Assange is facing a 175 year sentence for publishing truthful information in the public interest.
The Royal Courts of Justice in London decided to overturn a decision not to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian P. Assange to face trial in the United States, where he is accused of one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States.
The High Court accepted assurances from the US that Assange would be treated well in custody even after the American government secretly plotted to assassinate him.
The prosecution against Assange for publishing secret government documents under the Espionage Act of 1917 has been called an existential threat to freedom of the press that represents retaliation for making the world aware of documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
The Espionage Act, originally intended for use against spies, has been wielded against as sources of journalists and whistleblowers in recent decades, but never a publisher or a journalist.
These new charges against him are unprecedented and threaten to criminalize national security reporting in the United States, where the 56 journalists arrested or detained so far during 2021 approaches the combined totals of 2017, 2018, and 2019.
The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war has defended Assange at his London extradition hearing, saying WikiLeaks had acted in the public interest when he published a video that exposed American military lies about the slaying of journalists in Iraq and warning that he would not get a fair trial in the United States.
“I was acutely aware that what was depicted in that video deserved the term murder, a war crime,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 leaked documents known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other news outlets, in testimony urging London’s Old Bailey court to reject the extradition request. “I was very glad that the American public was confronted with this reality of our war.”
“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information,” said ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner. “If the US can prosecute a foreign publisher for violating our secrecy laws, there’s nothing preventing China, or Russia, from doing the same.”.
“Prosecuting journalists — any journalists — for publishing leaked material from government whistleblowers is wrong, dangerous and unconstitutional,” said Timothy Karr, formerly an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press who now works with the group Press Freedom. “It moves us closer to prosecuting any national-security journalist trying to expose the inner workings of the government, military or intelligence community.”
Leading civil liberties groups, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, ACLU, and Human Rights Watch have called the charges against Julian Assange a “threat to press freedom around the globe.”
Also calling for his release were Knight First Amendment Institute, Committee to Protect Journalists, and NJTODAY.NET.
Two dozen leading civil liberties and press freedom organizations recently sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to share “profound concern about the ongoing criminal and extradition proceedings relating to Julian Assange” after shocking revelations surfaced showing that the CIA drew up plans under the Trump administration to kidnap and even kill Assange while he was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Pamela Anderson, the former Baywatch actress, tweeted out a message of support for Assange saying he should not be extradited to the US.
Journalist unions, including the National Union of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, have said that “media freedom is suffering lasting damage by the continued prosecution of Julian Assange.
Assange faces a 175-year prison sentence for doing what journalists typically do.
The American government’s indictment of Assange poses a threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.
A judge in January ruled that “it would be unjust and oppressive” because his mental condition would make him prone to suicide.
The Australian journalist is in Belmarsh prison in London, and faces espionage charges in the US for the publication of thousands of secret documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to the charging document, Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organization Sunshine Press, stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents in its first 10 years.
A federal grand jury returned an 18-count superseding indictment returned against Assange in May 2019 and a second superseding indictment without additional counts on June 24, 2020. That indictment broadened the scope of the conspiracy surrounding alleged computer intrusions with which Assange was previously charged.
Since the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange has spoken at hacking conferences to tout his own history as a “famous teenage hacker in Australia” and to encourage others to hack to obtain information for WikiLeaks.
In 2009, for instance, Assange told the Hacking At Random conference that WikiLeaks had obtained nonpublic documents from the Congressional Research Service by exploiting “a small vulnerability” inside the document distribution system of the United States Congress, and then asserted that “[t]his is what any one of you would find if you were actually looking.”
WikiLeaks releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war, a report about a corruption investigation in Kenya, and an operating procedures manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder footage from the July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among several civilians killed. The video disproved an official US statement that initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the military did not know how the deaths occurred.
Other releases in 2010 included the Afghan War Diary and the “Iraq War Logs”. The latter release allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in “significant” attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published.
In 2010, WikiLeaks also released a large number of classified cables that had been sent to the US State Department.
In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
In 2012, WikiLeaks released the “Syria Files,” over two million emails sent by Syrian politicians, corporations, and government ministries.
In 2015, WikiLeaks published Saudi Arabian diplomatic cables, documents detailing spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on successive French presidents, and the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial international trade agreement that had been negotiated in secret.
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party’s national committee favored Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.