After more than a decade of persecution, Julian Assange has returned home to Australia a free man. He almost didn’t make it. The FBI and the Pentagon considered every available means—legal and otherwise—to prevent Julian from winning his freedom. Chip Gibbons and Kevin Gosztola return to discuss with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Project Censored’s Eleanor Goldfield the inside story of Julian’s fight for freedom, and the monsters who tried to crush him.

Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to the Real News Network Podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us.

Eleanor Goldfield:

And I’m Eleanor Goldfield, a journalist, filmmaker, and the co-host of the Project Censored radio show. And I’m really excited to be teaming up with Max to co-host this very special episode of the Real News Podcast today.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Before we get going today, I want to remind y’all that the Real News is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. We have a small but incredible team of folks who are fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support and we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today, it really makes a difference. Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, founder of WikiLeaks is finally free. On June 24th, Assange left Belmarsh Prison in London, a maximum security prison where he is been incarcerated for over the past five years, awaiting what many expected to be an extradition order to the United States. Assange then boarded a plane and was flown to the island of Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Western Pacific. There he was taken to a federal courthouse where he pled guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents in violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. As part of the plea deal, he was sentenced to time served in Belmarsh, and he was released to return home to his native Australia, finally, which he did on Wednesday, June 26th.

Eleanor Goldfield:

So firstly, there’s absolutely no question that Assange’s freedom is thanks to the tireless efforts of his family and tens of thousands of people around the world, including in no small part to our guests today who work to raise awareness and support for Julian. The US government deserves exactly zero thanks for this, much like with the case of Chelsea Manning. It is no evidence of benevolence or justice to free the person whom you wrongfully imprisoned such moments as these are evidence of the power of the people. Let’s take that time to celebrate and recognize this win, a sustaining reminder for the many fights that we have before us. Fights that Julian’s work has bolstered and illuminated. Indeed, Julian’s contributions to our movements are hard to quantify, as one of our guests on this show, Kevin Gosztola covers in his book on Julian called Guilty of Journalism.

There is no issue, be it government corruption, climate change, or the military industrial complex which WikiLeaks has not shed light upon and given us organizers and journalists and indeed citizens vital facts and fuel for both our struggle against oppression and our push to build a better future. At the same time, Julian’s work cannot easily be cast in a left-right paradigm. It’s far more elegant and indeed simple. It’s just about the truth and the right of we the people to know what governments do in our name as journalists, as organizers, as citizens, and really just human beings, we’re excited and relieved to know that Julian is free. And at the same time, we are intensely aware of what this case against Julian, and not least of all the guilty plea, mean for our dwindling access to a free press. Something that our guests will speak more to.

Maximillian Alvarez:

As Chip Gibbons journalist, researcher, and policy director of the nonprofit advocacy organization, Defending Rights in Dissent. And another one of our guests today wrote for Jacobin on June 27th. “There is zero question that Assange going free is cause for celebration. Assange is a journalist who exposed US war crimes. As a result of this work, he has suffered vicious and relentless persecution at the hands of the US government. Yet Assange’s freedom was attained in a bittersweet victory. Until the very end the US government refused to drop its claim that basic journalism can constitute a violation of the Espionage Act. A plea deal does not set a legal precedent, but the steep price extracted from Assange will undeniably have a chilling effect on journalism”. So what effect will the US government’s relentless persecution of Julian Assange and this plea deal have on journalism worldwide, the people who produce it and all of us who depend on it, and what effect will it have on the world we live in and how we live in it?

What effects has it already had? As this bitter, twisted, monumental 14 year saga comes to an end we want to take some time to not only walk through the latest news and the conditions under which Assange finally secured his freedom, but to appreciate what this all means. We need to also reflect on the real substance of the US government’s persecution of Julian Assange on what this case was “about” in the popular mind and what it was actually about and on what our response to all of it or lack thereof these past 14 years says about us, our media and the society we live in.

Eleanor Goldfield:

And to do that, Max and I have brought in two incredible guests who have covered and publicized this case and advocated for Julian’s freedom for years when so few others would. Kevin Gosztola is the author of Guilty of Journalism, the Political Case against Julian Assange and the editor of the Dissenter Newsletter, which regularly covers whistleblowing, press freedom, and government secrecy. He’s one of the few reporters to report on both Chelsea Manning’s Court Martial and the extradition proceedings against Assange. Kevin has also been a frequent guest on the Project Censored Radio Show and indeed Guilty of Journalism comes to you from the Censored press collaboration with seven stories. Chip Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights and Dissent, where he has advised multiple congressional offices on reforming the Espionage Act. He covered Assange’s extradition for Jacobin Magazine and he is currently working on a book on the history of FBI political surveillance for Verso books. Kevin, Chip, thanks so much for being here.

Kevin Gosztola:

Thank you.

Chip Gibbons:

My pleasure. My pleasure.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, gents, it really is an honor to have you both here on a rare occasion when we do have some good news, albeit we will get into the details of how good, how bad this news is. But after this 14 year long saga in which y’all have been fighting so hard, and of course Julian and his family have been fighting relentlessly against the onslaught they faced as Julian was persecuted by the United States government. This is indeed a cause for celebration, a moment to reflect, and we are going to talk about your impressions and larger reflections when we get to the end of this conversation here.

But I wanted to start where we are right now and jump right into the context of the news that people are hearing about over the past couple days and weeks. Now, back in February, Real News viewers watched our on-the-ground coverage from London, where the high court heard the Assange team’s request for permission to appeal his extradition order to the US where he faced 18 charges under the Espionage Act, despite not being a US citizen. So let’s quickly bring folks up to speed on how we got from there to here. Also, like I said, we want to take some time to get your larger takeaway thoughts and reflections at the end of the conversation but for now, tell us about where you were when you heard the news and what was going through your mind at that moment. So Chip, why don’t we start with you then, Kevin, we’ll go right to you.

Chip Gibbons:

Sure. So in February, Julian Assange’s defense team requested nine different grounds for appeal. I believe it was nine. Each of these grounds of appeal are tied to a specific point in UK Extradition Law or European Human Rights Law. But at the heart, what they were arguing was that Julian Assange was a journalist and that it violated who was being persecuted for exposing state criminality. He got the information from Chelsea Manning, a whistleblower, and that this was impermissible to extradite him to the United States. They raised a number of issues from the fact that it would violate his free expression rights to be tried for his journalism, for exposing war crimes, that it would be a political offense. And the UK US Extradition Treaty is very clear, you cannot extradite someone for a political offense. And they also made a number of arguments about the fairness of the trial he would receive, that he might be prejudiced as a result of his nationality, and that he might face the death penalty.

The UK judges heard these nine arguments and they rejected the vast majority of them as grounds for appeal. They found some very limited grounds for appeal. First, the lack of death penalty assurances. Under UK statutory law, you cannot be extradited if you will face the death penalty. Death penalty assurances are routine for the US because most of the world doesn’t share our belief that governments can kill their citizens. So they have to offer those types of assurances if they want to actually extradite people. The other two assurances came from comments that Gordon Kromberg, one of the lead prosecutors in the case made. Kromberg is a notorious figure. He was involved in the Daniel Hale prosecution. He was involved in one of the many attacks on Sami Al-Arian, a Muslim civil rights Palestinian civil rights activist, who has since been deported from this country thanks to the government attacks on him.

And he has a history of making really inflammatory anti-Muslim comments. I believe he’s also a very sort of die-hard Zionist who has a personal blog where he refers to the occupied Palestinian Territories, Judea and Samaria. And he just has a real history of making inflammatory remarks, which have led a lot of people to question why the US government lets him handle sensitive cases. He told the British courts in an affidavit that Assange would have a really fair trial in the US because he could challenge his indictment for violating the First Amendment, for violating the Fifth Amendment, saying the Espionage Act was too vague. And then he came in with, but of course the US government wouldn’t accept these arguments. And he listed, and this is where he made his mistake, he listed all of the areas where they would challenge them. Including that Julian Assange as a foreign national might not be entitled to First Amendment rights, at least with respect to national defense information.

And Julian Assange’s legal team seized on this. And they said, if he can’t rely on the First Amendment, that’s a free expression violation and he would be prejudiced as a result of his nationality. And these two UK judges couldn’t find anything in violation of freedom of expression for prosecuting Julian Assange for exposing war crimes. They said all but three of the charges brought against him had no free expression nexus. That’s of course not true. And of those three that did have free expression nexus, the information wasn’t in the public interest to share. But in spite of that, they said if he can’t have First Amendment rights as a foreigner, he would have his right to free expression violated and he would potentially be prejudiced as a foreign national. But they said he could appeal in those three grounds, death penalty, free expression, prejudice as foreign national, unless the US gave satisfactory assurances.

And the US has been allowed to give assurances in this case before to basically short circuit the legal process in the UK and get rubber stamps. And they literally told the US what to say. So I thought they were going to just rubber stamp this again. But they had a hearing. The defense agreed that Julian Assange, the death penalty assurance was sufficient. But they argued about this assurance the US gave where they said he could seek to rely on the First Amendment, but the US government said only a court could decide what were the scopes of the First Amendment. And that’s true, and they were a bit in a corner with that one. But they also refused to say that Kromberg wouldn’t even raise this argument about being a foreign national.

So it was a really hubristic thumbing of their nose at the British legal system, which from my standpoint of having sat through these hearings and having watched it for five years was ready and willing to rubber stamp the persecution of a journalist for exposing war crimes. But they just thumbed their nose at them over this last assurance. And we’ve learned from the Washington Post that the British lawyers who represent the US didn’t think they could win on this point. And at that point, they agreed to the plea deal in it. And I can talk more about what’s in the plea, but I’ve been talking for a long time and I want to let Kevin get a word in edgewise as they say.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Kevin Gosztola, hop in here, brother.

Kevin Gosztola:

All right. Well, thank you for laying that all out, Chip. I’ll go ahead and share where I was when I heard this news because I had an opportunity to hop on a live stream with Chip after I was informed of this unbelievable development. I must stress that I didn’t exactly think that Julian Assange would be walking out of Belmarsh prison this year or next year or the year after. My imagination or my ability to think that we could create the scenario where he would be a free man did not get to that point yet. And CIA whistleblower, former CIA officer John Kiriakou, gave me a phone call. Usually I call John Kiriakou because of who he was and who he has been, and invite him to come on a show and do a live discussion of developments with an Espionage Act prosecution or something related to government secrecy.

He was calling me and he was very serious. He said, “Have you seen the news?” And I was like, “What?” “It’s all over”. “What’s all over, John?” “Well just look at it, it’s everywhere”. I thought somebody had died, but nobody was dead. And in fact, it was the opposite. Something remarkable had happened, and Julian Assange had been able to break free from the clutches of this US government from, I believe, a security apparatus that would’ve been happy if he had died in prison. And we hopped on and did a quick reaction to it. And then I slowly processed what had taken place. And as I paid attention to the Assange legal team and their reactions, and then as we were treated to the reporting from the Washington Post based on insiders sources, it became clear that this case had collapsed. That in fact, it’s the fault of the US Justice Department that Julian Assange was free.

We created the space, the global movement undoubtedly created a space for plea deal negotiations. But it became clear to me that the reason they were not pushing forward with an extradition, and the reason why they had offered such a favorable plea deal, which we’ll get to those terms, is because they were now fearful of losing. There’s an email that’s referenced in this Washington Post report that says, “The urgency here has now reached a critical point”. This is from a Justice Department trial attorney. “The case will head to appeal and we will lose. It doesn’t get more evident than that. We overcame an unprecedented prosecution against Assange”. And we will get to the fallout, the aftermath.

Eleanor Goldfield:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you both for contextualizing that. And I want to go even further back, and obviously as the saying goes, you could write a book about this, and, Kevin, you did. So I don’t want to try to force an entire book into this little space, but I want to get to some of the basics of the case. And, Kevin, I think that one of the things, like you and I have discussed before, that feels more shocking. To listeners who aren’t as familiar with the case as you are, is the role of the CIA, and as you pointed out the fault of the Justice Department here in taking up this case, I was wondering if, Kevin, you could talk about this and then Chip also with your expertise, talk a little bit about the basics of the case that was originally brought thanks to the CIA and indeed how that has gotten to us to this point where it did all fall apart.

Kevin Gosztola:

Yeah. And what you’re saying, it’s not some kind of kooky conspiracy theory that we’re making up. We’re not trying to do our own progressive left version of Infowars here. We have a Yahoo news report that was put out by Michael Isikoff, Sean Naylor, and Zach Dorfman that dug into, they had conversations with over 30 people. They were former officials from the Trump Administration. They were people who had a connection to US intelligence, presumably some of them at some point worked in offices at the CIA. Were in a position to know that there were discussions led by former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, where war plans, it’s called War plans, they were sketched out to try and target Julian Assange as part of a pressure campaign while he was living in Ecuador’s London Embassy under political asylum. And he was there from June 2012, I believe, to April 11th, 2019 when he was arrested, expelled.

And the British police put him in a van and took him to Belmarsh Prison. And we learned in this article that they are discussing plans to kidnap, even poison, Julian Assange. And that they were willing to entertain the possibility of a rendition flight, basically, to try and get him outside of the embassy, put him on this plane and bring him to the United States. That created a panic inside the Justice Department. They don’t have indictments ready for Julian Assange, and they’re wondering what charges they’re going to bring exactly against him. And that spurs them to develop an indictment so that he doesn’t arrive on the shores of the US at some point in need of an arraignment hearing, and then the Justice Department would be caught with their pants down and have no indictment against Julian Assange ready to go. This would be an extra judicial act on the part of the United States.

So that’s important as the context for the charges that get issued. Mike Pompeo is a key player in labeling WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence service, signaling that they’re going to try and destroy this media organization. And as I look at it, something that Chip can dig into deeper with his deep knowledge of the FBI is that I believe the CIA was willing to employ co-Intel pro-style tactics against WikiLeaks by turning people against each other. But the charges that get brought up first, we see a sweetening of the media landscape so that people will be malleable to the idea of the Justice Department prosecuting Julian Assange. They come forward with a computer crime charge, and they say that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to crack a password and help her move inside of a military computer anonymously. And then a month later, after everything has been laid so that they can create this narrative that Julian Assange was some sort of a criminal who went beyond being an ordinary journalist, they then reveal the 17 Espionage Act charges. And at that moment, the Press Freedom organizations, the human rights organizations, every single civil liberties’ organization understands they must take this seriously. There’s no applause for the US Justice Department showing restraint. The misguided attitude that some journalists and other players had beforehand, they aren’t using that logic anymore. They’re not justifying the Justice Department’s actions. And so I’ll let Chip continue from there.

Chip Gibbons:

Yeah. And the CIA played an incredibly important role, given that they plotted to kill and rendition him. As someone who is writing a book on the FBI, I want to also remind us that the FBI played a pretty strong role here. We know during the Obama years, they drafted potential charges against Julian Assange and that they argued that unless Julian Assange, this is the intelligence division, unless they charged him, there wouldn’t be a deterrent against this type of activity. And we know at one point, both the FBI and the CIA demanded a meeting with Obama. I’ve filed many FOIA requests with the FBI about WikiLeaks. I’ve gotten the response in the past that there was an ongoing legal process.

There is no longer an ongoing legal process so I’ve refiled that request, and I’ve sued the FBI over FOIA a number of times, and I’m prepared to do so in this case as well. So hopefully we find out what it is they sent over in 2013 to Obama in the charging documents and compare it to what they actually charged him with. I think we’ll find it’s the same case. So Julian Assange is indicted under eventually an 18 count indictment, one count of conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And then the remaining counts are brought under the Espionage Act. All of the charges are from [inaudible 00:22:56] in 2010 to 2011. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks received information from Chelsea Manning, a heroic…

Chip Gibbons:

… and WikiLeaks received information from Chelsea Manning, a heroic whistleblower about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about the creepy criminal backroom dealings at the State Department as well as about the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. This information was newsworthy and they partnered with a number of media outlets, including mainstream ones who threw Julian under the bus as soon as they could, as well as more independent ones. There’s a really fascinating series of articles published between WikiLeaks, The Nation, and I believe it’s HaitiLibre about what the documents show about U.S. interference in Haiti, including that we tried to stop them from raising their minimum wage. You have just everything from U.S. soldiers massacring civilians, and covering up to U.S. interference in the Spanish judiciary process in order to prevent the prosecution of U.S. soldiers for murdering a Spanish photojournalist to just helping, I think Levi, a jeans corporations prevent Haiti from raising their minimum wage.

It’s an incredible document set. For this good act, Chelsea Manning was tortured and received, at that point, the longest sentence in history for giving information to the media. I think it might not have been as long as the Schulte sentence, but that was quite recent and quite complicated. Under the Espionage Act indictment, Julian Assange faces three unprecedented counts of pure publication, that is he posted the information on the WikiLeaks website. He faced four counts, I believe it was, of receiving national defense information. Of course, you can’t publish national defense information if you don’t receive it. He faced a number of aiding and abetting charges where they wanted to impose criminal liability on him for actions that Chelsea Manning took. I believe they actually had more aiding and abetting charges for Manning’s conduct, which was heroic other than Manning actually faced in her court-martial.

I believe she was only charged under 793E at the court-martial, and they… Was it more than? Other than espionage. They put in a whole range of other charges as well. He’s facing liability for what Chelsea Manning did. He’s facing liability for having information and he’s facing liability for publishing it, and there’s also a conspiracy count. In the final part of the prosecution where they take the plea deal, he pleads only guilty to the 793g conspiracy provision, which requires two or more people to plead to have committed other offenses under the Espionage Act. That conspiracy is brought under the conspiracy they allege in the criminal information, which is like an indictment, is that Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning conspired to break the Espionage Act.

Manning broke the provisions under the Espionage Act for giving information to someone unauthorized to receive it. Knowing he would publish it, Julian Assange broke the provision of receiving it. Then, it’s a little bit ambiguous to me as to whether or not they include the final publishing in the criminal information because the charge that Julian Assange faced for pure publication is also one of the aiding and abetting charges that Manning faced. They just list out the parts of the indictment, but they don’t give more information. The criminal conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act is that Chelsea Manning gave information to a journalist about war crimes knowing he would publish it. That journalist accepted the information and he received it. If you look at the statement of facts, and they were laying this case out in the courtroom in February, there’s this theory that WikiLeaks begins the conspiracy essentially by existing since WikiLeaks exists as a website that is willing to publish information at the hearing in February, the prosecutor stressed without the permission of the person who owns the information like, “Yes.” In investigative journalism, you generally don’t get the person’s permission, that they were inciting people to break the Espionage Act.

Believe also in the February hearing, inciting people or soliciting them to break the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They also make a deal about the fact that Manning and Assange are in contact to learn to transfer of the documents, and that Assange said to Manning when she said, “I have no more information,” curious eyes never run dry. I would love to take that before a non-Eastern District jury, if that’s what the conspiracy hangs on that very ambiguous line. Kevin, what is Julian Assange guilty of?

Kevin Gosztola:

He’s guilty of journalism. Actually, Chip, if you don’t mind… Also, Max and Eleanor, if you don’t mind me just coloring in some details that I know from the Chelsea Manning court-martial, which I believe are relevant. There was never any attempt by military prosecutors to argue that Julian Assange was part of some conspiracy or that Chelsea Manning was a co-conspirator with Julian Assange during that court-martial. I always thought that was worth raising as we see on the flip side that the Justice Department is accusing Julian Assange of working with Chelsea Manning. There wasn’t really ever this allegation of trying to help her move anonymously through military computers and crack a password. The reason being was because it is known that Chelsea Manning had access to those military databases. It doesn’t actually make sense. The allegation or the narrative in this prosecution never added up.

In fact, a lot of holes were poked in it by a former forensic military examiner. Actually, I think he still works. His name was Patrick Eller, and he was hired by the Assange legal team to give some really crucial testimony going over evidence from Chelsea Manning’s court-martial. It shows that she didn’t need help because her security clearance cleared her to be in these computers. In fact, the discussion about cracking a password, if you look at the record of the court-martial, it had more to do with the fact that soldiers in this particular unit in Baghdad were trying to install movies, music and software on their computers without being detected by their superior officers. That is they wanted to have unauthorized downloads and being able to crack a password on their computer to get through as an admin without somebody knowing was something they were interested in doing, so they didn’t get brought up on some kind of charge of violating the good order and discipline in the U.S. military.

That’s nothing that the Justice Department ever wanted to address or take seriously. I also should remind people that when this trial was unfolding in Chelsea Manning’s case, WikiLeaks did not have this stigma that develops within the U.S. Government and gets more intense past 2016 and 2017. There’s an actual Army counterintelligence document that treats it as a media organization, treats Julian Assange as a staff writer for a foreign media organization, and says that the documents that he has about U.S. military equipment that he’s handling with attention to the newsworthiness of the material in that document.

Yochai Benkler does a good job during Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, demonstrating to the judge and Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, Colonel Denise Lind, that, in fact, WikiLeaks is performing a role that is no different from the New York Times. We know that that becomes a reality for the Justice Department because all of the reporting from that time proves and indicates that the Justice Department was not comfortable going forward with charges against Julian Assange because it would endanger the editors and the publishers and reporters at these organizers that had partnered with WikiLeaks like the Guardian, Der Spiegel in Germany, El Pais in Spain, Le Monde in France and so on.

Chip Gibbons:

The conspiracy is incredibly weak that they were arguing. I sat in the courtroom in February and very few words were made about the password hash, which is weak on a technical level, but in terms of a legal one, it’s the strongest part of the government’s case because that type of conduct does not have a clear First Amendment protection that you can make it the way the other ones do. So much of it was just WikiLeaks exist and therefore, they’re liable for other people breaking the Espionage Act. I actually think the CFAA too. In the second superseding indictment, the third indictment they bring against them, they expand the narrative against them. There’s a whole section of overt acts that’s not clear if they’re under the Espionage Act or the CFAA or both. The overt acts are going on Democracy now to talk about Edward Snowden, which I hope is not a felony, giving talks, extolling the virtue of whistleblowing, which I hope is not a felony.

They label it continued attempts to recruit systems administrators that by Julian Assange, by talking about the importance of sources in journalism as well as saying if people have classified information, WikiLeaks will publish it. He did say that, that he is recruiting people and at this whole theory of recruitment and solicitation in the government’s indictment in the government’s theory. Apologist for the government’s case like to hone in on the password hashing. They like to hone in on some of the later stuff about LulzSec that’s in the third indictment. The password hashing came up in the court, but none of the other stuff did. It always was they have a website that says they will publish secret information and therefore, they are soliciting people to hack and steal national defense information. That’s really very dangerous.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to talk about a point that you all both raised, which is how the rest of the media contributed to making this narrative hold some water. In fact, the complicity of so many other media outlets, either in their complicit silence and refusal to talk about this or in their outright complicity in painting Julian Assange as somehow not a journalist in WikiLeaks as something other than a resource for journalistic material, trying to isolate and make Assange doing everything in their power, of course, to try to isolate Julian Assange and make this case make sense within those conditions. Now, I know you all have talked about this in past interviews, but I definitely think it bears revisiting and wanted to ask you all if we could just talk a bit about the role of the media and the public response to this, right? Because this case is 14 years old.

Fourteen years ago, I was working as a temp in a warehouse in Southern California in the Great Recession. I had no idea what the hell was happening with this. I fully admit that like so many others in the country for many years, I just felt like it was too big to wrap my head around. I also admit that the reports I would see from trusted media sources that painted this case as something that was too opaque, too heavily concerned with national security for me to have any worthwhile opinion on, I stepped back and had none on it. I wanted to ask you all if you could just say a bit about the role that the consent manufacturing apparatus played, including by outlets that would go on to win journalistic awards for using the content of the WikiLeaks.

Kevin Gosztola:

Yeah. We have to highlight the New York Times. We have to highlight the New York Times in particular, because they play a role in stigmatizing Julian Assange. They play a role in giving everyone a language for demonizing him. It’s executive editor Bill Keller who gives us this depiction of Julian Assange as a kind of bag lady who’s stinky and he doesn’t change his socks, and they promote that hacker stereotype as much as they can to create this image of an unreliable media partner. They go above and beyond to emphasize on and on that he is not an equal to the New York Times, that WikiLeaks and the New York Times are on a different level. They say that Julian Assange is a source, which is not true. Because to me, working in this space as long as I have, and I cover this for 14 to 15 years, my understanding of journalism is that the source is the originator of the documents.

The originator of the documents is Chelsea Manning. If Chelsea Manning had gone directly to the New York Times, in fact, she actually tried to do that. But if Chelsea Manning had handed over these documents to the New York Times, then that would be a source and a journalist relationship. Julian Assange is functioning as a publisher and editor of this new kind of media organization that wants to create a clearinghouse for government documents from governments all over the world. The New York Times is basically thumbing their nose at Julian Assange and refusing to be an equal. That creates an incredibly contentious relationship. We even see later that the New York Times goes behind the back, convinces the Guardian to pass along U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks is no longer willing to share with the New York Times because they don’t trust the New York Times. Part of the problem is that the New York Times holds this position in the media ecosystem of reviewing their national security and military stories with the U.S. Government sharing what they’re about to do.

WikiLeaks doesn’t believe that that’s how you should act if you are engaged in investigative journalism, if you are serious about this kind of reporting. There’s more to say about this back history, and I’m certain that Chip will get into it and color some more context. The other point that I want to raise before I give the floor back, before I share the floor with Chip here is to say that someone like Charlie Savage at the New York Times who contextualized what this president means, he was very clear that this was a chilling precedent for the press that Julian Assange had pled guilty, that the Justice Department was able to secure a plea deal. He mentioned that this would now be a deterrent for reporters and media organizations that were thinking about publishing stories in the national security arena about intelligence agencies and about the U.S. military.

The problem with that is, Charlie, you work for the New York Times. The New York Times withheld stories about Bush warrantless wiretapping in 2004. James Risen, very famously well-known case of this media malpractice tries to get this out before President George W. Bush’s reelection, and they don’t want to publish the story. They sit on this evidence of criminality and an abuse of power. Only by saying he’s going to include it in his book, State of War, do they eventually run a story. He shares the byline with Eric Lichtblau.

They reveal this. It’s a major, major scoop, but they sit on it. There was no threat of prosecution in that case that I’m aware. Yes, there were Justice Department people and FBI agents that went hunting for sources. In fact, it’s argued that NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake got caught up in that dragnet and trying to find somebody that they could hold responsible. They went after Thomas Tam for challenging the Justice Department’s endorsement of this illegal and unchecked mass surveillance. I just share that to illustrate that what we are experiencing now may not fundamentally change a whole lot. I know we’re going to have a larger discussion about what happens next after Assange, so I’ll give the floor back to Chip.

Chip Gibbons:

Kevin, your memory might be better here than mine, but in 2011, the New York Times published a lengthy insider account of working with Julian Assange that painted him in completely negative terms about what an uneasy relationship it was. I think it’s worth remembering what journalism was like in 2010, which is unfortunately what it’s like in 2024 as well. We had just come out of a period where there was little trust in the corporate media because they had all served as stenographers for the Bush administration. They cheered on the war in Iraq. They didn’t report civilian casualties properly in Afghanistan. They were not willing to speak truth to power, especially in the Iraq war. I think that was really… I was talking to a Italian newspaper reporter the other day, and she mentioned even 20 years after that, she’s in Italy, not in the U.S., people will cite the Iraq war media coverage is why they don’t trust the media.

That has had a huge impact people perceived the media. When WikiLeaks and Julian Assange come on the scene, they’re very courageous. Stefania Maurizi who wrote a fascinating book about her time working with WikiLeaks. She says, “Technology is part of the story, but courage is a huge part of the story.” Just seeing someone who was willing to stand up as a journalist to the U.S. national security state when all of these other people were acting as stenographers was really inspiring. I think they despise Julian Assange for that. Also, the New York Times view of journalism is you parrot what the Pentagon says, whereas Julian Assange’s view of journalism is if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth, sort of the I.F. Stone type perspective of journalism. They don’t recognize that as valid. They don’t recognize, “If you believe journalism can be used to speak the truth, to challenge injustice.” They don’t view that as journalism.

I think that’s a huge part of the story here. As a result, these media outlets were willing to throw Julian under the bus. I do think part of the reason why they came for Julian Assange and not for the New York Times and not for the Guardian, is because Julian Assange had that vision. WikiLeaks was challenging military policy. They were challenging U.S. foreign policy, what you might call imperialism and empire. I believe that’s why the U.S. Government came for them. Yeah. He’s challenging U.S. military policy, challenging U.S. foreign policy, where so many people in the corporate media view themselves in partnership with U.S. national security state. Sometimes they expose them in ways they don’t want to be exposed, but they don’t view themselves as on different teams.

Kevin Gosztola:

Well, is it okay if I just put an exclamation point on that? Because I think that’s such an important point to make. Because oftentimes, it’s been a criticism of Julian Assange that he didn’t do enough to recognize U.S. politics. Maybe he didn’t do enough to boost Hillary Clinton or understand that Democrats are the bulwark and they’re supposed to be able to fend off Republicans and you’re not supposed to take certain positions. He’s outside of the United States. He doesn’t understand US politics first and foremost, I don’t think, but he also is someone who is on the outside experiencing this oppression against him and WikiLeaks that is being carried out by both of these political parties.

Navigating it is a little bit like what people feel every day who don’t have a leader in any of these parties. More importantly, it is that fact that he’s willing to challenge U.S. empire and challenge the American Empire Project, if you will. I do see him as somebody who’s carrying on the kind of work that we’ve seen, the scholarly work that we’ve seen from people like Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Greg Grandin, Andrew Bacevich, and so on, and that his work is hard to swallow for these media people and for the U.S. Government for that matter, because he’s not controllable, and so…

Kevin Gosztola:

… because he is not controllable, and so that is the fear. I mean, the reason I think that this indictment, these charges had to be generated against Julian Assange is primarily because they knew that when they go to him to negotiate, he does not share their interests. So when you go to a New York Times editor or you go to a New York Times publisher and you say, “Well, we’re trying to do this, we want to counter Chinese influence in the Asia-Pacific region, so we need you to hold this back,” I don’t think Julian Assange is going to go along with that.

He’s going to make the case that what he has is in the public interest, and we need to expose the way in which the US is abusing foreign policy to justify human rights abuses, to justify the expansions of wars, that justify the destabilization of countries around the world. And you can’t tell him, “Oh, we’re engaged with great power competition, we’re engaged with trying to maintain US influence around the globe,” and have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks sit on a whole set of documents, and not include them in their complete archive.

Eleanor Goldfield:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, what you’re both speaking to is the tagline of WikiLeaks, which is, “We open governments,” and that’s not about whether the Democrats are doing this or whether the Republicans… It is, as I said earlier, it’s about the truth, and it is that elegant and that simple. But of course, since it is that, there has to be some kind of character assassination. And we saw this with Snowden too, like, well, and Lee Camp, the activist comedian has a joke about this, about how when Snowden came forward with his findings, it was basically like, “Oh, we have to scramble.” Like, “Oh, he didn’t graduate from college, right?”

And Lee Camp’s joke is like, “If your house is on fire and some dude walks by and says, ‘Hey, your house is on fire,’ are you going to react or are you going to turn to him and be like, ‘Hold on, did you not graduate college?'” Like, no, the point is over here that your house is on fire. And so the character assassination machine has to get rolling, because Assange and WikiLeaks have such a simple, and focused, and indeed elegant goal.

And I’d also like to point out that this is why critical media literacy is so important, so that you can read between the lines and see, “I don’t actually care whether Julian Assange showers regularly, like, what does this have to do with what WikiLeaks is doing, and why are they trying to highlight this? What are they trying to hide and shift my attention away from?” And of course, at Project Censored, one of the things that we really focus on is this critical media literacy, to understand how we’re being propagandized and lied to every single day by the very same outlets that threw Assange under the bus. And I mean, we could talk about this for the next several hours, but I want to get to what we’ve kind of been discussing a little bit, which is this plea deal, and y’all’s feelings on this plea deal, the good, the bad, and the ugly, as it were?

Chip Gibbons:

Can I just respond to something you said about sort of the character assassinations or changing the story to the whistleblower or the journalist thing? One of the most famous whistleblowers in US history is Deep Throat. He is the person who gave information to two Washington Post reporters that brought down the Nixon administration. Who was Deep Throat? Deep Throat was Mark Felt, the one of only two FBI agents to be criminally prosecuted for the counterintelligence programs. Between being prosecuted, which is, I believe, his defense was funded up by Nixon, and Reagan pardoned him. He was the massive campaigner for reviving the Hoover-like programs for defending them, including defending the illegal acts.

He had no concern, he participated in black bag jobs. Richard Nixon actually testifies in his defense, which is free legal break-ins, said, “Oh, actually, legal break-ins are normal in the executive branch.” Of course, Nixon would know that. His concern was not with democracy, it was with Nixon passed him up for a promotion he wanted to take over for Hoover. No one says, “Let’s throw out the Watergate reporting because Mark Felt is unlike Snowden, unlike Manning, unlike Assange, actually a really bad guy, who actually had done harm to our democracy.” But we don’t ever say that, nor should we. It doesn’t change that the Watergate reporting was correct.

Kevin Gosztola:

I’ll go ahead and jump in on the plea deal, and then Chip, you can go ahead and add to… What’s been on my mind, so one of the things that’s been out there in the ether about this plea deal is that it is a win for US intelligence agencies, and I have serious doubts about whether this is a victory. I think that it’s been spun that way by figures like former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, because they don’t want to admit that it failed.

I don’t think the end goal of prosecuting, putting all this time, energy, and resources tarnishing the US image that they wanted this to end in a plea deal, where Julian Assange was never put on trial. I do believe that the security agents, the intelligence agencies, military officials even who were offended by seeing their information published, certainly people at the State Department, because believe it or not, the State Department spokespeople were more aggressive in the last months in defending Julian Assange’s prosecution than the Justice Department itself, that I don’t think that they wanted to just see Julian Assange hop on a plane and fly home to Australia.

Okay, he made a pit stop in a US territory, but fly home to Australia, and be welcomed like it was a homecoming parade that he was given. There was jubilation from the Australian people. He got a phone call from Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, basically saying, “Welcome back to Australia,” it sounds like. So I don’t believe this was the outcome that they were hopeful for. I think this is the spin to cover up the fact that the Justice Department botched this case and failed to secure Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States. The other point that I believe is that this isn’t as much of a chilling precedent for free press, the plea deal is not. I think it’s an unmitigated victory for freedom of the press, freeing a journalist and ensuring that they don’t slowly continue to die in prison and to ensure that they survive.

Freeing a journalist from this persecution is always a victory for freedom of the press, whether we’re talking about it being an attack by China, Russia, Iran, the Israeli government, Turkey, you go down the list of offenders, India, Pakistan. Freeing somebody who is going through this kind of ordeal is always a victory, no matter what kind of chill, shock waves are being sent through the profession. But what’s the chilling precedent is the fact that the US government ever thought that it was okay to bring charges against Julian Assange, who is an Australian citizen, not a US citizen, somebody who is a foreign national, who the US Justice Department decided they should extraterritorially apply the Espionage Act to Julian Assange, even though he had never held a security clearance, he never signed a nondisclosure agreement, like any of the other whistleblowers who have been unjustly punished.

He had no allegiance to the United States that he was supposed to file the loyalty that he had to show to the United States, he never pledged to protect state secrets. So he was free, like any journalist or reporter, to do with the information whatever he pleased. Now, there might be ethical questions, there could be ethical considerations. We can have discussions about how media organizations handle material that they receive, but that’s not the law. Irresponsibly handling information does not mean that you’re now a criminal and you should be prosecuted by a government on that. We should all agree.

Chip Gibbons:

It’s really hard for me to figure out what the US government thought the end game was here. Part of me agrees with Kevin that they didn’t want a plea deal, and we saw in the Washington Post a story that there were people within the Justice Department who absolutely want to drop this case, and they were being stifled to doing so from higher-ups. Obviously, those types of leaks are self-serving. I do think in some ways, though, the indictment is such an egregious act of charge stacking that it’s difficult to not read it as an example of an attempt to coerce a plea deal. Most of these Espionage Act cases do end in pleas because of this. I’m not going to go through all 18 counts, but let me just, with the counts from the State Department cables, just to illustrate how this is charge stacking.

First, we have a charge that Chelsea Manning obtained the documents in violation of the Espionage Act and Assange is guilty under an aiding and abetting theory. Then, we have that Chelsea Manning had lawful possession of the State Department cables, and she unlawfully communicated them to Julian Assange, and Assange is guilty of this under an aiding and abetting theory. Then, we have Chelsea Manning, who in the previous count, just had lawful possession, now she has unauthorized possession of the same document set, and unlawfully communicated them to Julian Assange.

Then, we had Julian Assange receive the documents, and then we had Julian Assange publish them. These are just the counts from the State Department documents. We could go through this with the Iraq rules of engagement, the detainee assessment briefs, the significant activity reports, and everyone will be falling asleep, because this is pretty dry. So I do think, I too, I am stunned that they turned this into an 18-count indictment, especially when the final plea agreement, 793(g), encompasses almost all of this conduct, right?

The conspiracy between Chelsea, alleged conspiracy between Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, is just the rest of the indictment charges, and they hit him with the conspiracy charge and all these other charges. So I do think this was an abusive indictment to escalate the potential sentence. I think one theory for that would be to try to coerce a plea deal. I think one theory could be to try to game the sentencing, and I also think that there’s also a potential of a split jury verdict, because the aiding and abetting charges would be about what standard you hold Chelsea Manning to. It’s an open question, what the government has to prove to convict someone who’s not a government employee.

And on top of that, there is case law about the First Amendment, that when you have a pure speech issue, you have to prove a very high level of intent that has never been applied to these Espionage Act cases, because the government said there isn’t pure speech. But there’s three charges that I think the government could not get out of arguing for pure speech. And if you look at what the UK judges said, I mean, these are the three charges that they ruled undeniably had a free speech nexus, and I just decided the documents weren’t that interesting, and we don’t have that kind of balancing test. So you could have a real disaster if you took this to a jury. Of course, they were in the Eastern District, which is very stacked.

And so I don’t know, part of me thinks there are people in the FBI and the CIA who would’ve taken this to the very end, and part of me thinks there are… But I think there are also people in the political part of the Justice Department who wanted an exit ramp. I think the plea deal, I think the stacked nature of the charges could also be explained by the vindictiveness of the FBI and the CIA, or it could be this sort of standard practice in the US justice system of stacking charges against people to coerce pleas. I will say, I do think there was a schism between the career intelligence officials and the FBI, the career intelligence officials or career national security officials, and the Department of Justice National Security Division, the CIA, although they may be their own third block, since they were more interested in illegal activities than the prosecution, and sort of the more career- or the political-minded people, political appointees who just don’t want to touch this.

So what is the impact of this indictment? Kevin is 100% right in his assessment. The plea deal sets no legal precedent and the precedent that was set, the political precedent, the chilling precedent was set by the fact that the government brought this case in the first place, that they pursued it for five years, including appealing adverse rulings in the UK system. Remember, originally, a judge in the UK rejected the free expression arguments, but blocked the extradition based on the US prison conditions, which would’ve allowed the US to walk away but still claim a victory with the Espionage Act. And not just the five years in Belmarsh, but the seven years he spent in an embassy that a United Nations working groups said was arbitrary detention, the fact that a UN special [inaudible 00:59:56] said he was tortured.

I mean, you look at Julian Assange’s ordeal, and I don’t think anyone is eager to repeat it, any aspect of it. Yes, Kevin is shaking his head. Yeah, so I think the precedent was set by bringing the indictment, I think the precedent was set by punishment by process, and I think the precedent was set by 14 years of extralegal, extrajudicial warfare on Assange and WikiLeaks, and that precedent is very scary.

Kevin Gosztola:

Yeah, and I just want to quickly add specifically from the plea deal that Julian Assange’s legal team did an excellent job of winning him some inclusion of items that sweetened him pleading guilty to this felony charge, and I don’t actually presume that it’s going to make too much difference to his life in Australia. He was able to get a pledge in writing or a commitment in writing that there will be no criminal cases brought by the Justice Department, that they will not try to extradite him from Australia for the publication of any other documents that he obtained and published prior to the plea deal negotiations.

So he can never be prosecuted for publishing CIA hacking materials that were really the source of Mike Pompeo deciding that he needed to act out his revenge against WikiLeaks. Julian Assange will never receive an indictment for anything related to the Clinton campaign or DNC emails that were published in 2016, but of course, we already know that there weren’t really charges to bring, and there were First Amendment issues with indicting Julian Assange, because that’s what special counsel Robert Mueller determined during the course of his investigation.

And there’s no gag order, he can talk about his case openly. There’s nothing that he has to follow. There’s no restrictions, there’s no supervisory release in Australia, and he’s free to go back and be editor-in-chief or work in some capacity, helping WikiLeaks rebuild itself now that he is free from prison, which I think is another reason I believe the US national security state would be unhappy with Julian Assange walking free, because now, there’s more likelihood than ever that we’ll see a resurgence from WikiLeaks, that they will try to publish once again. And I’ll say this, that it’s my conviction, I believe this to be true, that the US government is not just upset about Julian Assange and the information that was published in 2010 and 2011. They don’t just want to destroy WikiLeaks and stop it from operating because of the documents that we have discussed briefly in this conversation today, but they are fearful of the next leak.

They are fearful of some kind of an organization that has such a high profile to convince and inspire whistleblowers around the world to pass along documents. And they have a long way to go to prove that people could securely submit documents and not have them intercepted by agents, and that people in the different security apparatuses throughout the world wouldn’t be able to find out those whistleblowers’ identities. They have work to do to prove that they are a credible place that you could turn to. And they also have competition. There are over 75 media organizations that now have secure submission systems. So they’re no longer the novelty that they were back in 2007, 2006, 2007, when WikiLeaks first came on the scene. But that being said, I think they will try to return, with or without Julian Assange, because they don’t want the United States to have the final say in whether WikiLeaks can operate and be a participant in journalism.

And we spoke about the media earlier. We spoke about the way that journalists have reacted to WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange, and just, I know we’ve been talking for a while, we’re probably going to start winding down, I’m kind of weaving in some of my larger takeaways before you put that question to me. But the thing that I think most of all is that journalists in the US prestige media were always reticent and afraid of showing too much solidarity for Julian Assange, too much solidarity for what WikiLeaks was going through, and that’s because they themselves don’t like what he did. He embarrassed them and the whole institution of journalism that they’re a part, they showed how much they rarely actually exercise their freedom of the press.

So here’s Julian Assange practicing freedom of the press to the fullest, being guilty of journalism, and here they are, actually limiting the kind of impact that they could have to effect change, to protect and preserve human rights, to ensure that there is wider democracy. So that’s how you see these frivolous debates that we were pulled into, that actually fed into the US Justice Department and their prosecution by saying things like, “Julian Assange is not a journalist,” or that it doesn’t matter whether you think Julian Assange is a journalist or not, it just matters that the First Amendment protects the acts of journalism.

But I insist and will forever insist that it was crucial to grapple over this and argue with people over this, because the Justice Department was trying to and successfully stigmatized Julian Assange as not being a journalist, so that they could persuade us that this Espionage Act prosecution was an exception to the rule. Part of getting the wheels going on this was to say, “Oh, don’t worry. We’re just going to prosecute him with the Espionage Act. It won’t be other reporters, it won’t be other journalists on down the line.”

And we fed into that. Anybody who ever allowed and ceded ground to the Justice Department by saying, “Yeah, okay, it doesn’t matter if you think he’s a journalist or not,” I feel like it made it easier for the Justice Department to continue on with their case. And so that’s why I was always frustrated with organizations like Committee to Protect Journalists that wouldn’t include him in their jailed journalist index, not because I’m opposed to the Committee to Protect Journalists, but because I really wanted to struggle with them over this.

And I was pleased that the Reporters Without Borders organization, Rebecca Vincent did some tremendous work for them as their International Campaigns Director, to observe the extradition proceedings. I was pleased that he was included in their list of detained journalists annually. I was upset and frustrated that Amnesty International wouldn’t classify Julian Assange as a prisoner of conscience. I felt that there were more things that organizations and media organizations could do, but I think that the reason why they were always reluctant to go as far as they should was because they were afraid to show this solidarity.

Chip Gibbons:

I’m fairly certain Defending Rights & Dissent, the organization I work for, was the only press freedom organization that was consistent in calling Julian Assange a journalist as well as a political prisoner. I’ve been in the meetings on the Hill with the big press freedom groups, and they would all go around in a circle and say, “We don’t think he’s a journalist,” or, “It doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t a journalist.” I would always say, when I was in public appearances, from a First Amendment standpoint, it doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t a journalist, but I think he’s a great journalist, which I do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and on top of that, just to throw in one additional critical media literacy layer here, is that it didn’t even have to go that far for so many of us. What we also got trapped in was this discussion of whether or not you like Julian Assange as a person, and what you think of his character, or what you’re told about his character, as if that supersedes our basic civil and human rights, that rights are rights, unless the guy’s an asshole, right? Then, suddenly, we can just throw our human rights out the window, and if we’re already engaging in that kind of discussion, we have already lost. And I think that that is one of many kind of takeaway lessons that we should really beat into our brains, moving forward, for all of us, so that I’m not asking everyone listening to this to whip yourselves for not being the best Assange advocate, but I am asking you to do better moving forward, and to learn.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But I am asking you to do better moving forward and to learn from this as we are all trying our best to do. And we owe so much to the work of folks like Chip and Kevin to showing us what was kept from us and what we in fact also obscured ourselves in the ways that we would participate in these discussions over these past 14 years. And gents with that, I wanted to kind of round out because we’ve kept you for a long time, and Eleanor and I could talk to you about this for eight more hours, but we know that we got to wrap things up and let y’all go. And so we don’t know exactly what comes next for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as y’all said, but of course, from here at The Real News, from Project Censored, from all of us, more than anything, we just hope that he and his family find some peace and healing after this incredibly hellacious ordeal.

But I wanted to ask you guys what comes next for you both and also what your reflections are after this saga has come to an end that frankly none of us expected even a couple months and weeks ago. And I’ll pose it to Chip and Kevin by way of a final thought here and what I’m trying to reflect on. Because one thing that I think is still very much an open question is, it’s not just that so many of us regular working people, citizens of the world, people who consume some news, who care to a reasonable degree but are also dealing with our own lives, your average person, I think that so many of us had different reasons for not engaging with this case. We have a lot of excuses, but a lot of really legitimate reasons. People are dealing, like I said, with their lives, they’re struggling to get by, they’re caring about their kids. There are other stories that may be they’re really concerned about and our brains only have so much room.

But I think that there’s a much larger problem here about our political and intellectual attention spans in the digital age. Because for as frustrated as I know you all have been, and Eleanor, I include you in this as well as someone who’s been covering this for a lot longer than I have, the lack of care from the public has been a constant source of frustration for you all as people who have cared so deeply about this and have understood the consequences and the weight of this case in a way that the rest of us, frankly, didn’t.

But what I’m also wrestling with is that that’s the case for practically any story that we cover. I mean, people forgot about Ukraine four months after that war started. And I was standing in East Palestinian, Ohio a couple months ago where that train derailed and where the citizens of that town have just been left to flounder in this toxic hell, and they feel just as forgotten as a Julian Assange would. And I stood there in that town and I told them, as someone who interviews other working people around the country, it’s not that folks have forgotten about you, it’s that they all feel as forgotten as you do. And so what do we do with that?

How do we build enough sustained attention, let alone political commitment to win a strike, free a journalist who’s being persecuted by the largest imperial power in the world, stop a genocide happening in our name across the country? A big part of that is how much we ourselves in this mediad environment can stay focused and stay committed. And I don’t think that’s all a personal failing. I think it’s like our brains don’t know how to adjust to this world that we’re in, and that’s a real political liability for any of us who want to build something, let alone fight for something that’s going to take a long time to build.

So that’s my final thought. Chip, Kevin, I wanted to toss it to you and ask what your kind of big takeaway reflections are here. And also, please do take a bow for your incredible fucking work and tell us what you are doing next and where folks can find you. And then Eleanor, I’ll let you close it out with your final thoughts.

Kevin Gosztola:

Go ahead, Chip. You can go first.

Chip Gibbons:

Okay. So I will say this. A lot of people will ask me, was any of this worth it? Do people care about the revelations that Manning gave and that Assange published? Do people care about the truth or publishing the sort of information? And my response to them is always, the governments of the world are incredibly invested in silencing the truth. They spent 14 years trying to destroy WikiLeaks, trying to break Julian Assange, trying to send a message to future journalists. In Israel right now where there’s a genocide in Gaza, we see them assassinating journalists, we see them shutting down Al Jazeera. We see in the US the Congress wants to, they always want to ban TikTok, but now they want to ban TikTok because they blame it for people getting full information about Gaza. So the governments of the world are incredibly invested and will go to extraordinary lengths to silence and suppress the truth. So we should not be cynical about the importance of this work, about the power of the truth, because the governments aren’t., The US government isn’t. The Israeli government isn’t.

Where I’m going next, you can find me as a journalist on Twitter at ChipGibbons89. The organization I work for is Defending Rights and Dissent rightsanddissent.org. They are one of the only organizations who have consistently struck the right tone on this case over 14 years. We were the ones who were the first group to go on the Hill and talk to members of Congress. I was involved in setting up those meetings, including bringing Jeremy Corbyn to talk to American members of Congress, I guess I’m still not supposed to name who they were. But we did a lot behind the scenes on this case. I did a lot of journalism. So please visit us at rightsanddissent.org.

Where we’re going next. I mean, I think a couple things we have to think of next. First, the Espionage Act is still on the books. Julian Assange has said that he thinks his actions are protected by the First Amendment, and he thinks they violate the letter of the Espionage Act. He’s 100% correct. And now is the time for us to strike at the Espionage Act to make sure we don’t have a law on the book that criminalizes First Amendment protected activity when journalists reasonably rely on the First Amendment every day to do things the Espionage Act says is unlawful. And the Espionage Act doesn’t just apply to journalists, it doesn’t just apply to whistleblowers, it applies to anyone who reads the newspaper and talks about the story that they’ve just read.

On top of that, I will say, we are back in the landscape that WikiLeaks emerged in, in that we have a government that is lying to us about a war, in this case, a genocide and we have a media that is parroting those lies. If ever there was a time that called out for a Dan Ellsberg or a Chelsea Manning or a Julian Assange, it is this time right now where we have a genocide being perpetuated based on lies. And I think it’s really important for us to stand up for those who are telling the truth about Gaza, to stand up for the journalists who are being assassinated, for the public officials who are resigning. And I don’t quite know what solidarity looks like in this exact moment, I’m still figuring it out. But I do know that working with the Gaza, the truth tellers, to uplift them and support them and show my solidarity with them along with going after the Espionage Act are going to be a huge role of where I’m going next because there is a collateral murder happening every day in Gaza.

Kevin Gosztola:

Like Chip says, there’s a lot of work that still has to be done. And I should just mention that, Chip, you’ve done some incredible work on the Hill to advance Espionage Act reform. And that’s a crucial going forward that that’s the next thing in my mind after following this case, you just paraphrased Julian Assange. But everyone around the world, outside of the United States, but global, we’re talking about this mostly in a domestic context, but all around the world, it’s now been clear that if you are an international reporter or a correspondent for a news media organization, especially if you’re reporting on wars or foreign policy of your country and there’s some United States involvement and you obtain primary source material about what is happening, you could be at risk. It just depends on if you’re in a location where the US could get its hands on you, if there’s a government that would be willing to open you up to this prosecution. If you’re in some limbo, if you end up trying to claim asylum and then there’s a pressure campaign and you get forced out and then detained. I believe that that should really alarm many who have not considered this fully up until this point about how unsafe the US government has been making the free press or freedom of the press around the world.

And so on these things like Espionage Act reform, we must probably engage. I think we should all be invested in a reporter’s shield law. We don’t have a national reporter’s shield law here in the United States. The Press Act, this is something that the Freedom of the Press Foundation has been working on very aggressively. It’s available, it’s there sitting in Dick Durbin’s wet paper towel hands. All he has to do is hold a vote on it. And then I don’t know what Joe Biden will do, but he should sign it. And then I also think that we should be following more closely anytime there are national security or police subpoenas or we see that there are things like censorship regimes that are imposed, like what we are seeing as Chip raised the issue of the war on Gaza, Israel, the Israeli government have this incredible censorship regime that they’ve imposed. It’s led to the banning of Al Jazeera. And not to mention the fact that at least 100, 1,020 journalists have been killed by the Israeli military at this point. And that should be a focus of us because of the US’s role in that conflict.

I know that there are other imprisoned people that are political prisoners. There is journalism under attack in places like India and Pakistan that the US is complicit in the way that they’re being mistreated. And so there are journalism cases, there are attacks on freedom of the press that we should support or attend to that they’re not the boutique causes like many of these press freedom organizations hold them up all the time. We’re talking about things that fall under the radar.

I know we need to wrap, so just a personal reflection as we close. Thank you to The Real News and thank you to all of the scrappy independent media organizations out there that ever invited me on their shows to be interviewed and to speak about this. I mean, I’m indebted to you because without having this platform and being able to share this work I don’t know that I would’ve been able to reach so many people. I’m indebted to Project Censored and The Censored Press for giving me the ability to write this book, Guilty of Journalism. This is 14 to 15 years of my life. Now, fortunately, I didn’t spend it in prison or in any form of arbitrary detention. I wasn’t being persecuted. But I mean, this is a long time. It’s a feature of this case. The passage of time was an issue in this extradition case. I just think of all the incredible people I’ve managed to meet. I don’t think I would’ve met Chip or Max or Eleanor. Eleanor and Max, you’re both very supportive of the book, and I have immense gratitude for that. But I’ve met whistleblowers, I’ve met journalists, I’ve met attorneys that I’m sure I never would’ve encountered.

I had the ability to meet Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and I’ve been so disappointed this past several days that he wasn’t able to live to celebrate this moment. I’m disappointed that another supporter of my work, especially covering Chelsea Manning’s court-martial, human rights attorney Michael Ratner is not alive to celebrate seeing Julian Assange walk free. And since many people are familiar with Ellsberg and maybe less familiar with Michael Ratner, it is worth taking a moment to laud him for what he did at a very dark time in the Assange, WikiLeaks timeline, because there was all of this contempt and derision directed towards Assange saying, oh, he’s just paranoid. He’s talking about how the US government wants to come after and extradite him. He won’t go to Sweden because he says that the US government is going to try to get him in his grips and bring him to the US and prosecute Julian Assange. Well, that’ll never happen. That could never take place.

Michael Ratner would go on news media shows that invited him and very clearly articulate the grounded fears for why Julian Assange needed to be protected and why the Justice Department needed to shut down and close their grand jury investigation and announce very clearly that there would be no charges. So I celebrate him.

And finally, I’m professionally indebted to Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. I can tell you, I would not be the journalist I am today without them. And much like a war correspondent can get an award for a summary execution and maybe feel a little bit conflicted inside about how they’re being celebrated for capturing that brutality. I’ve been documenting and chronicling both of these cases, and I’ll continue that work with The Dissenter Newsletter at thedissenter.org. I’ll continue to follow whistleblowers, government secrecy and threats against freedom of the press. I’ll cover attacks on journalists, mass surveillance, secrecy, abuses. And do all of this work that should be an extension based upon the understanding, and I’ll end on this, that what we have seen illustrated through Julian Assange’s case is not only that he’s guilty of journalism, but that the war on whistleblowers is a war on journalism. It’s been said by many in this space before, but those individuals are correct that these are not just people who are whistleblowers or leakers, they are media sources. And the Julian Assange case and Chelsea Manning’s case are both clear examples in the past 15 years of the US government waging a concerted attack on investigative journalism.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Kevin Gosztola and Chip Gibbons, again, on behalf of The Real News and all of our audience, let me just say that we are indebted to you. And Eleanor, I wanted to toss it to you to share your final thoughts and round us out.

Eleanor Goldfield:

For sure. So I’m reminded, I worked on a film years ago called Killswitch about Snowden, and it shares a quote from him that one of his biggest fears that nothing will fundamentally change. And that has stuck with me since I worked at that film and since I’ve been doing this work. And I think, I mean not to try and sugarcoat it because I’m not. But the reality is that things have changed. You changed Max, like you pointed out, when this case started you were working in a warehouse and now you are bringing these stories to light. I mean, Kevin, you pointed out that this has been 14 years of your life. Chip, this has changed you and therefore it’s changed the people around you and the orbits in which we organize and share this information.

I think that that quote from Snowden, it means that it is on us to not just personally change, but to change the way that we interact. It’s also changed how I do journalism. I mean, my journalism career started in recording magazines telling people how to mend their cables. I mean, I’ve obviously veered away from that, although I can still help people fix their cables. But I think that it does show the power of these actions by these whistleblowers and by journalists. And again, I agree with both of you who point out Assange is a journalist and it shows the power of truth. It shows the power of journalists doing that incredibly important work that like in Gaza, like Chip pointed out, there’s a reason that these journalists are being targeted because Israel is terrified of the bits of truth that they carry with them.

And so I think it’s really important to highlight that and to highlight that journalists are there, to your point, Max, not just ensure that the folks who feel forgotten are not forgotten, but also to ensure that that support is built around these issues and these stories. And people might say, oh, well, the job of a journalist is to be objective. I say bullshit, there’s no such thing as objectivity. The way you cover something, your angle, it shows who you are and it shows how you feel about a certain topic. And so I think that that’s the really important role that we have as folks who do this kind of work. And also, this shows that people, truth tellers, whistleblowers, have people on their side. And that might feel like a small comfort when you’re being tortured. It might feel like a small comfort when you’re confronting genocide. But I think this is also where we find each other, like Vaclav Havel said, the solidarity of the shaken. I think that that’s so important that we use an opportunity like this to remind each other that we have that and that this is our role. And however that manifests going forward for y’all, for you Max, for me, I think that is a really important lesson to take with us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Yeah. Just by final note, I really, really wanted to underscore for our listeners, please support this work however you can. Support Chip’s work, support Defending Rights and Dissent. Support Kevin’s work, buy his book. Support The Dissenter Newsletter. Support Project Censored. Please support The Real News. I mean, I know you can’t support all of them at once, but we need it. And if you want this work to survive, you got to support the folks that are doing it. So please, please do that.

And by way of rounding out, I just wanted to sort of make a quick announcement in that vein because I’m so honored and excited to have this kind of space where I can talk to incredible warriors and journalists like yourselves. And we want to do everything we can to lift up your work and to broaden its reach and to collaborate together. And so yeah, this will not be the last time that y’all hear me and Eleanor on the pod together, or you’ll be hearing more of Eleanor and the great Mickey Huff on The Real News podcast feed because I’m excited to announce that The Real News will be syndicating the Project Censored show, which many of you have probably already listened to on Pacifica Radio. It’s an excellent show. Kevin was just on there a couple weeks ago talking about this case. It’s incredibly mission aligned. It’s smart. The guest that you guys have on our great. We’re really excited to bring it on our podcast feed.

And Real News listeners, if you’re digging this, you’re going to get a lot more great content coming at you from this feed. But please go check out all the great stuff that Project Censored is doing. We’re going to link to everyone’s work and everyone’s website in the show notes for this episode. And of course, we’re going to link to our website, our newsletter, which you can sign up to if you never want to miss a story. And please, please, please donate to The Real News if you want to keep hearing more important coverage and conversations just like this. You can do that by going to TheRealNews.com/donate and become a donor today. We really appreciate it, y’all.

For now, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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