CN Editor Joe Lauria spoke out in defense of Julian Assange and against growing press censorship in the West at a meeting of Pen International in Bled, Slovenia.
Consortium News Editor Joe Lauria addressed the 54th annual PEN International Writers for Peace Committee meeting in Bled, Slovenia on Thursday. A video of the opening session, called “Empty Chairs,” which honored Julian Assange and other journalists follows his address. Below that is the text of Lauria’s remarks.
Text of Joe Lauria’s address on Assange to PEN International Writers for Peace Committee
It is hard to exaggerate the monumental significance of the case of Julian Assange.
It is hard to exaggerate about the destruction of a man’s life for doing his job better than almost anyone else and about the destruction of Western governments’ claims that they champion a free press.
Our website, Consortium News, has provided the most comprehensive coverage of the Assange case in the English language. We were inside Assange’s courtroom in London and followed every hearing later by video link to the courtroom. We have just come from Australia, where we have contacts with Assange’s family and his supporters there.
Within weeks he could be extradited to the U.S. to face up to 175 years in an American dungeon for the crime of publishing accurate information.
Julian Assange is not a rapist. He’s not a spy. He’s not a hacker. He’s not an agent of Russia or anyone else. He’s a publisher who is slowly being killed for his work as a publisher. And for no other reason.
Julian Assange’s case is one of the most important press freedom cases in history. And why? Harold Pinter said that while the U.S. commits crimes around the world the media acts as though “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening.”
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks showed that it did happen.
And for that the U.S. has imprisoned him in a major European capital and charged him with revealing its wrongdoing.
It is an attack on press freedom usually associated with the most repressive totalitarian regimes. Assange’s case goes to the core of how we define ourselves in the West: are we democracies that uphold the right to criticize government or growing autocracies that crush dissent?
“The really horrifying thing about this case is the lawlessness that has developed: The powerful can kill without fear of punishment and journalism is transformed into espionage,” said the UN rapporteur of torture Nils Melzer. “It is becoming a crime to tell the truth.”
Silencing Assange was the beginning of the recent tide of censorship in the West with Ukraine now being used as the excuse and it is getting worse. Before, the U.S. government pressured social media to shut down speech it didn’t agree with. Now it is directly involved, creating a Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security law enforcement to police the media. Woodrow Wilson failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate in 1917 to legalize direct government censorship in the Espionage Act despite the First Amendment. Now Wilson’s dream is coming true.
He didn’t get government censorship but he got passed the Sedition Act under which the leader of the U.S. Socialist Party was imprisoned for a speech he made against the military draft. Hundreds of others were imprisoned for what they said.
Assange has been indicted under that Espionage Act, which is in direct conflict with the First Amendment, but so far not successfully challenged in court. Vice President Joe Biden said in 2010 that Assange could not be indicted because he only received classified material and didn’t steal it himself. But now Biden refuses to end Trump’s prosecution of Assange.
It began with Assange, but now efforts are underway to stamp out the smallest spark of dissent, lest it grow. The U.S. government is demanding total control of the narrative. The word total is in “totalitarianism.”
We in the West have to understand what is happening to us in the midst of this war hysteria. We have to rationally analyze this crisis. We cannot put up with censorship of the press, no matter what we think of the war in Ukraine. There are irresponsible people in the media who are calling for direct war with Russia and some who think a nuclear war can be won. The madness has to stop.
Assange is the most dangerous man alive to the Western establishment. He was destroying the myths by which it retains it legitimacy. And thus they are destroying him.
Julian Assange is dying. And so too is Western democracy if the world does not rise up in his defense.
The Buffalo shooter wore an Azov Battalion neo-Nazi shirt, Israel’s military kills
a journalist reporting the facts of its apartheid, Germany stops a vigil for that journalist,
and U.S./NATO puts a “knife at your throat” (V. Putin).
The good doctor ties it all together: “A nation that continues year after year to spend
more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death”
(Dr. MLK Jr. 1967, “Beyond Vietnam” speech).
Although American totalitarianism is death, Julian Assange is alive no matter what
they do to him.
Your usual succinct statement of the case, Joe. As Annie Matan pointed out (at 1:27 ff.)
hxxps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJYpac0SQ0 (the 5/11 Brussels rally for Assange),
the DoJ has strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel on the First Amendment point. I quote a detailed legal commentary on this. Brief background:
hxxps://www.wiley.law/newsletter-Court-Protects-First-Amendment-Right-of-Foreign-National-Christopher-Steele-to-Distribute-Trump-Dossier
“Several Russian-Israeli businessmen are suing Christopher Steele and his United Kingdom-based company Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. The businessmen allege that Steele and Orbis defamed them by disseminating false statements about them in the Steele Dossier.” While “Steele allegedly distributed the dossier to reporters in the United States in an effort to inform U.S. citizens about Donald Trump and Russian influence in the months leading up to the 2016 election,” we all know that Hillary Clinton hired him, an ex-MI6 agent, to dig up Trump dirt that was never substantiated. And, then to “call off” the FBI and call in CrowdStrike, her private security firm, to pretend to investigate Steele. Here is the more detailed result:
“Steele filed a special motion to dismiss the complaint under the District of Columbia’s Anti-SLAPP Act (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”). That statute affords special protections against lawsuits “arising from an act in furtherance of the right of advocacy on issues of public interest.” D.C. Code § 16-5502. The Anti-SLAPP Act protects the exercise of First Amendment rights against harassing or punitive litigation that has little merit.
“Steele’s entitlement to the protection of the D.C. anti-SLAPP statute and First Amendment was challenged because he is a non-resident foreign citizen. But the D.C. Superior Court ruled that the dossier itself is entitled to First Amendment protection regardless of Steele’s foreign citizenship. “[A]dvocacy on issues of public interest has the capacity to inform public debate, and thereby furthers the purposes of the First Amendment, regardless of the citizenship or residency of the speaker,” the court ruled. “It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas…. As a result, the interest of U.S. citizens in receiving information that the First Amendment protects does not depend on whether the speaker is a U.S. citizen or resident.”
But “The court did not stop there. It went on to rule that Steele, a non-resident alien, also is entitled to First Amendment protection because he has “ample connections with the United States that are clearly substantial enough to merit First Amendment protection.”
“Steele filed a special motion to dismiss the complaint under the District of Columbia’s Anti-SLAPP Act (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”). That statute affords special protections against lawsuits “arising from an act in furtherance of the right of advocacy on issues of public interest.” D.C. Code § 16-5502. The Anti-SLAPP Act protects the exercise of First Amendment rights against harassing or punitive litigation that has little merit.
“Steele’s entitlement to the protection of the D.C. anti-SLAPP statute and First Amendment was challenged because he is a non-resident foreign citizen. But the D.C. Superior Court ruled that the dossier itself is entitled to First Amendment protection regardless of Steele’s foreign citizenship. “[A]dvocacy on issues of public interest has the capacity to inform public debate, and thereby furthers the purposes of the First Amendment, regardless of the citizenship or residency of the speaker,” the court ruled. “It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas…. As a result, the interest of U.S. citizens in receiving information that the First Amendment protects does not depend on whether the speaker is a U.S. citizen or resident.”
Finally, the court ruled that Steele’s dissemination of information about the foreign businessmen is entitled to the First Amendment protection afforded by New York Times v. Sullivan because, the court ruled, the businessmen are public figures. Because they are public figures, Steele is protected by the heightened “actual malice” standard of the First Amendment.
That is Equal Protection of the law today.
The implications are fascinating and far-reaching in regards to The Assange matter.
Thank you, Joe Lauria, for all you do to protect the world from encroaching neo-fascism and totalitarianism. You are a world hero. Keep up the immensely important work you are doing!
Most people do not realize the truth of what CT is saying, the danger to democracy that the persecution of Assagne conveys. Simply reporting the facts in Wikileaks undermines the legitimacy of the regime change hegemony of the past generation. The persecution of Assange is similar to the murder of journalists in Mexico, about 10 per year over the past generation, by drug cartels. How are our elites here different than drug cartels?
“Hear. Hear.” You rocked it, Joe Lauria, TY.
Follows is not pushback just personalized, i.e., “Assange’s case goes to the core of how” I, LeoSun, define our Ruling Class in the West: EVIL, to the core.
In sum, imo, Priority 1 – The Executioners NOT Extradite; but, FREE, Julian Assange.
Priority 2 – STOP! Calling The Divided $tates of Corporate America a “democracy.” A democracy would NOT have a “Supreme” anything; especially NOT a Court of Ayatollahs. A democracy would NOT assault, censor, snuff, silence, disappear Investigative Journalists, Publishers, or the Readership.
Priority 3 – REVOLUTION, Anybody?
Everybody, FREE to ditch the stages of grief, “We the People” cycle through, daily, per the extreme decline of “democracy.” INDEED, Protest & Survive.
From Day One, The Investigative Journalists “online” Press & Julian’s Lawyers, Family, Friends have been our eyes and ears.
“We the People” are eyewitnesses. “We the People,” stand w/all who advocate Justice for Julian Assange. Stop the Extradition. Stop the Execution. NO More Empty Chairs!!!
Hopefully, PEN is mightier than the (Corrupt bureaucracy).
That last sentence is very moving and true.
If by some miracle the British Home Secretary should find in favour of Julian Assange and block the extradition, we can all be thankful for the persistance of CN and others for their reporting of this case. Trapped in her own ‘Westminster Bubble’, we will never know whether Priti Patel ever reads beyond her own briefings, or listens to others apart from her own advisors, probably only telling her what she wants to hear.
Yes, “Julian Assange is dying. And so too is Western democracy ….”. That captures essence.
Totally true: Totally. And I know because before I retired from journalism, I from time to time dared, and was chastised, often by my colleagues who, for the most part, are absolute cowards when it comes to reporting the truth and only the truth.