26 May 2019|The Interregnum| Mohamed Elmaazi
The US Department of Justice has unveiled 17 more criminal charges against Julian Assange, which make clear he is being targeted for his role in exposing war crimes committed by the US government and allied forces.
Featured image via First Run Features and CBS/60 Minutes
On 23 May 2019 the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced 17 more charges (totalling 18) against publisher, journalist, and transparency activist Julian Assange. Every charge relates to Assange’s role in publishing classified and other official US documents, provided to him by military analyst Chelsea (formerly Bradly) Manning, via Wikileaks. Assange faces 10 years imprisonment for each charge.
Daniel Ellsberg, the US’s famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, explained that:
“I was sure that the Trump administration would not be content with keeping Julian Assange in prison for five years, which was the sentence for the one charge of conspiracy that he was charged with earlier. So I was sure they would go after him with a much longer sentence under the Espionage Act”.
Speaking to The Real News Network Ellsberg explained that 23 May 2019 was a “historic day” on which a “declaration of war” against the press was initiated by the US government. Ellsberg, a former strategic analyst and consultant to the US Department of Defense, said:
“I was charged with 12 counts, including one of conspiracy, in 1971, for a possible sentence of 115 years. In this case they brought 17 counts under the Espionage Act, plus the one conspiracy. So they’re facing him with 175 years. That’s, frankly, not that different from 115. It’s a life sentence. And it’ll be enough for them.”
Criminalising dissent
It is perhaps fitting that the US government is bringing these charges under 18 USC Chapter 37, section 793 whose text was established by the Espionage Act 1917. After all the Espionage Act – along with the Sedition Act 1918 – was passed by Congress under the Woodrow Wilson era to not only tackle espionage but also to crush opposition to WWI. Over two thousand men and women were convicted under these two laws for their anti-war activism.
The Pentagon Papers changed history
Ellsberg’s leaks helped bring an end to the US war in Vietnam. A war which killed an estimated 3.8 million Vietnamese men, women and children, and more than 58,000 US forces. On top of the tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans scarred for life with PTSD, loss of limbs, and chemical weapons poisoning. As well as the hundreds of thousands killed in Cambodia and Laos as a result of the US expanding its war into those two neighbouring countries. US cluster bombs have killed and maimed more than 35,000 Laotians since the US ceased bombing the country in 1973, bombs which continue to kill to this day.
The grand jury indictment
A 23 May 2019 press release from the DOJ says:
“A federal grand jury returned an 18-count superseding indictment today charging Julian P. Assange, 47, the founder of WikiLeaks, with offenses that relate to Assange’s alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.”
A grand jury is made up of citizens and to whom prosecutors present and test their case usually without a defence ever being presented. If they think there is enough evidence for charges to be brought they vote in favour of an indictment. The proceedings are closed to the public and have long been criticised for being used to imprison[pdf] political activists. A judge has imprisoned Manning – yet again – because she refused to participate in the secretive grand jury proceedings.
The DOJ explains that the superseding indictment completely pertains to Assange’s journalist work with Manning back in 2009 and 2010. It argues that:
“Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries and put the unredacted named human sources at a grave and imminent risk of serious physical harm and/or arbitrary detention.”
But Ellsberg, having followed Manning’s trial along with the nature of the leaks, pointed out that:
“it clearly was shown to result in no damage, no harm to any individual, which was precisely what they’re charging him now with having risked….[The US government] weren’t able to come up with a single instance in these hundreds of thousands of files which were released in which a person had, in fact, been harmed”.
Assange and Chelsea “revealed the true human cost of our wars in the middle east”
In April 2019, even before these latest charges were added, Veterans for Peace UK (VfP UK) blasted Assange’s arrest and possible extradition as “an act of revenge”. VfP UK wrote that WikiLeaks’s Iraq War Logs and Afghan War Diaries:
“revealed the true human cost of our wars in the Middle East. Wikileaks acted in the public interest by releasing these documents and Julian Assange, as a journalist, was right to publish in association with newspapers including The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel.”
The infamous “Collateral Murder” video, exposing “the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff”, is among the many war crimes exposed by Assange and Wikileaks during this time period.
Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in Afghanistan and Iraq have been killed since 2001 and 2003- in wars with seemingly no end in sight.
UK military veteran “profoundly grateful” to Assange and Manning
Mike Lyons, VfP UK’s current Policy Group Chair, said he was “eternally grateful” to Assange and Manning for the “profound impact” their work had on his life. The sailor medic, who was incarcerated for seven months after refusing to be deployed to Afghanistan, told this author:
“Seeing the high civilian casualties that had essentially been covered up and then learning more about the reasons behind the initial invasion were huge for me.”
Lyons noted that “in military prison there was a guy who had stabbed an Afghan child” who the military gave “a similar length of sentence to me” which he found “mad considering his crime compared to mine”.
He also explained that while civilians and soldiers “mocked” and “bullied” him for his change of heart and political positions:
“Since leaving I’ve met plenty of veterans from all over the world who were similarly affected by the Wikileaks revelations. Not all were serving at the time they were released.”
He also noted that the links he found “most useful” were from The Guardian before “they started running anti-Manning and [anti-]Assange pieces”.
An “extraterritorial” assault on the “basic principles of democracy in Europe”
Wikileaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Horaffnson responded to the latest charges on 24 May 2019 saying:
“This is the evil of lawlessness in its purest form. With the indictment, the ‘leader of the free world’ dismisses the First Amendment [of the US constitution] — hailed as a model of press freedom around the world — and launches a blatant extraterritorial assault outside its borders, attacking basic principles of democracy in Europe and the rest of the world.”
The First Amendment of the US constitution says:
“Congress shall make no law[…] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Criminalising journalism
In summary, the US (with the assistance of the UK) is seeking to prosecute Assange, a non-US person who never agreed to abide by US secrecy laws, for his journalistic activities conducted entirely outside of the US. Activities which the US Supreme Court already ruled, in the Pentagon Papers case, are protected by the First Amendment. This point is also being echoed by an increasing number of journalists and civil liberties groups. Though, as Ellsberg himself pointed out, the current Supreme Court has a rather different makeup.
The only question now is whether the current pushback will be enough to stop Assange from being extradited to the US, where he faces decades in prison, for the crime of speaking truth to power.
UPDATE: This article was amended to reflect the fact that the Supreme Court ruled favourably towards the New York Times in the case of publishing the Pentagon Papers, rather than in the criminal prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg’s prosecution was thrown out by the judge in his case due to “improper Government conduct shielded so long from public view”.
See also:
Timeline of important posts relating to Julian Assange
Mohamed Elmaazi volunteers with CAMPACC.
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