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.”
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Much of
the substance of the post, though, pointed
to the opposite conclusion. “WikiLeaks’s
practice of dumping huge loads of data on
the public without examining the motivations
of the leakers can leave it open to
manipulation,” Mahoney sniffed. He
continued:
To
some, Julian Assange is a warrior for
truth and transparency. To others, he is
an information bomb-thrower. The
question with which CPJ has had to
grapple is whether his actions make him
a journalist. Each year, we compile a
list of journalists imprisoned around
the world, based on a set of criteria
that have evolved as technology has
upended publishing and the news
business. After extensive research and
consideration, CPJ chose not to list
Assange as a journalist, in part because
his role has just as often been as a
source and because WikiLeaks does not
generally perform as a news outlet with
an editorial process.
By using
an array of rhetorical gymnastics, Mahoney
and the CPJ tacitly accepted the Justice
Department “logic” for prosecuting Assange,
even as the CPJ officially condemned the
prosecution itself. The bottom line is that
the CPJ legitimized the government’s
campaign to put Assange outside the
boundaries of legitimate journalism.
Kevin
Gosztola, managing editor of
Shadowproof.com, aptly pointed out the
underlying problem with the CPJ’s tightrope
act: “Can a laudable press freedom
organization claim Assange is not a
journalist without aiding the political case
brought by prosecutors in President Donald
Trump’s Justice Department?” Gosztola also
highlighted
a likely reason for the CPJ’s ambivalent (at
best) stance: “CPJ’s Board of Directors is
composed of many journalists in the U.S.
media establishment, an establishment which
clings to the notion that Assange is not a
journalist in order to maintain a supposed
distinction between his work and their
work.”
Whatever
their motives, journalists who excuse or
justify efforts to prosecute Assange are
acting as gullible tools in the government’s
ongoing campaign to plug leaks and stifle
criticism, especially regarding defense and
foreign policy issues. The intent is clearly
to suppress embarrassing revelations by
WikiLeaks and other players.
But the
strategy the CPJ and its cohorts have
adopted is akin to appeasing a tiger in the
hope that it will eat the appeaser last—or,
ideally, become sated with its initial
victims. This approach is both unprincipled
and myopic. The government has already made
worrisome forays against troublesome
mainstream journalists who have published
embarrassing disclosures. Barack Obama’s
administration conducted electronic
surveillance of both
New York
Times
reporter James Risen and Fox News reporter
James Rosen in an effort to identify their
sources. The government even named Rosen as
an “unindicted
co-conspirator”
in an espionage case brought against his
source. Similarly, the administration
asserted that it had the right to prosecute
Risen, even though it chose not to take that
step. Those were ominous warning signals.
The
New York
Times
reported that President Trump expressed even
greater interest in prosecuting journalists
who utilize leaked classified information.
In his much-discussed February 2017 Oval
Office session with FBI Director James Comey
(during which Trump allegedly asked Comey to
end the investigation into former national
security advisor Michael Flynn), the
president
reportedly
backed the Obama approach.
“Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began
the discussion by condemning leaks to the
news media, saying that Mr. Comey should
consider putting reporters in prison for
publishing classified information.”
Government
prosecutors are going after Assange because
he is an especially controversial figure and
therefore a more vulnerable target. But
prosecuting him and WikiLeaks for espionage
poses a mortal threat to a free and
independent press in the United States. It
is extraordinarily dangerous to the health
of the First Amendment to allow the
government to decide
who is or is
not a “legitimate” journalist.
Only legacy publications friendly to the
national security bureaucracy could then
count on restraint—and, as the Rosen and
Risen cases indicate, even that expectation
would be quite fragile. The CPJ and other
media institutions that choose to abandon
Assange are playing the role of the
government’s useful idiots and imperiling
their own best interests.
Ted
Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense
and foreign policy studies at the Cato
Institute and a contributing editor to
The American Conservative, is the author
of 12 books and more than 850 articles on
international affairs. His books includeThe
Captive Press: Foreign Policy Crises and the
First Amendment (1995), which
was named an Outstanding Academic Book by
the College Division of the American Library
Association.
This article was originally published
by "The
American Conservative" -
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