'The U.S. case against Assange is facing mounting criticism here at home as a threat to press freedom.'
President Joe Biden is pressing ahead with a controversial criminal case against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. Assange has been languishing for close to four years in the UK’s harsh Belmarsh Prison while appealing extradition to the United States, where he faces espionage and computer intrusion charges that could land him in a maximum security prison for 175 years.
In 1971, Dan Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, to several newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. The resulting stories sent shockwaves through the nation, further eroding public support for the war. President Richard Nixon was furious, and orchestrated a criminal campaign to destroy Ellsberg and to block further publication of the papers.
“Assange, like me, was illegally surveilled. In his case, even his lawyers’ and his doctors’ discussions were surveilled,” Ellsberg said this week on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Discussions were made of kidnapping and killing him or poisoning, just as a dozenassets were brought up from Miami on May 3rd, 1973, by President Nixon with orders to ‘incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally’.”
James Goodale, the renowned First Amendment attorney who as the young general counsel for the New York Times fought and won against the Nixon administration over the Pentagon Papers, agrees. In a recent piece in The Hill, Goodale wrote, “Since Cryptome published the leaks before Assange did, Assange should have no liability for such publication.”
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