HERO ASSANGE SET FREE: But Be Clear, With No Free Press, We Are Not Free
Without complete unchallenged freedom of press to defend them, none of our rights are safe, and if they are not safe, in essence, they do not exist.
Julian Assange on his flight back home to Australia.
Rights as a citizen are not just for safe and sunny times. It is in dark times of strife, crisis and conflict, when they are most needed. Times like right now.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (6/26/24)
Seeing journalist Julian Assange walk free yesterday was one flash of light in an increasingly dark and brutal world. As a one-time journalist and believer in the First Amendment and free, independent journalism, I have long admired Assange and tracked his situation closely through five hellish years of incarceration and torture at Bellmarsh prison and seven years before that taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Be clear, the Biden administration could have completely dismissed the case and freed Assange from its first day. But they chose not to. Why now? Perhaps fear of the revelation in trial of the CIA plots to poison, kidnap and even murder Assange, as detailed in the third story below, The Wild Story Behind US Assange Plea Deal.
By finally being home with his family and safe (we hope) in Australia, Assange is where he should be. But the Biden “JUST-Us” Department insistence that Assange plea guilty to one count of violating the draconian US Espionage Act made clear to publishers and investigative reporters that — ultimately — you do not have freedom of press. The corporate government can — and will — come after you. A not-so-subtle “brick-through-the-window” warning from the organized corporate crime syndicate known as the United States government.
Revealing the sins of the government
Assange’s agreement to this deal is not on him. Nobody — and I mean nobody — has shown greater courage and integrity standing for journalism and the right of us all to know the sins of the government acting in our name and on our tax dollar. While Assange suffered for doing right, the government officials, intelligence agencies, military command and — yes — even individual soldiers in the field who murdered and tortured will not be brought to justice in the corporate American “JUST-Us” system.
Without complete unchallenged freedom of press to defend them, none of our rights are safe, and if they are not safe, in essence, they do not exist. Rights as a citizen are not just for safe and sunny times. It is in dark times of strife, crisis and conflict, when they are most needed. Times like right now.
As the conditions of Assange’s release make clear: Our First Amendment no longer exists. Thus, make no naive assumptions that any other rights are safe. If you cannot speak and write freely and forcefully in defense of your rights, those rights do not exist. All the US blather and posturing to the world about freedom of speech and the press rings hollow. The US Constitution is an empty husk. Another truth in the long list of symptoms of the death of American ’democracy’.
Resist or submit.
Photo by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
Julian Assange Is Free, But Our First Amendment Rights To Free Speech & Press Are Crippled
Instead of just dropping the case, the Biden administration got a guilty plea and set a dangerous tone for reporters everywhere.
By Trevor Timm
The Guardian (6/25/24)
Julian Assange is on the verge of being set free after the WikiLeaks founder and US authorities have agreed to a surprising plea deal. While it should be a relief to anyone who cares about press freedom that Assange will not be coming to the US to face trial, the Biden administration should be ashamed at how this case has played out.
Assange is flying from the UK to a US territory in the Pacific Ocean to make a brief court appearance today, and soon after, he may officially be a free man in his native Australia.
The deal is undoubtedly good for Assange, who has been holed up in Belmarsh prison suffering from serious medical problems for the past five years, and stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years prior to that. It’s good for the Biden administration, which avoids the embarrassment of potentially losing its extradition case in the UK high court, but more importantly avoids the Assange case becoming a polarising issue in the election.
But is the deal good for press freedom? Not so much. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no doubt the worst fate was avoided and every journalist breathed a sigh of relief that this result did not occur via a court decision. A plea deal does not create an official precedent that a conviction and appeals court ruling would – something that could have potentially bound other courts to rule against journalists in future cases.
But it’s hard not to be shaken by the charge the US justice department forced Assange to plea to in order to get his freedom: a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, which according to the law, amounts to “receiving and obtaining” secret documents, and “willfully communicating” them “to persons not entitled to receive them”. (In Assange’s case, that means the public). That is a “crime” that journalists at mainstream outlets all over the US commit virtually every day.
Crippling the First Amendment
A court won’t readily be able to cite DoJ v Assange in future rulings, but that doesn’t mean this guilty plea won’t embolden future federal prosecutors with an axe to grind against the press. They will see this case as a success. And it doesn’t mean the legal arms of news outlets won’t now be worried a case can be brought against their own journalists for ordinary journalistic conduct that was once assuredly protected by the first amendment.
Just imagine what an attorney general in a second Trump administration will think, knowing they’ve already got one guilty plea from a publisher under the Espionage Act. Trump, after all, has been out on the campaign trail repeatedly opining about how he would like to see journalists – who he sees as “enemies of the people” – in jail. Why the Biden administration would hand him any ammo is beyond belief.
So if the Biden administration is looking for plaudits for ending this case, they should get exactly none. They could have dropped this case three years ago when they took control of the DoJ. Every major civil liberties and human rights group in the country repeatedly implored them to. They could have just dropped the case today, with Assange spending the same amount of time in prison, but they felt the need to again emphasise in court documents that they believe obtaining and publishing secret government documents is a crime. …
You Saved Julian Assange
Art by Mr. Fish
Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up — which is what the corporate state is counting on — will see us enslaved and the earth’s ecosystem become inhospitable to human habitation. Let us take a lesson from the courageous men and women who took to the streets for 14 years to save Julian. They showed us how it is done.
By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report (6/26/24)
The dark machinery of empire, whose mendacity and savagery Julian Assange exposed to the world, spent 14 years trying to destroy him. They cut him off from his funding, canceling his bank accounts and credit cards. They invented bogus allegations of sexual assault to get him extradited to Sweden, where he would then be shipped to the U.S.
They trapped him in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for seven years after he was given political asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship by refusing him safe passage to Heathrow Airport. They orchestrated a change of government in Ecuador that saw him stripped of his asylum, harassed and humiliated by a pliant embassy staff. They contracted the Spanish security firm UC global in the embassy to record all his conversations, including those with his attorneys.
The CIA discussed kidnapping or assassinating him. They arranged for London’s Metropolitan Police to raid the embassy – sovereign territory of Ecuador – and seize him. They held him for five years in the high security HM Prison Belmarsh, often in solitary confinement.
And all the while they carried out a judicial farce in the British courts where due process was ignored so an Australian citizen, whose publication was not based in the U.S. and who, like all journalists, received documents from whistleblowers, could be charged under the Espionage Act.
They tried over and over and over to destroy him. They failed. But Julian was not released because the courts defended the rule of law and exonerated a man who had not committed a crime. He was not released because the Biden White House and the intelligence community have a conscience. He was not released because the news organizations that published his revelations and then threw him under the bus, carrying out a vicious smear campaign, pressured the U.S. government.
He was released — granted a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents — in spite of these institutions. He was released because day after day, week after week, year after year, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe mobilized to decry the imprisonment of the most important journalist of our generation. Without this mobilization, Julian would not be free.
Mass protests do not always work. The genocide in Gaza continues to exact its gruesome toll on Palestinians. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still locked up in a Pennsylvania prison. The fossil fuel industry ravages the planet. But it is the most potent weapon we have to defend ourselves from tyranny.
This sustained pressure — during a London hearing in 2020, to my delight, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser of the Old Bailey court overseeing Julian’s case, complained about the noise protestors were making in the street outside — shines a continuous light on injustice and exposes the amorality of the ruling class. This is why spaces in the British courts were so limited and blurry eyed activists lined up outside as early as 4 a.m. to secure a seat for journalists they respected, my spot secured by Franco Manzi, a retired policeman.
These people are unsung and often unknown. But they are heroes. They move mountains. They surrounded parliament. They stood in the pouring rain outside the courts. They were dogged and steadfast. They made their collective voices heard. They saved Julian. And as this dreadful saga ends, and Julian and his family I hope, find peace and healing in Australia, we must honor them. They shamed the politicians in Australia to stand up for Julian, an Australian citizen, and finally Britain and the U.S. had to give up. I do not say to do the right thing. This was a surrender. We should be proud of it. …
Read the rest and 10-minute audio
The Wild Story Behind US Assange Plea Deal
CIA plans to kidnap, poison or murder the Wkileaks leader would’ve emerged in court
By Jeff Stein
Spy Talk (6/25/24)
After nearly two decades on and off the run, Julian Assange has finally been convicted—in a plea deal that is sending him to Australia and freedom. The outcome presents a crushing defeat for the security organs of the U.S. government, especially the CIA, which floated plans and hatched plots to kidnap and even murder the Wikileaks founder, especially during the the tenure of the Trump administration’s spy agency director, Mike Pompeo.
All that was detailed in an astonishing piece by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff for Yahoo News in September 2021.
Dorfman, now reporting and producing an investigative intelligence podcast for Project Brazen, a national security oriented news site, called attention to the piece on his X account Tuesday, adding that the CIA’s sordid secret history of trying to neutralize the leaks-channeling operator was behind the Biden Justice Department’s decision reduce the charges against him to one count of violating the Espionage Act, and dispatch him to his native land, Australia.
“During the Trump administration, even many harsh critics of Assange, who wholeheartedly supported prosecuting him, thought Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal. They also—critically—thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution,” Dorfman wrote. Plans included breaking into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was holed up for seven years, and “renditioning” him to the U.S. like a terrorist, or blocking Russian attempts to smuggle him out of the U.K., even if it required gun battles in the streets of London.
Violence-crammed thought bubbles
Justice Department lawyers and other Trump national security officials called the violence-crammed thought bubbles basically insane, the then-Yahoo reporters wrote in 2021. It would make prosecuting Assange impossible for several obvious reasons, not least of which was the fact that press freedom advocates were already making a stink about prosecuting someone for publishing leaks—something the mainstream press did all the time—a right enshrined in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. …
The Challenge Before Us…
“Let there be no doubt: Julian Assange is free, but free speech and the notion of a free press is dead in America today, killed by our collective passivity in the face of the brutalization of Julian Assange by the US government for the “crime” of exposing their crimes for all the world to see.
“The truth no longer sets us free.
“Rather, shining light on the inconvenient truth has become a crime.”
— Scott Ritter (6/25/24)
It's very telling that Trump never pardoned Assange. The hierarchical leadership of the so-called "anti-establishment right" is as equally in cahoots as the est. left is with the Anglo-Zionazi order. And unfortunately, "independent conservatives" keep falling for Republican bait one way or another, so the remaining citadels of decency are primarily "old" hard-leftists, as I notice currently.
"Rights as a citizen are not just for safe and sunny times. It is in dark times of strife, crisis and conflict, when they are most needed. Times like right now. "
Well said. Let's take courage from Julian Assange's lesson in endurance and righteousness. We can get through these dark times and we can keep our rights to free speech--but we must be willing to fight for them. Nothing worthwhile in life is easy. Power to the people!