Julian Assange Out of Jail

In the weirdest set of moves yet, the U.S. government is trying to build a legal case against Assange.  I’ve rightly heard this compared to jailing Carl Bernstein for “the Deep Throat” leaks. Carl Bernstein was at least an American.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

For some reason, Eric Holder is taking a bigger interest in this than he did in our breaking the Geneva Convention agreements on torture and the West Wing’s orders to assassinate a U.S. citizen abroad.  What a warped sense of Justice we’ve developed in this country!

Every one from Sweden to the Crown Prosecution service have argued against bail for Assange.    Sweden was not allowed to make any arguments or offer any evidence as is custom in British Courts.

There was an early sign that the day would go in Assange’s favour when Ouseley said: “The history of the way it [the case] has been dealt with by the Swedish prosecutors would give Mr Assange some basis that he might be acquitted following a trial.”

American legal action could further complicate the situation. As you hear in the video above, Assange vowed to continue his work.   Here’s one interesting result from the leaks of some of the cables.  CNN reports that Zimbabwe’s first lady is suing because it was leaked she had dealings in illegal diamonds. You may recall the blood diamond issue from the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

The cables in question, from the U.S. Embassy in Harare, claimed that Zimbabwe’s first lady was among the senior Zanu-PF and government officials who were gaining huge profits from the smuggling of diamonds in the eastern part of Zimbabwe.

“The diamonds that are sold to regime members and elites are sold for freshly printed Zimbabwean notes issued by the RBZ (Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe),” the paper quoted a 2008 cable as saying.

“The cables suggested that (the head of the bank, Gideon) Gono kept the money printing press running to finance the purchase of diamonds and this could have accelerated hyperinflation, which eventually rendered the Zimbabwe dollar worthless,” the newspaper charged.

Grace Mugabe said in the suit that the report published Sunday by The Standard was “false, scandalous, malicious and bent on damaging (her) reputation.”

The documents said the newspaper wrongly suggested that Grace Mugabe had “used her position as the First Lady to access diamonds clandestinely, enriching herself in circumstances in which the country was facing serious foreign currency shortages, which amounts should have been channeled to the fiscus.

AlterNet has an interesting interview up with peace activist Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the NYT during the Nixon years.  Ellsberg believes the law that Holder is using to try to prosecute Assange is unconstitutional.

Yet, as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin pointed out earlier this month, the law no more shields journalists than anybody else from prosecution for the dissemination of classified information. For instance, in the case decided by the Supreme Court regarding the New York Times’ decision to publish the Pentagon Papers leaked by Ellsberg, the court held only that the government did not have the right to keep the Times from publishing the papers, but the government still had the right to prosecute the Times after classified information from the papers was published in its pages. So, why try to make a distinction, however polemical?

“The law they’re using makes no distinction between journalists, the press — it applies to readers of the New York Times, just as well as to the publishers, the journalists and the leakers,” Ellsberg explained. “The language of that law makes no distinction. Now, that’s why they’ve been reluctant to use it — because it’s so broad, that it’s almost clearly unconstitutional.”

“They have tried to use the law — mostly unsuccessfully — but they’ve tried to use the law against leakers,” Ellsberg continued. “They’ve never tried to use it against a publisher. So this would be a first.”

In other words, if the Justice Department can successfully brand Assange as something other than a journalist or a publisher, it would not appear to be violating the perception of freedom of expression held by most Americans.

Exactly.  We’re talking freedom of the Press here. The Republicans continue to shake their fists and spew weird diatribes at Assange.  The weirdest to date was the P Woman accusing Assange of being “un-American” which is some weird word salad given Assange is an Aussie.  Fred Thompson has been twittering up a storm on Michael Moore’s contributions to Assange’s bail. Something about Democrats not understanding real patriotism.  Same old Republican jingoism!   It does seems odd to me that a Democratic Attorney General would be following their lead, but hey,  these appear to be strange times for Democrats in deed.  To quote John Lennon: “Most peculiar Mama!”

Update: Since more Republican memes about Assange appear to be showing up in unlikely places–Remember, what they tried to do to Daniel Ellsberg?– I’m putting up some of the honors Assange has earned from the International Community.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has been involved in publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, for which he won the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award. He has also published material about toxic waste dumping in Africa, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer.^[11] In 2010, he published classified details about US involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, on 28 November 2010, WikiLeaks and its five media partners began publishing secret US diplomatic cables.^[12] The White House has called Assange’s release of the diplomatic cables “reckless and dangerous”.^[13]

For his work with WikiLeaks, Assange received the 2008 Economist Freedom of Expression Award and the 2010 Sam Adams Award. Utne Reader named him as one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World”. In 2010, New Statesman ranked Assange number 23 among the “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures”.