Michael Moore has stepped up to help post Mr. Assange’s bail, but is also offering massive technical space in Moore World.
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
Rep.-elect Allen West has announced he wants to censor news agencies.
Mr. Assange has made powerful enemies, some I have to say are the exact right ones. People like Sarah Palin, Mary Matalin, the woman who said former Pres. Bill Clinton was more responsible for 9/11 than anyone else, a real whopper of a reality rewrite, called him a “terrorist,” as did the always hyperbolic Rep. Peter King. Then there is Sen. Joe Lieberman who wants to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act. The worst came from Bob Beckel on Fox who said: “A dead man can’t leak stuff… This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so…there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
If Daniel Ellsberg would have had the current crop of media, partisan talking heads, not to mention congressional weenies aimed at him, the Pentagon Papers wouldn’t have seen the light of day. People forget and never understood that they were far more damaging and revelatory than anything close to the Peyton Place diplo docu dump of Julian Assange.
Now the Obama administration is upping the drama, with CNN reporting (via ggreenwald) that the Obama administration is targeting Assange, so his troubles could mount in the New Year.
A secret grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, is meeting to consider criminal charges in the WikiLeaks case, an attorney for the site’s founder, Julian Assange, told the Al-Jazeera network in an interview.
“We have heard from Swedish authorities there has been a secretly empaneled grand jury in Alexandria. … They are currently investigating this,” Mark Stephens told Al-Jazeera’s Sir David Frost on Sunday, referring to WikiLeaks. The site, which facilitates the disclosure of secret information, has been slowly releasing a trove of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables since November 28.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week that he had authorized “significant” actions related to a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks’ publication of the cables but has declined to elaborate.
I wrote a long piece about the ridiculous notion that in our technologically sophisticated world, this long after 9/11, our government still hasn’t taken to heart the 21st century world in which we live. Blaming Assange for utilizing an open information world, because of federal incompetence is absurd.
What’s worse is that in a democratic republic the people are supposed to be kept informed on what our government is doing in our name. At a time of the Tea Party, you’d think the Right would get this, but once again they prove that “freedom” is only for those they deem worthy, which amounts to men and those who are like minded. Everyone else should trust and not worry about verifying what the people we elect are up to, no matter how heinous, counterproductive or expensive.
Can we keep our democratic republic? It’s a good question.
This post has been updated.
I never thought I would say this but we would have been better off woth a George Bush third term or even McCain as president. We would have had a majority united against wars, against illegal electronic monitoring, against torture, against unlimited detension, against tax breaks for the rich, for governmental oversight, for open government, against …
But instead we have Democrats working to maintain and increase the worst of the Bush years. F them all.
I totally agree. In my wildest dreams, I never anticipated that an Obama presidency would essentially be a third Bush term. That is not change I can believe in!
Assange is definitely in trouble. He is surrounded by appeasers.
The Brits will do anything to appease the Americans; Obama will do anything to appease the Republicans who are calling for his head. He could be prosecuted in Virginia where he could probably get twenty-five years to life. Who knows?
Taylor,
Agree with you about Assange. If our government wasn’t so incompetent and living in another century, they would be involved in this mess! They only have themselves to blame.
To compare Ellsberg and Assange is not necessarily correct. It’s a better to compare Assange and the NYT, who actually were the ones published the Pentagon Papers.
While the US will have a tough case to make, here’s a good explanation from an article in Foreign Policy magazine:
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/06/replace_the_espionage_act
“It is a crime to disclose classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917 (see 18 U.S. Code § 793, paragraph e). The Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in Schenck vs. United States (1919). The Court ruled that “Words which, ordinarily and in many places, would be within the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment may become subject to prohibition when of such a nature and used in such circumstances a to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils which Congress has a right to prevent.” The First Amendment does not protect espionage.
The most famous prosecution under the Espionage Act was the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times vs. United States (1971), in which the Nixon administration attempted to stop the publication of a Department of Defense internal history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration lost the case and the New York Times (and others) published the history in full. Since the Pentagon Papers case, administrations have been generally reluctant to prosecute under the Espionage Act both because of the perceived difficulty of winning a conviction and because of general discomfort with the idea of suing the media for the content of what they publish.
The Pentagon Papers case is, however, a poor guide to Espionage Act prosecutions. The administration sought to prevent the Times from publishing, not bring criminal charges against it for what it had already published. The Court ruled that such attempts at “prior restraint” must meet a higher standard, which the Nixon administration failed to do regarding the Pentagon Papers — which was, after all, just an internal history, not a record of ongoing operations. The Court did not invalidate the Espionage Act, nor did the ruling acquit the New York Times.
In fact, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, in his concurrence, practically invited the administration to pursue prosecution against the New York Times after the publication was completed. The “failure by the Government to justify prior restraints does not measure its constitutional entitlement to a conviction for criminal publication,” he wrote, “I would have no difficulty in sustaining convictions under these sections on facts that would not justify … prior restraint.” This was in 1971.”