealing with our own lives, your average person, I think that so many of us had different reasons for not engaging with this case. We have a lot of excuses, but a lot of really legitimate reasons. People are dealing, like I said, with their lives, they’re struggling to get by, they’re caring about their kids. There are other stories that may be they’re really concerned about and our brains only have so much room.
But I think that there’s a much larger problem here about our political and intellectual attention spans in the digital age. Because for as frustrated as I know you all have been, and Eleanor, I include you in this as well as someone who’s been covering this for a lot longer than I have, the lack of care from the public has been a constant source of frustration for you all as people who have cared so deeply about this and have understood the consequences and the weight of this case in a way that the rest of us, frankly, didn’t.
But what I’m also wrestling with is that that’s the case for practically any story that we cover. I mean, people forgot about Ukraine four months after that war started. And I was standing in East Palestinian, Ohio a couple months ago where that train derailed and where the citizens of that town have just been left to flounder in this toxic hell, and they feel just as forgotten as a Julian Assange would. And I stood there in that town and I told them, as someone who interviews other working people around the country, it’s not that folks have forgotten about you, it’s that they all feel as forgotten as you do. And so what do we do with that?
How do we build enough sustained attention, let alone political commitment to win a strike, free a journalist who’s being persecuted by the largest imperial power in the world, stop a genocide happening in our name across the country? A big part of that is how much we ourselves in this mediad environment can stay focused and stay committed. And I don’t think that’s all a personal failing. I think it’s like our brains don’t know how to adjust to this world that we’re in, and that’s a real political liability for any of us who want to build something, let alone fight for something that’s going to take a long time to build.
So that’s my final thought. Chip, Kevin, I wanted to toss it to you and ask what your kind of big takeaway reflections are here. And also, please do take a bow for your incredible fucking work and tell us what you are doing next and where folks can find you. And then Eleanor, I’ll let you close it out with your final thoughts.
Kevin Gosztola:
Go ahead, Chip. You can go first.
Chip Gibbons:
Okay. So I will say this. A lot of people will ask me, was any of this worth it? Do people care about the revelations that Manning gave and that Assange published? Do people care about the truth or publishing the sort of information? And my response to them is always, the governments of the world are incredibly invested in silencing the truth. They spent 14 years trying to destroy WikiLeaks, trying to break Julian Assange, trying to send a message to future journalists. In Israel right now where there’s a genocide in Gaza, we see them assassinating journalists, we see them shutting down Al Jazeera. We see in the US the Congress wants to, they always want to ban TikTok, but now they want to ban TikTok because they blame it for people getting full information about Gaza. So the governments of the world are incredibly invested and will go to extraordinary lengths to silence and suppress the truth. So we should not be cynical about the importance of this work, about the power of the truth, because the governments aren’t., The US government isn’t. The Israeli government isn’t.
Where I’m going next, you can find me as a journalist on Twitter at ChipGibbons89. The organization I work for is Defending Rights and Dissent rightsanddissent.org. They are one of the only organizations who have consistently struck the right tone on this case over 14 years. We were the ones who were the first group to go on the Hill and talk to members of Congress. I was involved in setting up those meetings, including bringing Jeremy Corbyn to talk to American members of Congress, I guess I’m still not supposed to name who they were. But we did a lot behind the scenes on this case. I did a lot of journalism. So please visit us at rightsanddissent.org.
Where we’re going next. I mean, I think a couple things we have to think of next. First, the Espionage Act is still on the books. Julian Assange has said that he thinks his actions are protected by the First Amendment, and he thinks they violate the letter of the Espionage Act. He’s 100% correct. And now is the time for us to strike at the Espionage Act to make sure we don’t have a law on the book that criminalizes First Amendment protected activity when journalists reasonably rely on the First Amendment every day to do things the Espionage Act says is unlawful. And the Espionage Act doesn’t just apply to journalists, it doesn’t just apply to whistleblowers, it applies to anyone who reads the newspaper and talks about the story that they’ve just read.
On top of that, I will say, we are back in the landscape that WikiLeaks emerged in, in that we have a government that is lying to us about a war, in this case, a genocide and we have a media that is parroting those lies. If ever there was a time that called out for a Dan Ellsberg or a Chelsea Manning or a Julian Assange, it is this time right now where we have a genocide being perpetuated based on lies. And I think it’s really important for us to stand up for those who are telling the truth about Gaza, to stand up for the journalists who are being assassinated, for the public officials who are resigning. And I don’t quite know what solidarity looks like in this exact moment, I’m still figuring it out. But I do know that working with the Gaza, the truth tellers, to uplift them and support them and show my solidarity with them along with going after the Espionage Act are going to be a huge role of where I’m going next because there is a collateral murder happening every day in Gaza.
Kevin Gosztola:
Like Chip says, there’s a lot of work that still has to be done. And I should just mention that, Chip, you’ve done some incredible work on the Hill to advance Espionage Act reform. And that’s a crucial going forward that that’s the next thing in my mind after following this case, you just paraphrased Julian Assange. But everyone around the world, outside of the United States, but global, we’re talking about this mostly in a domestic context, but all around the world, it’s now been clear that if you are an international reporter or a correspondent for a news media organization, especially if you’re reporting on wars or foreign policy of your country and there’s some United States involvement and you obtain primary source material about what is happening, you could be at risk. It just depends on if you’re in a location where the US could get its hands on you, if there’s a government that would be willing to open you up to this prosecution. If you’re in some limbo, if you end up trying to claim asylum and then there’s a pressure campaign and you get forced out and then detained. I believe that that should really alarm many who have not considered this fully up until this point about how unsafe the US government has been making the free press or freedom of the press around the world.
And so on these things like Espionage Act reform, we must probably engage. I think we should all be invested in a reporter’s shield law. We don’t have a national reporter’s shield law here in the United States. The Press Act, this is something that the Freedom of the Press Foundation has been working on very aggressively. It’s available, it’s there sitting in Dick Durbin’s wet paper towel hands. All he has to do is hold a vote on it. And then I don’t know what Joe Biden will do, but he should sign it. And then I also think that we should be following more closely anytime there are national security or police subpoenas or we see that there are things like censorship regimes that are imposed, like what we are seeing as Chip raised the issue of the war on Gaza, Israel, the Israeli government have this incredible censorship regime that they’ve imposed. It’s led to the banning of Al Jazeera. And not to mention the fact that at least 100, 1,020 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military at this point. And that should be a focus of us because of the US’s role in that conflict.
I know that there are other imprisoned people that are political prisoners. There is journalism under attack in places like India and Pakistan that the US is complicit in the way that they’re being mistreated. And so there are journalism cases, there are attacks on freedom of the press that we should support or attend to that they’re not the boutique causes like many of these press freedom organizations hold them up all the time. We’re talking about things that fall under the radar.
I know we need to wrap, so just a personal reflection as we close. Thank you to The Real News and thank you to all of the scrappy independent media organizations out there that ever invited me on their shows to be interviewed and to speak about this. I mean, I’m indebted to you because without having this platform and being able to share this work I don’t know that I would’ve been able to reach so many people. I’m indebted to Project Censored and The Censored Press for giving me the ability to write this book, Guilty of Journalism. This is 14 to 15 years of my life. Now, fortunately, I didn’t spend it in prison or in any form of arbitrary detention. I wasn’t being persecuted. But I mean, this is a long time. It’s a feature of this case. The passage of time was an issue in this extradition case. I just think of all the incredible people I’ve managed to meet. I don’t think I would’ve met Chip or Max or Eleanor. Eleanor and Max, you’re both very supportive of the book, and I have immense gratitude for that. But I’ve met whistleblowers, I’ve met journalists, I’ve met attorneys that I’m sure I never would’ve encountered.
I had the ability to meet Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and I’ve been so disappointed this past several days that he wasn’t able to live to celebrate this moment. I’m disappointed that another supporter of my work, especially covering Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, human rights attorney Michael Ratner is not alive to celebrate seeing Julian Assange walk free. And since many people are familiar with Ellsberg and maybe less familiar with Michael Ratner, it is worth taking a moment to laud him for what he did at a very dark time in the Assange, WikiLeaks timeline, because there was all of this contempt and derision directed towards Assange saying, oh, he’s just paranoid. He’s talking about how the US government wants to come after and extradite him. He won’t go to Sweden because he says that the US government is going to try to get him in his grips and bring him to the US and prosecute Julian Assange. Well, that’ll never happen. That could never take place.
Michael Ratner would go on news media shows that invited him and very clearly articulate the grounded fears for why Julian Assange needed to be protected and why the Justice Department needed to shut down and close their grand jury investigation and announce very clearly that there would be no charges. So I celebrate him.
And finally, I’m professionally indebted to Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. I can tell you, I would not be the journalist I am today without them. And much like a war correspondent can get an award for a summary execution and maybe feel a little bit conflicted inside about how they’re being celebrated for capturing that brutality. I’ve been documenting and chronicling both of these cases, and I’ll continue that work with The Dissenter Newsletter at thedissenter.org. I’ll continue to follow whistleblowers, government secrecy and threats against freedom of the press. I’ll cover attacks on journalists, mass surveillance, secrecy, abuses. And do all of this work that should be an extension based upon the understanding, and I’ll end on this, that what we have seen illustrated through Julian Assange’s case is not only that he’s guilty of journalism, but that the war on whistleblowers is a war on journalism. It’s been said by many in this space before, but those individuals are correct that these are not just people who are whistleblowers or leakers, they are media sources. And the Julian Assange case and Chelsea Manning’s case are both clear examples in the past 15 years of the US government waging a concerted attack on investigative journalism.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Kevin Gosztola and Chip Gibbons, again, on behalf of The Real News and all of our audience, let me just say that we are indebted to you. And Eleanor, I wanted to toss it to you to share your final thoughts and round us out.
Eleanor Goldfield:
For sure. So I’m reminded, I worked on a film years ago called Killswitch about Snowden, and it shares a quote from him that one of his biggest fears that nothing will fundamentally change. And that has stuck with me since I worked at that film and since I’ve been doing this work. And I think, I mean not to try and sugarcoat it because I’m not. But the reality is that things have changed. You changed Max, like you pointed out, when this case started you were working in a warehouse and now you are bringing these stories to light. I mean, Kevin, you pointed out that this has been 14 years of your life. Chip, this has changed you and therefore it’s changed the people around you and the orbits in which we organize and share this information.
I think that that quote from Snowden, it means that it is on us to not just personally change, but to change the way that we interact. It’s also changed how I do journalism. I mean, my journalism career started in recording magazines telling people how to mend their cables. I mean, I’ve obviously veered away from that, although I can still help people fix their cables. But I think that it does show the power of these actions by these whistleblowers and by journalists. And again, I agree with both of you who point out Assange is a journalist and it shows the power of truth. It shows the power of journalists doing that incredibly important work that like in Gaza, like Chip pointed out, there’s a reason that these journalists are being targeted because Israel is terrified of the bits of truth that they carry with them.
And so I think it’s really important to highlight that and to highlight that journalists are there, to your point, Max, not just ensure that the folks who feel forgotten are not forgotten, but also to ensure that that support is built around these issues and these stories. And people might say, oh, well, the job of a journalist is to be objective. I say bullshit, there’s no such thing as objectivity. The way you cover something, your angle, it shows who you are and it shows how you feel about a certain topic. And so I think that that’s the really important role that we have as folks who do this kind of work. And also, this shows that people, truth tellers, whistleblowers, have people on their side. And that might feel like a small comfort when you’re being tortured. It might feel like a small comfort when you’re confronting genocide. But I think this is also where we find each other, like Vaclav Havel said, the solidarity of the shaken. I think that that’s so important that we use an opportunity like this to remind each other that we have that and that this is our role. And however that manifests going forward for y’all, for you Max, for me, I think that is a really important lesson to take with us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Yeah. Just by final note, I really, really wanted to underscore for our listeners, please support this work however you can. Support Chip’s work, support Defending Rights and Dissent. Support Kevin’s work, buy his book. Support The Dissenter Newsletter. Support Project Censored. Please support The Real News. I mean, I know you can’t support all of them at once, but we need it. And if you want this work to survive, you got to support the folks that are doing it. So please, please do that.
And by way of rounding out, I just wanted to sort of make a quick announcement in that vein because I’m so honored and excited to have this kind of space where I can talk to incredible warriors and journalists like yourselves. And we want to do everything we can to lift up your work and to broaden its reach and to collaborate together. And so yeah, this will not be the last time that y’all hear me and Eleanor on the pod together, or you’ll be hearing more of Eleanor and the great Mickey Huff on The Real News podcast feed because I’m excited to announce that The Real News will be syndicating the Project Censored show, which many of you have probably already listened to on Pacifica Radio. It’s an excellent show. Kevin was just on there a couple weeks ago talking about this case. It’s incredibly mission aligned. It’s smart. The guest that you guys have on our great. We’re really excited to bring it on our podcast feed.
And Real News listeners, if you’re digging this, you’re going to get a lot more great content coming at you from this feed. But please go check out all the great stuff that Project Censored is doing. We’re going to link to everyone’s work and everyone’s website in the show notes for this episode. And of course, we’re going to link to our website, our newsletter, which you can sign up to if you never want to miss a story. And please, please, please donate to The Real News if you want to keep hearing more important coverage and conversations just like this. You can do that by going to TheRealNews.com/donate and become a donor today. We really appreciate it, y’all.
For now, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
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
But it is not just these glaring reporting failures that kept Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the entire media acted in concert in his character assassination, making it not only acceptable but respectable to hate him.
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).
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?”
‘The truth will out’, or so the saying goes. The question is, at least in a modern context, is how much injury – moral and otherwise – is suffered by the courageous men and women trying to expose it? Psychologist and researcher Kari James explores that answer.
12th July 2007: Two US Apache helicopters unleash 30mm cannon fire on a group of Iraqi civilians. Two of them are Reuters journalists – Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.
Twelve are killed, including both journalists and a passing van driver who stops to help the wounded. The van driver’s two young children, passengers at the time, are severely wounded.
The journalists’ cameras were later retrieved from the soldiers who had seized them. They indicated no evidence of the firefight the US military claimed had prompted the strike.
5th April 2010: WikiLeaks releases a video titled Collateral Murder, confirmed as authentic by the US military. The grainy footage taken from one of the Apaches documents the casual slaughter of noncombatants. You can hear the crew laughing at some of the casualties.
Is this just part and parcel of war? Is it sanctioned by the brass, or just the actions of a few bad apples, like the 2005 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal that had previously embarrassed the US military?
The troops involved in the Collateral Murder atrocity were well aware of the rules of engagement, and that they were in violation. Yet a US military investigation cleared them of any wrongdoing, though they were unable to locate their own copy of the footage.
Stories that make or break
In service of public interest reporting, journalists worldwide may routinely witness traumatic events like the Collateral Murder atrocity.
While that’s no picnic, it’s the outcome of a story that makes or breaks the journalist.
In some cases, the story never sees the light of day, spiked by an editor who doesn’t see the value in it.
In other cases, the story is published, people read it and think ‘oh, how awful’, and then nothing changes. The same atrocities continue.
And in other cases, the story is published, the public react to it, and the world comes perilously close to making much-needed changes. Vested interests may then come into play, seeking to make scapegoats and examples of those who dare to incite change.
Protestors celebrate the life of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, gunned down by Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp in May 2022. (IMAGE: France24 screengrab)
That’s how people like Jamal Khashoggi, Shireen Abu Akleh, and the Balibo Five wind up on the cutting room floor. And that’s how WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange wound up behind maximum security bars in Belmarsh.
A timeline of persecution
25th June 2024: Julian Assange is released from prison, a guilty plea of espionage extorted from him in exchange for his freedom.
It’s an interesting conclusion to a saga that began with Swedish sexual assault charges in 2010, just a few months after the release of Collateral Murder.
After losing his appeal against the European arrest warrant issued against him, in 2012 Assange skipped bail. He was granted asylum by the government of Ecuador on grounds of political persecution and fears of extradition to the US. Not a commonplace concern in European sexual assault cases concerning a non-US citizen. But not many subjects of sexual assault allegations are simultaneously the subjects of CIA kidnapping and assassination plots.
So, Assange hid out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for the next seven years, during which time the Swedish sexual assault charges were dropped.
Assange’s asylum was withdrawn in April 2019. Coincidentally, the Swedish sexual assault charges were briefly re-instigated in May before being dropped again in November.
Julian Assange, pictured in the Equadorian embassy in 2014, with Ricardo Patiño, Ecuador’s then Foreign Minister. (IMAGE: David G Silvers, Cancillería del Ecuador, Flickr)
The reason given? “The evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.”
Apparently, that didn’t matter. The UK and US colluded to extradite Assange to the US because, in a roundabout case of extreme serendipity, he was wanted there for espionage.
Perhaps the distinction between journalism and espionage is fuzzy.
In April 2019, British police were invited into the embassy, and Assange was arrested, found guilty of breaching bail on those null-and-void charges, and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. In May 2019, the US filed espionage charges.
So, those 50 weeks dragged on for just over five years, as Assange’s status evolved from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
Post-plea bargain, he now gets to pick up the pieces.
Moral betrayal and moral injury
What might the picking up of pieces look like for a freshly released political prisoner? Well, it depends on the status of their mental health. And political persecution is not known to go gentle on the mental health.
Assange has had many loyal and courageous supporters over the last decade and a half. But few politicians and journalists were among them. Many aided and abetted Assange’s persecution with casual character assassination, as though a pile-on were in the public interest.
Professor Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. (IMAGE: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)
Moral betrayal involves witnessing or experiencing persecution, gross injustice, or systemic failure; or being let down by legitimate authorities, colleagues, or the public when it really counts.
Moral betrayal is one of a handful of established causes of moral injury, a traumatic stress injury that shares some features with PTSD and depression, though with some important distinctions.
The morally injured suffer intrusive memories of their experience and intense feelings of horror, anger, guilt, and shame. They become demoralized and socially alienated. They may become preoccupied with justice. And their trust horizon shrinks, often to just a handful of people who had their back through their ordeal.
All too often, moral injury ends in suicide.
I don’t know if Julian Assange is morally injured; I haven’t had the opportunity to assess him. But exposure to high-stakes situations that challenge one’s values, expectations, and social norms are potentially morally injurious. And such situations are a journalist’s bread and butter.
Occupational hazard?
Like first responders, journalists are frequently, and often repeatedly, exposed to trauma and moral challenge, whether reporting on natural disasters, violent crime, war, or human rights abuses.
Unlike first responders, journalists are neither expected nor equipped to intervene or assist.
They bear witness to extreme violence, cruelty, abuse, and tragedy. And yet they are unable to protect people from the very events they must report on.
Chelsea Manning pictured at a conference in Germany in 2018. (IMAGE: Media Convention Berlin, Flickr)
Sometimes, in the line of reporting duty, a journalist may accidentally cause harm. Perhaps by encouraging disclosures from vulnerable individuals. Perhaps by inadvertently endangering a source, like Chelsea Manning, the former US soldier who was court-martialled and incarcerated for seven years following her transfer of hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, including the Collateral Murder footage.
Witnessing suffering and inflicting accidental harm are thought of as moral transgressions, as they conflict with the individual’s values or ethics. Like moral betrayal, they can result in moral injury.
Compounding this, journalists are subject to public scrutiny for the decisions they make when they do their job of reporting in lieu of offering help. And it may appear to the public that the journalist is impervious to the suffering of others.
Yet journalists often empathize greatly with the subjects of their stories, which makes it hard for them to detach from their work.
Suffering for their work isn’t just psychological. There are also physical risks, particularly when reporting from a warzone.
The most dangerous year was 2006, with 155 journalists murdered, 43% of them in Iraq.
The killing of journalists was rare in Iraq before the 2003 Anglo-American invasion. It costs a lot to keep a secret.
So, when a story fails to result in justice or policy change, a journalist may question why they put themselves, or others, on the line.
A chilling effect?
It’s now widely speculated that Assange’s plea bargain will have a chilling effect on future reporting on the moral and ethical transgressions of the world’s governing authorities and their enforcers.
It seems prior chilling events may have tumbled down the memory hole.
Yes, while the plea bargain sets a precedent for the criminalization of public interest journalism, extrajudicial guarantees against public interest journalism have long been in place.
Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi pictured in March 2018, six months before he was slaughtered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey on the orders of the Saudi Royal family. (IMAGE: POMED, Flickr)
Just ask the Saudis, who butchered regime critic, Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi embassy in Turkey in 2018.
Or the Israeli Defence Forces, who gunned down Shireen Abu Akleh as she covered their raid in the Jenin refugee camp in 2022, wearing a press vest, no less.
Or the Indonesian special forces, who murdered five journalists – Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters, and Malcolm Rennie – in 1975 for their coverage of the lead-up to Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, and who subsequently executed Australian Journalist Roger East by firing squad after he attempted to investigate the murders.
The Australian government has not wanted to compromise its relationship with the Indonesian government by holding them to account.
Yet unperturbed by the moral injuries of witnessing and betrayal, imprisonment, and even death, journalists worldwide continue to exercise moral courage.
Moral courage involves acting in service of one’s convictions despite the risk of adverse consequences. While it is frightening to do so, history abounds with examples of heroes who served the masters of truth and justice above their fears of retribution.
Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are two such examples. Both certainly knew the potential consequences of their actions.
Assange’s story is a special one, but not a particularly exceptional one, save for the fact that he was not assassinated as so many others have been.
And while his extorted plea bargain is tantamount to the criminalisation of journalism, the cat is already out of the bag.
Pacific Journalism Review has challenged journalists to take a courageous and humanitarian stand over Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in its latest edition with several articles about the state of news media credibility and the shocking death toll of Palestinian reporters.
It has also taken a stand in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who was set free in a US federal court in Saipan and returned to Australia the day before copies of the journal arrived back from the printers.
In the editorial provocatively entitled “Will journalism survive?”, founding editor Dr David Robie wrote: “Gaza has become not just a metaphor for a terrible state of dystopia in parts of the world, it has also become an existential test for journalists — do we stand up for peace and justice and the right of a people to survive under the threat of ethnic cleansing and against genocide, or do we do nothing and remain silent in the face of genocide being carried out with impunity in front of our very eyes?
“The answer is simple surely.”
Launching the 30th anniversary edition, adjunct USP professor Vijay Naidu paid tribute to the long-term “commitment of PJR to justice and human rights” and noted USP’s contribution through hosting the journal for five years and also continued support from conference convenor associate professor Shailendra Singh.
Papua New Guinea’s Communication Minister Timothy Masiu also launched at the PJR event a new book, Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, edited by Professor Biman Prasad (who is also Deputy Prime Minister of Fiji), Dr Singh and Dr Amit Sarwal.
The PJR editors, Dr Philip Cass and Dr Robie, said the profession of journalism had since the covid pandemic been under grave threat and the journal outlined challenges facing the Pacific region.
The cover of the 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review. Image: PJR
Among contributing writers, Jonathan Cook, examines the consequences of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) legal cases over Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Assange’s last-ditch appeal to prevent the United States extraditing him so that he could be locked away for the rest of his life.
Both cases pose globe-spanning threats to basic freedoms, writes Cook.
New Zealand writer Jeremy Rose offers a “Kiwi journalist’s response” to Israel’s war on journalism, noting that while global reports have tended to focus on the “horrendous and rapid” climb of civilian casualties to more than 38,000 — especially women and children — Gaza has also claimed the “worst death rate of journalists” in any war.
The journalist death toll has topped 158.
Independent journalist Mick Hall offers a compelling research indictment of the role of Western legacy media institutions, arguing that they too are in the metaphorical dock along with Israel in South Africa’s genocide case in the ICC.
PJR designer Del Abcede with Rosa Moiwend at the PJR celebrations. Image: David Robie/APMN
He also cites evidence of the wider credibility implications for mainstream media in the Oceania region.
Among other articles in this edition of PJR, a team led by RMIT’s Dr Alexandra Wake, president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (Jeraa), has critiqued the use of fact check systems, arguing these are vital tool boxes for journalists.
The edition also includes articles about the Kanaky New Caledonia decolonisation crisis reportage, three USP Frontline case study reports on political journalism, the social media ecology of an influencer group in Fiji, and a photo essay by Del Abcede on Palestinian protests and media in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.
Book reviews include the Reuters Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2024, Journalists and Confidential Sources,The Palestine Laboratory and Return to Volcano Town.
The PJR began publication at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1994.
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pacific Journalism Review with a birthday cake . . . Professor Vijay Naidu (from left), Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, founding PJR editor Dr David Robie, PNG Communications Minister Timothy Masiu, conference convenor and PJR editorial board member Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, and current PJR editor Dr Philip Cass. Image: Joe Yaya/Islands Business
Pacific Journalism Review founder Dr David Robie says PJR has published more than 1100 research articles over its three decades of existence and is the largest single Pacific media research repository.
But it has always been “far more than a research journal”, he added at the launch of the 30th anniversary edition at the Pacific International Media Conference in Fiji yesterday.
Speaking in response to The University of the South Pacific’s adjunct professor in development studies and governance Vijay Naidu who launched the edition, he spoke of the innovative and cutting edge style of PJR.
APMN’s Dr David Robie talks about Pacific Journalism Review at the launch of the 30th anniversary edition in Suva. Image: NBC News/APMN screenshot
“As an independent publication, it has given strong support to investigative journalism, sociopolitical journalism, political economy of the media, photojournalism and political cartooning — they have all been strongly reflected in the character of the journal,” he said.
“It has also been a champion of journalism practice-as-research methodologies and strategies, as reflected especially in its Frontline section, pioneered by retired Australian professor and investigative journalist Wendy Bacon.
He thanked current editor Philip Cass for his efforts — “he was among the earliest contributors when we began in Papua New Guinea” — and the current team, assistant editor Khairiah A. Rahman, Nicole Gooch, “extraordinary mentors” Wendy Bacon and Dr Chris Nash, APMN chair Dr Heather Devere, Dr Adam Brown, Nik Naidu and Dr Gavin Ellis.
Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, PNG Information and Communcations Technology Minister Timothy Masiu, USP’s Associate Professor Shailendra Singh and Dr Amil Sarwal at the PJR launch – the new Pacific media book “Waves of Change” was also launched. Image: NBC News/APMN screenshot
Paid tribute to many
He also paid tribute to many who have contributed to the journal through peer reviewing and the editorial board over many years — such as Dr Lee Duffield and Professor Mark Pearson of Griffith University, who was also editor of Australian Journalism Review for many years and was an inspiration to PJR — “and he is right here with us at the conference.”
Among others have been the Fiji conference convenor, USP’s associate professor Shailendra Singh, and professor Trevor Cullen of Edith Cowan University, who is chair of next year’s World Journalism Education Association conference in Perth.
Dr Robie also singled out designer Del Abcede for special tribute for her hard work carrying the load of producing the journal for many years “and keeping me sane — the question is am I keeping her sane? Anyway, neither I nor Philip would be standing here without her input.”
Meanwhile, New Zealand media analyst and commentator Dr Gavin Ellis mentioned the Pacific Journalism Review milestone in his weekly Knightly Views column:
This month marks the 30th anniversary of Pacific Journalism Review, the journal founded and championed by journalist and university professor David Robie. PJR has provided a unique bridge between academics and practitioners in the study of media and journalism in our part of the world.
The journal is now edited by Dr Philip Cass, although Robie continues to be directly involved as associate editor and editorial manager. The latest edition (which they co-edited) explores links between journalists in the South Pacific with the conflict in Gaza, together with analysis of the wider role of media in coverage of the plight of Palestinians.
A special 30th anniversary printed double issue is being launched at the Pacific International Media Conference in Fiji. The online edition of PJR is now available here.
Sustaining a publication like Pacific Journalism Review is no easy feat, and it is a tribute to Robie, Cass and others associated with the journal that it is entering its fourth decade strongly and with challenging content.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
— Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass, December 1871
Once you understand that profound poem, you are ready to fathom the great debate between our dumb and dumber candidates for the Highchair in the Oval Office.</
In light of Julian Assange’s release from an English prison and President Biden’s dementia-riddled debate performance against dumb-mouthed Donald Trump – Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whom Alice, when through the looking-glass, said looked exactly like a couple of schoolboys – I have been thinking about a famous proverb – “acta, non verba” (action, not words). Like most platitudes and effective propaganda, it contains both truths and contradictions and can therefore be spun in multiple ways depending on one’s intent.
Killing people is an action that needs no words to accompany it. It can be done silently. Even when it is the killing of millions of people, it can be carried out without fanfare or direct responsibility. Without a whisper, with plausible deniability, as if it were not happening. As if you were not responsible. The playwright Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Prize Address, wrote truthfully about U. S. war crimes:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’
Trust, of course, is a sick joke when it comes from the mouths of U.S. presidents, just as the two bloodthirsty debaters want the American people to trust them and agree with their support for the US/Israel genocide of Palestinians, as does Robert Kennedy, Jr., another aspirant for the position of Killer-in-Chief.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum, “but it isn’t so nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” said Tweedledee. “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
And the boys continue to battle over Tweedledum’s “nice new rattle” that he accused Tweedledee of spoiling.
The spectacle of presidential politics and people’s addiction to it is a depressing commentary on people’s gullibility. To think that the candidates are not puppets manipulated by the same hidden powerful elite forces is a form of illiteracy that fails to grasp the nature of the fairy tale told through the looking-glass. The real rattle is not a toy, but the sound of the rattling of the marionettes’ chains. In the 2020 presidential election, more than 155 million Americans voted for Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the highest voter turnout by percentage since 1900. More so than the population at large, these voters are dumb and getting dumber by the day. They think they live in a democracy where to get into the Highchair candidates will spend 10 billion dollars or so.
“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
Like the voters in 2020, those this year will echo the boys in illusionary expectations of political change – “Ditto, ditto, ditto – as they look in the mirror of their cell phones and hope to take selfies with the candidates to mirror the narcissistic mendacious marionettes of their illusions.
Julian Assange killed no one, but he suffered greatly at the hands of the U.S. military-industrial-security state and its evil accomplices because he used words and images to reveal their atrocities. In other words, his words were his courageous actions to counteract the murderous actions of the U.S. government. He gave voice to the previously unspeakable, a void in confronting systematic evil that seems beyond imagining or words to convey. Assange’s words were his deeds and therefore reversed the proverb or turned it on its head or upside down. He showed that the words of denial from the U.S. government were lies, language used to obscure thought about its war crimes. That is why they tortured him for so many years.
Despite such treatment, he never bowed to their violence, remaining steadfastly true to his conscience. A true individual. He was betrayed by the corporate mainstream media such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and others who published what Julian published, then trashed him and ignored him, and finally hypocritically supported him to save their own asses after he suffered for fourteen years. It is a very typical tale of elite betrayal.
Those who serve and wish to serve as American presidents are so lacking in Assange’s moral conscience that one should never expect truth from them, neither in words nor actions. Assange stands head and shoulders above these craven creeps. Here, as recounted by Marjorie Cohn, are some of their atrocities that journalist Assange, a free man, published for all the world to read and see.
The relationship between words and actions is very complex. Even Shakespeare compounds the complexity by having a character say that words are not deeds. But they are.
Neither Biden nor Trump ever personally killed a Syrian or Palestinian, but they gave orders to do so. They made sure as young men that they would never serve in the military and kill with their own hands, having received between them nearly ten deferments. What’s the term for such Commanders-in-Chief? Pusillanimous armchair warriors? Jackals with polished faces who know ten thousand ways to order others to kill and torture while keeping their hands clean but their souls sordid?
Obama had his Tuesday kill list that included American citizens whom he chose for death; Trump gave the orders to “terminate” Iranian General Qasem Soleimani; we can only imagine what orders Biden (or his handlers) has given, while Ukraine, Russia, and Gaza have suffered terribly from them. Now Tweedledum, desperate to retain his rattle, pushes the world closed to nuclear war.
But notice the expensive suits these boys wear, the crisp white shirts and pocket handkerchiefs, the elegant watches and shiny shoes. But they are killers whose orders to kill are whispered, action words, passed down the line. With a smile, a grin, a shrug, or completely indifferently, as if they were ordering a bagel with cream cheese to go.
Yet true it is, as the forgotten but great American poet Keneth Rexroth wrote in his 1955 poem Thou Shall Not Kill: “You killed him! You killed him./ In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,/ You son of a bitch.”
Like many writers, I am politically powerless. My words are my only weapon. Are they actions? I believe they are. They are deeds. I move my pen across the paper and try to write something meaningful. Sometimes I succeed in this action; at others, I fail. Who can say? I surely can’t. As my father used to always remind me, “Quien sabe?” (Who knows?)
There are those who claim that wordsmiths are all full of shit. Why don’t they just shut up and do something, is what they say. They fail to grasp the paradoxical relationship between action and words. For writers who write to defend humanity from the predations of the ruthless ruling classes, their words are not orders to kill. Just the opposite.
Our words are reminders that killing is wrong, that waging wars are wrong, that genocide is wrong, that assassinating people is wrong – simple truths that almost everyone knows but forgets when they get caught up in the antics of the Tweedledums and Tweedledees who come and go with the breezes as the system that creates them rolls merrily along.
So if words, contrary to the famous proverb – action, not words – are a form of action, we are caught in a paradox of our own making. This is not uncommon. For there are silent and wordy acts as well as words as actions, some noisy, others sotto voce. There are violent deeds and violent words; and there are peaceful words meant to encourage peaceful deeds.
Tweedledum Biden and Tweedledee Trump are prime examples of how far my country (I write that with a lump in my throat), the United States of America, has descended into illiteracy, evil, and delusion.
The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche once wrote that the “Greeks were superficial out of profundity.” Too many Americans have become superficial out of stupidity by believing the words and deeds of con men battling over a rattle.
No Way! We landed on the moon!
– Jim Carrey, playing Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber, 1994
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame is now back in the country of his birth, having endured conditions of captivity ranging from cramped digs in London’s Ecuadorian embassy to the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh Prison. His return to Australia after striking a plea deal with the US Department of Justice sees him in a state with some of the most onerous secrecy provisions of any in the Western world.
As of January 2023, according to the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Commonwealth had 11 general secrecy offences in Part 5.6 of the Criminal Code, 542 specific secrecy offences across 178 Commonwealth laws and 296 non-disclosure duties spanning 107 Commonwealth laws criminalising unauthorised disclosure of information by current and former employees of the Commonwealth.
In November 2023, the Albanese Government agreed to 11 recommendations advanced by the final report of the review of secrecy provisions. While aspiring to thin back the excessive overgrowth of secrecy, old habits die hard. Suggested protections regarding press freedom and individuals providing information to Royal Commissions will hardly instil confidence.
With that background, it is unsurprising that Assange’s return, while delighting his family, supporters and free press advocates, has stirred the seething resentment of the national security establishment, Fourth Estate crawlers, and any number of journalistic sellouts. Damn it all, such attitudes seem to say: he transformed journalism, stole away our self-censorship, exposed readers to the original classified text, and let the public decide for itself how to react to disclosures revealing the abuse of power. Minimal editorialising; maximum textual interpretation through the eyes of the universal citizenry, a terrifying prospect for those in government.
Given that the Australian press establishment is distastefully comfortable with politicians – the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for instance, has a central reporting bureau in Canberra’s Parliament House – Assange’s return has brought much agitation. The Canberra press corps earn their crust in a perversely symbiotic, and often uncritical relationship, with the political establishment that furnishes them with rationed morsels of information. The last thing they want is an active Assange scuppering such a neat understanding, a radical transparency warrior keenly upsetting conventions of hypocrisy long respected.
Let’s wade through the venom. Press gallery scribbler Phillip Coorey of the Australian Financial Review proved provincially ignorant, his mind ill-temperedly confused about WikiLeaks. “I have never been able to make up my mind about Assange.” Given that his profession benefits from leaks, whistleblowing and the exposure of abuses, one wonders what he is doing in it. Assange has, after all, been convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917 for engaging in that very activity, a matter that should give Coorey pause for outrage.
For the veteran journalist, another parallel was more appropriate, something rather distant from any notions of public interest journalism that had effectively been criminalised by the US Republic. “The release of Julian Assange has closer parallels to that of David Hicks 17 years ago, who like Assange, was deemed to have broken American law while not in that country, and which eventually involved a US president cutting a favour for an Australian prime minister.”
The case of Hicks remains a ghastly reminder of Australian diplomatic and legal cowardice. Coorey is only right to assume that both cases feature tormented flights of fancy by the US imperium keen on breaking a few skulls in their quest to make the world safe for Washington. The military commissions, of which Hicks was a victim, were created during the madly named Global War on Terror pursuant to presidential military order. Intended to try non-US citizens suspected of terrorism held at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, they were farcical exercises of executive power, a fact pointed out by the US Supreme Court in 2006. It took Congressional authorisation via the Military Commissions Act in 2009 to spare them.
Coorey’s colleague and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Peter Hartcher, was similarly uninterested in what Assange exposed, babbling about the publisher’s return as the moment “Assangeism came into plain view”. He had no stomach for “the cult” which seemed to have infected Canberra’s cold weather. He also wondered whether Assange could constructively “use his global celebrity status to campaign for public interest journalism and human rights”. To do so – and here, teacher’s pet of the political establishment, beater of the war drum for the United States – Assange would have to “fundamentally” alter “his ways to advance the cause”.
All this was a prelude for Hartcher to take the hatchet to the journalistic exploits of a man more decorated with journalism awards that many in the Canberra gallery combined. The claim that he is “a journalist is hotly contested by actual journalists.” Despite the US government conceding that the disclosures by WikiLeaks had not resulted in harm to US sources, “there were many other victims of Assange’s project.” The returned publisher was only in Australia “on probation”, a signal reminder that the media establishment will be attempting to badger him into treacherous conformity.
Even this language was too mild for another Australian hack, Michael Ware, who had previously worked for Time Magazine and CNN. With pathological inventiveness, he thought Assange “a traitor in the sense that, during a time of war, when we had American, British and Australian troops in the field, under fire, Julian Assange published troves of unredacted documents”. Never mind truth to power; in Ware’s world, veracity is subordinate to it, even in an illegal war. What he calls “methods” and “methodology” cannot be exposed.
Such gutter journalism has its necessary cognate in gutter politics. All regard information was threatening unless appropriately handled, its more potent effects for change stilled. Leader of the opposition in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, found it “completely unnecessary and totally inappropriate for Julian Assange to be greeted like some homecoming hero by the Australian Prime Minister.” Chorusing with hacks Coorey, Hartcher and Ware, Birmingham bleated about the publication by Assange of half a million documents “without having read them, curated them, checked to see if there was anything that could be damaging or risking the lives of others there.” Keep the distortions flying, Senator.
Dennis Richardson, former domestic intelligence chief and revolving door specialist (public servant becomes private profiteer with ease in Canberra), similarly found it inexplicable that the PM contacted Assange with a note of congratulation, or even showed any public interest in his release from a system that was killing him. “I can think of no other reason why a prime minister would ring Assange on his return to Australia except for purposes relating to politics,” moaned Richardson to the Guardian Australia.
For Richardson, Assange had been legitimately convicted, even if it was achieved via that most notorious of mechanisms, the plea deal. The inconvenient aside that Assange had been spied upon by CIA sponsored operatives, considered a possible object of abduction, rendition or assassination never clouds his uncluttered mind.
Sharp eyes will be trained on Assange in Australia, however long he wishes to stay. He is in the bosom of the Five Eyes Alliance, permanently threatened by the prospect of recall and renewed interest by Washington. And there are dozens of journalists, indifferent to the dangers the entire effort against the publisher augurs for their own craft, wishing that to be the case.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been released from Belmarsh Jail after over five years of incarceration. This marks the end of a prolonged saga that began in 2010 when WikiLeaks released footage showing the US military committing acts that are considered war crimes in Baghdad, though no one has been charged over these actions. Successive Australian governments, regardless of their political leanings, failed to act on Assange’s behalf, despite promises made while in opposition.
Despite criticism of the Albanese government for perceived slow action, significant diplomatic efforts behind the scenes have finally borne fruit – Jennifer Robinson, Assange’s legal counsel, praised the work of Albanese and others in securing his release, heralding it as a great day for media freedom.
The charges against Assange were always contentious, serving more as a warning to potential whistleblowers than a pursuit of justice. The public’s right to know about government actions, especially in the context of the US military’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a central theme. Yet, the whistleblowers Assange and Chelsea Manning faced severe consequences, while the perpetrators of the exposed war crimes went unpunished. The case has also highlighted problems with the US Espionage Act, which needs reform.
The nuclear debate in Australia, led by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, appears to have lost momentum – it was never a serious proposition anyway but served as a political tool to position Dutton as a leader with a plan, divert government resources, and amuse the media. Speculation now suggests the announcement was also a strategic move to fend off a potential leadership challenge from Angus Taylor, the Shadow Treasurer. Recent media scrutiny, particularly from traditionally conservative outlets, also indicates underlying leadership tensions within the Liberal Party.
In response to the nuclear debate, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Matt Kean, a former NSW Liberal Treasurer known for his climate activism, as the new chair of the Climate Change Agency. This move, while politically clever, aims to foster bipartisanship on climate issues, though it has upset some within both major political parties.
Senator Fatima Payman made headlines by supporting a motion in the Senate to recognise the state of Palestine, aligning with historical Labor values. Despite the motion’s defeat, it symbolised a significant gesture of support for Palestine. Prime Minister Albanese indicated there would be no repercussions for Payman, highlighting the complex relationship between international relations and party politics. The genocide in Gaza continues with daily attacks by the Israeli Defense Force against civilians but despite reduced media coverage in recent weeks, anti-war and anti-genocide protests continue across Australia. The conflict threatens to destabilise the Middle East further, highlighting the urgent need for a resolution.
Samantha Mostyn, the incoming Governor–General, will begin her term with a notable salary increase, and this has sparked controversy, given the current cost-of-living pressures. However, the increase aligns with legislative decisions and the comparative lack of a military or judiciary pension for Mostyn, distinguishing her from her predecessors.
This episode of New Politics explores these complex political issues, providing in-depth analysis and discussion on the implications for Australia and beyond.
Song listing:
‘Just Give ‘Em Whiskey’, Colourbox.
‘All Along The Watchtower’, Afterhere.
‘Godless’, The Dandy Warhols.
‘Praise You’, Fat Boy Slim.
Music interludes:
Support independent journalism
We don’t plead, beseech, beg, guilt-trip, or gaslight you and claim the end of the world of journalism is coming soon. We keep it simple: If you like our work and would like to support it, send a donation, from as little as $5. Or purchase one of our books! It helps to keep our commitment to independent journalism ticking over! Go to our supporter page to see the many ways you can support New Politics.
After a 14-year struggle, including five years spent in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is finally free. Under the terms of a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain documents, writings and notes connected with the national defense under the Espionage Act. Assange was facing 175 years…
The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession. Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise. For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.
The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.
Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line. One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.
Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy. “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018. Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?” For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day. “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew. Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”
These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets. In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith. Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.
The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power. When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate. WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.
Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it. Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.
The tendency is pestilential. While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.” An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”
While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”
There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks. There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.
Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face. “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell. He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”
In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher. By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained. Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award. Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners. In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.
After bleak beginnings, our campaign united a formidable group of parliamentarians from across the political spectrum
In late 2012 I had a call from John Shipton, Julian Assange’s father. I had done some advocacy on the Assange case for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. John wanted to know if I would run Julian’s bid to be elected to the Senate in the 2013 federal election. From that time on I have worked with John, Julian’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, the lawyer Steve Kenny and others to help bring an end to the US pursuit of Assange for publishing material which clearly implicated that nation in war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our work morphed into an Australian Assange campaign.
The Australian political environment has changed enormously since I began campaigning for Assange 11 years ago. Then, the Labor government of Julia Gillard not only showed no sympathy for Assange but ordered an investigation into whether he had broken any Australian laws in publishing the material. It was an absurd proposition and one that was quickly dismissed by commonwealth law officers. There seemed to be little interest on the part of the Coalition parties, and many in the Australian media saw Assange as a dangerous impostor.
WikiLeaks director Julian Assange pleaded guilty “to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information” (CBS, 6/25/24).
In some ways, the nightmare for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is coming to an end. After taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he was arrested in 2019 by Britain, who have since been trying to extradite him to the United States on charges that by publishing official secrets he violated the Espionage Act (FAIR.org, 12/13/20; BBC,6/25/24). Once he enters a guilty plea, he will be sentenced to time served and walk away a free man (CBS, 6/25/24).
Assange’s case has attracted the attention of critics of US foreign policy, and those who value free speech and a free press. His family has rightly contended that his treatment in prison was atrocious (France24, 11/1/19; Independent, 2/20/24). A group of doctors said he was a victim of “torture” tactics (Lancet, 6/25/20). In 2017, Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that the “CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation” and that CIA and Trump administration insiders “even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.”
His supporters noted that the charges against him came after he harmed the US imperial project, particularly by leaking a video showing US troops killing Reuters journalists in Iraq (New York Times, 4/5/10). Under his watch, WikiLeaks also leaked a trove of diplomatic cables that the New York Times (11/28/10) described as an “unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.”
Press freedom and human rights groups like the International Federation of Journalists and Amnesty International had long called for his release. Several major news outlets from the US and Europe—the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País—signed a letter calling for his release (New York Times, 11/28/22). They said his “indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
Hostility toward press freedom
Assange will owe the Australian government half a million US dollars for his flight home from imprisonment (Guardian, 6/25/24).
Assange’s loved ones and supporters are certainly glad to see him come home (Guardian, 6/25/24). But let’s be perfectly clear-eyed: The entire ordeal and his plea deal are proof of a hostile climate toward a free press in the United States and the wider world, and its chilling effect on investigative journalism could substantially worsen.
Assange’s deal has echoes of the end of the West Memphis Three case, where three Arkansas men were wrongfully convicted as teenagers of a heinous triple homicide in 1993 (Innocence Project, 8/19/11). The three re-entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. They won their freedom, but their names were still attached to a terrible crime, and the state of Arkansas was able to close the case, ensuring the real killer or killers would never be held accountable. It was an imperfect resolution, but no one could blame the victims of a gross injustice for taking the freedom grudgingly offered.
Something similar is happening with Assange. It compounds the persecution already inflicted on him to force him to declare that exposing US government misdeeds was itself a high crime.
“On a human level, we’re thrilled that he’s out of prison, including the time in the embassy,” said Chuck Zlatkin, a founding member of NYC Free Assange, a group that has held regular protests calling for his release. “We’re thrilled for him personally.”
But the deal shows how eager the US government is to both save face and remain a threatening force against investigative reporters.
‘Criminalization of routine journalistic conduct’
Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24): “Under the legal theory used in the indictment, any journalist could be convicted of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining national defense information from a source, communicating with a source to encourage them to provide national defense information, or publishing national defense information.”
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24), said in a statement:
It’s good news that the DoJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.
The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case, but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.
And that is all happening while threats against leakers and journalists remain. Edward Snowden, the source in the Guardian’s investigation (6/11/13) into National Security Agency surveillance, still resides in Russia in order to evade arrest. I recently wrote about the excessive sentencing of the man who leaked tax documents to ProPublica and the New York Times showing how lopsided the tax system is in favor of the rich (FAIR.org, 2/2/24). NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking documents to the Intercept on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US election (Vanity Fair, 10/12/23).
Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who brought Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance to light, said that Assange’s conviction could silence reporters doing investigative reporting on the US government (New York Times, 12/21/20). Chelsea Manning, Assange’s source for these investigations, spent only seven years in prison out of the 35 years of her sentence thanks to presidential clemency, but that is still a harrowing experience (NPR, 5/17/17).
‘Not transparency’ but ‘sabotage’
The New York Post (6/25/24) predicted that Assange’s release would be cheered by “anarchists and America-haters.”
Worse, some in the so-called free press have rallied behind the government. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/11/19) cheered the legal crusade against Assange, arguing that the leaks harmed national security. “Assange has never been a hero of transparency or democratic accountability,” the Murdoch-owned broadsheet proclaimed.
The neoconservative journal Commentary (4/12/19) dismissed the free press defenders of Assange, saying of Wikileaks’ investigations into US power: “This was not transparency. It was sabotage.”
And the British Economist (4/17/19) said, in support of Assange’s extradition to the US:
WikiLeaks did some good in its early years, exposing political corruption, financial malfeasance and military wrongdoing. But the decision to publish over 250,000 diplomatic cables in 2010 was malicious. The vast majority of messages revealed no illegality or misdeeds. Mr. Assange’s reckless publication of the unredacted versions of those cables the following year harmed America’s interests by putting its diplomatic sources at risk of reprisals, persecution or worse.
Unsurprisingly, Murdoch outlets gave the plea deal a thumbs down. “Don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted ‘publisher,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) warned.
The New York Post editorial board (6/25/24) disparaged Assange’s motives, saying he “wasn’t interested in justice or exposing true abuse; he simply relished obtaining and releasing any secret government or political material, particularly if US-based.” Alleging that the documents he published were sensitive, the paper argued in favor of government secrecy: “Uncle Sam needs to keep some critical secrets, especially when lives are on the line.”
In reality, US intelligence and military officials have never been able to trace any deaths to WikiLeaks‘ revelations (BBC, 12/1/10; Guardian, 7/31/13; NPR, 4/12/19)—and certainly have never identified any damage anywhere nearly as serious as the very real harms it exposed. (NPR did quote a former State Department lawyer who complained that WikiLeaks‘ exposes “can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts.”) Alas, some publications side with state power even if journalistic freedom is at stake (FAIR.org, 4/18/19).
‘Punished for telling the truth’
The vindictive plea bargain the Biden administration forced on Assange might provide Donald Trump in a potential second term with tools he could use to put establishment journalists in prison (CNN, 12/7/23).
Assange’s case is over, but he walks away a battered man as a result of the legal struggle. And that serves as a warning to other journalists who rely on brave people in high levels of power to disclose injustices. Stern is right: Another Trump administration would be horrendous for journalists. But the current situation with the Democratic administration is already chilling.
“All he was being punished for was telling the truth about war crimes committed by this country,” Zlatkin told FAIR.
And without a real change in how the Espionage Act is used against journalists, the ability to tell the truth to the rest of the world is at risk.
“We’re still not in a situation where we as a general population are getting the truth of what’s being done in our name,” Zlatkin said. “So the struggle continues.”
But many, such as the NGO ARTICLE 19, have a warning: However, this is not a slam-dunk win for press freedom. The US should have never brought these charges. The single remaining criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents puts investigative journalism at severe risk in the United States and beyond. Journalists that cover national security, the armed forces and defence do this day in and day out as part of providing transparency and accountability to hold abuses of power in check.
‘We are all at risk if the government can hold an archaic law, the Espionage Act, over the heads of journalists to silence them.’ The charge under the Espionage Act undermines the principles of media freedom, accountability, and independent journalism that Assange, his legal team, and campaigners had championed throughout his case, which began in 2012. The fact that his release from Belmarsh prison is a result of plea deal is a clear reminder of how important it is to redouble our efforts defending media freedom and pushing for accountability.
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 WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will at long last taste freedom again. He should never have been imprisoned. Nevertheless, the release is conditional on his accepting to plead guilty to espionage in the United States — in the far-flung US territory of Saipan. There he is to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served. However, it is much longer that 62 months. Since Sweden ordered an arrest of Assange over rape allegations in 2010, Assange has found himself under some form of incarceration until his current release.
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.
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.
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.
We discuss the plea deal and release of Julian Assange with Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, and the reaction in Assange’s home country of Australia to his release and WikiLeaks’s legacy, which he says helped open the door to whistleblowers and leakers in the era of digital journalism. Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, also discusses the state of press freedom in Israel’…
Julian Assange, a journalist who faced 175 years in prison for publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes, has agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. government, ending years of imprisonment in the United Kingdom where he awaited extradition and allowing him to live in freedom. The WikiLeaks founder was charged under the Espionage Act under the Trump administration, which alleged that he had illegally…
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 24, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday reached a deal with the U.S. government, agreeing to plead guilty to one felony related to the disclosure of national security information in exchange for his release from Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom.
A related document was filed in federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth. Under the plea agreement, which must still be approved by a judge, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will seek a 62-month sentence, equal to the time that the 52-year-old Australian has served in the U.K. prison while battling his extradition to the United States.
Assange faced the risk of spending the rest of his life in U.S. prison if convicted of Espionage Act and Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges for publishing classified material including the “Collateral Murder” video and the Afghan and Iraq war logs. Before Belmarsh, he spent seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London with asylum protections.
“Julian Assange is free,” WikiLeaks declared on the social media platform X, confirming that he left Belmarsh Monday “after having spent 1,901 days there,” locked in a small cell for 23 hours a day.
Julian is free!!!!
Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU- yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. tHANK YOU. THANK YOU.
— Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) June 25, 2024
“He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stanstead Airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the U.K.,” WikiLeaks said. “This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grassroots organizers, press freedom campaigners, legislators, and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations.”
“He will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars,” the group continued. “WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know. As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom. Julian’s freedom is our freedom.”
The news of Assange’s release was celebrated by people around the world, who also blasted the U.S. for continuing to pursue charges against him and the U.K. for going along with it.
“Takeaway from the 12 years of Assange persecution: We need a world where independent journalists work in freedom and top war criminals go to prison—not the other way around,” the progressive advocacy group and longtime Assange supporter RootsAction said on social media.
BREAKING: @TheJusticeDept and Julian Assange have come to a plea deal in the long-running case that threatens press freedom.
— Freedom of the Press (@FreedomofPress) June 25, 2024
Seth Stern, advocacy director at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said that “it’s good news that the DOJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets.”
“That’s what investigative journalists do every day,” Stern noted. “The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic.”
“The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit,” he added. “And they made that choice knowing that [former U.S. President] Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.”
— Free Assange – #FreeAssange (@FreeAssangeNews) June 24, 2024
Leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in a statement: “I congratulate Julian Assange on his freedom. Assange’s eternal imprisonment and torture was an attack on press freedom on a global scale. Denouncing the massacre of civilians in Iraq by the U.S. war machine was his ‘crime’; now the massacre is repeated in Gaza I invite Julian and his wife Stella to visit Colombia and let’s take action for true freedom.”
Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt, who represents Melbourne in Parliament, said on social media that “Julian Assange will finally be free. While great news, this has been over a decade of his life wasted by U.S. overreach.”
“Journalism is not a crime,” Bandt added. “Pursuing Assange was anti-democratic, anti-press freedom, and the charges should have been dropped.”
After more than five years in the maximum-security Belmarsh Prison in the UK, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange reached a plea deal with the U.S. government. The deal allows for his release and return to his home country of Australia after a formal sentencing at a US court in the… pic.twitter.com/5S3xdbZnG2
The women-led peace group CodePink said in a statement:
Without Julian Assange’s critical journalism, the world would know a lot less about war crimes committed by the United States and its allies. He is the reason so many anti-war organizations like ours have the proof we need to fight the war machine in the belly of the beast. CodePink celebrates Julian’s release and commends his brave journalism.
One of the most horrific videos published by WikiLeaks was called “Collateral Murder,” footage of the U.S. military opening fire on a group of unarmed civilians—including Reuters journalists—in Baghdad. While Julian has been in captivity for the past 14 years, the war criminals that destroyed Iraq walked free. Many are still in government positions today or living off the profits of weapons contracts.
While Julian pleads guilty to espionage—we uphold him as a giant of journalistic integrity.
Vahid Razavi, founder of Ethics in Tech and host of multiple NSA Comedy Nights focusing on government mass surveillance, told Common Dreams that “they took a hero and turned him into a criminal.”
“Meanwhile, all of the war criminals in the files exposed by WikiLeaks via Chelsea Manning are free and never faced any punishment or even their day in court,” he added. “You can kill journalists with impunity, just like Israel is doing right now in Gaza.”
Former United Nations human rights official Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his job last year over the world body’s refusal to prevent Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, said on social media that “political prisoner Julian Assange, persecuted for years for the crime of journalism, simply for telling the truth about U.S. war crimes, is free.”
Mokhiber hailed what he called “a moment of light in an age of darkness.”
Julian Assange boarding an airplane. It's an image I never thought I would see—this year or next year or the year after. But because of the work of many advocates, campaigners, journalists, & others, we forced an outcome that avoided a much more dangerous precedent for journalism pic.twitter.com/Ht4zBHs1tV
British journalist Afshin Rattansi said, “Let no one think that any of us will ever forget what the British state did to the most famous journalist of his generation.”
“They tortured him—according to the United Nations special rapporteur on torture—at the behest of the United States,” Rattansi noted.
Andrew Kennis, a professor of journalism and social media at Rutgers University, told Common Dreams that “Julian Assange is nothing less than the Daniel Ellsberg of our time.”
“His journalism revealed more war crimes by the U.S. than any other publisher in the world, and far more extensively than what Ellsberg was able to pull off with a photocopy machine,” he added. “But as opposed to receiving a deserved pardon… the persecution of Assange has been indicative of the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy these days: Prosecute the whistleblowers exposing war crimes while funding Israeli war criminals in an ongoing attempt at genocide against occupied Palestine.”
In both 2013 and 2017, two separate international-polling organizations found that (as the first of them, Win/Gallup, put it), America is “The Greatest Threat To Peace In The World Today”. On 5 May 2021, a NATO-affiliated poll of 53 countries was introduced by NATO’s former chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, saying “Nearly half (44%) of respondents in the 53 countries surveyed are concerned that the US threatens democracy in their country; fear of Chinese influence is 38%, and fear of Russian influence is lowest at 28%.” On 1 November 2021, Pew’s “survey of 17 advanced economies” reported that “Just 17% say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow, while 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. Another 23% do not believe it has ever been a good example.” On that same day, a different poll, the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist National Poll, bannered “Americans See a Serious Threat to Democracy; Trust Elections Largely on Partisan Basis”. Earlier polls among only Americans were also showing greatly increased disillusionment. People around the world who thought that their Government was a democracy but also thought that their Government was lousy, have been coming to view democracy itself with less and less favorability — and this provides encouragement to the aristocracy, who naturally hate democracy, because they want to control the Government. On 8 February 2021, the AP-NORC Poll bannered “Few in US say democracy is working very well” and reported: “Just 16% of Americans say democracy is working well or extremely well, a pessimism that spans the political spectrum. Nearly half of Americans, 45%, think democracy isn’t functioning properly, while another 38% say it’s working only somewhat well.” At year’s-end 2021, 71% of Republicans considered Biden’s Presidency “not legitimate”; 91% of Democrats considered it “legitimate.” In a billionaires-run country, partisanship — setting the Parties increasingly hostile against each other — is the best method to protect the actual rulers, because the public’s hatred of each other is preventing them from looking and seeing upward, toward the aristocrats who are actually pulling all those strings in this political puppet-show that’s happening down below. Thus, rampant and still increasing corruption took over America’s Government, and ever since 2014, life-expectancies in this nation have been going down. And the worse its regime gets, the more arrogantly it threatens or criticizes struggling and rising economic competitors.
