Weekend Economists' Harvest Ball September 21-23, 2012

[Demeter]

37. Is Julian Assange's Asylum Claim Legit? STUDY IN RULE OF LAW

I AM POSTING THIS LITTLE BIT BECAUSE IT CONCERNS US FINANCIALLY...
THE SPEAKER IS The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/julian-assanges-asylum-claim-legit-point-counterpoint-glenn-greenwald?page=0%2C2&akid=9427.227380._Kgrs5&rd=1&src=newsletter714105&t=19

...I think you’re making an argument from a very legalist perspective, and it’s one that I wholeheartedly agree with. It would be an incredibly violent breech of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press for Assange to be prosecuted for doing what media outlets do all the time, which is receive classified information from government sources, and then publish it in the public interest. As you pointed out, the New York Times published many of these same documents. They’ve not only done that, but they’ve published far more secrets than Julian Assange has ever dreamed of publishing, including top-secret information. The New York Times has published all kinds of top-secret designations, whereas Wikileaks never has. None of the documents leaked from the Iraq War and Afghanistan war logs or the diplomatic cables were top-secret. They were either classified or confidential, a much lower designation of secrecy.

From a strictly legal perspective you’re right. Nonetheless if you look at what the United States government has done over the past 10 years, the fact that something is legally dubious or difficult seems to be no bar from them doing it. This is the same government that’s assassinating its own citizens without due process of any kind, putting people in cages in Guantanamo without a whiff of due process. The prior administration got away with declaring torture as something other than torture. We see the constant manipulation of law for the benefit of the United States government. When you add on to that the very deferential posture of the federal courts when it comes to claims about national security -- where all kinds of Muslims have been prosecuted for what looks to all kinds of scholars to be nothing other than First Amendment activity, like advocating for groups and putting YouTube clips on the Internet -- I think it’s a lot easier to say in some abstract legal sense that it would be a difficult prosecution, but that’s far from the same thing as saying that it won’t happen and that it won’t be successful.

The other thing I would add is that the Justice Department doesn’t convene grand juries for fun. They do it only when they’re serious about prosecuting. They didn’t convene a grand jury during the Wall Street financial crisis because they weren’t serious about prosecuting. They didn’t convene one to investigate Bush's torture crimes or eavesdropping crimes because they weren’t serious about prosecuting. They’ve convened a grand jury, they’ve had testimony, they’ve filed motions, and have been very active in this process leading to the very rational conclusion that they are serious. Whether they will go through with it or not nobody knows. It would be incredibly foolish for someone in Julian Assange’s position to blithely assume that it won’t happen, or that if it did happen it would succeed given the success of the United States in its court system over the last decade. ...civil liberties abuses and tyrannical power grabs always work is the same way everywhere. They begin with a very limited, marginalized group, but they never remain with that marginalized group. Once the society accepts the assertion of power and the abuses of power against that marginalized group because they are marginalized those powers become legitimized and then spread beyond their original application. That has happened in every single instance. We already see the abuses of the war on terror spreading to domestic dissent, the entrapment that has been used to put Muslims in prison. It’s spreading to people in the Occupy movement. The Patriot Act, which was justified in the name of the war on terror has been used overwhelmingly in cases not having anything to do with the war on terrorism. I think that what you see is this proliferation beyond its original application.

The other thing that I think is really important to note is because of the work I do I’ve gotten to know Daniel Ellsberg pretty well, who has been sort of my supreme political hero. One of the things the Nixon administration did in the Ellsberg case was it broke into a psychiatrist’s office to get all sorts of incriminating psycho-sexual information about him to leak it and destroy his credibility. I never quite understood why the Nixon administration thought that would be helpful. To me it was a non-sequitor. Ellsberg was leaking the Pentagon Papers, which showed that the US government systematically lied to the people about the Vietnam War. Why would Ellsberg’s sexual fantasies or his aberrations that were embarrassing to him personally have anything to do with that? The reason is if you can throw enough dirt on somebody in a sexual or personal or intimate level it makes almost everybody unwilling to defend that person, to want to be near them, to want to be associated with them...