Julian Assange Has Ruffled the Feathers of Limp-Wristed Experts
Those who did nothing, while Julian Assange spent twelve years in purgatory, have spilt their tea over his plea bargain.
For those with other things on their mind this past decade, Assange is the founder, director, and jack-of-all-trades at an organization named Wikileaks that, as its name implies, leaks wikis. A wiki is a web site that allows almost anyone to edit and add content. Think Wikipedia, with a bent toward uncovering government misdeeds.
Julian’s misdeed was to expose a major U.S. government misdeed
On 25 July 2010, WikiLeaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The documents detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties.
Assange neither found nor collected the documents. That was the work of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst who provided the WikiLeaks with tens of thousands of classified documents in what was believed to be the largest unauthorized release of state secrets in U.S. history.
There are legitimate state secrets and those that hide crimes that must be exposed in a free society. Let’s just say there was much egg on many faces, and that’s a no-no in the Pentagon, CIA, the White House, and elsewhere in D.C.
So, Julian took the rap, and his young children grew up without him
Now, twelve years later, after the dust has settled and Julian is back to father his kids, the journalistic cows are mooing.
Anthony Bellanger, general secretary of The International Federation of Journalists claimed, “Had Assange gone to prison for the rest of his life, any reporter handed a classified document would fear facing a similar fate.” Not that Bellanger spent any personal time on picket lines, or rallied the Federation to come to the defense of one of its own in need.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was “alarming” the plea had been pursued. “The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come,” he said. I guess ‘advocacy’ doesn’t include Assange. I don’t recall Seth’s voice on the issue, but he’s properly alarmed that a man abandoned by free speech advocates worldwide, would take a plea deal to get home to his wife and kids.
On 25 July of 2010, The Guardian, New York Times, and Der Spiegel were recipients of some 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009
That’s a bunch: 18,400 a year, 71 a day, if you don’t count weekends, because even the Pentagon goes home on weekends. They detailed individual incidents, including friendly fire and civilian casualties. Assange chose those newspapers because he trusted them to vet the package before printing.
When he got indicted for violating the Espionage Act, did journalists from those papers threaten to go out (on strike) to support the holy grail of journalism? Nope.
Did any of these co-conspirator news outlets get indicted by the U.S. government? They actually printed the stuff, which seems a bit more serious than simply passing it on. No Espionage Act indictments for them, and they kept their heads low in a cowardly act of abandonment. The U.S. government was properly pissed though, at having been found guilty of war crimes, pants around their ankles, bare-assed before the world.
Taking this whole mess to its obvious conclusion, it is (or should be) a war crime to indict either journalists or whistleblowers for exposing war crimes
Without the Chelsea Mannings and Edward Snowdens making public the crimes our American government has perpetuated against both non-combatant foreign citizens and illegal surveillance of its own, we would not know about these crimes. Snowden, Manning and Assange all paid enormous personal prices to make unpleasant truths known. Possibly that’s the price we pay for the cancerous growth of bureaucracy in nearly all aspects of our federal government. Too many chickens in the henhouse, and there’s bound to be a horror-story here and there.
Which is why those who expense their lunches at organizations like The International Federation of Journalists and Freedom of the Press Foundation ought to keep their opinions to themselves when real journalists and real members of the media put their lives and reputations on the line.
Welcome home, Julian. Glad (and honored) to have you back among us.