Mehdi Hasan: Set Aside Your Emotions and Understand Why the Prosecution of Julian Assange is an Attack on the First Amendment

Screen Shot 2021 12 14 at 11.46.05 AM

MSNBC has often disappointed me over the years, but this commentary by Mehdi Hasan is excellent. There is a high principle at stake with regard to the prosecution of Julian Assange. Trump was wrong to bring the case and Biden is wrong to continue the prosecution. Obama’s DOJ was correct that there is no way to prosecute Assange without violating the First Amendment. As far as Assange’s allege hacking, Hasan correctly comments that the main witness to that claim has recanted, something not widely reported because it does not fit the narrative of most legacy news outlets. You might not like Assange, but that has nothing to do with the merits of his case. Numerous civil liberty organizations are horrified about the prosecution of Assange. If you support the prosecution merely because you think that Assange is “bad,” this is a good time to revisit the legal basis for your opinion.

Share
Tags:

Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath December 14, 2021 Reply

    I have to return to my earlier comment: Assange had no obligation to hold secret what he had learned. He was not a U.S. citizen, he accepted information from people willing to provide it. He did not breach any US security protocols nor processes nor policies nor laws. I am unaware of any proof that the people sending him information were operating under his orders or control.

    See
    https://dangerousintersection.org/2021/12/11/our-distrust-in-news-media-has-been-well-earned/comment-page-1/#comment-686787

    I feel compelled to point out the obvious: MSNBC has been at the forefront of the attack on the first amendment since Trump rose to prominence, and has never let up.

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth December 23, 2021 Reply

    An excerpt from Ed Snowden’s comment on Julian Assange today:

    The U.S. attempts to distinguish Assange’s conduct from that of more mainstream journalism by characterizing it as a “conspiracy.” But what does that even mean in this context? Does it mean encouraging someone to uncover information (which is something done every day by the editors who work for Wikileaks’ old partners, The New York Times and The Guardian)? Or does it mean giving someone the tools and techniques to uncover that information (which, depending on the tools and techniques involved, can also be construed as a typical part of an editor’s job)? The truth is that all national security investigative journalism can be branded a conspiracy: the whole point of the enterprise is for journalists to persuade sources to violate the law in the public interest. And insisting that Assange is somehow “not a journalist” does nothing to take the teeth out of this precedent when the activities for which he’s been charged are indistinguishable from the activities that our most decorated investigatative journalists routinely engage in.

    https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/assange01

Leave a Reply