{"id":168935,"date":"2020-09-21T12:00:23","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=168935"},"modified":"2020-09-18T07:42:02","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T06:42:02","slug":"julian-assange-and-press-freedom-on-trial-in-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/julian-assange-and-press-freedom-on-trial-in-london\/","title":{"rendered":"Julian Assange, and Press Freedom, on Trial in London"},"content":{"rendered":"

17 Sep 2020 – <\/em>The role of the free press is to hold power accountable, especially those who would wage war. Press freedom itself is currently on trial in London, as Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, fights extradition to the United States over an ever-evolving array of espionage and hacking charges. If extradited, Assange faces almost certain conviction followed by up to 175 years in prison. His unjust imprisonment would also shackle journalists worldwide, serving as a stark example to anyone daring to publish leaked information critical of the U.S. government.<\/p>\n

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U.S. prosecutors allege that Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a Private in the U.S. Army, to illegally download hundreds of thousands of war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, along with a huge trove of classified cables from the U.S. State Department.<\/p>\n

The first disclosure from this massive whistleblower release was a video that WikiLeaks called \u201cCollateral Murder.\u201d It was recorded aboard a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship as it patrolled the skies above Baghdad on July 12, 2007. The Apache crew recorded video and audio of their slaughter of a dozen men on the ground below, including a Reuters cameraman, Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40. After the initial high-caliber machine gun attack, a van arrived to help the wounded. The Apache crew received permission to \u201cengage\u201d the van and opened fire, tearing apart the front of the vehicle, injuring two children in the van. Reuters had unsuccessfully sought the video for years.<\/p>\n

Before long, The New York Times, The Guardian <\/em>and Der Spiege<\/em>l had worked together with WikiLeaks and Assange, publishing stories based on the disclosures. They detailed war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture at CIA<\/span> blacksites, abuses at the U.S.\u2019s notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and cynical diplomatic dealings by State Department officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a clear press freedom case,\u201d Jennifer Robinson, one of Julian Assange\u2019s attorneys, said recently on the Democracy Now!<\/em> news hour.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe First Amendment is understood to protect the media in receiving and publishing that information in the public interest, which is exactly what WikiLeaks did.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The British authorities have kept Assange in almost complete isolation in London\u2019s high security Belmarsh prison since arresting him in April, 2019, dragging him out of the Ecuadorian embassy. Granted political asylum by Ecuador, he lived inside the dark, cramped embassy for over seven years. When a right-wing president took power in Ecuador, he revoked Assange\u2019s asylum and allowed the arrest.<\/p>\n

Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, visited Assange in Belmarsh, and reported afterwards,<\/p>\n

\u201cI spoke with him for an hour\u2026then we had a physical examination for an hour by our forensic expert, and then we had the two-hour psychiatric examination. And all three\u2026came to the conclusion, that he showed all the symptoms that are typical for a person that has been exposed to psychological torture over an extended period of time.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The conditions of Assange\u2019s imprisonment have only worsened during the COVID<\/span>-19 pandemic. He hasn\u2019t spoken publicly in court, other than once, shouting \u201cNonsense<\/em>!\u201d in response to one of the many unsupported claims by the U.S. prosecutor. The presiding magistrate threatened to have Assange removed. Experts have lined up to defend Assange, including legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.<\/p>\n

In 1971, Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the United States\u2019 war in Vietnam, documenting how successive administrations had lied to the public about the war. Like Assange, he provided the leaked documents to the New York Times.<\/em> Also like Assange, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act, and could have spent life behind bars. Ultimately, a judge threw out his case, when it was revealed that President Nixon had ordered criminal break-ins seeking derogatory information on Ellsberg.<\/p>\n

In a prepared statement in Assange\u2019s defense, Ellsberg reflected on the importance of the WikiLeaks disclosures.<\/p>\n

\u201cI consider them to be amongst the most important truthful revelations of hidden criminal state behaviour that have been made public in US history,\u201d <\/em>he said. \u201cThe American public needed urgently to know what was being done routinely in their name, and there was no other way for them to learn it than by unauthorized disclosure.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Many of the war crimes exposed by WikiLeaks, in cooperation with established news organizations around the world, occurred under President George W. Bush. Assange\u2019s prosecution began under President Barack Obama. Then-Vice President Joe Biden called Assange a \u201chigh-tech terrorist<\/em>.\u201d Now, President Trump, who said during his 2016 campaign, \u201cWikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks<\/em>,\u201d wants to lock up Assange and throw away the key. No president, of any party, should be allowed to threaten the free press. Indeed, it is essential to the functioning of a democratic society.<\/p>\n

Related: <\/strong>Jeremy Scahill —> New Indictment of Assange Is Part of a Broader War on Journalism & Whistleblowers:<\/strong><\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yYPycYBgYBc<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, recently released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Sep 2020 – Press freedom itself is currently on trial in London, as Julian Assange fights extradition to the U.S. He faces 175 years in prison and his unjust imprisonment would serve as an example to anyone daring to publish leaked information critical of the U.S. government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[229,918,910,942,487,378,651,234,911,454,572,639,292,70,126,921,113],"class_list":["post-168935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-activism","tag-assange","tag-big-brother","tag-ecuador","tag-human-rights","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-surveillance","tag-sweden","tag-torture","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-whistleblowing","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}