A Dark Chapter Closes by Ottenberg Eve The dust has finally settled over Julian Assange’s release from jail, but it may never settle over what the U.S. state did, to him and to a free press. He is now in Australia, with his family, where he belongs, beginning the hopefully not too long process of healing from his ordeal, from being driven nearly out of his mind by official torture at the hands of British ghouls acting on behalf of American ones. Last reports were that Assange took anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medication to cope with existence in his Belmarsh prison cell. I hope it helped; such meds often save a life, but they entail dangers, too. The important thing for him, personally, is that the worst is over.
Above all, the Assange case sets a lousy precedent, not so much his guilty plea precedent, but something much worse, the precedent for how the American government may pursue, hound, persecute and prosecute a journalist. Previously, if the CIA wanted to disappear a reporter, the agency did it secretly. But Mike “Get Assange” Pompeo changed that, with the agency’s plans either to kill or kidnap the journalist.
There has been no official apology or explanation for this much bruited about, intended atrocity, which reached the planning stage. Instead, there’s a cover-up – fundamentally futile, given how widely this potential crime was rumored – with reports that part of Washington’s motive for the guilty plea was to coerce Assange’s consent never to investigate schemes to rendition him. Hard, factual news of such a rendition, you see, would be most embarrassing to Beltway bigwigs, who otherwise couldn’t care less about Assange or a free press. Horrified that their repulsive web of criminality might come to light, Assange’s American pursuers scuttled back into the darkness, abandoning their loathsome project.
This guilty plea underlines that congress must repeal the odious and illegal Espionage Act, which nullifies the First Amendment. It was under this Act that Assange was convicted. Thus now, as always, this repellent law muzzles free speech, which was indeed its original purpose when that deceitful war criminal, Woodrow Wilson, signed it. Unfortunately, given its obsession with suppressing so-called disinformation, aka free speech, the Biden gang (or the president’s wife, let’s not pretend el jefe himself makes these executive decisions) would veto any such repeal that came across the Oval Office desk. Supposing one ever did. Somehow it’s difficult to imagine Chuck “Wall street Is the Only Street” Schumer or Mitch “Democracy’s Grave Digger” McConnell standing up so bravely and forthrightly against the security state as to repeal the Espionage Act.
Meanwhile, don’t rush to attribute any good intentions to Washington nabobs who let Assange go free. They tried their damndest to break him and lock him up for life. According to the Washington Post June 27, “the near-collapse of the case in a British court sent prosecutors hurtling toward a plea deal.” Washington was gonna lose, so its manipulators grabbed what they could, namely a pledge from Assange never to pursue CIA rendition plans, and then stampeded the exists.
The “real scandal of this,” journalist Matt Kennard tweeted June 29 “is the English courts took five years to send this signal. [The] U.S. indictment was unconstitutional, criminalized journalism, and was brought by a country on record as plotting to assassinate the defendant. How did U.K. judges let it get this far? Who runs Britain?” One can only imagine what would have happened had Assange sought refuge in, say, Argentina, currently ruled by Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump wannabe Javier Milei – it’s doubtful he would be a free man now thanks to someone in the judiciary showing spine.
Assange pled guilty to a single count of obtaining and revealing national security information, something investigative journalists do all the time. According to Matthew Ingram in the Columbia Journalism Review June 27, one press expert said the Justice Department’s allegations described “everyday journalistic practices as part of a criminal conspiracy.” That includes “cultivating sources, protecting sources’ identities and communicating securely. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the charges pose ‘a dire threat’ and the Freedom of the Press Foundation called them ‘terrifying.’”
But that didn’t stop those with little regard for the First Amendment, among them Trump’s former vp Mike Pence, who called Assange’s deal “a miscarriage of justice” because, Ingram reported, Wikileaks’ classified revelations “put members of the U.S. military in danger.” They did not. Indeed, the prosecution was unable to cite one instance of American soldiers, spooks or other personnel endangered by the carefully redacted info Assange published.
Another entity with great scorn for freedom of the press is Rupert Murdoch’s Times in the U.K., which claimed Assange was “not a genuine whistleblower, let alone a test case for journalistic freedom, but a thief,” a view cravenly echoed, as Ingram notes, by Doug Saunders in Canada’s Globe and Mail. This pusillanimous hack sneered at Assange as “a fraud who called himself a journalist and whistleblower, while greatly hindering journalism and making life harder for actual whistleblowers.” Saunders also charged that Wikileaks was a “tool of dictators,” in reference to the widespread (and stubbornly resistant to reason) canard that revealing Hillary Clinton’s emails helped the Kremlin. Nice to know leading journalists understand that their bread is buttered by the national security state and vindictive politicians and not some scruffy, rude reporter who reveals truths uncomfortable for those in power.
Because such views are commonplace among corporate media honchos and in the elite echelons of Western power, I would hope that Assange proceeds very carefully when he resumes steering Wikileaks. These bloodhounds will not lope away nor stop baying for blood. Among mainstream media’s most egregious prevarications were that Assange had nothing to fear from the U.S. and thus should not have fled to the safety of the Ecuadoran embassy. Ho, ho! And au contraire. He did, and if he resumes his vocation, he will. His worst fears were thoroughly justified, while the opinions of idiot pundits, who tarred him for seeking refuge, were categorically wrong.
Any journalist who does what Assange did, namely profoundly embarrassing the U.S. military with revelations of its war crimes in the Middle East or indeed anywhere, would be well advised to take up residence in Russia, China or some other nation without an extradition treaty to the United States. Who cares what lies such a move might generate? As Edward Snowden demonstrated to the entire planet, sometimes the better part of valor is self-preservation. At least, after all, if a journalist survives, he or she may continue to act as Snowden and Assange did, namely serving truth. That’s very tough to do in any public way for someone buried alive in a dungeon.
.................,.. Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Busybody. She can be reached at her website.
