Rashida Tlaib is leading a group in Congress calling on Joe Biden to halt extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. The prosecution of Assange should worry anyone who believes in freedom of the press.
Rashida Tlaib attends a House Financial Services Committee
BY BEN BURGIS
04.14.2023
On Tuesday, a group of House members led by Michigan’s democratic socialist representative, Rashida Tlaib, put out a letter calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the Justice Department’s indictment of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Tlaib and her colleagues point out that the US effort to extradite a foreign journalist for publishing classified documents represents a serious threat to freedom of the press.
Anyone who cares about democracy should support their call to drop the charges.
The Core of the Issue
Many people who might otherwise care about press freedom are reluctant to defend Assange because of aspects of his politics or his history. Most seriously, in 2010, he was accused of sexual assault in Sweden. The charges were never proven, and the investigation was ultimately dropped, but I can understand why a question mark hangs over his head in the minds of many observers.
The crucial point, though, is that whatever is or isn’t true about these other allegations, none of it has any bearing on this case. Prosecuting him for engaging in investigative journalism is a disturbing assault on press freedom in the United States and around the world.
Assange isn’t even a US citizen. If he can be prosecuted for publishing information that the US government would prefer to keep secret, any journalist anywhere in the world would have to think twice about exposing war crimes for fear of ending up on a one-way trip to the United States. The chilling effect on the global media would be profound.
Which is, of course, exactly the point.
Julian Assange and the “New York Times Problem”
In the letter, the House members point out that “what Mr. Assange is accused of doing” in “publishing truthful information” about Guantanamo Bay and US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan is “legally indistinguishable from what papers like the New York Times do,” and that the Obama administration decided not to indict Assange for precisely that reason. “The Trump administration, which brought these charges against Mr. Assange, was notably less concerned about press freedom.”
If anything, that comparison is misleadingly generous to Obama — although in a way that ultimately reinforces Tlaib and her cosigners’ point. The Obama administration’s record on press freedom was abysmal. Yet even Obama was too squeamish about the democratic implications to indict Assange.As the Associated Press noted in a fact check of one of Obama’s statements in 2018, the Obama administration used “extraordinary actions to block the flow of information to the public,” using “the 1917 Espionage Act with unprecedented vigor, prosecuting more people under that law for leaking sensitive information to the public than all previous administrations combined.” These efforts included many instances of going after journalists and media organizations (including the Associated Press itself) to try to clamp down on leaked information.
Still, there was a line that the Obama administration was reluctant to cross. It hated Assange, who had repeatedly exposed the misdeeds of the US war machine; then vice president Joe Biden said that Assange was “closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.” (The actual leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, strongly disagreed with that assessment and is a staunch supporter of freeing Assange.) But the administration ultimately decided not to indict Assange under the Espionage Act because of what the administration internally referred to as “the New York Times problem.”
As much as it deplored leaks, the Obama administration knew that there was no way of legally differentiating what Assange did from what any investigative journalists does. Welcoming, encouraging, and publishing information that governments or other powerful actors want to remain secret is at the heart of what investigative journalism is, and any legal theory used to prosecute Assange could be used against the Times or any other mainstream news outlet that exposes the secrets or lies of people in power.
Trump decided that he was fine with setting a democracy-flouting precedent. And the Biden administration is picking up right where Trump left off.
Treating a News Publisher Like Hannibal Lecter
Last year, when I interviewed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on my podcast, he told me a small but revealing story about visiting Assange in prison. Žižek had a container of coffee between himself and Assange on the table. He picked it up, took a sip, and set it back down without replacing the cap. Immediately, a prison guard rushed over to tell him that this was a security risk — he had to keep the cap on. Such a dangerous prisoner, after all, might decide to splash hot coffee in the face of one of his friends and supporters. Perhaps Assange should be wheeled around in the same contraption as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs to make sure he doesn’t randomly jump on people and start tearing gobs of flesh out of their necks.
It’s worth remembering that the heinous crime for which Assange is facing extradition to the United States is . . . publishing information embarrassing to the US government. As Tlaib and her cosigners point out in their letter to Garland, Assange’s prosecution “marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act.” This could lead to the prosecution of outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post when they do their job and publish information the government wants to shield from the public — or, “just as dangerous for democracy, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.”
That last point is the most important one. Citizens of what’s supposed to be a democracy need to know what their government is up to so that they can have their say. The more effectively that government keeps elements of its foreign policy secret from the public, the more it turns that core premise of democratic government into a bad joke.
As usual, Rashida Tlaib is absolutely right.
CONTRIBUTOR
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.
Inglorious Inertia: The Albanese Government and Julian Assange
The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating. Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming office in Australia, he insisted that the matter dealing with the WikiLeaks publisher would be finally resolved. It had, he asserted, been going on for too long.
Since then, it is very clear, as with all matters regarding US policy, that Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a constipated, non-committal position. “Quiet diplomacy” is the official line taken by Albanese and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a mealy-mouthed formulation deserving of contempt. As Greens Senator David Shoebridge remarks, “‘quiet diplomacy’ to bring Julian Assange home by the Albanese Government is a policy of nothing. Not one meeting, phone call or letter sent.”
Kellie Tranter, a tireless advocate for Assange, has done sterling work uncovering the nature of that position through Freedom of Information requests over the years. “They tell the story – not the whole story – of institutionalised prejudgment, ‘perceived’ rather than ‘actual’ risks, and complicity through silence.”
The story is a resoundingly ugly one. It features, for instance, stubbornness on the part of US authorities to even disclose the existence of a process seeking Assange’s extradition from the UK, to the lack of interest on the part of the Australian government to pursue direct diplomatic and political interventions.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop exemplified that position in signing off on a Ministerial Submission in February 2016 recommending that the Assange case not be resolved; those in Canberra were “unable to intervene in the due process of another’s country’s court proceedings or legal matters, and we have full confidence in UK and Swedish judicial systems”. Given the nakedly political nature of the blatant persecution of the WikiLeaks founder, this was a confidence both misplaced and disingenuous.
The same position was adopted by the Australian government to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), which found that same month that Assange had been subject to “different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorean embassy.” The Working Group further argued that Assange’s “safety and physical integrity” be guaranteed, that “his right to freedom of movement” be respected, and that he enjoy the full slew of “rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention.”
At the time, such press outlets as The Guardian covered themselves in gangrenous glory in insisting that Assange was not being detained arbitrarily and was merely ducking the authorities in favour of a “publicity stunt”. The conduct from Bishop and her colleagues did little to challenge such assertions, though the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did confirm in communications with Tranter in June 2018 that the government was “committed to engaging in good faith with the United Nations Human Rights Council and its mechanisms, including the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.” Splendid inertia beckoned.
The new Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith, has kept up that undistinguished, even disgraceful tradition: he has offered unconvincing, lukewarm support for one of Belmarsh Prison’s most notable detainees. As the ABC reports, he expressed pleasure “that in the due course of next week or so he’s agreed that I can visit him in Belmarsh Prison.” (This comes with the usual qualification: that up to 40 offers of “consular” support had been previously made and declined by the ungrateful publisher.)
The new High Commissioner is promising little. “My primary responsibility will be to ensure his health and wellbeing and to inquire as to his state and whether there is anything that we can do, either with respect to prison authorities or to himself to make sure that his health and safety and wellbeing is of the highest order.”
Assange’s health and wellbeing, which has and continues to deteriorate, is a matter of court and common record. No consular visit is needed to confirm that fact. As with his predecessors, Smith is making his own sordid contribution to assuring that the WikiLeaks founder perishes in prison, a victim of ghastly process.
As for what he would be doing to impress the UK to reverse the decision of former Home Secretary Priti Patel to extradite the publisher to the US, Smith was painfully predictable. “It’s not a matter of us lobbying for a particular outcome. It’s a matter of me as the High Commissioner representing to the UK government as I do, that the view of the Australian government is twofold. It is: these matters have transpired for too long and need to be brought to a conclusion, and secondly, we want to, and there is no difficulty so far as UK authorities are concerned, we want to discharge our consular obligations.”
Former Australian Senator Rex Patrick summed up the position rather well by declaring that Smith would be far better off, on instructions from Prime Minister Albanese, pressing the current Home Secretary Suella Braverman to drop the whole matter. Even better, Albanese might just do the good thing and push US President Joe Biden and his Attorney-General Merrick Garland to end the prosecution.
Little can be expected from the latest announcement. Smith is a man who has made various effusive comments about AUKUS, an absurd, extortionately costly security pact appropriately described as a war-making arrangement. The Albanese government, having placed Australia ever deeper into the US military orbit, is hardly likely to do much for a publisher who exposed the war crimes and predations of the Imperium.
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