Although Julian Assange is then a free gentleman, he ought not to have been indicted for a crime at first.  ,
The Wikileaks chairman, who has spent the next five years in a European prison, was  , released Monday , after striking a deal with President Biden’s Department of Justice. Assange admitted to breaking the Espionage Act by publishing confidential information about American authorities activities in the Middle East and Afghanistan beginning in 2009. On Tuesday, he traveled to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S.-controlled place, where he was scheduled to show up in court on Wednesday before returning to his native Australia to reunite with his community.
What was done to Assange is unlawful, and it poses a very real threat to reporters who dare to question the national security position as the years-long suffering comes to an end. Simply put, Assange’s actions are comparable to those of The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and many other commercial media outlets every time: they submit and report on classified information that has been obtained or stolen without permission from the public.
The main distinction between Assange and these stores is that Assange did it in order to demand accountability, while the corporate media does it in the name of power, at least when a Democrat leadership is in power. From the earliest time of Wikileaks, Assange’s aim was to distribute information that was beyond the power of states, especially the U. S. state. Most major media outlets submit only what the government has approved and accepted immediately.  ,
Remember that Assange became the country’s top adversary when Wikileaks published reams of classified documents about American military operations in Guantanamo Bay in the golden days of President Obama’s second term. ( Remember that Obama’s Justice Department zealously prosecuted leakers, threatened journalists with jail time if they refused to testify against their idyllected government sources, and secretly tapped reporters ‘ phone lines with the Associated Press. )
Assange received some of these documents from Chelsea Manning, a transgender man and past U.S. military intelligence official who at the time was known as Bradley Manning and had access to hundreds of thousands of reviews on the global war on terror, including sensitive information about operatives and sources with the U.S. military elsewhere.
In violation of federal law, Manning, no Assange, leaked these classified documents to a multimedia outlet after stealing them. However, Manning was convicted on several charges of spy and robbery of classified supplies, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.  ,
But Assange’s accusations of espionage stem from the publication of materials that were illegally leaked set a terrible example for free speech and journalism. For instance, it means that every New York Times or Washington Post reporter who writes a story citing secret sources or citing classified documents could face criminal charges.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made this point Monday on X after news broke of Assange’s release, rightly noting that” the US security state succeeded in criminalizing journalism and extending their jurisdiction globally to non- citizens”.
Of course, most corporate journalists are unlikely to see or admit the connection, mostly because they maintain there’s a difference between what they believe are “legitimate” news organizations and something like Wikileaks. But there’s not. The only difference is that Assange was open to discussing his ideological beliefs and did n’t falsely represent Wikileaks and himself as a “neutral” media organization in the same way that traditional media outlets do. He went about publishing as much secret information he could get his hands on, and he still likely believes that governments should not keep secrets, especially about their wartime activities.
Now, maybe you disagree with that. Fine. You might consider Assange to be a bad guy who threatens American national security. Fine. You might be tempted to believe that he should have used your better judgment in publishing information about dissidents and secret sources working for the U.S. military, and that he may have actually had blood on his hands as a result of the information Wikileaks published. Maybe so.
However, publishing that information was not illegal. Every news outlet in this country should change its business model, and this is going to be done quickly because our First Amendment is useless.
