Press freedom

There are some in the West who are fully convinced that Assange deserves to be tried and thrown in jail for ‘threatening’ US national security and ‘undermining’ its democratic processes. Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Joe Biden have called him a ‘terrorist’, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then the director of the CIA, has described WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said prosecuting Assange is a “priority” for him.

Many have also come to see him as a political player who purposefully sought to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential elections, while others consider him a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin, although no evidence for this was ever found. It is more likely that Assange’s indictment is coming not as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 US election, but in response to WikiLeaks publishing the biggest leak in the history of the CIA called #Vault7.

Whatever Assange’s political leanings or views, his case is not about whether you like him or not, but about freedom of the press. As Edward Snowden rightly said: “You can despise WikiLeaks and everything it stands for. You can think Assange is an evil spirit reanimated by Putin himself, but you cannot support the prosecution of a publisher for publishing without narrowing the basic rights every newspaper relies on”.

If Assange is eventually arrested, extradited to the US and stands trial there, he is almost certainly going to be found guilty - just as Chelsea Manning was - and he would probably end up in a Guantanamo-like prison. His prosecution and jailing would have global repercussions for whistle-blowers, publishers and journalists.

A lawsuit that tries to make it illegal or a form of ‘espionage’ to publish documents would set a dangerous precedent for publishers and journalists who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest. It would endanger the very foundation of free press.

We already live in a world in which politics and distribution of information are being profoundly transformed. Not only do dangerous populists and authoritarian leaders come to power by ‘manufacturing consent’, backed by the use of perception management methods by tech companies or organised fake news campaigns, but they also come to power by openly spreading misinformation and concealing information of public interest.

While it became ‘natural’ for politicians to employ such questionable methods to reach power, it is the job of journalists, the media and whistle-blowers to keep such behaviour in check. Punishing them for doing their job - uncovering uncomfortable truths that those in power would like to keep away from the public - means removing one of the most important checks on executive political power.

How would we know today of the wiretapping of the Democratic Party headquarters if it hadn’t been for the hard work of American investigative reporters uncovering information the Nixon administration wanted to hide? How would we know about all the offshore accounts and money laundering activities of politicians across the world if a whistle-blower hadn’t leaked the Panama papers? How would we know how many Reuters journalists were killed by the US army in Iraq, as revealed by the ‘Collateral Murder’ video leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by WikiLeaks? And how would we know how the Democratic Party treats some of its most progressive members, such as Bernie Sanders, if WikiLeaks hadn’t released the files from the hacked Democratic National Committee email server?

This article has been excerpted from: ‘What happens if Julian Assange is tried in the US?’

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com