Freedom For Assange Showcases The “Trump Justice” Difference

In 2016 Assange published Democratic emails that were stolen by Russian intelligence operatives. He was not charged immediately, but it revealed the depth of the spying activities in the election that brought Trump to power. 

Trump was furious. 

Then he was not.

Then he reverted and wanted Assange prosecuted.

Justice Department officials had considered charging Assange but were unsure a case would hold up in court.  It was similar to other actions by conventional journalists.

The Justice Department position changed when Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions called for Assange’s arrest as “a priority” in 2017.  During a 2010 interview, Trump said WikiLeaks was “disgraceful.” 

“I think there should be like death penalty or something.”

At other times. Trump praised the site for its revelation of the leaks of Hillary Clinton’s emails.  “WikiLeaks shows how crooked the whole thing is,” Trump stated.  “I love reading those WikiLeaks.”

Later he swung back into an anti-Assange camp, saying “it’s OK with me” if Assange is arrested.

In his next phase of mental gymnastics, Trump claimed to not even know who Assange was. While speaking to reporters in 2018, Trump claimed “I don’t know anything about him [Assange].  Really.  I don’t know much about him. I really don’t.”

This is one of the great dangers of a Trump presidency: not just that he is vindictive, but that he is so changeable.  His whims can whip-lash his administration’s actions.  If they are combined with an Intelligence community mind-set that is determined to end a prosecution without letting it see the light of a trial (more below), then American democracy is in a very dangerous place.  It is, in fact, indistinguishable from the court of the KGB – the old Soviet secret police…with Trump as Stalin.

Assange had created his Wikileaks website in 2006, as a “dead letter drop” for leakers of classified or sensitive information.  Its first media storm came in 2010 when it leaked video showing a US military helicopter gunning down 11 civilians, including two journalists, during the Iraq war. The Apache crew even shot at a van that tried to rescue the injured. It was a shocking reveal of how the US was conducting its war.

Later that year, Wikileaks put out more than 90,000 documents, mostly secret US military reports about the Afghanistan war, and 400,000 about the Iraq war.

He then started his life in-and-out of asylums of immunity, in England and elsewhere.

Edward Snowden is also seeking assurances of a fair trial in the US before he returns.  The former CIA contractor witnessed the mass collection of electronic data on American citizens, and he thought it was wrong.  He leaked intelligence secrets in 2013 and then earned $5-million from his book “Permanent Record”, plus speaking tours. The US government sued him and took the money.  Snowden is living in Russia now, as a Russian citizen. 

It was also similar to the case of John Bolton, the former national security adviser who published a damaging book about President Donald Trump earlier this year, and who faces a similar attempt by the Justice Department to claw back proceeds for publishing.

The Assange and Snowden cases reveal two things.

First, there is the uncertain and shifting grounds for prosecution under the Espionage Act.  The charges are political and arbitrary.  This is why we are fortunate not to live under a government where this kind of directed action is ‘legal’.  Trump’s love of Wikileaks changed as the 2016 election memories changed, and prosecution became his mantra.

Second, they demonstrate that the Intelligence community prefers to deal with people before they have actually faced charges under the Espionage Act.  If cases enter the official stream of justice, then actions like the US ‘war on terror’ will come under scrutiny.  Its human rights violations, kidnapping, torture and illegal detention will be on the stand.  The US government’s very narrow focus of charges for Assange zeroes in solely on non-journalistic conduct, according to the book “A Century of Repression: The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press”.  The Espionage Act of 1917, BTW, is the most important yet least understood law threatening freedom of the press in modern American history.  It would make an interesting deep-dive at a later date.

Digression aside, the Intelligence mavens often work in the dark – and sometimes when they do, they are working more for their own power and not necessarily a more secure America.

Do they ever cross the line, in fact, into illegal responses? 

Nixon’s “Plumbers” broke into the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg.  They discussed murdering journalist Jack Anderson.  Gobin Stair, director of Beacon Press, was personally threatened by Nixon with charges of interference in the Vietnam war. 

Officials in the upper reaches of the Trump administration discussed killing Assange, going as far as planning “options” like gun battles on the streets of London. 

The Espionage Act is a weapon of information control.

That is not always a bad thing.

If there is a valid and considered administrative rationale for an ongoing policy that comes under regular and rigorous review, then it has a place as a shield against America’s enemies.

But I have written before about the formation of the Dark State, which has no purpose anymore except to conceal the mistakes of the political and military leadership.

This differs, to me, from the “Deep State”, which is an alleged condition without parentage. 

Many people warn that official secrecy has grown completely out of control. It has created fear far outside the confines of government offices, defense contractors, and newsrooms. Even in the halls of academia, and inside elite foundations, people have come to fear prosecution just for doing research on state secrecy. More than half of government-funded scientific research goes to the military. 

If there were a Department of Secrets, it would now have a budget almost double that of the Department of Commerce, and almost 50 percent bigger than that of the Treasury Department.

Yet the expenditure does not guarantee results for anyone except the secret-keepers.  American intelligence for example knew that an attack was coming on Pearl Harbor; they had broken the Japanese code.  American radar in Hawaii picked up the presence of the incoming planes.  But nothing was done in time about either piece of information…because decision-making was siloed.

When government officials realize they have been incompetent, they treat the potential revelation of that fact as a ‘grave danger to national security’.  This is the first of three major lessons from Pearl Harbor. Secrets are often kept to hide incompetence, and this shortsighted mistake has been repeated so many times it should no longer seem very original. But after more than eighty years, it can still take people by surprise.

It also is no guarantee that America is any safer. None of the American secrecy against the Soviet Union mattered.  Between the embassy bugs from 1945 to 1964, and the decryption of naval communications from 1967 to 1984, the Soviets knew everything, and were able to rest easier at night for nearly forty years.

The main concern for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during that time was to protect their turf against any encroachment by civilian officials appointed by the president. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas Moorer went so far as to have a spy in the White House steal classified “eyes only” papers so that he and his colleagues could be a step ahead in thwarting any such plans. The navy mole even rifled through Henry Kissinger’s briefcase.

Such control kills Americans.  The physicist Leo Szilard estimated that compartmentalization within the Manhattan Project – the atomic bomb project -  added eighteen months to the development of the bomb. If the United States had not gone to such lengths to (unsuccessfully) conceal the atomic-bomb program, it might have had a nuclear option to defeat Nazi Germany months before the D-Day landings. 

Oppenheimer’s bomb would have been dropped on Germany, not Japan.  Millions of allied soldiers and civilians would have lived, saved from unneeded death on the beaches of Normandy, the fields of Eastern Europe, the bombardments across the continents, and the naval battles of the Pacific.

One research manager at a Department of Energy weapons lab would later admit, “Far more progress is actually evidenced in the unclassified fields of research than the classified ones.”

Colin Powell, for instance, bragged about how, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he orchestrated the conduct of the Gulf War, offering President George H.W. Bush only one option to end it.  In just the first seven years of his retirement he amassed over twenty-eight million dollars from corporate boards, book deals, and speaking engagements.

In the light of such a reveal, it is a bit hypocritic that the Intelligence community wanted Snowden’s book publishing money.

Generals and admirals refuse to be accountable, even in the most literal sense: budgets and spending.

Preventing public scrutiny — even decades after the fact — is not just the policy of the Joint Chiefs. It pervades Pentagon culture. Even when presidential policy calls for the “automatic” declassification of twenty-five-year-old records, DOD officials find reasons to prevent the release of more than half of them.

The military would never have gained so much power if civilians had not let them have it.

By letting the Dark State exist, we threw away “Opportunity Cost”: the money we spend on secure research is siloed, stifled money. A senior CIA official who spent many years working with the NRO concluded that: “The best engineering decisions are the ones debated in public. The very worst are the ones hidden from scrutiny under the cloak of security.”

There are now twenty-seven million cubic feet of federal records awaiting review and processing, almost twice as many as in 1985, and more than three times more cubic feet of archival holdings. That load includes records from eight new presidential libraries. And whereas there were thirteen million electronic records in 1991, now there are 21.5 billion, with two billion more every year.  The government is not only taking longer and longer to let us know what they are doing, they are also releasing less and less of that record every year.

This is the real scandal, the “real issue” revealed by the Clinton e-mail affair and Trump’s torn-up state papers: the Department of Justice has for years refused to faithfully execute laws requiring that all government officials keep a record of what they do in our name.

Americans do not have a real choice if they do not know what they are voting for, and what they could be voting against. That, in the end, is the core problem, but it actually starts at the top, with the president’s sovereign power to decide what the people are allowed to know and when they are allowed to know it. Unpacking that problem can finally explain how this whole system of government secrecy has spun out of control.

That was the core issue for both Assange and Snowden. They attacked the Dark State’s control over our lives.

We rely on science to advance our economy today.  Science aims to uncover and secure knowledge, whereas secrecy conceals knowledge and surrounds it with misinformation. A strategy that is based on science must therefore keep secrecy to the absolute minimum. Science, after all, is a team effort, wherein cumulative and sometimes rapid advances depend on the free flow of information between free people.

That is the gem the Assanges of this world want to protect.

Our future.

Giving that up for the desire to narrowly prosecute Julian Assange and others like him is a threat to all of us.

If we want to prosecute him, we need to be able to put the charges in the fullest context and say: “here is the world we did not want people to see”.

That would be very scary for the Dark State.

Today Assange is able to plead guilty to a felony charge in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that will allow him to walk free. Thus ends a long-running legal battle that has been going on for a decade.

Assange left a British prison a few days ago and will soon appear in a U.S. federal court to plead guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defense information.  The guilty plea means he does not have to spend any more time in prison. The court is in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Western Pacific. Assange is Australian, so it’s right in his neighborhood.

WikiLeaks said Assange boarded a plane and departed the United Kingdom on Monday after leaving the British prison, where he has spent the last five years. WikiLeaks applauded the announcement of the deal, saying it was grateful for “all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom…WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know.”

The “right to know” will also be bestowed on a few specific people.  After spending five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, Assange will reunite with his wife Stella, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.

In my opinion, the world is a better place for the stand their father took. 

Ultimately, that is the highest achievement one can wish for, in one’s lifetime.

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