December 29, 2019 "Information
Clearing House" -
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange languishes
in a British prison awaiting probable
extradition to the United States to stand
trial for violating the Espionage Act of
1917. Ironically, he is serving jail time
for jumping bail on trumped-up sex crime
charges in Sweden that even the Swedish
government
has now
abandoned.
Most Western, especially American,
mainstream journalists, though, have
expressed at most tepid opposition to the
persecution of Assange, even as reports
mount that his health
has
deteriorated
to an alarming extent.
This is
shameful and jeopardizes the news media’s
own long-term interests.
The worst
thing about such conduct is that so many
reporters have bought into the Justice
Department’s insistence that Assange is not
a “legitimate” journalist. John Demers, the
DOJ’s assistant attorney general for
national security,
bluntly
stated
the government’s thesis earlier this year.
“Julian Assange,” Demers said, “is no
journalist,” since he engaged in “explicit
solicitation of classified information.”
Other
Trump administration officials have
conducted a
similar
campaign
to delegitimize Assange’s status as a
journalist, thereby justifying his
prosecution for espionage. “WikiLeaks walks
like a hostile intelligence service and
talks like a hostile intelligence service,”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo said in April 2017
during his first public speech as head of
the agency. “Assange and his ilk,” Pompeo
charged, seek “personal self-aggrandizement
through the destruction of Western values.”
Unfortunately, much of the U.S. press seems
eager to exclude Assange from its ranks. A
decision by the Committee to Protect
Journalists (CPJ) in early December
underscored the mainstream media’s
willingness to disown Assange. The CPJ
refused to include him on its annual list of
journalists jailed throughout the world. CPJ
Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney’s
attempt to explain the decision was an
exercise in painful linguistic contortions.
His December 11
blog post
on the CPJ website used the unequivocal
title, “For the sake of press freedom,
Julian Assange must be defended.”