Julian Assange Wins 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award
February 10, 2020 . 10 Comments
Imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange has been awarded Consortium
News' 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award for courage in the face of
an unprecedented attack on press freedom.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Julian Assange, the imprisoned and maligned publisher of WikiLeaks, has been
awarded the 2020 Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award by the board of the
Consortium for Independent Journalism, publishers of Consortium News.
Assange is incarcerated in a maximum security prison in London awaiting a
hearing later this month on an extradition request by the United States. He
has been charged 0n 17 counts under the U.S. Espionage Act of possessing and
publishing classified material that revealed prima facie evidence of U.S.
war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For practicing the highest order of journalism-revealing crimes of the
state-Assange faces 175 years in a U.S. prison-a life sentence for the
48-year old Australian.
Assange, whose life has been endangered in harsh prison conditions, has
become an international symbol of the threat to press freedom. He is the
first journalist to be charged under the Espionage Act for possession and
dissemination of state secrets.
The late Robert Parry.
Robert Parry, the late founder and editor of Consortium News, was a staunch
defender of Assange's rights. In 2010, he wrote: "Though American
journalists may understandably want to find some protective cover by
pretending that Julian Assange is not like us, the reality is - whether we
like it or not - we are all Julian Assange."
The award is named after journalist Gary Webb whose life was cut short after
the mainstream press vilified him for accurate reports about a CIA operation
that flooded urban areas of the U.S. with cocaine from Nicaragua.
Journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, a member of the Consortium News board,
said: "Having been close to Julian Assange through much of his struggle
against corrupt power, I had no hesitation in voting for him for the Gary
Webb prize. While Gary was a tragedy at the end, Julian must be a triumph."
A History of Scoops
Assange launched WikiLeaks in Dec. 2006. Among its first revelations were
files alleging corruption by former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi; the
U.S. Army manual for soldiers at Guantanamo Bay and registers of U.S.
military equipment in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In January 2008, WikiLeaks released "United Nations Confidential Reports"
that "expose matters from allegations of hundreds of European peace-keepers
sexually abusing refugee girls to generals in Peru using Swiss bank accounts
to engage in multi-million dollar frauds against the UN."
Chelsea Maning in 2017. (YouTube)
Chelsea Maning in 2017. (Vimeo)
WikiLeaks' first major release came on April 5, 2010 with the publication of
the Collateral Murder video, providing evidence of a U.S. war crime in Iraq.
It was leaked by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was
arrested and charged on May 26, 2010 under the Espionage Act.
With Manning in jail, WikiLeaks published more of her leaked material. The
Afghan War Diaries were released on July 25, 2010, which revealed the
suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led
death squad and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict. Assange
partnered with The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian in
publishing the Afghan leaks.
On Nov. 28, 2010, the first of Manning's U.S. Diplomatic Cables were
released. They helped spark a revolt in Tunisia that spread into the
so-called Arab Spring, revealed Saudi intentions towards Iran and exposed
spying on the UN secretary general and other diplomats.
Over the next few years WikiLeaks revealed embarrassing documents on Turkey,
Syria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the Sony Corporation, and secret details of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership.
WikiLeaks in 2011 pioneered an anonymous online "drop box" for
whistleblowers to deposit documents without their identities being known,
even to WikiLeaks. The organization carefully authenticates every document
it receives and has a perfect record of accuracy. Major news organizations
like The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and CNN have copied WikiLeaks in
creating their own anonymous drop boxes.
In 2016, WikiLeaks published leaked emails from the Democratic National
Convention and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta that exposed
DNC efforts to derail the primary candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT),
Hillary Clinton's role in the destruction of Libya and a pay-to-play scheme
at the Clinton Foundation.
During the Trump administration, WikiLeaks published in March 2017 secret
CIA documents that exposed "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA," which
the agency had lost control of. WikiLeaks avoided "the distribution of
'armed' cyberweapons." But the documents it published revealed how the
agency can remotely gain control of a citizen's television set and showed
that the CIA can plant doctored fingerprints into a cyber-attack to falsely
blame an adversary. The Vault 7 release led then CIA Director Mike Pompeo to
label WikiLeaks a "non-state hostile intelligence service."
Over the past decade, WikiLeaks publications have spurred countless news
reports and academic papers around the world, and have been used in numerous
court cases promoting human rights.
Assange's Arrest
A month after the Afghan War Diaries were published two women went to the
police in Sweden to ask if Assange could be tested for sexually transmitted
disease after having unprotected relations with both of them. One of the
women later texted that she had been "railroaded" by police into making a
formal complaint about rape and refused to sign her statement. The next day
Sweden's chief prosecutor dismissed the allegations. She said: "I don't
think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape."
Nils Melzer (UN Photo)
After Swedish authorities told him he was free to go, Assange returned to
London when an extradition request was issued by a prosecutor, not a judge,
and he was arrested in December 2010. This came after Swedish police had
altered and signed the statement of one of the women who had refused to
sign, in a way that permitted the case to be re-opened, according to a UN
special rapporteur's investigation. Nils Melzer, the rapporteur on
torture, said:
"I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original
documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of the
woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only
that: The woman's testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police
without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible
rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text
messages."
While still in the police station, she wrote a text message to a friend
saying that she didn't want to incriminate Assange, that she just wanted him
to take an HIV test, but the police were apparently interested in <getting
their hands on him.> The police wrote down her statement and immediately
informed public prosecutors. . two hours later, a headline appeared on the
front page of Expressen, a Swedish tabloid, saying that Julian Assange was
suspected of having committed two rapes."
After he exhausted his appeals in British courts to fight extradition to
Sweden, Assange sought and received political asylum by the government of
Ecuador in its London embassy on June 19, 2012. Assange and his lawyers said
at the time they feared onward extradition from Sweden to the U.S. to face
charges for publishing classified material.
The former foreign minister of Ecuador on why his country gave Assange
asylum:
Assange continued running WikiLeaks from inside the embassy. Despite needing
medical care, British authorities said he would be arrested if he left the
embassy and re-entered British territory. In February 2016 a UN panel ruled
that Assange was a being "arbitrarily detained" in the embassy.
A change in government in Ecuador in May 2017 led to the eventual revocation
of Assange's asylum without due process and in likely violation of
Ecuadorian national law and the 1954 United Nations Convention on the Status
of Refugees. The convention stipulates that no asylee can be expelled to a
territory "where his life or freedom would be threatened."
Assange was eventually dragged out of the embassy by British police on April
11, 2019. His fears of extradition to the U.S. were realized when the U.S.
indicted him on 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one charge of
computer intrusion. Imprisoned in the high security Belmarsh Prison with
terrorists and other violent criminals, Assange has had restricted access to
visitors, including with his lawyers. Nils Melzer, the U.N. special
rapporteur on torture, visited Assange in his cell and reported that he was
suffering from psychological torture.
Assange faces an extradition hearing at Woolwich Crown Court that begins the
week of Feb. 24 and will continue in May. (Consortium News will be in London
to provide extensive coverage in print and video.)
In a normal case, Assange's indictment would be thrown out after it was
revealed that the prosecuting government was spying on Assange's privileged
conversations with his attorneys in the Ecuador Embassy.
Police expelling Assange from embassy, April 11, 2018. (YouTube)
Police expelling Assange from embassy. (YouTube)
Both U.S. indictments against Assange spell out the exact work of
investigative reporting. The indictment on intrusion alleges that Assange
helped Manning gain access to a government computer, which the indictment
acknowledges Manning had security clearances to legally access.
What the indictment alleges is that Assange egged Manning on for more
information and tried to help her, unsuccessfully, to sign in under an
administrative user name to help her do what every reporter must do, hide
their sources' identity. The second indictment likewise accused Assange of
practicing journalism by encouraging his source to provide classified
documents.
In his 2010 article Parry said in his investigative reporting he did the
exact things Assange had done, even encouraging his sources to commit a
crime if it could prevent a larger crime from occurring. He wrote:
"The process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of
state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official
to break the law either by turning over classified documents or at least by
talking about the secret information. There is almost always some level of
'conspiracy' between reporter and source. . In most cases, I played some
role - either large or small - in locating the classified information or
convincing some government official to divulge some secrets. More often than
not, I was the instigator of these 'conspiracies.'"
At the time Parry wrote his article, the Obama administration had empaneled
a grand jury to consider charging Assange under the Espionage Act for
publishing leaked secrets, which Parry defended as the core work of
investigative journalism. Ultimately, then Attorney General Eric Holder
decided against indictment, because of what the administration called its
"New York Times problem."
That was an acknowledgement that Assange was a journalist and that
prosecuting him for doing what the Times and other big media also do would
open them up to prosecution as well. The First Amendment prevailed until the
Trump administration brushed aside the very same problem and charged Assange
with espionage.
The 1917 Espionage Act, derived from the 1889 British Official Secrets Act,
outlaws any unauthorized possession and/or dissemination of classified
information. Journalists have for decades possessed and published state
secrets without consequence. This is what makes Assange's case an
unprecedented assault on freedom of the press and the First Amendment.
Recognition of Threat to the Press
Rachel Maddow.
At the time of his arrest, even long time critics of Assange acknowledged
the threat to press freedom it posed. In an editorial, The New York Times
wrote:
"The new indictment . is a marked escalation in the effort to prosecute Mr.
Assange, one that could have a chilling effect on American journalism as it
has been practiced for generations. It is aimed straight at the heart of the
First Amendment."
"The new charges focus on receiving and publishing classified material from
a government source. That is something journalists do all the time. . This
is what the First Amendment is designed to protect: the ability of
publishers to provide the public with the truth."
The Times praised Assange's work:
"Mr. Assange shared much of the material at issue with The New York Times
and other news organizations. The resulting stories demonstrated why the
protections afforded the press have served the American public so well; they
shed important light on the American war effort in Iraq, revealing how the
United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces
and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict."
The New Yorker's Masha Gessen, wrote: "The use of the Espionage Act to
prosecute Assange is an attack on the First Amendment. . It stands to reason
that an Administration that considers the press an 'enemy of the people'
would launch this attack. In attacking the media, it is attacking the
public."
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, the Democratic Party booster, who probably had more
influence than any commentator in drumming up the Russiagate conspiracy
theory and Assange's alleged role in it, launched into an astounding defense
of the imprisoned publisher. On her program she said:
"The Justice Department today, the Trump administration today, just put
every journalistic institution in this country on Julian Assange's side of
the ledger. On his side of the fight. Which, I know, is unimaginable. But
that is because the government is now trying to assert this brand new right
to criminally prosecute people for publishing secret stuff, and newspapers
and magazines and investigative journalists and all sorts of different
entities publish secret stuff all the time. That is the bread and butter of
what we do."
Victim of Disinformation Campaign
Assange has been the victim of an effective, mass disinformation campaign,
planned as long ago as March 8, 2008 when a secret, 32-page document from
the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessment branch of the Pentagon described in
detail the importance of destroying the "feeling of trust that is WikiLeaks'
center of gravity."
The document said: "This would be achieved with threats of exposure and
criminal prosecution and an unrelenting assault on reputation."
"It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very
principle of freedom of speech," Pilger said in 2018 (video above).
As a result, a number of falsehoods about Assange's story are deeply
entrenched in the media and the public and are resistant to correction with
facts.
1. Assange is not a journalist.
Most establishment journalists do not consider Assange to be one of them.
First, he is completely a product of the Internet Age, a medium as
revolutionary as the printing press, radio and television. His journalism is
of a different type than traditional reporting.
Second, WikiLeaks publishes entire documents, rather than reporting
extensively on them. In the past newspapers, such as The New York Times,
published several pages in print editions of major documents, such as the
top secret Pentagon Papers and today provide whole documents online.
Accepting the Freedom of Expression award, 2008 (Index on Censorship)
Assange is not simply a clerk receiving documents and posting them online
without studying any of them. He has engaged in their authentication and has
a profound understanding of their contents and newsworthiness. Assange has
given countless interviews and speeches, authored three books, edited and
co-written two others, and written dozens of articles. Throughout he has
displayed a deep understanding of geopolitics and the internal affairs of
numerous nations.
Most importantly, Assange has had an adversarial relationship with power,
something that is waning in establishment media. Because of that
increasingly cozy relationship between journalism and power Assange has
scooped major media, perhaps engendering a degree of professional jealousy.
His role as a journalist was affirmed by the numerous awards he has won,
including The Economist's New Media Award (2008); Amnesty International's UK
Media Award (2009); the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence
award (2010); the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011, which Parry
won in 2017); the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to
Journalism (2011, Australia's Pulitzer Prize), the Voltaire Award for Free
Speech (2011), the International Piero Passetti Journalism Prize of the
National Union of Italian Journalists (2011), the Jose Couso Press Freedom
Award (2011); the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts (2013) and the
Galizia Prize for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to
Information (2019).
In 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first among websites "that
could totally change the news." No less of an authority than the founder of
this site, one of America's best investigative reporters, said, "Journalists
are all Julian Assange." And Parry gave this warning to establishment
journalists: "By shunning WikiLeaks as some deviant journalistic hybrid,
mainstream U.S. news outlets may breathe easier now but may find themselves
caught up in a new legal precedent that could be applied to them later."
Google search results for Assange.
2. Assange was "charged" with rape. This might be the most frequent
falsehood uttered about Assange, even mistakenly by Assange supporters. No
rape or any other charges were ever filed by Swedish authorities. The case
was dropped three times, but the "rape" smear persists. Stefania Maurizi, a
reporter for La Repubblica in Italy, obtained documents that showed British
authorities pressured the Swedish chief prosecutor not to come to London to
interview him in the embassy.
In a report on the German ZDF TV network last week documents were produced
by Melzer showing the rape allegations were "invented" by Swedish police.
"Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation
for rape without charges ever having been filed?" he recently told the Swiss
newspaper Republik. "Just imagine being accused of rape for nine-and-a-half
years by an entire state apparatus and by the media without ever being given
the chance to defend yourself because no charges had ever been filed."
Many persist in believing that Assange is a "coward" who fled to the
Ecuadorian embassy to escape the rape "charges" when he voluntarily went to
the police station in Sweden. His fear was being extradited to the U.S. via
Sweden.
3. Assange was charged with endangering U.S. informants.
Much was made in the Espionage Act indictment of Assange allegedly revealing
the names of U.S. informants and endangering their lives. At the top of the
indictment are all the U.S. statutes prosecutors say Assange violated.
Nowhere among them is revealing the identity of informants. That's because,
though it may be unethical, there is no law against it.
In fact, as Australian mainstream journalist Mark Davis revealed in a talk
webcast by CN Live! it was Assange and not his mainstream media partners who
worked through the night to redact the names of many informants before the
Afghan War Diaries were released in July, 2010.
Davis, who was in the "bunker" at The Guardian in London working on the
documents, said it was only when two Guardian journalists in a book
published the secret password to the entire trove of documents, endangering
informants named in them, that Assange released the full archive to alert
those in danger. The Guardian denies this saying WikiLeaks told them the
password it used in its book would expire within hours. In any event, there
is no evidence that any informant named has been harmed.
4. Assange hacked secret U.S. databases.
Assange was arrested at age 20 for hacking but was released on good
behavior. The label "hacker" has followed him ever since even though Assange
is not being charged as a "hacker" but for helping Manning hide her identity
while accessing classified material she had clearance to access, which Parry
said is standard journalistic practice.
5. Assange was charged with interfering with the 2016 U.S. election.
One of the most widely mistaken beliefs is that Assange interfered in the
U.S. election with Russian help in order to get Donald Trump elected. All of
the U.S. charges against Assange stem from 2010 and have nothing to do with
the 2016 election, another mistaken belief.
In the 2017 film Risk, by filmmaker Laura Poitras, Assange is filmed on the
phone in early 2016 saying WikiLeaks had obtained emails on Hillary Clinton
and "we hope to get something on Trump." As Maurizi has written for
Consortium News, WikiLeaks did obtain Trump documents but discovered they
had already been published.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, told CN Live! that had
WikiLeaks had damaging information on Trump, they certainly would have
published it, especially before an election when voters need to be informed
about the candidates.
There is zero evidence that WikiLeaks had material on Trump and suppressed
it, another widely believed falsehood. Assange favored neither candidate and
before the election said the choice between the candidates was like choosing
"cholera or gonorrhea."
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report alleges that Assange communicated
with Russian GRU defense intelligence agents posing as "Guccifer 2.0" to
obtain leaked Democratic Party emails. Even if it were true that Guccifer
2.0 was a cover for Russian intelligence, Mueller offers no evidence that
Assange would be aware of that.
And even if it were the Russians who provided the material to Assange, the
emails were accurate, meaning it is irrelevant who the source of the leak
was. The Wall Street Journal's and other major media's anonymous drop boxes
prove that. They don't need or want to know the source if newsworthy
documents are authenticated.
If a foreign power inserted fabricated emails into a U.S. presidential
campaign, that would be sabotage through disinformation. But that's not
what happened. The emails were information, not disinformation.
What Really Happened
Plague to be presented to Assange. (Made by Roy de Visser in Sydney,
Australia)
The truth is that a vindictive U.S. government was exposed with clear
evidence of committing war crimes, meddling in other nations' internal
affairs and spying on adversaries, allies and citizens alike and in response
imprisoned and charged the journalist who revealed this wrongdoing. It is an
attack on press freedom usually associated with the most aggressive
totalitarian regimes, going to the core of how the West defines itself: as a
democracy that upholds the right to criticize government or authoritarianism
that crushes dissent.
"The really horrifying thing about this case is the lawlessness that has
developed: The powerful can kill without fear of punishment and journalism
is transformed into espionage," said Melzer. "It is becoming a crime to tell
the truth."
Melzer told the Republik:
"Imagine a dark room. Suddenly, someone shines a light on the elephant in
the room - on war criminals, on corruption. Assange is the man with the
spotlight. The governments are briefly in shock, but then they turn the
spotlight around with accusations of rape. It is a classic maneuver when it
comes to manipulating public opinion. The elephant once again disappears
into the darkness, behind the spotlight. And Assange becomes the focus of
attention instead, and we start talking about whether Assange is
skateboarding in the embassy or whether he is feeding his cat correctly.
Suddenly, we all know that he is a rapist, a hacker, a spy and a narcissist.
But the abuses and war crimes he uncovered fade into the darkness."
A plaque in honor of Assange's award, reads: "For bravery in the face of a
grave threat to Freedom of the Press and for journalistic accomplishments in
revealing crimes of the state."
The Gary Webb Award is the third prize Assange has won while in prison, and
the first from the United States. Recognition of the threat his case poses
to press freedom grows.
Past winners of the Gary Webb Freedom of the Press Award are Sam Parry
(2016), who created Consortium News' website in 1995, and filmmaker Oliver
Stone (2017).
History of the Award
About the origin of the award, Parry wrote: The award is named in honor of
investigative reporter Gary Webb who in 1996 courageously revived interest
in one of the darkest scandals of the 1980s, the Reagan administration's
tolerance of cocaine trafficking by the CIA-organized Nicaraguan Contra
rebels who were fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista
government.
Journalist Gary Webb holding a copy of his Contra-cocaine article in The San
Jose Mercury-News.
The Contra-Cocaine scandal was originally exposed by Associated Press
reporters Robert Parry and Brian Barger in 1985, but the major U.S.
newspapers accepted the Reagan administration's denials and treated the
story as a "conspiracy theory."
So, when Webb revived the story in 1996 for The San Jose Mercury News and
described how some of the Contra cocaine fueled the spread of crack across
urban America, the major newspapers again rallied to the defense of the
Contras and the Reagan administration's legacy.
The assault on Webb was led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and
The Los Angeles Times - and was so ferocious that Webb's editors at the
Mercury News sacrificed him to protect their own careers. Webb found himself
cast out from the profession that he loved.
It didn't even matter that an internal CIA investigation by Inspector
General Frederick Hitz confirmed, in 1998, that the CIA was aware of the
Contra cocaine trafficking but had put its goal of ousting the Sandinistas
ahead of any responsibility to expose the Contra criminality.
Because of the false impression that Webb had manufactured a fake story, he
remained unemployable in mainstream journalism. In 2004, with his life in
tatters and his financial resources spent, Webb took his own life, a tragic
casualty in the difficult fight for a truly free press in America, a press
that doesn't just rubber stamp government propaganda and accept official
lies as truth.
