Julian Assange charged with 17 new Espionage crimes by America could face the death penalty

With the latest Department of Justice charges against Julian Assange coming out this week, it looks like America wants to make an example out of him to scare the rest of the journalist world. Not only that, America wants to scare the entire world, particularly Iran, with its build up of Sea power around the Straits of Hormuz. Is America becoming more totalitarian as time goes by?

Certainly the military swagger of America has always been present, but this clampdown on Assange by releasing 17 charges against him is a new low point in their historic upholding of the first amendment, providing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As a writer and blogger this affects many of us personally. This time the charges involve alleged violations of the espionage act. This is grave and could lead to the death sentence for Assange or hundreds of years in prison where he can continue to be torched by an increasingly ruthless American state.

This would not have happened 50 years ago. Take the Nixon Watergate scandal. That was exposed by the journalists who gained access to information incriminating the top man of the government and they published it and Nixon resigned as a result. There was no question of criminalizing the whistleblower publishers the way Assange and Wkileaks is being punished right now.

America is learning from China, who by the way is certainly not a third worlds country any more, but a competitor to America on ore levels that we realize. And China has been arresting and murdering its political activists for decades already. Ai Weiwei is one example of a famous artist who was under arrest for years for his outspoken views. America is going the same way.

The murder files released by Assange. Manning and Wikileaks that showed American helicopter pilots shooting down a Reuters journalist and numerous Iraqi civilians, may become their Tiananman Square incident, though I won’t hold my breath. The 30th anniversary of that atrocity where the Chinese state used tanks and soldiers to kill hundreds if not thousands of its protesting citizens, is coming up in a fortnight on June 4.

This Espionage Act that Assange is being tried under is from 1917 and has hardly ever been used for a leak of this sort, and certainly rarely ever successfully.

“For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges against a publisher for the publication of truthful information,”

Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

Maybe President Trump is learning some qualities from Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, where journalists and naysayers get executed by the dozen nowadays. MBS will have your head if you dare dissent. With billions of dollars worth of military weaponry going to the Saudis from America, we can see that being bedfellows with dictatorial tyrants can find some of their qualities rub off on you. Better watch what we say, their tentacles may stretch all the way to bloggers like us who may voice any moral outrage in defense of their victims.

Julian Assange had a right to call out the war crimes of America, and killing him will not stifle that information. You may be trying to stifle future whistle blowers from leaking your future crimes against humanity or genocide.

“The most dangerous aspect of this indictment for freedom of the press is that it would criminalize the encouragement of leaks of newsworthy classified information and criminalize publication of it. That’s criminalizing journalism.”

Ted Boutrous Media Law Attorney

The repercussions of Trump’s move to lay these espionage charges against Assange will rock the journalistic world because what he is being tried for is what journalists all over do every day. It’s thanks to just such journalism that the American people know about numerous other crimes of state, like the pentagon Papers, etc. Abuse of power is going on all the time and it is specifically for this reason that freedom of the press has always been enshrined in the constitution of America.

The levers of power have been delicately set in place to keep the ship of state steady on its course, the one department counter-balancing the other because at the end of the day you are talking about the delegating of tremendous amounts of power to a handful of people. That power needs to be held in place so that the institution maintains and is not hijacked by the individuals involved in managing it.

President Trump or whoever is controlling him, is now removing the levers of balance and self-regulation so that the military, senate and presidency can do whatever they like without the observant eye of the media on them. Argus is no more. Argus was the 100-eyed giant of Greek mythology who was the all-seeing one, and was a servant of Queen Hera and a guard of princess Io. He was killed by Hermes for Zeus, who loved her and wanted Io for himself.

“The fact that WikiLeaks published many of those documents in collaboration with an international consortium of leading news organizations — including The Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, El País, and Der Spiegel — ensured that the charges against Assange were immediately denounced by journalists and free speech advocates as an unconstitutional assault on press freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/05/24/julian-assange-espionage-act-us-extradition/

With journalism muzzled like this we may be seeing a new era in policy by the powers that be toward the people. Fortunately we have the blockchain upon which to place our uncensorable speech, or so we would like anyway. It may be our only hope. As right wing fascism takes hold all over the world at present, times may be changing. China is obviously a perfect example, but even throughout South America we see numerous countries run by merciless heavy-handed leaders who seem to favor trade with the elite and America, while their people suffer crippling austerities.

As America sends 1500 more troops to the Middle East, to assist the Saudi dictatorship there, it looks like ruthless power and military might is the flavor of the day. The rights of the people are being trampled by the leaders who may be sold out to the IMF and World Bank, and besides that there is a lot of money in arms sales for America, along with the desire to maintain their domination of the power supplies, like oil. Empire is alive and well, in pockets all over the globe now and they are bumping up against each other, including the Straits of Hormuz, The Asian Pacific and Venezuela. Assange may be the canary in the coal mine for the rest of us. He will always be seen as a hero and a martyr regardless of what happens to him. We will remember him forever.

“Put simply, these unprecedented charges against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are the most significant and terrifying threat to the First Amendment in the 21st century,”
Trevor Timm, cofounder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation."

Ref: https://www.wired.com/story/julian-assange-espionage-act-threaten-press-freedom/