Friends,
Even though Assange worked with Putin to get Trump elected,
we have to support him.
Kagiso,
Max
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (photo: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters)
A Fair
Trial for Julian Assange
By John Kiriakou, Reader
Supported News
30 May 17
If recent press reports are to be believed,
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is the target of a secret grand jury
investigation, either in the federal court of the District of Columbia or in
the notorious Eastern District of Virginia, known colloquially as “the
espionage court.” Assange is currently holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in
London, where he fled to avoid a British arrest warrant and probable
extradition to Sweden on what supporters and many legal analysts called a
flimsy sexual assault case.
The
Swedish case was dropped last week, but
Assange remains in the embassy. British authorities say that he still faces a
misdemeanor UK charge of jumping bail (on the moot Swedish case), but the
British disingenuously won’t talk about the rumors of a US case and the
possibility of extradition to the US.
For
its part, the Justice Department isn’t saying anything. Still, the Trump administration,
like Obama’s before it, has made it clear that it sees Assange as an
arch-criminal, rather than a journalist. And CIA director Mike Pompeo went so far as to say that
Wikileaks acts as a “hostile foreign intelligence service.” Remember, Pompeo is
the same guy who said that he’d like to see Ed Snowden “hang from a tree until
he’s dead.”
I’m
not an Assange fan personally. We have some friends and acquaintances in
common, and they tell me that he is a misogynist. And we can’t ignore the fact
that Assange’s single-minded obsession with ruining Hillary Clinton during the
2016 election and publishing the embarrassing “Podesta emails,” very likely
played a role in giving us Donald Trump.
Still,
the Trump administration’s position on Assange is to level serious charges and
to speak bombastically. Neocon and neoliberal rhetoric aside, though, Wikileaks
is a journalistic entity devoted to transparency and Julian Assange is a
journalist, whether Washington muckety-mucks like his politics or not. A
criminal case against him could put the CIA in a very difficult position
because a trial would have to lead to invocation of the Classified Information
Procedures Act (CIPA). It could also lead to a constitutional crisis over the
first amendment’s freedom of the press. If Wikileaks is devoted to transparency
and exposing governmental waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality – which it is –
well, that’s the definition of journalism, isn’t it? Even the most basic
charges against Assange would merit appeals to the Circuit Court of Appeals and
to the Supreme Court. Does the Justice Department want to risk overturning the
Espionage Act? It would be a serious gamble.
CIPA,
which was passed into law in 1980,
allows the government to keep things secret in a national security trial that
otherwise may have been made public. It reduces incidents of “graymail,” where
a defendant may insist on revealing classified information to defend himself.
For example, if a defendant is charged with revealing that “Zorg” was a secret
program that damaged Iranian widgets, and both “Zorg” and the widgets are
classified, “Zorg” will be referred to in the trial as “carwash,” or some such
nonsense, and the widgets will be referred to as “cigars.” The jury has no real
idea what in the world was revealed in the first place. But, at least in the
Eastern District of Virginia, they always vote “guilty” anyway.
At the
District Court level, then, the only way for Assange to get a fair trial would
be for the court to order the declassification of CIA and FBI documents
necessary for his defense. Would the intelligence community want to risk even
further exposure of classified information in a trial? They would have to if
they intend to prosecute. Assange is entitled to this information as discovery.
But does the government want to take the risk of Assange passing the discovery
on to Wikileaks, again, in the interests of transparency,
CIPA be damned?
Furthermore, the CIA has never said one way or the other if the documents that
Wikileaks has released as attributable to the CIA are actually original and
true Agency documents. They would have to do so in a trial.
Policymakers
at the Justice Department, the CIA, the FBI, and the White House clearly have
not thought this through. It’s one thing to criticize journalists who publish
stories that contain “classified” information. It’s an entirely different thing
to try to punish those journalists under the Espionage Act. And it’s
unprecedented in American history. Cooler heads have to prevail in Washington.
You don’t have to like Julian Assange’s politics to love constitutional
freedoms. You don’t have to like Julian Assange as a person to value what he
and Wikileaks do to expose waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality (which, by the
way, is the very definition of whistleblowing). Julian Assange could not get a
fair trial in a federal court. He shouldn’t have to have any trial in the first
place.
John
Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth
whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a
law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his
attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
