The Final Nail in the Coffin for A Free Press, The Case Against Julian Assange.
The Obama Administration has set a precedent that will only make it easier for the more overtly authoritarian Donald Trump to undermine press freedoms.
We have entered the second week of the Julian Assange extradition hearings and there has been no mainstream coverage of the case except for a segment with Glenn Greenwald on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. The fact that a case that has such dire implications for the first amendment and freedom of the press would be blatantly ignored by our mainstream media only reinforces the reality that our mainstream news outlets aren’t really operating with the intent to inform and educate the public, instead they’re intent on covering up for the corruption of those in power by operating as public relations agents for the ruling class.
This shouldn’t be a radical claim to make. The American public is aware that their mainstream media aren’t giving them the full story. For example, according to a Gallup poll regarding public trust in mainstream media, as of 2019 59% of Americans no longer trust mainstream media. Compare that to 1974 when public trust in the media was as high as 69%. This erosion of public trust in mainstream media over the years has made it increasingly difficult for the bipartisan ruling class and their lackeys within the media to hold a monopoly on what the American public considers true.
Due to this erosion of trust, we have seen the rise of alternative and independent media outlets on the internet that aren’t beholden to the same funding structures that corrupt mainstream media. These new media outlets have taken the duty of informing the American public into their own hands and have exposed the United States government for crimes against humanity that mainstream outlets wouldn’t dare to report on. As a result, the American Government has taken unprecedented action over the last decade by moving to use the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute journalists and their sources who dare to expose the crimes of the bipartisan ruling class.
For example, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation Barack Obama used the Espionage Act to put a record number of journalists and their sources in jail :
“Between 1917 and 2009, only one person was convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking to a news organization…During the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice brought charges under the Espionage Act against eight people accused of leaking to the media.”
Those individuals were:
Thomas Drake
Shamai Leibowitz
Stephen Kim
Chelsea Manning
Donald Sachtleben
Jeffery Sterling
John Kiriakou
Edward Snowden
The Freedom of the Press Association makes it clear that the Obama Administration has set a precedent that will only make it easier for the more overtly authoritarian Donald Trump to undermine press freedoms, and this brings us to the case of Julian Assange.
Julian Assange is currently fighting an attempt by the Department of Justice to extradite him to the United States to stand for a trial relating to charges that ironically accuse Assange of spying on the United States Government when in reality the US Government was spying on him. The DOJ is charging Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of violating a computer law crime that is also an Espionage Act offense. In total these charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.
The case against Julian Assange originally stems from when Wikileaks published the Collateral Murder tapes in 2010 which showed footage of a United States Apache helicopter indiscriminately murdering more than a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters news reporters. Wikileaks and Assange obtained this footage from Chelsea Manning, a former US Army soldier and whistle-blower who was also in prison being held in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day for refusing to testify against Julian Assange in front of a secretive grand jury. She was recently released from her unjust prison sentence after she attempted to commit suicide and a federal judge demanded her release, but US authorities are still hell-bent on getting their hands on Assange for exposing their war crimes. If they are successful, Julian Assange will not receive a fair trial. Under the Espionage Act, the defendant isn’t allowed to refute the prosecution’s case and explain why they chose to publish material that was published to the court. United States authorities will torture Julian Assange and lock him up for life.
Throughout the Obama Administration, Julian Assange and Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of documents that exposed countless war crimes and other acts of corruption by the United States and other global superpowers. For example, after U.S. interventions in Syria and Libya, Wikileaks published emails from the Democratic Party think-tank the Center for American Progres which showed Democratic Party insiders such as Neera Tanden discussing how Libya should pay the U.S. back with oil revenue for supporting a regime change operation that, just like in Iraq, created a power vacuum that has resulted in even more instability. This infuriated the Obama Administration, which then directed the Department of Justice to impanel a Grand Jury to conduct investigations into Wikileaks in 2011.
Upon ending their investigation into Wikileaks in 2013, Obama’s Department of Justice concluded that it couldn’t prosecute Assange because there was no way to distinguish between what Wikileaks did from what the New York Times and countless media outlets around the world routinely do, which is working with their sources to publish information while keeping their source out of harm’s way. The Obama Justice Department, with all of their flaws, knew that prosecuting and extraditing Julian Assange would create a slippery slope for a free and independent press to stand on.
This opinion changed when the Trump administration took over the Department of Justice in 2017. Since Trump’s election, hard-line officials like Mike Pompeo have reignited the conversation around prosecuting and extraditing Assange. In 2017 when Pompeo was still chief of the CIA he stated:
“We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us.”
Two years later Trump’s Department of Justice indicted Julian Assange for publishing classified documents and acting as a co-conspirator to Chelsea Manning by helping her allegedly hack into a database that she supposedly didn’t have access to herself. At the time of the indictment, The Intercept released an article stating that the DoJ’s allegations of hacking were totally unfounded.
“the indictment alleges no such thing. Rather, it simply accuses Assange of trying to help Manning log into the Defense Departments computers using a different username so that she could maintain her anonymity…”
These are standard operating procedures for any investigative journalists with experience in handling leaked material. Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped mainstream media from repeating claims of hacking or stating that Wikileaks disclosures harmed American national security whenever they do choose to cover the Assange case. It should be obvious that these claims of wrongdoing by Assange and Wikileaks coming from the United States are nothing but an attempt to punish a journalist for speaking truth to power.
Before the current hearings began Trump’s Department of Justice released a third indictment that didn’t include any new charges, but it would include conduct focusing on Assange supposedly colluding with “co-conspirators”, many of whom have already been subject to trials and sentenced to prison. In response to this, Edward Snowden tweeted:
“…tell me that the show trial of Assange doesn’t read like something from Kafka. The judge permits the charges to be changed so frequently the defense doesn’t even know what they are, the most basic demands are denied, no one can hear what the defendant says -- a farce.”
According to those who’ve been following the case closely, they believe that by adding an influx of new material prosecutors believe they can extradite Assange even if they fail to convince the court that publishing material obtained from Chelsea Manning was a criminal act, which they have been unable to do so far.
In an interview with Jordan Chariton, founder of the independent news organization Status Coup, the editor of Shadowproof.com, Kevin Gosztola stated:
“The prosecutors’ argument is that they’re going to willfully misinterpret their own indictment and make it seem like they’re not criminalizing journalism…when in fact they’re actually criminalizing the receipt of the information. So basically any journalist who receives theses documents would have been commiting a crime just by possessing the classified information. So that’s criminalizing news gathering and the most common practice of collecting information from sources.”
Assange’s defense team has worked to convince the court that the material published by Assange was in the public’s best interest since Wikileaks “disclosed U.S. involvement in criminal activity” by exposing war crimes and torture. On the second day of the trial Mark Summers, a defense attorney for team Assange called Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights attorney who has represented prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to the stand. Smith told Judge Baraitser, who’s presiding over the Assange case, that U.S. State Department cables obtained from Wikileaks helped those impacted by drone killings in Pakistan. According to Smith, a high court in Pakistan ruled that:
“drone strikes carried out by the CIA and U.S. authorities were a blatant violation of basic human rights, a blatant breach of the absolute right to life, and a war crime causing many innocent deaths.”
Smith also stated in his testimony:
“U.S. drone strikes are criminal offenses and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior U.S. officials involved in such strikes.”
It should be obvious to anyone paying attention to this case who isn’t seeking to cover up for the corruption of the bipartisan ruling class that Julian Assange is being prosecuted in an attempt to send a signal to journalists and their sources to stay away from exposing the illegitimacy of the ruling class. In an interview conducted by Kevin Gosztola of Shaddowproof.com, Assange’s lawyer in the United States Barry Pollack stated:
“The position that the U.S. is taking is a very dangerous one…that they have jurisdiction all over the world and can pursue criminal charges against any journalist anywhere on the planet, whether they’re a U.S. citizen or not…not only can the U.S. pursue charges against them but that person has no defense under the First Amendment.”
The conclusion of this case will set a precedent that could potentially put the final nail in the coffin for a free and independent press anywhere in the world. Now that the United States has made it clear that they will not allow journalists and their sources, regardless of where they are in the world, to publish material that exposes the illegitimacy of the bipartisan ruling class, journalists and their sources know that if they report on or leak information regarding the war crimes and corruption of the establishment that they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The Obama Administration had their own issues with freedoms of the press, but even the guy who prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than any other president in history knew that prosecuting Julian Assange would do irreparable damage to a free press. We must not allow the United States to extradite Julian Assange.