Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys on the line.
I got the great Joe Lauria.
He's the editor of ConsortiumNews.com on the line from the other side of the planet.
Through the miracles of space age, US government subsidized technology.
Welcome to the show, Joe.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you doing?
Do you ever worry when you're down there in Australia that you might fall off the bottom of the earth?
Or is that not how it works?
Well, if I walk more than three or four blocks in that direction from where I'm at, I start thinking about that.
Yes.
I would be terrified, honestly.
All right.
That's a scary thing, flying off into space, you know?
Well, I'm going to die of cold before I fall off the earth.
Oh, yeah, because it's winter time there in June, of course.
That's right.
You don't need air conditioning.
So, Joe, you wrote this piece.
After Assange's Espionage Act indictment, police move against more journalists for publishing classified material.
You don't say, huh?
You mean you weren't surprised, Scott?
You know, I was thinking that that might could happen.
I think people like you and me and others were warning all along that we're certainly fooling around with a dangerous precedent here in the USA.
In terms of allowing the government to misuse the Espionage Act against a journalist in this way.
They denied it, but we knew they had a grand jury years and years ago.
It was in the post that they were at least looking at it.
And so you're not exactly on that specific point, the Espionage Act in the US, but we got a bunch of Australian journalists getting raided.
And it kind of looks like the spirit of the day is for the governments to go ahead and push their luck and see how far they can get.
Yeah, what's interesting is that the ABC, the Australian Broadcast Corporation, which was raided by the federal police, the FBI, two days ago for a story that they broadcast in 2017.
It's almost two years ago.
And what was it about Afghanistan?
They got leaked from a lawyer who was a military lawyer who had seen enough of the crimes that special forces were committing, killing civilians in cold blood, that type of thing.
So he went through the whistleblower chain.
Familiar story.
They ignored him.
They even attacked him, he says.
So he went to the ABC.
They broadcast after a year a story that he's complaining wasn't strong enough.
He revealed details of higher level of offices, even at the general staff, who knew about these kinds of crimes and were doing nothing about it.
They only picked on the soldiers.
But nonetheless, it was an article that was based on classified information.
And there's a 1914 law here, just similar to our 1917 Espionage Act, that allowed the police to go in and seize hundreds of files that they are allowed to alter or delete.
You know, Winston Smith in 1984, his job was to go into the Times of London archives and rewrite things that didn't turn out to be true.
So they can go in there, actually change and delete and omit things.
They're allowed to do this.
They've taken these files away because computer files we're talking about.
They're allowed to change them.
That's according to the judge's order.
They're allowed to change what?
No, according to the law that is written.
Now, the police, the head of the AFP, the Australian Federal Police, was trying to say that as soon as we copy it to a disk drive, the metadata changes.
But I don't know if that's all the changes that he's talking about.
That's how he was trying to get around it.
The point I'm making here is that they could have gone in to get these files a year ago.
And then on the day before, that would have been on Tuesday, here down in Canberra in the capital, the police raided the home of the political editor of the Sunday Telegraph, which is a Murdoch-owned newspaper.
Because they were looking for files in her house of an article she'd published in April 2018, a year ago, saying that the legislature was thinking of changing the law to make it easier to spy on Australian citizens.
Ironically, and they went into her house to try to get her source, to get materials, notes, etc.
Two different media organizations, two days apart, one right after the other, for stories that were one and two years old.
And I'm arguing here that when Assange was indicted under the Espionage Act on May 23, just a few weeks ago, suddenly we see these two raids happening.
And I think there has to be a correlation here.
There is a change in the atmosphere.
All these governments that are kind of lackeys of the U.S. look towards the U.S.
And it was like, OK, now we can do it, too.
And WikiLeaks tweeted that morning of the ABC raid, quote, the criminalization and crackdown on national security journalism is spreading like a virus.
The Assange precedent is already having effect.
Journalists must unite and remember that courage is also contagious.
And it was the tweet of an article about the raid at the ABC headquarters.
So this is a really damaging, dangerous situation that we see and that even your friend Rachel Maddow had to admit was possible the day of the day after of the Espionage Act.
My friend.
Hey, so they don't even have a First Amendment there, though, and I'm not so sure ours is any good when it comes to this stuff anymore.
But so you mentioned the law there.
How far does it go, really?
And I mean, because they're talking about this.
You show these tweets from these guys.
They're saying that this is pretty unprecedented, right?
Yeah, it's sort of like.
Sorry.
Excuse me.
The Assange indictment was also unprecedented.
They had never indicted a journalist in the U.S. under Section E of the 1917 Espionage Act.
They had in the First World War, when it was passed, they did prosecute some journalists either on the Sedition Act, which was an amendment to the Espionage Act for three years until it was repealed, or under other sections where you could not impede the draft.
That was really what those other journalists were indicted for.
But no one had ever before until Julian Assange been indicted under the Espionage Act for possessing and disseminating classified information.
So likewise, I've been asking some Australians here.
No one could remember if this had happened before, that they could be very similar.
It was on the books and they never really used it before.
But I'm not 100 percent certain of that.
But it's unusual.
We'll say that.
That's to say the least.
Nobody can remember if this had ever happened before.
And I've asked some people who work at ABC and whatnot.
So it's a very dangerous situation.
I mean, this kind of thing does happen in England, right?
Where they have that Official Secrets Act and reporters know that they better not publish a document.
They could get in real trouble, right?
Well, let me tell you something about that.
I've been researching this piece for some time now about the history of the Espionage Act.
And I could tell you that the language of the Espionage Act is based on the 1911 Defense Secrets Act, U.S. Defense Secrets Act, which is based on the language of the 1889 Official Secrets Act in Britain.
And when the 1911 Defense Secrets Act came out, so six months later, the Official Secrets Act in Britain was updated.
The language is almost identical.
It is identical between the Defense Secrets Act of 1911 and the 1889 Official British Secrets Act.
In other words, they're very, very similar in Australia, although I should report that the legislature here, the parliament debated today, that would be Friday here in Australia, that they need new legislation to protect journalists from this type of thing.
So there's actually discussion going on that there needs to be something like a First Amendment, which they do not have.
Now, in Britain, they send a denotice to a newspaper saying we do not believe you should publish this information.
And under certain circumstances, they could just ignore it and still publish.
And in others, they could get in trouble for certain parts of their Official Secrets Act.
It's very complicated, these laws, that they could be prosecuted for this.
That's correct.
But it's not in every case.
It's mostly geared to civil servants, the Official Act, not to leak, not so much to journalists.
But there is one section, I think it's Section 5, that deals with all citizens, which includes journalists.
Well, of course, we know that our government is experimenting on our liberty at every chance they get.
And the Supreme Court almost always goes along with whatever the cops want to do and this kind of thing.
But can you imagine for just one moment what the USA would be like if we didn't have that First Amendment?
If we didn't have an explicit ban in the Constitution itself from the Congress and the president even going down this path?
I mean, like the standards for punishing libel even on a public person are extremely high, far higher than you would have in England, that kind of thing.
And this is the kind of thing that Trump complains about all the time.
All these journalists writing things about me I don't like.
Admittedly, many of them are lies, the things that they say.
But he wants to be able to do something about it, and he can't because of the First Amendment.
Right.
And what we hope to see from this indictment of Assange under the Espionage Act is a challenge from the ACLU or somebody that this part of the Espionage Act is unconstitutional.
Because it not only criminalizes journalism, it criminalizes anybody who shares, who possesses and shares what the government considers classified.
That would be any WikiLeaks document, any cable that has been classified.
It doesn't get declassified because it's in the public.
So if I send to you by email or a tweet a document from WikiLeaks that's classified, I am technically breaking the Espionage Act as well.
The New York Times the other day did a big piece about the leader of Abu Dhabi and the UAE, and they mentioned they quoted from a WikiLeaks classified cable.
They misbroke the Espionage Act as well.
This is why the Obama administration didn't go after Assange, because now the other newspapers are doing the same kind of thing almost all the time.
And why aren't they going to be prosecuted?
It's incredibly dangerous, and I hope that this is challenged, this part of the Espionage Act as being in violation of the First Amendment.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the Supreme Court, but it needs to be challenged so that this could be struck out.
It shouldn't be on there.
It's been used for the first time.
We're in a whole new world right now.
I said Rachel Maddow was your friend.
Of course I was being sarcastic, Scott.
But she and the other New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, others, Chris Hayes, they all came forward to say this is dangerous.
It was all self-interested, because I could be next.
Was anti-Trump?
Sure.
Because Trump is really a danger on this issue without any question.
He's been calling the media out.
He hates the media.
I guess if he has a second term, he doesn't need to be reelected again.
He could go after a larger news organization.
We've just seen them march into the ABC down here in Australia.
Think about that.
If the police went into NBC or to the New York Times newsroom to find out who their sources were on an article that revealed alleged war crimes by the U.S. government.
That's what happened here in Australia.
And that's what they're doing to Assange, obviously.
He's revealed alleged war crimes, prima facie evidence of war crimes.
And that's why they've indicted him.
This is what totalitarian governments do.
This is what the source, who has been arrested, by the way, in the ABC story.
He's been giving interviews.
And he just called the Australian government totalitarian yesterday, that they are only interested in the interest of the Australian government, not the Australian nation.
And that he was trying to help the country understand what the government's doing.
And they have punished him.
He faces several years in jail.
Hang on just one second.
Hey man, here's a book you guys got to read.
It's called No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
By Hussain Badajani.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
It's a book about how a libertarian ought to run his tech company.
I think you'll really get a kick out of it.
No Dev, No Ops, No IT.
Well, you know, and that kind of goes to the point against what I was saying a few minutes ago there about the First Amendment.
That really our constitution is traditional and implied in the same way that the British one is.
That really the First Amendment is only the First Amendment as long as the American people insist that it is.
As long as our tradition says you can't march your federal cops into the New York Times newsroom, man.
We don't do that.
Because in reality, they can.
They are the guys with the guns.
The federal police are at the top of the pile.
In fact, they can do whatever they want within the limits of what the American people will tolerate.
And so, like you're saying, this is a huge new precedent.
It's a brand new day in Australia.
This has been done now.
Maybe it can be done five more times.
Maybe this is how we're going to do business in Australia from now on.
If anybody publishes anything that they don't like on national security, they're going to end up getting raided and treated this way.
And maybe, as you're saying, maybe Donald Trump will just start acting like that if he feels like it.
And who is going to stop him?
It takes, it's essentially, it's the belief of the people in the society about what is inviolate and what they can get away with.
That is the only real check.
Absolutely.
And we are in a different era after the Assange indictment.
And it's terrifying.
It's a road to tyranny because they are unaccountable governments.
When a journalist holds them to account, they go in and arrest them.
Think about that.
This is what's happened.
This is not Orwellian.
This is real.
Yeah.
And by the way, those stories that you're talking about, about the Australian special operators committing war crimes in Afghanistan, those were huge stories.
Extremely important stories.
And then, like you say, the worst we ever got was hang the infantry out to dryer.
The lower down guys, but never the officers in charge of running the whole thing at the top in the first place.
It was going to be a limited hangout anyway.
It amounted to a limited hangout anyway.
But that's not good enough.
And, you know, same thing here about the Manning leak.
You know, all the liberals are so upset at Assange for supposedly, allegedly receiving a leak from the Russians about Hillary Clinton.
All DNC and Podesta campaign stuff that we had a right to know every single bit of it.
But all this indictment that they've gone after Assange for is for the Manning leak.
The Iraq and Afghan war logs.
The State Department cables.
As you say, New York Times is still citing those cables to this day.
Of course they are.
And this is a hugely important leak.
Again, that we had the right to know all of this stuff.
And, you know, it was just absolutely a blessing to journalism and to humanity, this leak.
So our whole society should be rallying around Assange and Manning right now and saying that no.
You know, you can try to, you know, otherize these two or whatever you want.
But essentially this is the greatest act of journalism in the 21st century.
And we'll be damned if you let them put them in prison.
I mean you say this needs to go to the Supreme Court.
Actually, you know, he needs to be kept.
Assange needs to be kept from being extradited to the U.S. at all.
You know, this case needs to be dropped before it ever even gets tested in a court.
And the American people, it would take, with some political champions, to demand it.
To make it that way that there's no way we're going to let you follow through with this.
And after all, I know you've read the indictment.
It's a joke.
The indictment couldn't possibly hold up in any court outside of eastern Virginia anyway, Joe.
Well, it's like a manual of investigative journalism.
How to encourage your sources to get information, to give you information.
How to protect their identity.
That's what it's describing, this indictment.
Investigative journalism.
Bob Perry, who founded Consortium News, wrote in December of 2010, a month after it was announced that the Obama Justice Department was beginning this investigation that has now ultimately culminated in the Espionage Act indictment of Assange, that he encouraged his sources all the time to give him more information.
He even encouraged them to break the law.
This is Bob Perry.
In order to give classified information that would unveil a much larger crime, like the crimes committed in Afghanistan and Iraq that WikiLeaks uncovered and ABC reported on.
This is what journalists do.
So that indictment is just describing journalism.
But another thing it does that's really interesting.
It keeps smearing Assange for having revealed the names of all these informants of the U.S., U.S. informants, endangering their lives.
We know there's not one shred of evidence any of them have ever been harmed.
And number two, there's no law against that.
If you look at the indictment, no statute is cited that he is violating in revealing names of those informants.
So it's not against the law.
This is window dressing and smearing against him to get public behind this controversial indictment.
And on top of that, the reason he revealed those names is because two Guardian reporters, David Lee and Luke Harding, in a book that they published before WikiLeaks had published the full scale of the cables, the State Department cables.
They were still unredacted.
Those guys, Lee and Harding, published a password to the unredacted files in WikiLeaks.
Therefore, only governments and intelligence agencies would be able to use that password and decrypt what was in there.
When that happened, WikiLeaks had to decide then immediately to release the unredacted files so that people who were named in them could get to safety.
In other words, let them know, because otherwise only the intelligence agencies would know who the informants were, and then they could take action against them.
That's how the WikiLeaks had to reveal those names.
And all we're getting is smears against Assange in that indictment for having done something that is not a crime.
It may be unethical, but in that case I described it, why he did it, but it's not a crime.
But we keep reading about that in the indictments.
And I feel, frankly, the extradition—now, as you know, the other news of the last few days was Sweden.
A Swedish court refused to issue a European arrest warrant.
Therefore, Assange cannot be then arrested and extradited to Sweden.
Sweden will have to go to prosecute him to the Belmarsh prison to interview Assange there on this reopened sexual allegation case.
That's very significant, because now the ball is firmly in Britain's court.
They can't palm him off and wash their hands of him giving him to Sweden and let Sweden send him to the U.S.
They've got to deal with it.
Does the British Home Secretary want to indict—sorry, want to extradite a journalist to a country that has indicted him for committing journalism, for doing investigative journalism, which is what that indictment—does they want to be seen doing that?
There's a lot of pressure, I think, on Britain in that case.
So now there are going to be new charges.
WikiLeaks said on Thursday in a tweet that there are new charges probably coming against Assange based on testimony from someone he used to know in Iceland, that the FBI in May, May 6th, went to Iceland to interview this guy, and then they brought him back to Washington on May 23rd for further questioning, and they feared there's going to be new charges against him.
They don't say what they are, but this guy that they name is a criminal.
He's been indicted for being a conman, for molesting nine minors, sexually molesting nine minors.
He has been diagnosed clinically as a sociopath.
But most informants are pretty bad people, too.
It's going to have to have some kind of forensic evidence, and it could have something to do with hacking.
This is what they want to get Assange on—real hacking, not that first stupid indictment, which was a five-year maximum penalty placeholder.
And in that case, he never tried to intrude a government computer, because Chelsea Manning had a top-secret clearance.
She had legal access to everything that she wanted.
She was just trying to protect her name, and she asked Assange, if it was Assange, in a chat, how do I protect myself by signing in as an admin so that I don't be seen as the— and the indictment says that.
By signing in—trying to sign in, they didn't do it.
As an admin, it would have made it hard for investigators to find out who she was.
That was exactly the point.
Like I was saying, the indictment says— And what does it not say?
What it doesn't say is that then Manning would have had access to a higher level of secrets and this kind of thing.
No, the indictment says clearly she had access to all of it and lays it out.
She had access to everything.
Hey, let me ask you this, Joe, because here's something I'm confused about, man.
So I talked with Trevor Tim.
I read the indictment.
I did a little fisking of it myself over at the Libertarian Institute.
But then I talked with Trevor Tim, and I talked with Dan Ellsberg about it, and I'm a little confused.
And I'm not sure if maybe I'm just making a kind of false distinction myself, or whether there is a distinction here.
But it seemed to me like what they were doing was they were essentially, as you were saying, with all those smears in the indictment, they never quite come out and say, and that's when he stopped being a journalist and became a co-conspirator.
They never quite do that.
They imply it a few times that there's some kind of transitive property of some kind of activity here where he stops being a journalist and starts being a leaker himself.
And so it seems to me like essentially what they're doing is like a bait and switch.
And they're saying, you know, Manning leaked this.
Manning leaked that.
Look at all the stuff Assange leaked.
Right?
But they're just kind of pretending that he was the leaker and not the receiver of the leak.
But then when I talked with Ellsberg, he said the way that he read it, and he knows a thing or two about the Espionage Act, old Dan.
And he was saying that the way he was reading it was that they were really going for the new and more expansive interpretation of the Espionage Act, that it applies to journalists in the ways that Woodrow Wilson always meant it to, but that so far it's never really been applied yet.
Is it one or the other or both of those or it doesn't make a difference?
Well, it doesn't.
Well, first of all, they never call him a journalist once in that indictment.
They're saying all along he was not a journalist.
The idea that he leaked something that was leaked to him is absurd, although the New York Times called him their source, and they think that too.
They're thinking Assange just leaked information to them rather than him being another reporter that shared his material with them.
But there's been no changes in the Espionage Act on that point.
What has changed, of course, was the 1961 amendment allowing anyone anywhere in the world to be prosecuted under this act.
It had been only on U.S. territory before, so it became global.
But this has always been on the books.
What Dan is saying is it's never been used.
I also spoke with Dan at length about this.
It's also never been used in this way before, but they always could use it that way.
So there's a legal, but clearly looks to be an unconstitutional part of that act, but it's still in there until the Supreme Court decides it's unconstitutional or the Congress acts to get rid of it, which neither one is probably going to happen, unfortunately.
So they just never used it before because they knew.
Even, you know, Nixon, Dan may have told you that when he leaked, depending on papers, that the Nixon administration did empanel a grand jury in Boston to look into two of the two Times reporters, Neal Sheehan and Hendrick Smith, were both in a grand jury process because they wanted to get them on that section of the Espionage Act.
The Supreme Court ruled that the government couldn't do prior restraint, can't tell a newspaper beforehand you can't publish this.
That's clearly a violation of the First Amendment.
That's not allowed, and that's what the Nixon administration tried to do, of course.
They put an injunction on the Times and the Post.
But what they did say in that majority opinion was that after publication, a journalist could be liable for prosecution because of the Espionage Act, this part of the Espionage Act, and Nixon tried to do it.
But when Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office was wiretapped, the two Times reporters asked the government, did you also wiretap us because we were talking to him on the phone, right, to Ellsberg.
They wiretapped Ellsberg, they wiretapped the psychiatrist, and that's when the government dropped the case against them.
So it never happened, but they got close.
It only happened on May 23rd last month when they indicted Assange.
So that's the thing that's changed.
But see, in that case, it's clear cut, right?
They weren't going to pretend for a minute that Neal Sheehan was the leaker, but that is what they're trying to do in this indictment.
They're trying to essentially put Assange's name where Manning's name goes.
When Manning has been already duly convicted of this crime and happily admits liberating these documents for us, we already know what happened here.
Yeah.
Well, that's rubbish.
He's clearly acting as the recipient, and the law says if you receive and you're not authorized to receive it, mere possession is a crime.
And then dissemination is another crime.
So, you know, the indictments, it's a joke, seriously.
It doesn't matter whether— Does it make sense when I'm asking, though, about the theory of the case here?
Yes, yes, because if you remember John Demers, who was the national security division head of the DOJ, in the press briefing he did on the day of the indictment on May 23rd, he was saying, I love the press.
You're all great.
We're not going after the press.
This guy's not a journalist.
Why?
Because he unveiled the names of these informants.
Again, that's not a crime.
But you guys wouldn't do that.
You're responsible.
He wouldn't do it.
And you know what, too?
On that particular point, in the indictment, they, I think, blunder.
I can see why they thought that this bolstered their case, but they quote Assange essentially saying why a lot of these informants' names are newsworthy.
Some of these people are in there because they falsely accused their neighbor of something and got him killed or something like that, or they're informants who are people with political power in Afghanistan.
This governor, this mayor, this police chief, this is all newsworthy stuff.
Don't act like we're violating the privacy of some narc that the DEA pressured into snitching on his connection or some kind of thing like that.
These are people who are involved in a war.
So maybe that doesn't count for every single name.
Maybe some of them should have been redacted.
But they quote Assange himself explaining why many of them are newsworthy.
Thank you very much.
Well, they don't think he's in a position to make news judgments since they say he's not a journalist.
It's a railroading indictment.
And I fear this next indictment, if it comes, another superseding indictment, could have a hacking charge.
I have no idea.
I'm just speculating.
But they did, the FBI did interview this Icelandic hacker who has a criminal record as long as your arm.
So as most informants do, but if he has some kind of evidence against Assange, this is what the government really wants.
And then that would prove people like Chuck Todd who says he's not a journalist, Assange.
He's a hacker.
Well, there's no evidence of that at all.
And I'm hoping they never do come up with something like that and that everything he's published is because whistleblowers and sources gave it to him and not for a hack.
And I really don't know what's going to come down the line, but we have to brace ourselves for something new, some new charges.
And look, seriously, if a reporter broke into, say, I don't know, DNC headquarters with a thumb drive and stole some DNC emails, that might be against the law, the breaking and entering part, but it wouldn't make the publishing a crime.
That would still be journalism.
And so you might say that you disapprove of that reporter's ethics.
You shouldn't report a story that way, committing crimes in order to report your story.
But story's still good if the story's still good.
Yes, it is.
And what about—so let me—oh, go ahead.
No, I was thinking you were talking about hacktivists who are ethical hackers, if you will.
They go in and get government documents or corporate documents.
Yeah, I mean, they're trying to draw these distinctions here.
You know, what about when Greg Palast goes in with a secret recorder and records Elliott Cohen talking about how we're going to steal all of Iraq's oil and whatever?
I guess you shouldn't do that.
And he didn't consent to be recorded.
But then again, he's helping plan a war.
And Palast is a journalist and is not recording him to blackmail him, but is recording him to publish all about what he said.
And so, you know, I don't know.
These should be ethical questions, not legal ones.
But there are laws against doing that, depending on your state, by the way.
Some states are one-party states where you don't—only one person needs to know the recordings.
So I don't know what state— Yeah, I don't mean to accuse Palast of a felony, but you get what I mean.
Yes, I do.
I do.
But that is a distinction.
As of right now, they've got nothing on Hassan.
He did not break any law.
I mean, he broke this part of the Espionage Act.
The law that he broke says that he could possess classified information.
The one that's way overbroad that's never been applied is the only one he broke.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it applies to me and you if we email a cable from WikiLeaks to somebody else.
We've also done this.
You know, so Glenn Greenwald, who is a lawyer, of course, wrote this thing for The Washington Post, which, hey, at least they let Greenwald write this thing, saying, look, guys, there's no government license that says that now you're a journalist on any level, state, local, or federal.
Of course not.
A journalist is one who does journalism ever.
I mean, if you catch someone right in the middle of just beginning an act of journalism, they're a journalist now.
It's as simple as that.
You don't even have to call yourself one.
And in the indictment, they go for these gimmicks where they say Assange and WikiLeaks had some branding, essentially, where they were saying we're the public's intelligence agency, which could be no different than a slogan for The Washington Post.
And then they pretend that that means, aha, see, he admits he's an intelligence agency.
This is silly.
That was ridiculous.
That was really ridiculous.
But you made a good point that you don't even have to say you're a journalist.
A lot of people say they are, in my opinion, are not because they're not really practicing journalism.
They're writing their opinion on a blog.
But Assange, it's what he did.
You could see from the indictment, it lays it out, that he knew what he was doing.
He was trying to help protect his source there, and he was trying to get more information from her.
And he's published this information.
He's written books.
He used to speak quite eloquently about geopolitical issues.
He understood what he was publishing.
This guy's not just some clerk who was getting documents and putting them out on the Internet.
So he did journalism.
Whether he calls himself that or not, exactly right, doesn't matter.
And, again, there are people who do say that I'm a journalist, and I don't think they really are, frankly, in my opinion.
Having been one, a professional one, for 30 years, I think there are certain standards and skills you need.
And Assange has them.
No question about it.
He did great journalism.
It doesn't matter if he didn't go to Columbia Journalism School.
Yeah.
And it doesn't matter if he published a document or 500 documents or 50,000 documents.
And it doesn't matter whether he wrote an introductory article to the documents or not.
I mean, these are, again, distinctions without differences.
I can see why, if you were at the CIA, and you were looking at this guy who likes publishing documents in bulk like that, that he could be a problematic problem for you that you want to do something about.
If you were Hillary Clinton, you might say, why don't we just kill this guy?
That makes sense to me, why they feel that way.
Because the Washington Post doesn't do them like that, but the Washington Post should.
And it's good that they don't like it.
I mean, they're not supposed to like being checked and balanced.
But ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
And obviously, the First Amendment is the First Amendment, and that's one of the five rights protected in the First Amendment for a very specific reason.
So that the public, the so-called pretended sovereign population, are the final and real check on the government that supposedly we allow to exist to protect us.
And we pay for it with our taxpayers' money.
They are doing things in our name abroad that they want to hide from us.
And when someone uncovers it, they want to put them in jail.
I mean, just think about that.
That's where we've come to in the U.S.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
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And thanks.
Hey, by the way, so let me just give you a chance to talk a little bit about the Manning leak.
I brought that up a minute ago.
But the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the State Department cables, a lot of people listening to this, they might have been too young or maybe they were a bad guy back then or just not interested or whatever.
They don't know the stories.
Quite a few years ago now, 2010, Manning leaks puts this on Wikileaks.
And just how important was this stuff and what exactly does it all represent there, Joe?
Well, 2010 was when the leaks took place, and this so-called war on terror began right after 9-11.
Correct?
So the country changed enormously after 9-11.
I'm sure you've talked a lot about this over the years.
In terms of the Patriot Act and the way journalism was embedded and had to toe the line, the fear that permeated the society, the way the press pushed that illegal invasion of Iraq, and then the conduct of the U.S. in Iraq and this endless war in Afghanistan.
You know a lot more about that than I do, having written that book.
So these things needed to be known to the American public.
And these are also wars that are always in the background somehow, Scott.
We're in this perpetual war that nobody's really paying attention.
It reminds me, and also in 1984, that the British Army was always at war, but nobody was paying attention.
It was on the radio, but nobody heard.
That's the way we're at right now.
So to have Chelsea Manning, an intelligence analyst, a private based in Iraq, come across this material and realize that this has to be known by the public.
This is what I signed and what I made an oath to, to the Constitution of the United States, not the president and not the political party that I was in, to the Constitution.
And I have a duty to reveal these crimes.
And she did that, and she did it by giving the Iraq War Diaries, the, sorry, the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diaries, and the State Department cables.
Two weeks, somebody ratted her out, somebody she trusted, and she was arrested, court-martialed, held in a prison where a U.N. rapporteur said she was essentially tortured, and finally got out because Obama commuted her sentence.
Now they're trying to get more dirt and trying to get more charges against Assange.
Even after this Espionage Act indictment, she remains in a jail in Alexandria, Virginia, because she refused to testify to this grand jury.
Don't know what they need from her anymore because they have this huge indictment now.
So maybe there are going to be more charges.
And she's not talking.
To her incredible credit, she has put herself in jail again, and they're going to fine her for every month that she's in prison and refuses to testify for the length of this indictment, which is 18 months.
Chelsea Manning is an incredible hero.
Julian Assange, for whatever you think about him personally, and it's not about his personality, it was a very courageous publisher and journalist.
And they have brought to the American public knowledge that we would never otherwise have that was, of course, published at the time by The Guardian in Britain, by The Spiegel in Germany, by The New York Times in the United States.
They partnered with these newspapers to bring this news to the American people.
And now those very journalists, after the 2016 election, turned against Assange, tried to say he's a Russian agent, et cetera, et cetera, without any evidence, no collusion.
The Mueller indictment does not prove in any way that Assange knew that he was talking to GRU agents.
I mean, the whole thing is so disturbing and part and parcel of the way the country has changed, and not for the better.
Since 9-11 up until now, the consequences of revealing that information are so stark right now.
It's not only Assange.
We're seeing now other news organizations being raided by the police.
It's just terrible.
Yeah.
Well, you know what, though?
And Dan Ellsberg was talking about this on the show, too, is that they sure set a great example.
And, of course, the government's trying to make an example out of them about this is what happens to you.
And yet, you know, Ellsberg knew that he was facing life in prison and he leaked the Pentagon Papers anyway.
As I like to put it, especially these military officers and these CIA officers and with the access to data that they have that they could inform the public of, and all they're risking is jail time when they quite literally, especially the military officers, they quite literally are sending their men, as they put it, off to risk their life and limb killing other people.
You know, many of them, you know, quite literally coming home without legs, without their manhood, without a future, you know, sitting in Walter Reed for the rest of their lives.
They demand those kind of sacrifices from 19 and 20 year old boys out there.
They ought to be willing to do life in prison to tell the truth about what our government is doing that we all know is criminal and wrong.
That we all know that if the American people had a fair chance to understand what was going on and to have a fight about it, that we would at least try to stop it.
Well, hold my breath.
Yeah, do that.
However, there is that guy here in Australia who was a lawyer, a very senior lawyer in the Australian army who had access to all this classified information.
He's the one who leaked it to ABC and he wanted to get the generals and they only went after the lower soldiers and he's facing years in jail right now for revealing the truth to the Australian people the way Chelsea Manning did to the American people.
I need people like this.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You cut out a little bit.
I thought you were done.
Manning, you mentioned the rat there, Adrian Lamo, the rat that turned in Manning.
I just want to mention a couple of things about that, the chat logs, because they were partially revealed, not completely, but in the chat logs, or maybe eventually they were.
But the rat says to Manning, hey, why don't you sell the secrets to Russia or China?
You can make all this money.
And Manning says, what, are you kidding?
No, see, the whole thing is, I'm not doing this for me.
I don't want anything and I sure don't want to help some other country against America.
I want the people of America and of the world to know this truth, the stuff I've been reading and these things, and to know the truth of this.
And it sounds so high school civics class, childish and naive and hopeful and earnest in such a way you almost doubt it.
But Manning says, I just want the people to be able to use democracy to make reforms so that – isn't that how it's supposed to work?
This is the purest kind of Jeffersonian ideal of how America is supposed to work that you could come up with right there, while the rat is trying to lure him into a death penalty case.
Well, you know, the myths that she was taught in school about America being for democracy and the lies that officials say that we're spreading democracy, she actually believed that and wanted to hold them to it.
Imagine that.
Exactly.
Also, she went to the New York Times and the Washington Post, by the way, with her files and her story, and they turned her down.
She went to WikiLeaks and he published it, Assange did, which makes him a journalist as well because that was published in the New York Times through Assange.
Think about it that way.
They first turned it down.
Yep.
And like you're saying, even the Times is quoting those WikiLeaks, those State Department cables to this day.
Anywhere you read a story that says, according to State Department cables from 2006, that's Manning and Assange brought that to you.
That's right.
Every time.
There must be 10,000 stories like that out there.
Anyway, I'll let you go.
Have a great evening.
I guess it is over there, down there in Australia.
Great to talk to you again, Joe.
Okay.
All the best, Scott.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
That's Joe Lauria, guys.
He's the editor of ConsortiumNews.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
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