Washington DC— Press rights advocates joined voices at the Department of Justice on Tuesday afternoon to condemn efforts to extradite Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange to the United States on charges of violating the U.S. Espionage Act. Activists speaking at the Department of Justice included well-known whistleblower and former CIA Intelligence Officer, John Kiriakou; Max Blumenthal, Editor-in-Chief and writer for The Grayzone; and Randy Credico, a civil rights activist, comedian, radio host, and the former director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice. Many others also spoke, including Dr. Marsha Coleman-Abedayo, founder of No Fear Coalition and Esther Iverem, an independent media journalist.
The action was organized by DCActionForAssange and held in parallel with another action being held in the U.K. to urge Priti Patel, the Home Office Secretary to block Assange’s extradition. Home Secretary Priti Patel is expected to rule on Assange’s extradition May 18th. If she rules in favor of US extradition, Assange’s last, but best hope for freedom will be appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
Assange has been held in Belmarsh Prison, London, since April 2019 and although he faces no charges in the U.K., he faces up to 175 years imprisonment if extradited to and convicted in the U.S.
The advocates condemned the treatment of Assange, calling those responsible for his incarceration hypocritical and barbaric parties in their roles to extradite him. Advocates also cast the process as illegal from the perspective of international law and a form of torture from a human rights perspective. They also called the entire affair an abuse of press-freedoms which are protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Max Blumenthal said, “We need to expect Julian Assange in our community here,” in the near future, meaning his extradition was destined to happen at any time. He called on those who loved press-freedoms to champion his cause, follow his case, and criticized those in media remaining silent as complicit.
Blumenthal also revealed that The Grayzone would continue to publish a trove of email which contained information damning to Home Secretary Priti Patel, UK Home Secretary, of a gross conflict of interest in oversight of Julian Assange’s extradition to the U.S.
John Kiriakou also castigated the mainstream media for its silence in covering the Assange case and ignoring the implications Assange’s extradition would have on journalistic liberties. Kiriakou said, “I’ve heard weak-kneed journalists saying ‘I’m not writing about this because Julian Assange isn’t a journalist he’s an activist.‘ It doesn’t make a difference what he is. What he did was he revealed waste, fraud, illegalities, or threats to the public health or to the public safety. Thats the legal definition of a whistleblower.”
Kiriakou also said that it was illegal to classify a criminal act and that just because the CIA says something is classified does not make it so. “This is a political case more than anything else and we have to make sure that the American people understand that it’s a political case,” he said.
Kiriakou urged Assange’s supporters to show up and to be present for Assange if and when he was brought before the Eastern District Court in Arlington, Virginia. It was in this same court that dozens of U.S. Attorneys twice failed to compel Chelsea Manning to testify against Julian Assange. As a result of her refusal to give testimony against Assange she was held in contempt of Court and further imprisoned another 18 months before the Judge was forced to free her. She was not convicted for refusing to testify against Assange.
Manning was previously convicted of violating the Espionage Act during a 2013 General Court-Martial at Fort Meade, for her role in releasing 750,000 classified documents to Wikileaks. She was sentenced to 35 years imprisonment and served from 2010 to 2017 until President Barack Obama commuted her sentence. These documents included a videotape that became known as the ‘Collateral Murder’ video which depicts two Reuters journalists and several Iraqi civilians, including children, being gunned down by a U.S. military Apache helicopter during the Iraq War. Public knowledge of this incident would not have come to light had the video not been released.
John Kiriakou referred, in part, to the ‘Collateral Murder’ video when he said that the classification of illegal actions was not sanctioned under national security law.
Esther Iverem, an independent media journalist, and radio host of ‘On the Ground: Voices of Resistance From the Nation’s Capital’, told there was a connection between the absence of press coverage about oppression of black and brown populations around the world and the absence of coverage of Assange, because mainstream media avoided the stories highlighting the underlying issues.
“There’s been a war on black and brown populations around the world whose deaths don’t even make the news,” she said. “When they talk about the [mass-murder] shooter in Buffalo [New York] they don’t want to talk about how he was wearing some of the same Nazi insignia on his clothing that the soldiers in Ukraine are wearing, that we are funding and supporting. If we had journalists courageous enough who aren’t afraid to speak out we would hear more of this news.”
Iverem was highly critical of those in the corporate press and admonished their silence on the issues behind the Assange story. “You’re not doing any favors to the American people by keeping truth from them. When we get to the point where our jobs and livelihoods are more important than telling the truth then I wonder why we came into journalism in the first place,” she said.
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, Founder of The No Fear Coalition, and a whistleblower during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, spoke from her own experiences in describing Assange’s incarceration. “Anyone who believes in press freedom and opposes imperialism must be a staunch Assange supporter because Wikileaks revealed U.S. crimes committed around the world,” she said.
Coleman-Adebayo exposed management for its corruption, retaliation, and discrimination against Federal workers at the Environmental Protection Agency during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her experience and pushback against such policies ushered through Congress the No Fear Act, a law signed into effect in 2003, that has protected thousands of Federal workers and their families from exposing personnel abuses in government workplaces.
Coleman-Adebayo drew a parallel between her experiences as a whistleblower and that of Assange. “I just had to be here today because I know the cost of being a whistleblower—the cost to your life, to your family, to your community. I think we all need to identify in a personal way with being a whistleblower,” she said.
Randy Credico said it was a very good sign that so many new activists and supporters had taken interest in Julian Assange’s case. “What they’re doing is a coup—forget about January 6–its like the final blow pulling out its most important pillar—the First Amendment.”
Chip Gibbons, Director of Policy for Defending Rights & Dissent, said that since Wikileaks revealed the truth about U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. intelligence agencies have waged an “all-out vendetta on everyone involved.” He pointed out that Chelsea Manning served more time than anyone else ever has for giving information to news media.
Gibbons also characterized the FBI and CIA as rogue organizations in their involvement with the Assange case. “The FBI illegally entered the nation of Iceland under false pretenses and seized the twitter account of a sitting member of Parliament and the CIA planned to assassinate Assange,” he said. He said that these are some of the reasons to be concerned about the prosecution of Assange and the that these policies had far reaching implications to press freedoms.
Voices From The Past
There is a lengthy history of whistleblower resistance in American history. Notable among those is Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of Rand Corporation who was working at the Pentagon when he released information to the New York Times about the Vietnam War during the Nixon Administration. These unauthorized releases became known as the Pentagon Papers and consisted of a trove of documents exposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the bombing of Hanoi, and the creep of the War into the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia.
In an interview with DCMediaGroup in 2014, Ellsberg said that Manning’s willingness to release information to Wikileaks resulted in “truth that authorities did not want [let] out, about torture, assassinations in Afghanistan, corruption…”
Video interview: Daniel Ellsberg Interview one
Video interview: Daniel Ellsberg Interview two
Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers caused a knee-jerk reaction from intelligence services, and threw a damper on the Nixon Administration’s continuation of the war there as public perception cooled towards U.S. forces being there. The Manning document release had similar affects on public perception to the Iraq War, both at home and abroad.
Another voice from the past is that of Ethan McCord, the Army Soldier depicted in the Collateral Murder video which was revealed in the Manning release. McCord was a Specialist assigned to a combat unit in Baghdad when Apache helicopters opened fire on Reuters Journalists and Iraqi civilians nearby. McCord was sent to the scene of the carnage with his squad and described in this interview the aftermath of what he found and his reaction to help dave the lives of seriously wounded Iraqi children.
McChord soon afterwards left military service.
Video interview: Ethan McChord
