All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, Joe Lauria, Editor-in-Chief of consortiumnews.com.
Thank God for that, and talking to us by the magic of space age technology from literally quite the other side of the planet down there in Australia.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Joe?
I'm okay, Scott.
Hope you're okay, too.
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you staying up so late to talk with us here.
You have been doing the all-important work this week, along with a couple of other greats in the alternative media here, of keeping track of the extradition hearings regarding Julian Assange and his charges under the American Espionage Act of 1917 there.
The big news is that Dan Ellsberg testified and said lots of things, but I know that lots of other things have happened as well, and I'd like to just give you the floor to tell us what we need to know about in order of what you figure is important.
Yeah, well, I'm kind of focused on what happened today, but you're right to bring up Dan.
He was tremendous.
Well, you can go ahead and talk about today first if you want, and whatever is fine.
Whatever is fine.
Yeah, let's talk about today, because it was a really jam-packed day.
Four different pieces of testimony today.
It began with an Australian, sorry, a New Zealand investigative journalist named Nikki Hager, who had worked and partnered with WikiLeaks on Afghanistan files, and he helped him write a book called Hit and Run about the conduct of a New Zealand special forces unit in Afghanistan that led to a parliamentary investigation in New Zealand, but he was testifying, and this is key because the government, the US government through their British lawyers, have been focused almost exclusively on the issue of Assange allegedly revealing the names of government informants in these releases in the Afghan, Iraq, and State Department cables.
They are claiming that they're only prosecuting him for the publication of these documents, and everything else is simply his possession of and obtaining and possessing these documents, which is illegal under the Espionage Act, at least I thought so until the testimony later in the afternoon, who made it much more complex.
But just to finish this, this issue of the informants has been dealt with almost every day now in two weeks, and the government alleges that Assange purposely put these names out there, recklessly did so, and he made statements that they deserve to die if they were ratting on their own country for the Americans and that type of thing.
And in fact, the defense witnesses, many of them have refuted almost every point, one as Hager worked with him and Geertz worked with him in London, or Julian, that is, during the publication of these documents, the media partners that Wikileaks put together, principally the New York Times, Der Spiegel in Germany, El Pais in Spain, and The Guardian in Britain.
They were also partnering with smaller papers in other countries like in New Zealand.
And everyone who worked in that bunker in The Guardian, except for David Lee and Luke Harding, two Guardian journalists there, have repeatedly said that Assange was overly cautious, paranoid even about the protection of the material, that he worked diligently and seriously to roll out slowly all of these documents, first redacting everything to the point where he angered those media partners because he allowed a deadline for publication to pass because he wasn't satisfied that the redactions had been completed.
And he was far more intent, we hear from these witnesses, on doing the redactions than anyone else from the other newspapers.
But David Lee and Luke Harding, in their book on Wikileaks, two things happen with that book that's really key because the government prosecutors continuously quote from this book.
And Lee and Harding, first of all, wrote about an incident at a restaurant in London during that period in which Assange allegedly said that insurgents deserve to die.
And John Gertz, who was a Der Spiegel reporter at the time, who testified on Wednesday, the same day Ellsberg did, was present at that dinner and he has stated in media reports and even in a signed statement that has appeared on Twitter that, in fact, Assange never said such a thing and that he, a mainstream journalist, is defending Assange on this point, that he was not reckless.
The defense attorneys put Gertz on the stand, a virtual stand, everyone is testifying online because of the pandemic.
And Gertz was, we were all waiting for the end of this testimony.
The defense attorney was going to ask him at the very end about what happened at that restaurant in London.
The government objected and it was sustained, unfortunately, by Judge Vanessa Barreta.
And the reason the government objected is because, excuse me, Gertz had not put this in, apparently, in his written testimony that was submitted to the court and that a supplemental witness statement should have been filed.
It wasn't.
So that could have been a screw up on the defense's team side.
And Barreta would not allow Gertz to tell what happened at that dinner.
So even today, that was Wednesday, today, the prosecutor again is bringing up what he said at that dinner.
And this lays out there in the court, of course, only Barreta is going to make a decision.
There's no jury here.
This isn't really a trial.
It's an extradition trial.
Still, though, let me make sure I understand this right.
The prosecutor has brought up this anecdote out of this book over and over again as though it's testimony.
Then they have a guy who was there who wants to testify that that never happened.
The judge sustains the objection, won't even let that exchange take place.
And then the prosecutor goes right back to making the same allegation of the same anecdote again after that.
Yeah.
And the other thing that the Harding and Lee book did was to, for some reason that's never been explained that I know of, as a chapter title on their book, it was a book about WikiLeaks.
The chapter title was the actual password that was given to the Guardian by WikiLeaks that would unlock the encrypted, unredacted Afghan, sorry, State Department cables.
Right.
So WikiLeaks was slow, as Geertz testified on Wednesday, was slowly rolling them out.
And they were going to spend a whole year taking their time to redact everything before they actually published them.
These guys put the password out there.
And that was back in February of 2011.
It wasn't until August or late July or August that a newspaper in Germany called Freitag noticed this.
It was actually brought to their attention apparently by Daniel Domschack-Berg, who was a close associate of Sancho, they had a huge falling out.
And he brought this to the attention of this German newspaper.
And WikiLeaks knew that this had happened and they begged them not to publish this password, but they did anyway.
And then a couple of, about a couple of weeks later, John Young at Cryptom, I'm sure you know who he is, Scott, he got the password.
He had the technical skills to use it to unredact all of, sorry, to unencrypt all of these hundreds of thousands of documents, I think 400,000 documents that WikiLeaks was slowly going through.
And then it was out there.
It was published.
The next day, WikiLeaks decided also to publish the unredacted files.
And the prosecutor knows this story just as well as you and I know this story about how that happened.
But they continuously say he did it first and he was reckless.
I mean, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
And that, pardon me, just to be clear, that really is their position, is that what you just said, never even mind that, it never happened and let's just ignore it to death.
Assange is the one who released the names.
Yep.
That's a blatant falsehood.
Sticking to it.
Yeah.
I mean, numerous, numerous well-positioned sources who were involved in this have testified to that effect and to no avail.
And listen, I'm sorry for the tangent, forgive me, but you bring up the name of this Italian journalist, which I need to memorize her name so I can invoke it in another important story here.
Stefania Morizzi, right?
Something like that.
Help me out.
Say it right for me.
Stefania Morizzi.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I can't even say it.
Anyway.
So she is the same lady who said, she debunked a whole major facet of the Russiagate garbage conspiracy theory that they released the Podesta emails in order to preempt the grab them by their lady parts thing from Donald Trump in the campaign of 2016.
And she was the one who said, excuse me, but I was working on that leak for months and it was ready.
And that was why we published it.
And it had nothing to do with the release of that tape or Roger Stone or any of this conspiracy theory garbage.
So it's just another point of the fake Russiagate hoax that adds up to absolutely nothing.
And she is the source of that.
Yeah, that's right.
She wrote that in conservative news.
It may have been for the first time she did a piece for us two years ago, I think.
And I actually think that it came out before the Hollywood access, like within an hour or something.
It was very close.
But you bring her up here in this article for a different purpose, which is she's explaining how much effort she put into helping to redact these Manning leaks, the Manning cables from back in 2010.
Correct?
Yeah.
Well, they're all Manning cable.
I mean, they're all Manning leaks.
Afghan.
No, no, no.
But I just mean, because we're talking about 2016 and the Podesta leak where she was involved in debunking that conspiracy.
But here, when she's debunking the lies about Assange, she's talking about her participation in helping to do the redactions back then.
Spent nine months with another journalist to go through 4,000, I think, documents, something.
Yes.
We've had great detail from another witness about how they actually did it.
A guy who started, Professor John Slavota, started Iraq Body Count, a website called Iraq Body Count, still up there, where they tried to get the numbers of civilians killed in the Iraq war.
And he saw the Afghan files and he somehow learned that Iraq would come out and he collaborated with Assange on these documents.
He explained how they redacted the names and basically they had to create their own software and it took weeks to test it and whatnot.
And the software put the hundreds of thousands of files up against an English dictionary and any word that didn't appear in the English dictionary appeared and those would use the Arabic names, even transliterated into Latin letters.
So he was very serious about doing that and the government continues to insist on that.
And there's another major development, and we saw that two days ago and again today, that they have started dropping this charge or this belief, statement, that Assange is not a journalist.
It's in the affidavit of Gordon Cromberg, who is an assistant attorney, a US attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, where Assange would go on trial if he's extradited.
Cromberg said he's not a journalist and that was a key part of the government argument.
They seemed to drop that because today in the afternoon there was an extraordinarily intense, and by the way, your listeners can read the account I just finished writing about it, and I did a video report on it as well, unfortunately, very few journalists are following the case.
We were fortunate to get video access, so we're watching every moment of it, and there aren't too many.
There are only a group of about 16 in our group, and there's another 60, there's like 30 or 40 journalists around the world who are, no one's in the actual courtroom, they're either in a room, a spillover room at Old Bailey, or they watch it online as we are.
And I'm sorry, I think I lost my train of thought.
I think you were going to talk about Al-Masri.
No, I wasn't going to get to Al-Masri yet, but we could talk about him as well.
No, the fact that they're saying he's not a journalist anymore, because the entire afternoon testimony today with this guy Carrie Shenkman, who was extraordinary in his battles with the prosecutor, she was trying to, Claire Dobbin, the prosecutor, was trying to clearly establish that the U.S. government can prosecute journalists, which is something I always say said, but I'm a layman, I'm not a lawyer, but from my reading, any one person's reading of that makes it clear that in section 793e, paragraph e, that any person alive who gets unauthorized possession of classified information has committed a crime.
So if you read a WikiLeaks document online that's still classified, and they are still classified, a lot of them, and then you email to a friend, you have technically broken the Exponage Act, so she was just trying to say that there is no preclusion of indicting journalists for this.
And that's the way I read it, but he gave very lawyerly answers about various cases that came up today, this case law that showed that this isn't all that clear, etc., and of course there's the First Amendment, and that's the big- Well, and look, I mean, they're giving it all away right there, that they're no longer trying to frame this, that this is a special exception of a case, and that because this is not really journalism, this is espionage.
He conspired with Manning somehow in a pre-planned way that makes it something other than journalism, and now they're saying, okay, you're right, the guy's a journalist, but we're still putting him in prison.
Right?
Right.
It's a conspiracy charge, a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to intrude a government computer.
So that's a theory, the indictment, so therefore you might say the government are conspiracy theorists because they're talking about a conspiracy, and all they have is a theory about it they haven't proven yet.
And one that is being disproven and has been disproven, really, as they're constructing it anyway.
Yeah, well, I mean, see, they can't technically on this part of the act at 793, 794 deals with classic espionage, a spy giving documents to a foreign government.
But 793 applies to any citizen, and one has to understand, and Schenckman laid that out brilliantly on Thursday, that the environment in the United States in 1917 when the Espionage Act was passed, there was mania about Germany, and there was a lot of opposition to going to war in the First World War.
I think George Washington's farewell address in which he warned against entanglements in Europe was still taken to heart by a lot of Americans in 1917.
It was only like 120 years after Washington had said that.
And Wilson, Woodrow Wilson, an admirer of the Ku Klux Klan, also admired putting people in jail for speech.
So he tried to put a censorship into that Espionage Act, and he was defeated by only one vote in the Senate.
And then he came up with the Alien Sedition Act, which became part of the Espionage Act.
And under that, many journalists, and Eugene Debs, the most famous one, were prosecuted and jailed for making speeches asking Americans to resist the draft.
And newspapers had published that.
That was enough to land you in prison, and many, many people were, because that was then, after Wilson was gone, it was repealed, that part of it.
But the issue is, this issue has been throughout American history where government has made attempts to stop publications, and you can't do it beforehand.
In other words, you cannot order a newspaper not to publish this, and we learned that in the Pentagon Papers New York Times case, where the government, the Supreme Court, ruled that it was illegal for the Department of Justice under Nixon to tell the Times and the Post you cannot publish this.
But once published, post-publication, they're liable to be charged in the Espionage Act.
And Senator Mike Gravel, who I wrote a book with in 2008 about a lot of these issues, told me when I was researching with him that he was very frightened that Nixon would go after him, because he was, could have been, because when he read the Pentagon Papers into the congressional record, he was under the speech and debate clause, he had immunity.
No legislator, no legislative act can be questioned about anything they do.
So you could put out any kind of classified information you want, if you are a congressman or a senator, and you're in the middle of a legislative act.
I remember Dick Durbin once saying, we knew that the intelligence on Iraq was faulty, but I couldn't say anything because I'm on the intelligence, Senate Intelligence Committee, we're bound by this.
He was lying.
It's wrong.
Absolutely.
And in fact, never even mind the fact that, yes, so you could have gone to sit in prison to save two million lives.
But in fact, as you say, he had nothing to lose whatsoever.
Anyway, please continue.
Well, he had what he had to lose was the same thing Gravel had to lose, but which was basically the confidence of his colleagues and even to be censured by the Senate.
They look very badly on Mike and he lost his chance at committee chairmanships, he told me.
And of course, any ideas he had about running for president at that time, and he was a very young senator, were gone.
So it hurt him in his standing in the Senate, but he didn't, wouldn't go to jail for that.
But when Mike tried to, did in fact publish pending on papers at Beacon Press, they could have gone after him.
But instead they went after Beacon Press.
The FBI invaded this small book publisher of the Unitarian Church in Boston and they harassed them and they almost prosecuted them.
And then a grand jury was impaneled in Boston to try to prosecute two New York Times reporters, Neil Sheehan and Hendrick Smith, who had written the articles about the Pentagon and the Times.
So this came up today in particular because the prosecutor was saying that, well she was actually at one point tried to say that because the government had never actually succeeded in prosecuting anyone, that that showed some kind of restraint, which was really astonishing because they have not shown that restraint here against Julian Assange.
But all of these cases, and there was FDR went against the Chicago Tribune, there was the case of- Obama has the world record for going after journalist sources.
And he got what, eight or 10 of government whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, not just for breaking their secrecy oath, but for espionage under this 1917 war act here.
But even he came up against the New York Times problem, which is if we imprison Assange for this, there's really no different argument to protect Charlie Savage or anyone who leaks even secrets that the CIA handed to them and told them to publish, no matter how untrue or counterproductive they are for the rest of us, you know?
Well, that's correct, except, and that's been thoroughly discussed in the first two weeks of testimony because the government is trying to argue that the, even though Obama administration decided not to prosecute Assange, that they never shut down that grand jury, and that they therefore, they didn't decide not to prosecute him, they just didn't prosecute him.
Some word games we've been going through.
So that the Trump administration was in its rights to pick up that grand jury.
So in other words, you're both right.
You and the prosecutor agree, and you and I both fear that they could go ahead and implement this law as written in a way they've never gotten away with doing so far.
They've come right up to the brink of it a couple of times, but generally the tradition has held that the leaker is in trouble, but the leakee basically can publish whatever he wants and they don't prosecute journalists for that in this country.
We don't have an official secrets act, at least we thought.
We only had this dormant one, but now they're making it active and they really can do this.
If they're willing to take that law that far, but then the question is whether ultimately that'll be struck down as unconstitutional because it would finally be put to that test.
That's what this Assange case could actually achieve if it goes to the US, and we're talking about years of appeals first in Britain, maybe in the European Court of Human Rights.
It could backfire on us too.
The court might uphold the Wilson Act.
It was a challenge to it in 1917, I believe, or 19, the Schenck versus US case, and the court upheld it and said it was not unconstitutional, but clearly anybody that looks at it knows that it's completely in conflict with the first amendment, but it's still in there and it has to be removed.
Maybe the Assange case will do that, but in the meantime, he can be prosecuted under it.
That's what's happened.
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All right, now I'm sorry because we only got six more minutes so please tell me everything that happened with good old Dan Ellsberg up there.
Yeah, Dan was tremendous.
I'm looking through my report now to refresh my memory because it seems like 22 years ago and it was only two days ago.
He was great.
He said that he compared, of course, all of Wikileaks releases to the Pentagon Papers saying they both had the highest public interest and that it was the first releases in 40 years that he saw that showed a pattern of policymaking like the papers they would Vietnam and in particular about Iraq and Afghanistan showing that the war were going very badly contrary to what the American people knew.
That's really what happened with the Pentagon Papers, of course.
The government lied for years.
Things were going well, they were going to win and they knew they were losing and similar things have been released and revealed by Wikileaks about particularly Afghanistan.
This was a really great point that Dan made.
I mean, it was unbelievable.
When he was working at the Saigon Embassy during the Vietnam War, he wrote these low-level field reports, just the same ones that Chelsea Manning released to Wikileaks.
He said at that time there was the Phoenix program, for example, there were an assassination program in Vietnam and other things going on that only the highest level of classification would, the people who had that would know.
In other words, these are the ones apparently above top secret that only the president can see or a few people around him.
So that kind of information, if the US was engaged in an assassination program and torture, that would not be in these low-level field reports.
But he said that's how far we've come now, basically, in 50 years, it's been normalized.
Torture and assassination have been normalized.
If these details that Manning revealed could be written by low-level people with low-level clearances like Manning, that thousands of Americans actually in government and contractors could read these things and write them.
So that was a really chilling thing to show how terrible it's become that it's normalized torture, that it could be put in these kinds of low-level reports.
Which, by the way, I'm sorry, Joe, that I really should have introduced the subject this way.
I sort of sometimes forget and presume everybody knows what we're talking about here.
But Daniel Ellsberg was, as the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, was called the most dangerous man in America by Richard Nixon.
And it was Nixon's government's persecution of Ellsberg that was part of the Watergate scandal that helped bring him down.
He is widely credited.
History judged, by the time I was born in 76, history had judged that, thank God, Daniel Ellsberg leaked those Pentagon Papers to tell the people the truth, to force the government to admit they'd been lying all along, that that was the real beginning of the end of the Vietnam War after that.
And that, essentially, everybody agreed.
Ellsberg had been right to stick his neck out and do this, despite whatever naysayers might have said at the time.
And so that's why it's so important that he's the one up there defending Assange in this way and Manning too, is that, listen, what I did, yeah, I broke the law.
And yeah, I was facing life in prison.
And yeah, it was the right thing.
And everybody else already agrees about that.
And so if that's true for me, it's true for them.
That's what's so important about this here, right?
He's the one saying it.
Now they agree with Ellsberg.
And he, he said he did not like this good Ellsberg, bad Assange theme that had risen up back in 2010, because he said, it's exactly right, Ellsberg, he's done the same thing that I've done.
And in fact, Ellsberg said on the stand that he did not redact a single name from the Pentagon Papers.
He even included the name of a covert CIA agent who he knew personally in Vietnam.
And he also knew that that was against the law.
It is against the law to uncover a covert agent like the Valerie Plam thing.
But there is no specific law about uncovering the names of informants.
Joe Lieberman introduced legislation in 2010 when the WikiLeaks, these documents came out that we're talking about, to try to criminalize revealing names of informants.
And the Senate voted it down.
So he wouldn't have introduced that if there had been a law.
What the government is arguing is that it's defense information, the names of the informants.
It's such a broad categorization they can make that a defense information could be the name of the informants.
That's why they're going after him about that.
But Dan Ellsberg didn't redact because he thought it would undermine the credibility of the papers.
So he also said this is really important.
He said he thinks, Assange also at the time he got these files from Manning, went to the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House asking for help to redact, to find out which documents had names that should be redacted, and even to help them with recommendations on how to redact them.
And the State Department and the Pentagon and the White House did not answer him.
They did not help him.
So how could they, he said how cynical they are to get up here now and charge him with revealing names of informants when he went to you back then to ask you to help him to redact it and you didn't help it.
And Dan thinks that that may have been a setup, basically, that they wanted him to put it out there so that they could charge him, because they were very upset that he published these documents.
They needed something.
Now, that's just a theory, but it's an interesting one.
The prosecutor said, so it's all the government's fault then.
And Ellsberg said, yes, they bear a heavy responsibility, said the government was highly cynical in feigning concern for the informants when they didn't try to help them when Assange approached them.
So it was a, it was an incredibly strong testimony from Ellsberg against his bully, James Lewis, QC, who is acting like an American prosecutor, not a British one, who are much more staid and condescending.
He's just acting like a, like an American prosecutor you'd see in a TV courtroom drama.
And it's despicable, the bullying that's going on.
I kind of like, though, that line in questioning, like he thinks that Ellsberg is going to be afraid to answer, you're damn right, when it comes to something like that, you know?
He was perfectly prepared.
It was this affidavit from Cromberg, the assistant attorney in Alexandria, who nobody had included in their testimony.
So the prosecutor was saying, well, you're not qualified to talk about it.
You're not balanced.
You're not an expert witness.
And Ellsberg read the damn thing the night before.
He was the first one.
So he was prepared to answer all these questions, and he really, I think, destroyed the government's argument.
The problem is, it's all up to Vanessa Barreza, who early on had shown extreme bias towards the government.
She seems to be a little bit more even-handed now.
So we've got at least another week or two of these testimonies.
And it's been extraordinarily, interestingly, an important, historically important trial.
That's not getting coverage in the media there, is it?
Yeah.
No, not too much.
But, you know, I think those of us who do care, and there are some, consortiumnews.com and Shadowproof, of course, leading the way.
We're doing our best to keep up with it at antiwar.com.
And I'm sure there are quite a few others that, you know, I'm not keeping track of.
I know Trevor Tim and the Free Press Foundation are good on this.
I don't know if they're doing, like, a running coverage of it the way you guys are.
But he made testimony too, Trevor Tim.
Right.
Yeah.
I can't interview him about it until soon.
But I got to interview him on our webcast, fortunately.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
Well, and Dan is 89 and he's tired, but I'm going to, I'm working on getting him on for next week.
So he's an old friend of the show too, so.
Dan is, he didn't seem like an 89-year-old man on the stand, I can tell you.
Nah, he's a badass.
He's great.
Listen, I'm so sorry.
I got to run, Joe.
I know you're up late anyway, man, but I got to run to my next one here.
Thank you so much for doing what you're doing on this case.
It's so important.
Thanks, Joe.
All right, you guys, that's Joe Lauria at ConsortiumNews.com.
He's Editor-in-Chief there, and he's got all you need.
Assange hearing, day nine, and went through right before that.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
