Press freedom
Breaking Biden says US may drop Assange case
A genuine indication of sense from US president – or more mind games?
US president Joe Biden has said that the US is ‘considering’ abandoning the country’s attempt to extradite persecuted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in response to a request from the Australian government. Assange has been held in Belmarsh prison for years while his legal team attempts to fight a case that should have been thrown out when the main US witness admitted he had been lying when he said that Assange arranged the hacking of US systems.
Last month, the High Court kept Assange in prison when it ruled that the US could have more time to provide assurances that it would not impose a death penalty on the Australian journalist, even though it admitted that the US was attacking his right to free speech in a way it would not do to one of its own citizens.
Before his imprisonment, Assange was effectively kept captive for years in the Ecuadorian embassy when the UK refused to stop trying to extradite him to Sweden, which Assange’s supporters feared was an indirect route to handing him to the US, despite Sweden dropping discredited rape allegations. The US has pursued Assange in vengeance for Wikileaks exposing war crimes by US military.
Last month, the US leaked hints that it might accept a ‘plea deal’ and drop the extradition in return for Assange accepting a lesser conviction – still an outright attack on journalistic freedom and the public’s right to know what their governments are doing. Biden’s latest comment may be more mind games and those who support Assange and the importance of press freedom to a functioning democracy should not let up on their pressure until the case is formally dropped and Assange is free, as he should have been all along.
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Pro-Assange protest grows larger still
Even more people than yesterday demonstrate at Royal Courts of Justice, ready to march on Downing Street against plan to extradite Wikileaks founder for exposing US war crimes
A banner referring to the fact that the main US witness against Assange admitted he had been lying all along
The number of people protesting at the Royal Courts of Justice against the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has swelled beyond the approximately two thousand who turned out yesterday, despite foul weather:
The US government’s extradition case against Assange should have been laughed out of court when its main witness admitted he had been lying all along, but the courts and UK government have persisted in shoring up what constitutes a global assault on journalism, democracy and the right of peoples to hold their governments to account.
Protesters are now marching to Downing Street, led by PCS public service union’s Samba band.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
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As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media | Glenn Greenwald
With General Alexander calling for NSA reporting to be halted, US and UK credibility as guardians of press freedom is crushed
The most under-discussed aspect of the NSA story has long been its international scope. That all changed this week as both Germany and France exploded with anger over new revelations about pervasive NSA surveillance on their population and democratically elected leaders.
As was true for Brazil previously, reports about surveillance aimed at leaders are receiving most of the media attention, but what really originally drove the story there were revelations that the NSA is bulk-spying on millions and millions of innocent citizens in all of those nations. The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! – falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden.
"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.
Committee to Protect Journalists issues scathing report on Obama administration | Glenn Greenwald
Obama's anti-press measures 'are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration'
(updated below)
It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."
Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are under way. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being 'an aider, abettor and/or conspirator' of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."
'I worry now about calling somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone records or e-mails,' said veteran national security journalist R. Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. 'It leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to monitor those contacts,' he said."
The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."
The war on whistleblowers and journalism | Glenn Greenwald
Discussing press freedoms with Julian Assange, David Coombs, Alexa O'Brien and others
I'm working on several stories, so posting this week will be difficult. Until then, below is the video of the 90-minute event I did this week at the Sydney Opera House on the war on whistleblowers and journalism, along with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning's lawyer David Coombs, the intrepid independent journalist Alexa O'Brien, and the Australian commentator Robert Manne, hosted by the Australian writer Bernard Keane. It was a great discussion and really covered in a broad way many of the issues discussed here over the last year, especially the last several months (I dropped out for roughly 25 minutes after I first spoke due to some technical difficulties with the video feed but returned to participate actively in the rest of the discussion).
Two related notes: 1) John Cusack has an excellent Op-Ed in the Guardian from yesterday on many of these same topics; 2) Mark Weisbrot has a helpful analysis of the fallout from the extraordinary cancellation by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff of the state dinner planned at the White House for October due to NSA surveillance, and McClatchy has good background on what happened there and why.