The U.S. government,
determined to extradite and try Julian
Assange for espionage, must find a way to separate what Assange
and WikiLeaks did
in publishing classified material leaked to them by Chelsea Manning from what
The New York Times and The Washington Post did in publishing the same material.
There is no
federal law that prohibits the press from publishing government
secrets. It is a crime, however, to steal them. The long persecution of
Manning, who on March 8 was sent
back to jail for refusing to testify before a grand jury, is about
this issue.
If Manning, a former Army
private, admits she was instructed by WikiLeaks and Assange in how to obtain
and pass on the leaked material, which exposed U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the publisher could be tried for the theft of classified documents.
The prosecution of government whistleblowers was accelerated during the Obama
administration, which under the Espionage Act charged
eight people with leaking to the media—Thomas Drake, Shamai Leibowitz,
Stephen Kim, Manning, Donald Sachtleben, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou and
Edward Snowden. By the time Donald Trump took office, the vital connection
between investigative reporters and sources inside the government had been
severed.
Manning, who worked as an Army
intelligence analyst in Iraq in 2009, provided WikiLeaks with over 500,000
documents copied from military and government archives, including the “Collateral Murder” video
footage of an Army helicopter gunning down a group of unarmed civilians that
included two Reuters journalists. She was arrested in 2010 and found guilty in
2013.
The campaign to criminalize
whistleblowing has, by default, left the exposure of government lies, fraud and
crimes to those who have the skills or access, as Manning and Edward Snowden
did, needed to hack into or otherwise obtain government electronic documents.
This is why hackers, and those who publish their material such as Assange and
WikiLeaks, are being relentlessly persecuted. The goal of the corporate state
is to shroud in total secrecy the inner workings of power, especially those
activities that violate the law. Movement toward this goal is very far advanced.
The failure of news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington
Post to vigorously defend Manning and Assange will soon come back to haunt
them. The corporate state hardly intends to stop with Manning and Assange. The
target is the press itself.
“If we actually had a
functioning judicial system and an independent press, Manning would have been a
witness for the prosecution against the war criminals he helped expose,” I
wrote after I and Cornel
West attended Manning’s
sentencing in 2013 at Fort Meade, Md. “He would not have been headed,
bound and shackled, to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. His
testimony would have ensured that those who waged illegal war, tortured, lied
to the public, monitored our electronic communications and ordered the gunning
down of unarmed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen were sent to
Fort Leavenworth’s cells. If we had a functioning judiciary the hundreds of
rapes and murders Manning made public would be investigated. The officials and
generals who lied to us when they said they did not keep a record of civilian
dead would be held to account for the 109,032 ‘violent deaths’ in Iraq,
including those of 66,081 civilians. The pilots in the ‘Collateral Murder’
video, which showed the helicopter attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad that
left nine dead, including two Reuters journalists, would be court-martialed.”
Manning has always insisted
her leak of the classified documents and videos was prompted solely by her own
conscience. She has refused to implicate Assange and WikiLeaks. Earlier this
month, although President Barack Obama in 2010 commuted her 35-year sentence
after she served seven years, she was jailed again for refusing to answer
questions before a secret grand jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks. While
incarcerated previously, Manning endured long periods in solitary confinement
and torture. She twice attempted to commit suicide in prison. She knows from
painful experience the myriad ways the system can break you psychologically and
physically. And yet she has steadfastly refused to give false testimony in
court on behalf of the government. Her moral probity and courage are perhaps
the last thin line of defense for WikiLeaks and its publisher, whose health is
deteriorating in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012.
Manning—who was known as
Bradley Manning in the Army—has undergone gender reassignment surgery and needs
frequent medical monitoring. Judge Claude M. Hilton, however, dismissed a
request by her lawyers for house arrest. Manning was granted immunity by
prosecutors of the Eastern District of Virginia, and because she had immunity
she was unable to invoke the Fifth Amendment protection against
self-incrimination or to have her attorney present. The judge found her in
contempt of court and sent her to a federal facility in Alexandria, Va. Hilton,
who has long been a handmaiden of the military and intelligence organs, has
vowed to hold her there until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury is
disbanded, which could mean 18 months or longer behind bars. Manning said any
questioning of her by the grand jury is a violation of First, Fourth and Sixth
Amendment rights. She said she will not cooperate with the grand jury.
“All of the substantive
questions pertained to my disclosures of information to the public in
2010—answers I provided in extensive testimony, during my court-martial in
2013,” she said on March 7, the day before she was jailed.
“I will not comply with this,
or any other grand jury,” she said later in a statement issued from jail.
“Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to
additional punishment for my repeatedly-stated ethical objections to the grand
jury system.”
“The grand jury’s questions
pertained to disclosures from nine years ago and took place six years after an
in-depth computer forensics case, in which I testified for almost a full day
about these events,” she went on. “I stand by my previous public testimony.”
Manning reiterated that she
“will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to,
particularly one that has been historically used to entrap and persecute
activists for protected political speech.”
The New York Times, Britain’s
The Guardian, Spain’s El País, France’s Le Monde and Germany’s Der Spiegel all
published the WikiLeaks files provided by Manning. How could they not?
WikiLeaks had shamed them into doing their jobs. But once they took the
incendiary material from Manning and Assange, these organizations callously
abandoned them. No doubt they assume that by joining the lynch mob organized
against the two they will be spared. They must not read history. What is taking
place is a series of incremental steps designed to strangle the press and
cement into place an American version of China’s totalitarian capitalism.
President Trump has often proclaimed his deep animus for news outlets such as
The New York Times and The Washington Post, referring to them as the “enemy of
the people.” Any legal tools given to the administration to shut down these
news outlets, or at least hollow them of content, will be used eagerly by the
president.
The prosecutions of government
whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, warrantless wiretapping, monitoring of
the communications of Americans and the persecution of Manning and Assange are
parts of an interconnected process of preventing any of us from peering at the
machinery of state. The resulting secrecy is vital for totalitarian systems.
The global elites, their ruling ideology of neoliberalism exposed as a con,
have had enough of us examining and questioning their abuses, pillage and
crimes.
“The national security state
can try to reduce our activity,” Assange told me during one of our meetings at
the embassy in London. “It can close the neck a little tighter. But there are
three forces working against it. The first is the massive surveillance required
to protect its communication, including the nature of its cryptology. In the
military everyone now has an ID card with a little chip on it, so you know who
is logged into what. A system this vast is prone to deterioration and
breakdown. Secondly, there is widespread knowledge not only of how to leak, but
how to leak and not be caught, how to even avoid suspicion that you are
leaking. The military and intelligence systems collect a vast amount of
information and move it around quickly. This means you can also get it out
quickly. There will always be people within the system that have an agenda to
defy authority. Yes, there are general deterrents, such as when the DOJ
[Department of Justice] prosecutes and indicts someone. They can discourage
people from engaging in this behavior.
But the opposite is also true.
When that behavior is successful it is an example. It encourages others. This
is why they want to eliminate all who provide this encouragement.”
“The medium-term perspective
is very good,” he said. “The education of young people takes place on the
internet. You cannot hire anyone who is skilled in any field without them
having been educated on the internet. The military, the CIA, the FBI, all have
no choice but to hire from a pool of people that have been educated on the
internet. This means they are hiring our moles in vast numbers. And this means
that these organizations will see their capacity to control information
diminish as more and more people with our values are hired.”
The long term is not so
sanguine. Assange, along with three co-authors—Jacob Appelbaum, Andy
Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann—wrote a book titled “Cypherpunks:
Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” It warns that we are “galloping
into a new transnational dystopia.” The internet has become not only a tool to
educate, they write, but the mechanism to create a “Postmodern Surveillance
Dystopia” that is supranational and dominated by global corporate power. This
new system of global control will “merge global humanity into one giant grid of
mass surveillance and mass control.”
“All communications will be
surveilled, permanently recorded, permanently tracked, each individual in all
their interactions permanently identified as that individual to this new
Establishment, from birth to death,” Assange says in the book. “I think that
can only produce a very controlling atmosphere.”
“How can a normal person be
free within that system?” he asks. “[He or she] simply cannot, it’s
impossible.”
It is only through encryption
that we can protect ourselves, the authors argue, and only by breaking through
the digital walls of secrecy erected by the power elite can we expose the
abuses of power. But ultimately, they say, as the tools of the state become
more sophisticated, even these mechanisms of opposition will be difficult and
perhaps impossible to use.
“The internet, our greatest
tool of emancipation,” Assange writes, “has been transformed into the most
dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.”
That is where we are headed. A
few resist. Assange and Manning are two. Those who stand by passively as they
are persecuted will be next.
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