By John W.
Whitehead
November
05, 2019
“What
happens to Julian Assange and to Chelsea Manning is meant to intimidate us, to
frighten us into silence. By defending Julian Assange, we defend our most
sacred rights. Speak up now or wake up one morning
to the silence of a new kind of tyranny. The
choice is ours.”
—John
Pilger, investigative journalist
All of us
are in danger.
In an age of
prosecutions for thought crimes, pre-crime deterrence programs, and government
agencies that operate like organized crime syndicates, there is a new kind of
tyranny being imposed on those who dare to expose the crimes of the Deep State,
whose reach has gone global.
The Deep State has
embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on truth-tellers.
Activists,
journalists and whistleblowers alike are being terrorized, traumatized,
tortured and subjected to the fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying,
smash-your-face-in tactics employed by the superpowers-that-be.
Take Julian Assange,
for example.
Assange, the founder
of WikiLeaks—a website that published secret information, news leaks, and
classified media from anonymous sources—was arrested on April 11, 2019, on
charges of helping U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning access and
leak more than 700,000 classified military documents that portray the
U.S. government and its military as reckless, irresponsible and responsible for
thousands of civilian deaths.
Included
among the leaked Manning material were
the Collateral Murder video (April
2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010),
a quarter of a million diplomatic cables (November 2010), and the Guantánamo
files (April 2011).
The Collateral Murder leak included
gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged
in a series of air-to-ground attacks while air crew laughed at some of the
casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were
gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who
stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened
to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious
injuries.
This is morally wrong.
It
shouldn’t matter which nation is responsible for these atrocities: there is no
defense for such evil perpetrated in the name of profit margins and war profiteering.
In true
Orwellian fashion, however, the government would have us believe that it is
Assange and Manning who are the real criminals for daring to expose the war
machine’s seedy underbelly.
Since his April 2019
arrest, Assange has been locked up in a maximum-security British prison—in solitary confinement for up to 23
hours a day—pending extradition to the U.S., where if convicted,
he could be sentenced to 175 years in prison.
Whatever
is being done to Assange behind those prison walls—psychological torture,
forced drugging, prolonged isolation, intimidation, surveillance—it’s wearing
him down.
In court
appearances, the 48-year-old Assange appears disoriented, haggard and
zombie-like.
“In 20 years of work
with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of
democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a
single individual for such a long time and with so
little regard for human dignity and the rule of law,” declared Nils Melzer, the
UN special rapporteur on torture.
It’s not just Assange
who is being made to suffer, however.
Manning,
who was jailed for seven years from 2010 to 2017 for leaking classified
documents to Wikileaks, was arrested in March 2019 for refusing to testify before
a grand jury about Assange, placed in solitary confinement for almost a month,
and then sentenced to remain in jail either
until she agrees to testify or until the grand jury’s 18-month term expires.
Federal
judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia also fined Manning
$500 for every day she remained in custody after 30 days, and $1,000 for every day she remains in
custody after 60 days, a chilling—and
financially crippling—example of the government’s heavy-handed efforts to
weaponize fines and jail terms as a means of forcing dissidents to fall in
line.
This is
how the police state deals with those who challenge its chokehold on power.
Make no
mistake: the government is waging war on journalists and whistleblowers for
disclosing information relating to government misconduct that is within the
public’s right to know.
Yet while this
targeted campaign—aided, abetted and advanced by the Deep State’s international
alliances—is unfolding during President Trump’s watch, it began with the Obama
Administration’s decision to revive the antiquated, hundred-year-old Espionage Act, which
was intended to punish government spies, and instead use it to prosecute government
whistleblowers.
Unfortunately,
the Trump Administration has not merely continued the Obama Administration’s
attack on whistleblowers. It has injected this war on truth-tellers and
truth-seekers with steroids and let it loose on the First Amendment.
In May
2019, Trump’s Justice Department issued a sweeping new “superseding” secret
indictment of Assange—hinged on the Espionage Act—that empowers the government to determine
what counts as legitimate journalism and criminalize the rest, not to
mention giving “the government license to criminally punish journalists it does
not like, based on antipathy, vague standards, and subjective judgments.”
Noting that the indictment signaled grave dangers
for freedom of the press in general, media lawyer
Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., warned, “The indictment would criminalize the
encouragement of leaks of newsworthy classified information, criminalize the
acceptance of such information, and criminalize publication of it.”
Boutrous continues:
[I]t doesn’t matter
whether you think Assange is a journalist, or whether WikiLeaks is a news
organization. The theory that animates the indictment targets the very
essence of journalistic activity: the gathering and dissemination of
information that the government wants to keep secret. You
don’t have to like Assange or endorse what he and WikiLeaks have done over the
years to recognize that this indictment sets an ominous precedent and
threatens basic First Amendment values…. With only modest tweaking, the
very same theory could be invoked to prosecute journalists for the very same
crimes being alleged against Assange, simply for doing their jobs of
scrutinizing the government and reporting the news to the American people.
We
desperately need greater scrutiny and transparency, not less.
Indeed,
transparency is one of those things the shadow government fears the most.
Why? Because it might arouse the distracted American populace to actually
exercise their rights and resist the tyranny that is inexorably asphyxiating
their freedoms.
This need to shed
light on government actions—to make the obscure, least transparent reaches of
government accessible and accountable—was a common theme for Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, who famously coined the phrase, “Sunlight is the best
disinfectant.”
Writing in January
1884, Brandeis explained:
Light is the only thing that can
sweeten our political atmosphere—light thrown upon
every detail of administration in the departments; light diffused through every
policy; light blazed full upon every feature of legislation; light that can
penetrate every recess or corner in which any intrigue might hide; light that will
open up to view the innermost chambers of government, drive away all darkness
from the treasury vaults; illuminate foreign correspondence; explore national
dockyards; search out the obscurities of Indian affairs; display the workings
of justice; exhibit the management of the army; play upon the sails of the
navy; and follow the distribution of the mails.
Of course,
transparency is futile without a populace that is informed, engaged and
prepared to hold the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law.
For this
reason, it is vital that citizens have the right to criticize
the government without fear.
After all,
we’re citizens, not subjects. For those who don’t fully understand the
distinction between the two and why transparency is so vital to a healthy
constitutional government, Manning explains it well:
When
freedom of information and transparency are stifled, then bad decisions are
often made and heartbreaking tragedies occur – too often on a breathtaking
scale that can leave societies wondering: how did this happen? … I believe that
when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments
and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the
act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction
between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and
subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.
Manning
goes on to suggest that the U.S. “needs legislation to protect the public’s
right to free speech and a free press, to protect it from the actions of the
executive branch and to promote the integrity and transparency of the US
government.”
Technically, we’ve
already got such legislation on the books: the First Amendment.
The First
Amendment gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully,
expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of
arrest, isolation or any of the other punishments that have been meted out to
whistleblowers such as Edwards Snowden, Assange and Manning.
The challenge is
holding the government accountable to obeying the law.
Almost 50 years ago,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Washington Post
Co. to block the Nixon Administration’s attempts to use claims of
national security to prevent The Washington Post and The New York Times
from publishing secret Pentagon papers on
how America went to war in Vietnam.
As Justice
William O. Douglas remarked on the ruling, “The press was protected so that it
could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press
can effectively expose deception in government. And
paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any
part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to
distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.”
Almost 50 years
later, with Assange being cast as the poster boy for treason, we’re witnessing
yet another showdown, which pits the people’s right to know about government
misconduct against the might of the military industrial complex.
Yet this
isn’t merely about whether whistleblowers and journalists are part of a
protected class under the Constitution. It’s a debate over how long “we the
people” will remain a protected class under the Constitution.
Following the current
downward trajectory, it won’t be long before anyone who
believes in holding the government accountable is labeled an “extremist,” is
relegated to an underclass that doesn’t fit in, must be watched all the time, and is
rounded up when the government deems it necessary.
Eventually,
we will all be potential suspects, terrorists and lawbreakers in the eyes of
the government
Partisan politics
have no place in this debate: Americans of all stripes would do well to remember
that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary
counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to
lead.
We don’t have to
agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the
rights of all individuals to speak freely without fear of
punishment or threat of banishment.
Never
forget: what the architects of the police state want are submissive,
compliant, cooperative, obedient, meek citizens who don’t talk back, don’t
challenge government authority, don’t speak out against government misconduct,
and don’t step out of line.
What the
First Amendment protects—and a healthy constitutional republic requires—are
citizens who routinely exercise their right to speak truth to power.
As I make clear in my
book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People, the right to speak out against government wrongdoing
is the quintessential freedom.
Be warned:
this quintessential freedom won’t be much good to anyone if the government
makes good on its promise to make an example of Assange as a warning to other
journalists intent on helping whistleblowers disclose government corruption.
Once again, we find
ourselves reliving George Orwell’s 1984, which
portrayed in chilling detail how totalitarian governments employ the
power of language to manipulate the masses.
In Orwell’s dystopian
vision of the future, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and
unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite
history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
Much like
today’s social media censors and pre-crime police departments, Orwell’s Thought
Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the other government
agencies peddle in economic affairs (rationing and starvation), law and order
(torture and brainwashing), and news, entertainment, education and art
(propaganda).
Orwell’s Big Brother
relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained
of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought
altogether unnecessary.
Where we stand now is
at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be
dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the
majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions
clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and
expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final
link in the police state chain.
Having
been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who
refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in
the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy
combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance
that sees and hears all—our backs are to the walls.
From this
point on, we have only two options: go down fighting, or capitulate and
betray our loved ones, our friends and ourselves by insisting that, as a
brainwashed Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s 1984, yes,
2+2 does equal 5.
As George Orwell
recognized, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
WC: 2270
ABOUT JOHN
W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional
attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new
book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People is available at www.amazon.com.
Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
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