The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies
One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus. That is, if you believe in final chapters. Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative. His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice. Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.
Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information. At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment. It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.
As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.
Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC). The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.
The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.
Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication. WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport. Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199. In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.
As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family. He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process. It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on. This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.
There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny. These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.
One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal. They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.” Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”
From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality. While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate. It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.
Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.
From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing. He gave the game away. He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.
To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom. It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled. While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment. The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.
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6 comments
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Jon Chesterson -
Patricia -
Terence Mills -
Clakka -
Canguro -
New England Cocky
Return to home pageWELCOME HOME JULIAN – YOU ARE AN INNOCENT MAN WHO SOUGHT THE TRUTH IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST, AND LET NO ONE FORGET IT
Not a Russian spy, North Korean, ISIS or Iranian spy, but an Australian journalist is the only person ever to be maliciously hunted, charged and wrongfully coercively convicted under a century old US wartime Espionage Act, 1917.
The American political and justice system is full of crap, saying Julian Assange put soldiers at risk – If the soldiers concerned had performed their duty properly, conducted themselves lawfully and in accordance with international law and moral code of conduct, they would have had nothing to fear, there would likely not even have been a Wiki leak. They are responsible for their own conduct – war crimes, as are the US military and government who simply covered it up with gross misconduct, false prosecution and relentless threats of retaliation and bullying, political persecution causing unjust and illegal incarceration of an innocent man for 12-14 years way beyond their national political and judicial jurisdiction – The US is not an international court or parliament. They chose to attack an Australian journalist, ‘friendly fire’, and so insult all Australians (their so called closest allies), and international human and civil rights, as have the UK for being the rogue jailer, shame on Britain.
Think about it very carefully, who our friends and allies are!
USA are not our friends, they will walk all over us and ditch us in their own national interest, political abuse, corruption, war crimes and pernicious interference in our own sovereignty. They are not to be trusted in international law, their own justice system and certainly not on human rights, freedom, freedom of speech or pillar of fair democracy. Julian is owed a US Presidential pardon and apology from the UK Prime Minister. Remember what our own LNP Party speaking out against him are saying come next election. They will not support Australians overseas let alone at home… they too will ditch us in favour of serving their masters USA, Birmingham is a blithering fool with no moral compass or independent mental capacity for reason – Totally untrustworthy in Parliament. As for Dutton, we already know he is a toxic nuclear walking landmine.
Hear, hear, Jon Chesterson, right on all counts, except for one, there is no justice system in the US, it is a legal system, any justice that comes out of it is not intended but a by product of a system that hounds its own people to their deaths.
The UK courts should hang their collective heads in shame for being the attack dog of the US. This was never about Wikileaks putting anyone in danger, it was about the US being able to bend other countries legal and political systems to their will.
The US is a danger to us all, including their own people. It is a rogue state.
Kissinger said it, “that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” It was a throw away line about the Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, but it applies to any country that thinks that the US is their friend.
Now for Albanese and the ALP to stop the persecution of Daniel Duggan who has been held in prison at the behest of the US in an Australian maximum security prison for the last 20 months, an absolute travesty that the Australian government has allowed the US to dictate against one of our citizens.
I too am concerned at the lapdog role played by the British government and their courts.
This extradition demand was always political and as Binoy has noted, sought to entrench a global reach for the US Department of Justice, a very worrying development for journalists, whistle blowers and speakers of truth anywhere on this planet.
Well done the Albanese government and in particular Kevin Rudd.
I agree wholeheartedly with the comments above.
In addition, I observe:
How did the falsehood of Sweden’s trumped up rape charge on Assange come about? With much political interference. Assange offered to cooperate in the matter, neither Britain nor Sweden proceeded, and yet Britain laid spurious charges of ‘skipping bail’ when Assange sought refuge in the Equadorian embassy – he knew it was about US rendition from Sweden. It was revealed that major political / judicial corruption was at play in the laying of Sweden’s charges.
Wikileaks (Assange) kept secrete the Brad (Chelsea) Mannings’ trove, and took it to The Guardian seeking its publication. He requested that names be redacted from the ‘war crimes’ matters. Despite assurances, The Guardian published the lot unredacted. Soon after, The Guardian published the url to Wikileaks entire ‘Manning’ trove – a heinous act of journalistic treachery by The Guardian. Along with The Guardian, New York Times and der Spiegel published the lot, yet the US DOJ did not go after anyone but Assange – a selective blind-eye to the acts of the mainstream publishers, who according to the case put by the US DOJ would be as guilty as Assange – arch hypocrisy, and an obvious political vendetta against Assange.
Some journalists, particularly in Oz, UK and USA were piss-weak in not backing-in Assange, and now it’s coming back to bite them hard.
The blow-up and conflation of the 2016 matters relating to the Democrats’ cables was an utter nonsense. There were no matters of State nor anything that could be construed as State secrets in the cables. They were not cables of the State, but cables of a political party. That they revealed substantial corruption and mischievous coercion within the party was sufficient journalistic reason to publish them. It would not surprise me at all that it was likely the Republican Trump quarter that facilitated moving the dossier to Russia.
After innumerable British lower courts’ toadying entanglements protracted the legalistic jiggery-pokery against Assange, the dogged persistence of Assange’s legal team, and Oz political diplomacy, finally brought the UK High Court to its senses, that ultimately the US had no proper grounds under UK law to obtain extradition. It finally revealed the Catch22 that would facilitate Assange’s team winning on appeal. But Assange’s team realized to appeal to finality might take years more, and even then, would only apply to the UK jurisdiction, meaning the US could pursue him anywhere else.
Thank goodness for the Albanese govt’s strong but quiet diplomatic representations. It enabled Assange’s legal team (before ignored by the US DOJ) to negotiate the final plea deal with the DOJ.
At the District Court hearing in Saipan, it was recorded that no individuals were harmed by the publication of Mannings’ trove, and that Assange was acting as a journalist. Also, it seems that such a plea deal cannot act as a precedence under US law, as there can only be a precedence when a matter has gone to trial. And numerous US legal commentators have stated that it has blown wide open the disjuncture between the US Constitutional First Amendment (Freedom of expression) and the US Espionage Act 1917, saying they must be made congruent.
All that said and done, in Oz, yesterday the disgraceful ABC News promulgated illogical and puerile dross from LNP’s Birmingham, and went on in a disgraceful, obviously LNP scripted, interview by Speers with Kevin Rudd. Kevin Rudd annihilated the simplistic deviousness of Speers and the ABC News
The sooner we get the lazy cowardly NewsCorpes and SevenWest flunkies out of Oz media and the minds of the Oz folks, the better.
Assange’s experience of imprisonment and duress at the hands of the hegemon and its flunky outpost, the UK, are entirely unsurprising. The rattlesnake, or scorpion – have what you will – does not respond well to being provoked, and Assange’s great mistake was to do exactly that. One can safely speculate with regard to the venom and hatred expressed after the release of the Collateral Murder tapes showcasing an instance of an American war crime that these Yankee brutes were determined to show the upstart who’s really in charge.
Given the dark underbelly of American civil life with its multiplicity of arguably deeply corrupted public bodies; NSA, FBI, CIA, USAF, USJD etc. etc, and the essentially limitless power they have to wield against those whom they choose to pursue, Assange never really had a chance once it was determined that he was to be arrested and put away for eternity, due process and journalistic licence be buggered, let alone the supposed guarantee of the First Amendment in safeguarding the right to freedom of speech.
It’s been seen time and again; American law wielded against those with whom it wishes to pick a fight, and suspended when it suits them to ignore their own statutes in pursuit of vengeance. I daresay Mr Assange isn’t planning a visit to that grim and benighted land anytime soon, and perhaps for his own peace of mind & safety he probably ought not leave this country for travel abroad either.
Welcome home Julian!! Australians applaud your guts and determination to expose the truth for all to see!!
I agree with all the above sentiments, particularly only the naïve ”country bumpkins” believe that the USA (United States of Apartheid) is concerned about Australia ….. except as a source of natural resources to be exploited without any benefit for Australian voters.