either you favor press freedom of speech, and freedom of your own speech, or you are a cowardly member of the great unwashed yearning for government to tell you everything you need to know and that you will then act as if their 'official' words are true, which then makes you a spineless fool;
And there it is. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged by the Trump administration’s Justice Department with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act,
carrying a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison. Exactly as Assange
and his defenders have been warning would happen for nearly a decade.
The indictment, like the one which preceded it
last month with Assange’s arrest, is completely fraudulent, as it
charges Assange with “crimes” that are indistinguishable from
conventional journalistic practices. The charges are based on the same
exact evidence which was available to the Obama administration, which as
journalist Glenn Greenwald noted last year declined to prosecute Assange citing fear of destroying press freedoms.
Hanna Bloch-Wehba, an associate professor at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law, has called the indictment
“a worst-case, nightmare, mayday scenario for First Amendment
enthusiasts.” Bloch-Wehba explains that that the indictment’s “theories
for liability rest heavily on Assange’s relationship with Manning and
his tendency to encourage Manning to continue to bring WikiLeaks
material” in a way that “is not readily distinguishable from many
reporter-source relationships cultivated over a period of time.”
One of the versions of the New York Times‘ report on the new Assange indictment, which has since been edited out but has been preserved here in a quote by Slate,
said that “officials would not engage with questions about how the
actions they said were felonies by Mr. Assange differed from ordinary
investigative journalism. Notably, The New York Times, among many other
news organizations, obtained precisely the same archives of documents
from WikiLeaks, without authorization from the government.”.........https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/05/24/how-many-times-must-assange-be-proven-right-before-people-start-listening/
No comments:
Post a Comment