Friends,
Be
very careful. If you ever think you can get on the good side of Donald
Trump, think what his Department of Injustice is now doing to Assange and what
might happen to other journalists who have worked with whistleblowers. I
am sure Jeremy Scahill is feeling the heat.
Kagiso, Max
The Indictment of Julian Assange Under the Espionage
Act Is a Threat to the Press and the American People
James Risen
May 24, 2019
The Intercept
A TRUE DEMOCRACY does not allow its government to decide who is a
journalist. A nation in which a leader gets to make that decision is on the
road to dictatorship.
That is why the new U.S. indictment of Julian Assange
is so dangerous to liberty in America.
The Trump administration has charged Assange under the
Espionage Act for conspiring to leak classified documents. The indictment,
released yesterday, focuses on his alleged efforts to encourage former Army
intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak classified documents to him and
WikiLeaks about a decade ago.
Many of those documents, including U.S. military
reports and State Department cables, were later published by WikiLeaks, but
they were also the basis of reporting by major news organizations like the New
York Times and The Guardian, which published some of them. The Manning leaks
helped reveal long-hidden truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the
post-9/11 global war on terror. Among the most striking leaks were a
classified video of U.S. military attack helicopters killing a dozen
people, including two Reuters staffers, in Baghdad in 2007, as well as the more
than 250,000 State Department cables, which continue to be an important
reference for reporters and researchers studying U.S. foreign policy.
The Manning documents also turned WikiLeaks into a
strange new player in the modern journalistic ecosystem. WikiLeaks would obtain
materials from sources inside governments and other organizations and then
disseminate them, either by publishing them itself or by sharing them with
major news organizations. WikiLeaks served as an intermediary between sources
and reporters.
Does that make Assange, its founder, a journalist? A
debate over that question has raged ever since and has never been resolved.
Journalists don’t want the government to settle this
question — and Americans shouldn’t either. If the government gets to decide
what constitutes journalism, what’s to stop it from making similar rulings
about any outlet whose coverage it doesn’t like?
THE INDICTMENT SAYS that Assange and WikiLeaks “repeatedly sought,
obtained, and disseminated information that the United States classified due to
the serious risk that unauthorized disclosure could harm the national security
of the United States.”
That is almost a textbook definition of the job of a
reporter covering national security at a major news organization. Take a look
at the tips pages of most news outlets, and you’ll see
a remarkable similarity between what journalists ask for and what WikiLeaks
sought.
The indictment goes on to say that “WikiLeaks’s
website explicitly solicited censored, otherwise restricted, and until
September 2010, ‘classified’ materials.” Today, virtually every major news
organization has a similar secure drop box where sources can provide
information anonymously. WikiLeaks popularized that technique for soliciting
anonymous leaks, but it is now common journalistic practice.
“Assange personally and publicly promoted WikiLeaks to
encourage those with access to protected information, including classified
information, to provide it to WikiLeaks for public disclosure,” the indictment
says. Nearly every national security reporter goes on television, gives
speeches, or launches book tours to promote their work and hopefully obtain new
sources.
All of this raises an obvious question: If the
government can charge Assange for conspiring to obtain leaked documents, what
would stop it from charging the CIA beat reporter at the New York Times for
committing the same crime?
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION began the government’s investigation of Assange
and WikiLeaks over the Manning leaks, but the issue of how to distinguish
between WikiLeaks and the rest of the media is generally thought to have given
them pause.
The Trump administration has no such qualms. President
Donald Trump sees the media as the enemy of the people; charging Assange opens
the door for his Justice Department to go after the rest of the press corps.
The great irony, of course, is that
Trump publicly declared his love for WikiLeaks during the 2016
presidential campaign, when WikiLeaks acted as a kind of intermediary between
shadowy front entities put up by Russian intelligence and the U.S. media in the
distribution of hacked emails and other documents from the Hillary Clinton
campaign and the Democratic Party.
Whether WikiLeaks and Assange knew they were getting
the materials at least indirectly from Russian intelligence is still an open
question. But there is no doubt that the New York Times, The Intercept, and
other major media organizations largely ignored their provenance and instead
lapped up the leaked materials and published them in the midst of the 2016
campaign.
The results were very good for Trump.
But the government’s case against Assange has nothing
to do with his role in laundering documents stolen by Russian spies to help
Trump win the 2016 election. Instead, it focuses on his earlier work, which
brought new light to the dark corners of the war on terror.
The selective nature of the charges against Assange
underscores the fact that this is a highly politicized case brought by a
Justice Department now run by Trump lackey William Barr. Even as it pursues
Assange for his role in producing groundbreaking journalism, Trump’s Justice
Department is ignoring the one known instance when Assange actually worked,
perhaps unwittingly, with a foreign intelligence service.
But given that exploring said angle would raise
new questions about alleged links between Trump and Russia, it is exceedingly
unlikely that this Justice Department would choose to go down that road.
Instead, it’s going after the publication of classified documents that helped
educate Americans about the conduct of their own government. All journalists —
and all Americans— should be deeply worried about that.
Jim Risen, a best-selling author and former New York
Times reporter, is The Intercept’s Senior National Security Correspondent,
based in Washington, D.C.
Risen also serves as director of First Look Media’s
Press Freedom Defense Fund, which is dedicated to supporting news organizations,
journalists, and whistleblowers in legal fights in which a substantial
public interest, freedom of the press, or related human or civil right
is at stake.
Risen was himself a target of the U.S.
government’s crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers. He waged a seven-year
battle, risking jail, after the Bush administration and later the Obama
administration sought to force him to testify and reveal his confidential sources
in a leak investigation. Risen never gave in, and the government finally backed
down.
The Intercept depends on the support of readers to
help keep its nonprofit newsroom strong and independent. Join.
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"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
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