Chelsea Manning & Julian Assange: Political Prisoners of the Big Lie
by Defending Rights & Dissent <info@rightsanddissent.org>
For the first time in US history, a publisher of information has been indicted under the Espionage Act. Hours ago, the DOJ announced they were bringing 17 Espionage Act charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. This is in an addition to a previous charge of conspiring to crack a password to a DOD computer. All of these charges stem from WikiLeaks’s decision to publish information provided to it by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This trove of documents contained information about US war crimes and general misconduct. In publishing these documents, WikiLeaks worked with a variety of international news outlets, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spegel, Le Monde and Al Jazeera. There is little question that publishing this information was in the public interest.
Espionage Act prosecutions against whistleblowers who give information to the media used to be a rarity. However, during the administration of Barack Obama, this practice became the norm. The Trump Administration has further cemented our authoritarian new normal with their Espionage Act indictments against whistleblowers Reality Winner, Terry Albury, and Daniel Hale.
In spite of the unprecedented war on whistleblowers, the Obama administration declined to prosecute Assange under the Espionage act. Their reasoning for doing so was simple–such charges would be an erosion of press freedom. Charges have never been brought against a publisher under the Espionage Act, because it has long been accepted that such a move would be unconstitutional. As the New York Times explain:
Legal scholars believe that prosecuting reporters over their work would violate the First Amendment, but the prospect has not yet been tested in court because the government had never charged a journalist under the Espionage Act.
Though he is not a conventional journalist, much of what Mr. Assange does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations like The New York Times do: seek and publish information that officials want to be secret, including classified national security matters, and take steps to protect the confidentiality of sources.
Writing in In These Times, Defending Rights & Dissent policy & legislative counsel Chip Gibbons explained what is at stake with the prosecution of WikiLeaks
The U.S. government has fought to keep secret its program of disappearances and torture, detention sites, and even what countries it bombs. But it isn’t just official secrecy that has helped obscure the nature of U.S. wars. Evidence of the human toll of U.S. wars isn’t hard to find. It’s certainly not a secret to those in other countries who live it daily. But for much of the mainstream U.S. media, there is little if any true reckoning with the civilian cost of war. WikiLeaks is currently in the crosshairs of the U.S. government, because it challenged this secrecy head on. Its fate will impact all those who wish to shine light on the U.S. empire.
Today’s indictments against Assange are both an unprecedented attack on press freedom and an attempt to silence those who would expose US governmental misconduct.
For further background on what WikiLeaks published, why the government is after them, and why it matters please read:
Chip Gibbons, “The Crackdown on Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange Is About Protecting U.S. Empire,” In These Times https://inthesetimes.com/article/21885/chelsea-manning-julian-assange-war-crimes-wikileaks-press-freedoms
Chip Gibbons, “Let Chelsea Go,” Jacobin httpss://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/chelsea-manning-grand-jury-solitary-confinement
