The American Bear

› The Death of Truth

LONDON—A tiny tip of the vast subterranean network of governmental and intelligence agencies from around the world dedicated to destroying WikiLeaks and arresting its founder, Julian Assange, appears outside the red-brick building on Hans Crescent Street that houses the Ecuadorean Embassy. Assange, the world’s best-known political refugee, has been in the embassy since he was offered sanctuary there last June. British police in black Kevlar vests are perched night and day on the steps leading up to the building, and others wait in the lobby directly in front of the embassy door. An officer stands on the corner of a side street facing the iconic department store Harrods, half a block away on Brompton Road. Another officer peers out the window of a neighboring building a few feet from Assange’s bedroom at the back of the embassy. Police sit round-the-clock in a communications van topped with an array of antennas that presumably captures all electronic forms of communication from Assange’s ground-floor suite.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), or Scotland Yard, said the estimated cost of surrounding the Ecuadorean Embassy from June 19, 2012, when Assange entered the building, until Jan. 31, 2013, is the equivalent of $4.5 million.

Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”

(Source: azspot)

› WikiLeaks has more US secrets, Assange says | The Agonist

Julian Assange has confirmed that WikiLeaks still holds classified United States government documents that it is yet to publish.

However the transparency website will not release this material during the court martial of its source, US Army private Bradley Manning.

Speaking to Fairfax Media, Mr Assange said on Tuesday that Manning was “America’s foremost political prisoner … an activist who faces retribution for revealing the truth”.

Manning last Thursday publicly accepted responsibility for providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic reports, telling a US military court that he did so to spark public debate on US foreign policy and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Bradley Manning’s plea was a very positive development for him,” Mr Assange said.

“For the first time he was able to speak about his motivation to reveal truths and stimulate public debate about war.

“The US Government has repeatedly sought to deny or suppress Manning’s motivation for his actions, and the tabloid press has tried to strip him of any political motivation.”

› Assange to Maher: Americans should know how easily their government can kill them | The Raw Story [video]

› John Cusack: What Is an Assange? Part 2

John Cusack: So Jon, on the same terrain — if you give me information and I decide I want to put it out on, say Twitter, — and it’ll reach a million plus people — am I in the same class as Assange — if somebody sends me a video of a crime, and I believe a crime has been committed? Do I have a right or moral obligation to expose the truth…And am I protected?

Jonathan Turley: Well, this is a longstanding conflict that we’ve had in the civil liberties community with Congress. In fact, I testified before the House Intelligence Committee years ago on the move by a number of members to criminalize the publication of classified information, whether you’re a journalist or anyone else. So they were including all the journalists, as well as non-journalists.

And this had the support of the Republicans and Democrats. Members of Congress tend not to like whistleblowers, or journalists for that matter, because they get them off-script and when they are most vulnerable. They make this less controllable. I have previously testified before both Democratic and Republican members considering a disastrous move toward criminalizing the publication of classified information regardless of how you receive it.

The question of your releasing the same information on Twitter is interesting. Given your status, you actually reach more people than virtually all of the daily newspapers. So you’re reaching over a million-plus people with a single tweet that most newspapers would dearly love to replicate.

John Cusack: We both blog and write on line — as we are now —

Jonathan Turley: Then, we get into this serious question of why you’re not a journalist but Chris Matthews is. I mean, you actually are likely to reach 100 times more people than MSNBC would on any given evening because of your status.

John Cusack: One of Arianna’s big ideas was to create what she calls citizen journalists to participate and have your voices heard, — and ordinary people could be alongside — right up there with Hillary Clinton. And blog, and she’ll aggregate news. She’s created this kind of revolution in her own way. But it has to do with connectivity and aggregation and the idea of a citizen journalist. So is Assange basically a citizen publisher? It gets back to the same question — what are the rights of people to expose the truth? Where are their protections?

Jonathan Turley: I think that’s right. And this is where I think the media has decided to go conspicuously silent. Because there’s no question that Assange’s release of this information resembles the type of act for which journalists have received Pulitzers. He released information that came to him, and information that had not been released in any other forum. That information dealt directly with government deception and potential crimes.

So it walked and quacked just like a journalistic story. But they’re not willing to call him a journalist.

John Cusack: And so therefore, he has no protections?

Jonathan Turley: Well, that’s how the US government is dealing with it. They have rather transparently opted to deal with him as a suspected hacker. And they’re going to pursue him on that ground. If they get their hands on him, I expect they’re going to do everything they can to keep him in jail. They need to hoist the wretch, they need to make it clear that you won’t get away with this if you embarrass the government and release this type of information. Both the Bush and Obama Administration have previously threatened journalists. They are not going to hold back on Assange if they have already threatened to prosecute reporters.

John Cusack: As the man once said — You have the right to free speech — as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it. So it’s another part of the widening clamp-down on civil liberties and freedom of speech.

Jonathan Turley: Indeed.

[continue]

› What Is an Assange? | John Cusack

Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I think it’s fascinating when you look at the reaction to Bradley Manning and Assange. The government really went to DEFCON 4 in dealing with these guys. And the question is why. I think the answer to that is they want to hoist the wretch. They want everyone to see these guys twisting in the wind, so no one will do this again.

And what is it that they did? They released —

John Cusack: They were whistleblowers.

Jonathan Turley: Right, they released information embarrassing to the government. But when you look at the media coverage, they clearly are unwilling to treat Assange as a whistleblower, and they are particularly unwilling to treat him as a journalist.

And so this sort of goes to this longstanding question of what constitutes a journalist in the age of blogs and Internet sites?

John Cusack: I guess that’s probably the question I was stumbling towards — what do you believe that difference is, from the constitutional perspective of freedom of speech, or its protection?

Jonathan Turley: Journalists have been adopting a very narrow definition because they have a legitimate concern that, with the ability to create a blog in a matter of minutes, everyone can claim to be a journalist. If everyone is a journalist, then no one will likely have journalistic privileges. Journalists survive on these privileges and those privileges will evaporate if everyone can claim them.

And so if you look at things like the National Press Club, they long have had a definition of a journalist that deals with how much the person gets paid to do journalism, excluding people who are legitimate journalists but are not receiving a full-time, or even a significant part-time, salary. Those definitions are highly artificial today. Most people are now getting their news from the Internet and from blogs.

Kevin McCabe: — in a reference in a Times story, the reporter referred to Chris Matthews and Katie Couric as journalists, who would be attending the Al Smith dinner. And I was going to send a note saying Chris Matthews is no journalist. At one time he was a columnist. But he’s a cable TV opinion guy now. I think that what you say just brings a striking relief to all of that. It’s just so obvious.

Jonathan Turley: It also creates this awkward position, where if Adam Liptak at the New York Times releases material from Assange, it’s a journalistic act. When Assange releases this information in bulk, it’s considered a terrorist act. And nobody seems comfortable with trying to explain that distinction. And I’m not too sure that they can.

There’s two ways to look at whether someone’s a journalist — their function and their motivation. And usually, we look at both. Well, what was the motivation of Assange? Assange’s motivation, it seems to me, was clearly to be a whistleblower and to release this information. But he was also doing an act which is identical to what journalists do.

And yet, if you look at how he’s treated in the newspapers, they’re not treating him as either whistleblower or journalist; they’re treating him somehow as sui generis, something unique. He’s an Assange. [++]

› Julian Assange Refuses to Submit to Erin Burnett’s Planned Hit Job | The Dissenter

› Lawyers for Julian Assange & WikiLeaks Seek Details on Justice Department’s Criminal Investigation | The Dissenter

Lawyers for WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, have sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting further information on the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks.

Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, counsel to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) write, “In light of recent reports suggesting the possibility of an ongoing criminal investigation of Mr. Assange and/or WikiLeaks—and the existence of secret grand jury proceedings in the Eastern District of Virginia—we write to assess whether Mr. Assange in fact faces any criminal jeopardy in the United States and to protect his interests in the face of an investigation and/or trial.”

The grand jury exists and has been meeting. It has been confirmed in proceedings in the court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks. It was also confirmed in diplomatic communications between the United States and Australia, which were covered by the Sydney Morning Herald.

The letter specifically asks for confirmation on whether Assange is a “target or subject of any federal grand jury investigation for alleged violations of the Espionage Act of 1917 and/or other federal criminal law.” It also seeks confirmation on whether the Justice Department plans to “ arrest or extradite Mr. Assange from Sweden or any other country to face current or prospective charges in the United States relating to WikiLeaks and/or his activities as a publisher and journalist.”

Noting the existence of ”indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, Section 1021 or of the September 21, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force,” the letter inquires as to whether the Justice Department might be operating under the legal theory that Assange “may have provided ‘substantial support’ to Al Qaeda or ‘associated forces’ by publishing information passed to him by Bradley Manning.” [++]

› Sweden detains Pirate Bay founder in oppressive conditions without charges | Glenn Greenwald

One of the prime arguments I have always made about the Assange asylum case is that his particular fear of being extradited to Sweden is grounded in that country’s very unusual and quite oppressive pre-trial detention powers: ones that permit the state to act with an extreme degree of secrecy and which can even prohibit the accused from any communication with the outside world.

That is what has always led Assange to fear going to Sweden: that those detention procedures could be used to transfer him to the US without any public scrutiny (only the most willfully irrational, given evidence like this, would deny that this is a real threat). And that is the argument on behalf of Assange that has produced the greatest amount of anger: in part because some self-loving westerners find the suggestion inconceivable and offensive that a nice western nation (as opposed to some Muslim or Latin American country) could possibly be oppressive in any real way.

But now we have a case that confirms exactly those claims about Sweden’s justice system, and since it has nothing to do with the WikiLeaks founder, one hopes these issues can be viewed more rationally. Gottfrid Svartholm is the founder of the file-sharing Pirate Bay website who has been prosecuted by the Swedish government for enabling copyright infringements. At the behest of Sweden, he was recently arrested in Cambodia and then deported to Stockholm, where he has now also been accused (though not charged) with participating in the hacking of a Swedish company.

Svartholm is now being held under exactly the pretrial conditions that I’ve long argued (based on condemnations from human rights groups) prevail in Sweden:

“Gottfrid Svartholm will be kept in detention for at least two more weeks on suspicion of hacking into a Swedish IT company connected to the country’s tax authorities. According to Prosecutor Henry Olin the extended detention is needed ‘to prevent him from having contact with other people.’ The Pirate Bay co-founder is not allowed to have visitors and is even being denied access to newspapers and television… .

“Since he hasn’t been charged officially in the Logica case the Pirate Bay co-founder could only be detained for a few days.

“But, after a request from Prosecutor Henry Olin this term was extended for another two weeks mid-September, and last Friday the District Court decided that Gottfrid could be detained for another two weeks.

“To prevent Gottfrid from interfering with the investigation the Prosecutor believes it’s justified to detain him for more than a month without being charged. The Pirate Bay co-founder is not allowed to have visitors and is being refused access to newspapers and television… . The Prosecutor hasn’t ruled out a request for another extension of Gottfrid’s detainment in two weeks, if the investigation is still ongoing.”

The claim that produced the most vitriol was that Sweden vests remarkable power in prosecutors and courts to keep accused suspects completely hidden from public view, with no communication or other contact with the outside world, and that this power is exercised with some frequency. Now we have confirmation of that claim from, of all people, the Swedish prosecutor in this case, Henrik Olin, who said in an interview outside the courtroom:

“‘According to the Swedish system, when the preliminary investigation is finished, I as prosecutor will decide whether to prosecute him… . In the Swedish system it is quite usual for people to be detained on this legal ground, and it gives me the possibility to prevent him from having contact with other people.’”

Unlike in the British system, in which all proceedings, including extradition proceedings, relating to Assange would be publicly scrutinized and almost certainly conducted in open court, the unusual secrecy of Sweden’s pre-trial judicial process, particularly the ability to hold the accused incommunicado, poses a real danger that whatever happened to Assange could be effectuated without any public notice. That has always been, and remains, the prime fear for his being extradited to Sweden: a fear that could be, and should be, redressed by negotiations between Ecuador, Sweden and the UK to assure that he can go to Sweden while having his rights protected.

› Julian Assange will speak to UN from Ecuadorian Embassy in London | CNN.com

Assange — who has been holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June — will “debate the legitimacy and applicability” of his request for asylum in Ecuador “from a legal and a human rights perspective,” according to RT, the Russian television channel that will transmit his live message at 6 p.m. ET

› Interview: President of Australian Lawyers Alliance speaks out in defense of Assange

crystalfallz:

“I think what it does show is the United States’ hypocrisy on this particular issue. If the US Government decides to leak materials against other regimes such as China for example, or Russia, then that’s all ok. But if there’s material out there that the United States doesn’t want to be out there, then the United States comes down upon that journalist very very hard. And I think that the so called “land of the free” has shown that it has got a glass jaw when it comes to tactics being used against it, that it itself uses against other nations.”

(via freeusapress)