09-12-2010, 12:04 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-12-2010, 12:07 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
Julian Assange cast as common enemy as US left and right unite
Growing clamour sees Republicans and Democrats demanding action against WikiLeaks founder
Ed Pilkington
The Guardian, Thursday 9 December 2010
Julian Assange: Republicans have labelled him a terrorist and even liberal Democrats have called for him to be prosecuted. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The outcry against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is intensifying in the US, drawing a rare degree of consensus from politicians and pundits who have collectively cast him in the role of a common enemy.
In the past few days the calls for action against Assange have grown steadily louder and more shrill, with leading Republicans labelling him a terrorist, and top liberal Democratic politicians, albeit in more moderate language, also calling for his prosecution.
The highly unusual bipartisan hounding of Assange has led some free speech campaigning groups to warn of a "chilling effect," in which the threats of legal action are already having an impact on the open spirit of the internet.
The most extreme attacks have come from prominent Republicans including Sarah Palin, who has likened Assange to an al-Qaida operative; Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who called him a "hi-tech terrorist"; and Newt Gingrich, who called him an information terrorist and said he should be arrested as an "enemy combatant" .
Assange was also attacked by leading Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein, who said he should be charged under the US espionage act, and John Kerry, who has called for the law to be changed to allow a prosecution of the WikiLeaks website.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and author of Necessary Secrets, said the cross-party baying put the Obama administration in a difficult place. "There is a huge amount of pressure on them to do something about WikiLeaks."
This week Joe Lieberman, the independent senator who has long been an opponent of WikiLeaks, widened the net when he accused the New York Times of an "act of bad citizenship" by publishing versions of the US embassy cables and called on the justice department to hold a "very intensive inquiry" into whether the paper had committed a crime.
Schoenfeld and other experts on the US first amendment think it highly unlikely that a prosecution will be brought against the New York Times – no news outlet has ever been charged under the espionage act and the supreme court ruled out such an action against the same newspaper over the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
The Times is keeping its head down for the moment, saying only that "We believe that our decision to publish was responsible journalism, legal, and important to a democratic society". It has also published a long explanation of why it went ahead with the embassy leaks.
So far key Obama administration figures have adopted a more temperate tone than much of the swirling debate around them. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has called the embassy cables "moderate" in their seriousness and said arguments that they had damaged national security were "fairly significantly overwrought".
The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has played a double game, threatening to take "aggressive steps" against disseminators of the cables while emphasising the positive worth of an open internet.
Eric Holder, the US attorney general, who will have the final decision on whether to prosecute, has said he will do everything he can to hold WikiLeaks accountable, but has not specified what that would mean.
"Whether or not new laws are passed to further curb freedom of speech, there is already a chilling effect," said Steve Rendall of the media watchdog Fair.
There is already evidence that some people who were willing to donate to WikiLeaks in support of the site's freedom of information work have now stopped doing so for fear of being arrested as terrorist funders .
Bloggers pointed out that if Feinstein's desire to wield the espionage act against WikiLeaks were followed through, it would have a powerful deadening effect on mainstream media outlets' efforts to report on national security matters.
However, some at the coal face of internet publishing say that they are unfazed by the current furore. John Young, whose website cryptome.org has published about 60,000 classified and non-classified documents over the past 14 years, believes the storm will pass.
"This is just typical arm-waving and yelling. If anything, this will just further wind people up to oppose authority and send in more documents."
Growing clamour sees Republicans and Democrats demanding action against WikiLeaks founder
Ed Pilkington
The Guardian, Thursday 9 December 2010
Julian Assange: Republicans have labelled him a terrorist and even liberal Democrats have called for him to be prosecuted. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
The outcry against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is intensifying in the US, drawing a rare degree of consensus from politicians and pundits who have collectively cast him in the role of a common enemy.
In the past few days the calls for action against Assange have grown steadily louder and more shrill, with leading Republicans labelling him a terrorist, and top liberal Democratic politicians, albeit in more moderate language, also calling for his prosecution.
The highly unusual bipartisan hounding of Assange has led some free speech campaigning groups to warn of a "chilling effect," in which the threats of legal action are already having an impact on the open spirit of the internet.
The most extreme attacks have come from prominent Republicans including Sarah Palin, who has likened Assange to an al-Qaida operative; Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, who called him a "hi-tech terrorist"; and Newt Gingrich, who called him an information terrorist and said he should be arrested as an "enemy combatant" .
Assange was also attacked by leading Democrats such as Dianne Feinstein, who said he should be charged under the US espionage act, and John Kerry, who has called for the law to be changed to allow a prosecution of the WikiLeaks website.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and author of Necessary Secrets, said the cross-party baying put the Obama administration in a difficult place. "There is a huge amount of pressure on them to do something about WikiLeaks."
This week Joe Lieberman, the independent senator who has long been an opponent of WikiLeaks, widened the net when he accused the New York Times of an "act of bad citizenship" by publishing versions of the US embassy cables and called on the justice department to hold a "very intensive inquiry" into whether the paper had committed a crime.
Schoenfeld and other experts on the US first amendment think it highly unlikely that a prosecution will be brought against the New York Times – no news outlet has ever been charged under the espionage act and the supreme court ruled out such an action against the same newspaper over the leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.
The Times is keeping its head down for the moment, saying only that "We believe that our decision to publish was responsible journalism, legal, and important to a democratic society". It has also published a long explanation of why it went ahead with the embassy leaks.
So far key Obama administration figures have adopted a more temperate tone than much of the swirling debate around them. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has called the embassy cables "moderate" in their seriousness and said arguments that they had damaged national security were "fairly significantly overwrought".
The secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has played a double game, threatening to take "aggressive steps" against disseminators of the cables while emphasising the positive worth of an open internet.
Eric Holder, the US attorney general, who will have the final decision on whether to prosecute, has said he will do everything he can to hold WikiLeaks accountable, but has not specified what that would mean.
"Whether or not new laws are passed to further curb freedom of speech, there is already a chilling effect," said Steve Rendall of the media watchdog Fair.
There is already evidence that some people who were willing to donate to WikiLeaks in support of the site's freedom of information work have now stopped doing so for fear of being arrested as terrorist funders .
Bloggers pointed out that if Feinstein's desire to wield the espionage act against WikiLeaks were followed through, it would have a powerful deadening effect on mainstream media outlets' efforts to report on national security matters.
However, some at the coal face of internet publishing say that they are unfazed by the current furore. John Young, whose website cryptome.org has published about 60,000 classified and non-classified documents over the past 14 years, believes the storm will pass.
"This is just typical arm-waving and yelling. If anything, this will just further wind people up to oppose authority and send in more documents."
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass