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54834
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
URL: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/26/jameel_jaffer_on_julian
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Julian Assange’s Release “Averted a Press Freedom Catastrophe” But Still Set Bad Precedent: Jameel Jaffer STORYJUNE 26, 2024Watch Full Show ListenMedia Options This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Julian Assange WikiLeaks Department of Justice Freedom of Expression GUESTS Jameel Jaffer director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. LINKS "The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law" As Julian Assange returns to his native Australia, press rights advocates warn that his case could cast a long shadow over journalists’ work to investigate and expose government secrets. The WikiLeaks founder has pleaded guilty to one charge of violating the U.S. Espionage Act as part of a deal with the Justice Department that lets him avoid further prison time following five years behind bars in the U.K. awaiting possible extradition to the U.S. He had been facing a possible 175 years in U.S. prison if convicted on all charges related to his publication of classified documents in 2010 that revealed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t think this is an unmitigated victory for press freedom, because we do still have this plea agreement in which Julian Assange essentially agrees that he has spent five years in custody for the kinds of acts that journalists engage in all the time,” says Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and previously the ACLU’s deputy legal director. Please check back later for full transcript. |
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54836
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/26/the-release-of-julian-assange-plea-deals-and-dark-legacies/
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can't really blame him for taking the deal...good for him..sad for law... June 26, 2024 The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies by Binoy Kampmark 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. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com |
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54837
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
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I don't blame him at all! I'm glad he's free. Biden should have done this 3 years ago, but then who would remember such graciousness at re-election time? Anyway, I wouldn't hold it against Assange if he decided to live a quiet private life for the duration, but am curious to see what will come. |
54839
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
| i hope he continues where he left off... |
54855
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
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Julian Assange is now free to do or say whatever he likes. What does his future hold? By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY, Associated Press Updated June 27, 2024 9:17 a.m. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures after landing at RAAF air base Fairbairn in Canberra, Australia, Wednesday, June 26 2024. Assange has returned to his homeland Australia aboard a charter jet hours after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that concludes a drawn-out legal saga. WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — He has run for office, published hundreds of thousands of leaked government documents online, and once lobbied to save his local swimming pool. One of the most polarizing and influential figures of the information age, Julian Assange is now free after five years in a British prison and seven years in self-imposed exile in a London embassy. What's next for the WikiLeaks founder remains unclear. Assange, 52, landed in his homeland of Australia this week after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that put an end to an attempt to extradite him to the United States. That could have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence in the event of conviction. “Julian plans to swim in the ocean every day. He plans to sleep in a real bed. He plans to taste real food, and he plans to enjoy his freedom,” his wife, Stella Assange, told reporters Thursday at a news conference that Assange did not attend. Her husband and the father of her two children would continue to “defend human rights and speak out against injustice,” she said. “He can choose how he does that because he is a free man.” Assange himself has given no clues. Will he “switch off”? All friends and acquaintances of Assange interviewed by The Associated Press this week emphasized that they did not know his future plans and underscored the toll taken by his ordeal — in prison he spent 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, following years in self-exile inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. “I just want him to survive this ordeal and be happy. I don’t care what Julian does next,” said Andrew Wilkie, an Independent Australian lawmaker who met Assange before the hacker launched WikiLeaks — and was one of the first politicians to lobby for Australia to intervene in his case. But some also found it hard to imagine Assange wouldn't eventually return to the preoccupations that have long captured him. “I suspect though that he doesn’t switch off, and it’s hard to see him just disappearing to a beach shack forever,” added Wilkie. Assange was “unable to walk past injustice” said Suelette Dreyfus, a lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne who has known Assange since he was a teenager, hacking secure networks for the fun of it. Dreyfus, who once lobbied alongside Assange to save a swimming pool in Melbourne, said her friend's health had worsened during his years in a British jail. “But I suspect he will not sit on a beach for the rest of his life,” she said. What is next for WikiLeaks? It is unclear what will happen to WikiLeaks, the site Assange founded in 2006 as a place to post confidential documents exposing corruption and revealing secret government workings behind warfare and spying. That work led him to be celebrated by supporters as a transparency crusader but lambasted by national security hawks who insisted that his conduct put lives at risk and strayed far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism. The site remains online, although Assange told The Nation in 2023 that it had ceased publishing because of his imprisonment, and because state surveillance and the freezing of WikiLeaks funds had deterred whistleblowers. Assange’s plea deal with the U.S. included an agreement to destroy any unpublished U.S. documents. “Will he go back to WikiLeaks and, if he does, will he do it differently? I don’t know,” said Wilkie, the lawmaker. Could he receive a pardon? One matter where Assange’s views are known is his hope for a pardon from a current or future U.S. president on the charge he pleaded guilty to as part of his deal. White House National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said President Joe Biden is not considering one. Media analysts worry the conviction threatened to cast a chilling effect on public interest journalism. Assange has always insisted he is a journalist and the case could lead to the prosecution of other reporters, said Peter Greste, a professor at the University of Queensland and a former foreign correspondent who was jailed in Egypt for his reporting. Could he run for office? In the past, Assange had designs on elected office, making an unsuccessful bid for the Australian senate with his WikiLeaks party in 2013, although he has not suggested he will contest an election again. “When you turn a bright light on, the cockroaches scuttle away. That’s what we need to do to Canberra,” he told the news program “60 Minutes” the same year, when asked why he wanted to enter politics. But where the government of the day had despised Assange — a mutual feeling, he said — he was met in his homeland on Wednesday with a hero’s welcome, including from some politicians and a public who had not supported him before. It reflected a slow reversal of views about the WikiLeaks founder in Australia – but it belied an odd tension, too. In a recent high-profile case, an Australian judge sentenced a former army lawyer to almost six years in prison for leaking classified information that exposed allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan. Assange’s legal team mentioned the case on Thursday. Analysts said that case and others, along with the renewed focus on Assange, drew attention to a fraught national culture of information secrecy that has been endorsed even by some of the politicians who celebrated Assange’s freedom. “We have some of the most restrictive legislation on access to public information in the world, and we have no constitutional protection for press freedom or freedom of speech,” said Greste. “I hope that Julian does also get involved in campaigning to support press freedom, and transparency and accountability of information in Australia.” Even when Assange did address the idea of what he may do next — in a 2018 interview for the World Ethical Digital Forum, credited as his last public appearance before he was jailed — he was typically enigmatic. “I don’t know,” he said. “No, I mean I do know. But I don’t know what I should answer in response to that question.” ___ Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed. June 27, 2024|Updated June 27, 2024 9:17 a.m. CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY |
54856
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/27/assanges-freedom-is-also-ours-to-tell-the-truth/
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June 27, 2024 Assange’s Freedom Is Also Ours: To Tell the Truth by Robert Koehler After 12 years — including five years of solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison in London — Julian Assange is free. God bless America! He wasn’t extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, where he faced a sentence of 170 years in prison for violating the so-called Espionage Act. Instead, he took a plea deal with the U.S. government, pleading guilty to one count of violating that act — you know, threatening America’s freedom — for which he had paid by his time already served. He was officially pronounced free at a U.S. federal court in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory), after which he flew home to his wife and two children in Australia. My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea, which has justifiably stirred concern and controversy. The government got its little triumph: a “legal” acknowledgment of its right to keep monstrous secrets about what it does and punish any unauthorized spilling of the beans as “espionage.” “He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” according to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, quoted by the New York Times. And Matt Taibbi said the decision “will remain a sword over the heads of anyone reporting on national security issues. Governments have no right to keep war crimes secret, but Assange’s 62-month stay in prison is starting to look like a template for Western prosecutions of such leaks.” While such concerns are no doubt worrisome, I don’t think the legal system is a mechanism for seriously addressing them. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was hardly an equal in this hellish controversy. He was in the legal crosshairs of the most powerful country on the planet, which he had had the nerve to defy, by publishing an enormous amount of “classified” — that is to say hidden — data, given to him by government-employed whistleblowers. This is called journalism, no matter that part of the U.S. case against Assange was that he doesn’t count as a real journalist. Mainstream, corporate journalists know how to behave themselves, I guess. They’re far more likely to “respect” the do-not-cross lines the government establishes. As I wrote in 2010, at the beginning of the WikiLeaks controversy: “In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo, we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.” As long as “national security” includes the waging of war, honest — a.k.a., real — journalism will be a nuisance to those in charge, because it includes actual reportage, not simply press-releases and public-relations blather. In the real world, war equals murder. War is not an abstract game of strategy and tactics. War itself is a “war crime” — especially when it’s waged not to gain freedom from an oppressor but to maintain control over the oppressed. WikiLeaks releases were outrageous acts of espionage — from a war-waging government’s point of view — because the data was raw, real and unsanitized. They included 90,000 classified documents on the US war in Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 secret files on the Iraq war, which . . . uh, bled beyond the official propaganda and, among other things, showed that civilian deaths in the two wars were, according to Al-Jazeera, “much higher than the numbers being reported.” In addition, WikiLeaks released data that, as Al-Jazeera noted, “unearthed how the Geneva Conventions were being violated routinely in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The documents, dating from 2002 to 2008 showed the abuse of 800 prisoners, some of them as young as 14.” And then, of course, there was the infamous “collateral murder” video, which showed a U.S. helicopter firing at people on a street in Baghdad, killing seven of them, including a Reuters journalist, and wounding a number of others, including two children, who were sitting in a van that had pulled up to aid the wounded people in the street. And all this happened as helicopter crew members snickered about the deaths. This was the United States in full view, waging its “war on terror” by unleashing terror at the level only a superpower could commit. Showing snippets of truth about the war on terror is Julian Assange’s crime: his act of espionage. And I get the government’s point of view. Assange put war itself into the forefront of collective human awareness — as a hideous reality, not a political abstraction. What he did bears striking similarity to what Emmett Till’s mother did. She exposed the raw horror of Southern racism by insisting that her son, a 14-year-old boy who was beaten and drowned by Mississippi racists for allegedly speaking to a white woman, have a public funeral with an open casket, so the whole world could see what had been done to him. This was in 1955. Not long afterward, the Civil Rights Movement was fully underway. Human evolution isn’t a legal issue, decided by the courts. It involves humanity facing and transcending its own dark side, which can be a messy and chaotic process. This is the nature of truth. Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. |
54857
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/27/julian-is-free/
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June 27, 2024 Julian is Free by John Kendall Hawkins I watched the livestream of Julian getting out of a car accompanied by Kevin Rudd the I’m Sorry prime minister of yore who’d teary-eyed up on TV like William Hurt in Elephant Man no, I meant, Broadcast News the one with the onion ready for poignant stories with layers Someone yank yells stupidly Do you like the weather here better than London? And one thinks of early Dylan at that news conference, some girlish reporter asking what he meant by his song, “Eve of Destruction,” and Dylan telling her he didn’t write that and him reaching for a match to light a smoke and everyone laughing, and Dylan high deciding right then and there not to wear the counterculture’s technicolor dream coat, no way, Jose, and besides, Barry McGuire can’t play harp either. Fuck it. He lights up, drifts. Yes, Assange is Free, Free At Last but at what price? did he compromise? did he re-learn certain alphabets? Was he rat-cage-faced and finds now that 2+2=5? will he ever wickedly leak again? will Stella and the kids be enough for him now or will he pull a Robinson Crusoe who returned free from that lost island to England sees his wife die and has his kids put into foster care and goes off on more pointless adventures (to be fair, Defoe was probably paid by the word, so…), some new parrot crying, Poor Crusoe? And the Press he took a knee for cries Do you like the weather? How do you feel? How do you feel? How do you feel? John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia. He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times. |
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54869
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: why Assange release deal sets bad precedent for press freedom
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June 28, 2024 Assange is Finally Free as America, Britain, Sweden and Australia are Shamed by Dave Lindorff This was quite a week in the annals of freedom of the press. Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower organization Wikileaks, after being hounded by the US with the help of its sycophantic allies in the governments of the UK, Sweden, Ecuador and, most shamefully, his native Australia, for 14 years since his Wikileaks organization obtained and released documents proving systemic war crimes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been freed. He spent the last 14 years fighting efforts by the US to lock him up oar execute 9or even to assassinate him ,spending 12 of those years in the hell of confinement in a British maximum security prison and earlier seven years as an asylum seeker trapped in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London. His asylum ended and his imprisonment in Belmarsh began when the leftist president who had granted him asylum from British authorities who wanted to hand him over to the US for prosecution as a spy, lost an election and was replaced by a right-wing president who cancelled his asylum and called in the London Metropolitan Police, who dragged him out of the embassy and into solitary confinement in Belmarsh Prison pending extradition to the US. Over the seven years he was trapped in the little embassy, or left alone in a tiny cell in hellish Belmarsh, his supporters — initially a handful of journalists and his family — a father, a half-brother and father and attorneys in Britain and the US, and one attorney, Sara Gonzalez Devant, who later bore him two sons who have never met him except in captivity worked to build a movement to defend and free him. It was a tough struggle. The US and UK media organizations that benefitted from his Wikileaks organization’s documentation of US war crimes, including the gun-sight video of a US helicopter gunship slaughtering, amidst audible mocking laughter, 11 unarmed Iraqis including two local Reuters journalists, and from other scoops Wikileaks received from whistleblowers, largely turned on him when he was being pursued by US prosecutors. Typically these same news organizations, when covering his case, would repeat in their articles about him (almost as if pasting in pre-set macro paragraphs”), the false accusation that he was wanted by Swedish prosecutors for allegedly “raping” two women in Sweden. They also would routinely include in such stories gratuitous quotes from politicians smearing his character and even from fellow journalists questioning his claim to be one of them, along with grudging acknowledgement that the US charge of espionage against him was a threat to press freedom, But truth gradually prevailed and pressure kept building: in Britain against his being extradited and against the US obsession with pursuing the case against him, and in Australia for the government in Canberra to end its years of submissive and callous acceptance of the abuse of an Aussie citizen by a US government out for revenge. This international movement to free Assange grew larger and more vocal when a new Labour government replaced the prior conservative one in Australia and Labor PM Anthony Albanese openly called on President Biden to end the case against his countryman Assange. In the end it was this slowly and painstakingly developed international movement to free Assange that compelled the Biden administration to offer Assange a deal. He and his attorneys were reportedly told that the US would agree to his freedom if he would plead guilty to one felony count of theft of US military secrets (the evidence of war crimes), and a sentence of five years, which would be satisfied by crediting the over five years he had spent being held in Belmarsh Prison without conviction of anything but denied bail while fighting the US’s extradition effort. Much is being made now, of course, by US officials of that guilty plea, but it is important that what Assange was facing if he were extradited to a court in Washington DC. With an indictment on 17 felony counts under the 1917 Espionage Act an one felony count of encouraging hackers and of helping NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to escape to Russia, the total prison term if convicted on all those counts would have run to 175 years’ jail time served consecutively. The urgency of the US plea deal offer, which apparently came as a something of a surprise to Assange and his defense team, had to do with the reality that the US was facing of his possible escape from their trap: That became at least a possibility when, after many rejections, two UK High Court Judges last year overruled a 2022 British Supreme Court decision denying Assange the right to challenge his extradition. Unconvinced by US promises that he would receive a fair trial in a US court (promises that were hedged by the US DOJ’s acknowledgement that the US Supreme Court would in fact be the final arbiter of whether, for example, Assange could avail himself of the Constitution’s First Amendment right of Free Speech and a Free Press — a Supreme Court packed with originalist justices who support the national security state. The two High Court judges were preparing to review his arguments against extradition later this month. There’s no telling how they would have ruled of course, but the Washington nightmare of his walking free in Britain was more than Biden, AG Merrick Garland and the US national security agencies pressing for a lengthy jail sentence in the US, could tolerate. They needed at least the fig leaf of a guilty plea. To understand why Assange, who is about to turn 53, after being effectively incarcerated for nearly a quarter of his life, simply for doing what investigative journalists do, revealing the truth about government crimes, it’s important to know what he was facing if he didn’t accept the Biden deal and then lost his last appeal of the extradition order that had already been approved in a UK court. Let me explain. In the self-appointed “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” United States, those of us who as journalists cover legal issues know that American justice is not blind like the statue in many courts of the woman “Justice” blindfolded and holding up a scale in one hand and a sword in the other.. Neither is it fair. Worse yet, it routinely punishes those who demand their Constitutional right to a jury trial for doing so applying the stiffest of penalties should they end up being convicted. The safest bet in an American court under such circumstances is to “cop a plea,” meaning to take the advice of one’s lawyer or public defender: typically to plead guilty to a lesser charge and accept a lesser penalty. or if that proves unacceptable to the judge and prosecution, agree to plead guilty as charged in return for a lesser penalty. This harsh reality has led to a large number of people in prison for crimes they did not commit, but that they pleaded guilty to out of necessity and lack of funds to hire a lawyer or to appeal a wrongful conviction. That’s why for instance, of the 71,954 defendants facing criminal federal charges in the US fiscal year 2022, only 1669 opted to go to trial, according to a Pew Research report. That is just 2.3% of all those facing felony or serious misdemeanor charges that year. Of those few who boldly requested a trial before a jury or a district court judge, only a handful — 290 or 0.4% of those charged, were acquitted. The other 1379 who had their cases tried were convicted, and because they insisted on a trial they had a right to, likely were slapped with lengthy or maximum sentences. Of the rest of those who didn’t have their cases adjudicated, 89.5% or 64.434 just pleaded guilty hoping for a lighter sentence. Another 8.2%, or 5900 defendants, had their cases tossed out, usually for lack of sufficient evidence. Given this sorry record, which is depressingly typical of how the federal courts operate year in and year out in the US, it’s understandable why Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who finally escaped over 12 years of terrible torture at the hands of the US government and a supine British government, agreed to cop a plea. Assange and his British counsellors also probably knew also about an investigative report published last year in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, summarized later in a British publication called The Pen, which located copies of at least some of the long-missing or destroyed emails between Swedish prosecutors and Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service concerning the effort by a politically connected and CIA-linked prosecutor in Stockholm and the CPS, which at the time in 2013 was headed by none other than Barrister Keir Starmer. He’s the man widely expected to become Britain’s new Prime Minister if, as polls suggest, his Labour Party wins an outright majority and a six-year term as Prime Minister in the July 4 Parliamentary elections. Starmer’s correspondence suggests it was his office that was pressing reluctant Swedish officials to keep insisting on trying to extradite Assange to Sweden to face questioning there about allegations of sexual abuse accusations by two Swedish women, and who advised them to reject offers by Assange and his attorneys to respond to their questions if they came to London and met with him. There had long been a question of why, Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, from 2010 to 2016, unable to question Assange in Sweden, refused a standing offer from his lawyers to travel to the UK and question him where he was holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy. As the Italian newspaper Il Facto Quotidiano explains, “No one understood why Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny did not want to travel to London to question Julian Assange and determine whether to charge him or not. It was our FOIA investigation that allowed unearthing the reason: It was the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service…who advised the Swedish prosecutors not to question Assange in London.” The magazine learned that all of the email correspondence by CPS officer Paul Close’s, who did most of the communicating with Ny was mysteriously wiped when he left the agency in 2014. Starmer, who has been strangely silent about Assange’s plea deal with the US and his escape from British detention, was in charge of the CPS from 2008 through 2013 and during those years when the office was handling communications regarding Assange with the Swedish prosecutor and was Close’s boss, appears to have been a key agent in Assange’s unconscionable torment. That would clearly have made Assange and his defense team keen to get him out of Britain and out of the news cycle before Keir “our national security always comes first” Starmer were to enter 10 Downing Street as the UK’s Prime Minister. The deal offered by the Biden Administration’s “Justice Department” was tough one. It required that in return for agreeing to plead guilty to one of the 17 felony charges of violating the US Espionage Act and being sentenced to five years in prison, a punishment which would be met by counting the over five years he has spent in solitary confinement in Britain’s dank and oppressive Belmarsh Prison fighting a US extradition petition, Assange would be able to fly home to his native Australia a free man. Behind the scenes, one can see that the Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations before it, has been vigorously doing the bidding of the US National Security State —the CIA,, the FBI, NSA and the Pentagon — in pursuing a major espionage case against Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, He and his organization had hugely embarrassed those agencies and the US government agencies over the years with the release of documents proving that the US was guilty of systemic and massive war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was spying on the leaders of allies in NATO, and and Assange had also also helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden, another arch enemy of the national security state, to escape to Russia. The US media happily ran page-one banner-headlined stories and videos of the US war crimes exposed by Assange and his Wikileaks organization. But then, when he was being indicted and hounded by the US government and was fighting his extradition to the US from a jail cell in Britain, those same media organizations just as happily stabbed him in the back, quoting slimy US politicians like former Trump VP Mike Pence claiming that his releases “put US personnel at risk.” (In fact the US, in its arguments in British courts seeking an extradition order, never could present a single case of a US soldier or CIA agent being put at risk, injured or killed because of a Wikileaks story or purloined document. Like the Swedish “rape charges,” all the smearing of Assange was and remains lies. Establishment journalists too, in Britain and the US, have been guilty of shamelessly piling on in the tarring of Assange even as others of their colleagues, most of them outside of the mainstream news organizations, have heroically worked to debunk the lies. The bottom line is that Assange in his struggle for freedom, has been heroically defending the freedom of all journalists and publishers around the world to speak truth to power. The indictment of Assange, a foreigner working outside the US, was nonetheless pursued by three presidents including Obama (whose Justice Department drew up a sealed indictment, but never acted on it), Trump, whose Justice picked it up and activated it in 2019, and Biden, who pressed forward with the effort to extradite Assange and have him face the Trump Justice Department’s indictment. All three presidents have sought to expand the reach of the already controversial Espionage Act to include journalists of any nationality operating anywhere in the world. From its first use in the days of WWI, when the Espionage Act was passed to enable the government to arrest immigrants (usually anti-war leftists) on supposed spying charges, the act has morphed fairly recently under those three feckless presidents into a tool to go after not just alleged spies, but whistleblowers and the journalists who rely on them. Going after Assange just expanded its reach globally. Some desk-bound pundits to whom the notion of challenging state abuse of power would never occur, are claiming that Assange, by copping a guilty plea, sold out his media colleagues. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, Constitutional scholars say that a plea bargain creates no new legal precedent in the federal or state courts of the US. Only an appellate court ruling of a Supreme Court ruling has such significance on future cases. (That’s not to say that just seeing what the US government and its willing puppet states in Europe are willing to do to those who do expose its crimes isn’t going to deter many from following in Assange’s footsteps.) But in any case, no one who has not spent more than twelve years in enforced confinement has any right to criticize Assange for availing himself of the chance to get out of jail, to avoid the horror of a prosecution in the US legal system, and to join his family, including his two children, whom he has never met except in captivity. As a fellow journalist, I can only congratulate him for his courage, to wish him well as he gets used to freedom again, and to salute all those who have worked for his freedom. As my friend, colleague and fellow journalist Ron Ridenour, a US journalist/activist who has long ago abandoned his native US to live in Denmark, and who years ago cashed in his retirement savings and sent it all to Assange’s defense fund (he also reports giving $1000 to a Crowdfunder campaign to fund to repay the cost of the private jet Assange had to charter at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to safely fly to his court hearing in Saipan in the Northern Marianas and on to the safety of Australia), says, “ I think Assange’s freedom is a huge victory. We the people all came together — not so much in the US, but in Europe and England and around the world. It shows that when a good number of people are willing to get together in the early morning in a cold rain we can make good things happen!” (In less than a week the fund had collected £441,793, close to the target goal of £520,000, a powerful demonstration of the support for Assange.) Ridenour adds, “It’s a disappointment that the great journalist John Pilger, who tirelessly fought for Julian’s freedom, and Dan Ellsberg, and Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner, didn’t live to see this day.” I think a headline on the BBC the day Assange walked out of a US district court in Saipan with the judge telling him he was “a free man” was on target, Referring to the years before PM Albanese called for his release, when Australian leader after Australian leader ignored Assange’s plight at the hands of the US, including even Labour PM Julia Gillard, who pointedly refused to lift a finger to help her persecuted countryman it read: Australia turned its back on Assange, Time made him a martyr. The only thing wrong with the story topper is it ought to have said: Australia turned its back on him, Britain tortured him at the request of US prosecutors, and America betrayed its own First and Fifth Amendments. Time made Assange a martyr. This article by Dave Lindorff appeared originally in ThisCantBeHappening! on its new Substack platform at https://thiscantbehappening.substack.com/. Please check out the new site and consider signing up for a cut-rate subscription that will be available until the end of the month. |
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