Julian Assange’s Australian lawyer, Stephen Kenny, speaks to CN Live! about the “end game” to free the WikiLeaks publisher. With U.S. constitutional lawyer Bruce Afran. Watch the replay.
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Volume 29, Number 332— Thursday, November 21, 2024
I fervently hope that Assange does not accept any kind of plea deal, because once he does, all anyone will ever hear about him again is that he pled guilty. The infowar to which Assange devoted his life prior to his confinement is as much or more about public perceptions and emotion as it is about facts.
The charges against Assange represent a full-on assault on free speech. If they are not fully dismissed or litigated, there will be nothing left of the First Amendment in the US – all we’ll know for sure is that we can’t say anything at all without being at risk of having our lives as we know them utterly destroyed. There’s no way the US Supreme Court can fully uphold the charges against Assange without making a complete laughing stock of themselves. They’ll have to come up with some kind of half-baked excuse for preserving parts of the Espionage Act, or formulate some kind of colorable basis for distinguishing protected from unprotected speech. We may not like their formulation, but at least part of the First Amendment will survive, and as for the rest, our task will at least have been narrowed, and we might have at least a little more clarity about what might remain as some kind of “safe harbor.”
I understand Assange personally would probably be destroyed in this process, and believe me, I wish it could be otherwise. But I fear that a plea deal could too easily be used to successfully nullify much if not all of the good he’s accomplished so far.
Perhaps you would like to contribute the rest of your life to the cause as you so freely suggest for Assange?
Unbelieveable, that Albanese must say “enough is enough” (as mentioned in the video) to secure the release of an Australian citizen, falsely charged on a whim, to seek revenge for revealing war crimes, on its merit alone, but fear that to not do so, might be detrimental to his future campaign.
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE.
“What is the point of an Alford plea?
An Alford plea is a guilty plea in which a defendant maintains their innocence and does not admit to the criminal act they are accused of, but admits that the prosecution has sufficient evidence to persuade a judge or jury to find the defendant guilty, and thus agrees to be treated as guilty”
This is a form of prosecutorial extortion to keep an innocent person from seeking recourse.
Who is the real criminal here???
With all due respect to Bruce Afran, I maintain that he underestimates the substantial risk posed by Julian Assange’s prosecution to every prospective investigative journalist and/or publisher of information that touches on sensitive or classified materials in any way, no matter where they are in the world, be they independent or mainstream (to the extent that his ordeal thus far has not already acted as an informal deterrent to many people who might otherwise more seriously contemplate pursuing those sorts of journalistic or publishing activities).
I am still given to believe that US authorities have targeted Assange at this stage (rather than, e.g., John Young of Cryptome on the one hand, or Luke Harding and David Leigh of The Guardian on the other) not despite his status as a non-traditional freelancer outside of corporate media, but in fact precisely because WikiLeaks directly partnered with mainstream media in a manner that simultaneously made it exceedingly more difficult for NYT, WaPo, etc. to outright kill stories or selectively frame primary source materials in ways congenial to the interests of policy elites and government officials. It serves to provide yet another incentive (alongside the myriad market and nepotistic ones) for corporate media outlets to further sideline their adversarial investigative journalism functions directed at institutions of power in favor of stenographic access journalism and Taylor Lorenz-type fare (i.e., a stick to accompany the multiple carrots), while trying to cow into submission any muckrakers who would dare act outside of that orbit with the threat of being similarly pursued with all the coercive might of the Weberian protection racket.
Given all of that, while I sympathize with the personal plight of Assange and his loved ones, taking a plea bargain that mitigates their own suffering but does not work to somehow invalidate the charges against him would seem to have deleterious sociopolitical implications that reach well beyond his own circumstances.
Of course, as an unrelated aside, I also think that Afran underestimates the malevolence and spite of many of those who have persecuted Assange and WikiLeaks up to now, and their (not merely hypothetical, but actively demonstrated) willingness to resort to egregious extralegal methods if it serves their malign purposes, public opinion be damned, but that is another matter.
Afran also talked about the possibility of pleading to a charge that has nothing to do with espionage or computer intrusion, such as the misdemeanor of mishandling government documents.
Where are the thousands of decent people, fighting for a man, who gave us truth? A decent, honest Journalist who
told the truth about US Crimes and lost his freedom!
His two little boys, can only see him once a week, in Belmarsh Prison….where he and Stella were married….but not allowed to kiss!
Our UK Government are happy to carry out the US dirty work and it seems, noone has the courage to shout out about Julian Assange….in Belmarsh Prison…with no charges against him!
We should be ashamed at what is done in our name and all those sitting in our Parliament, with huge personal wealth, should be shown the door!