Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.
Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.
His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.
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Tweets by @BTLRadioNewsInterview with Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, conducted by Scott Harris
After Julian Assange spent a week in a London jail, a British judge granted the WikiLeaks founder cash bail in the amount of 200,000 pounds or $315,000 with strict conditions. But Sweden, which is seeking to question Assange in connection with his alleged sexual assault of two Swedish women, announced that it would oppose the granting of bail.
WikiLeaks' has drawn harsh criticism from the Obama administration for its release of thousands of classified field reports on the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan this summer, and its more recent circulation of secret U.S. State Department cables, exposing Washington's sometimes embarrassing confidential discussions of foreign policy and heads of state. Conservative American politicians and commentators are ramping up the pressure to retaliate against Assange and Wikileaks. Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol has called for the assassination of Assange, U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., has demanded Assange be charged with treason and that the New York Times be investigated for its publication of some redacted WikiLeaks documents.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder maintains that WikiLeaks' release of secret documents has put the safety of Americans at risk, and says the Justice Department is investigating whether to prosecute Assange, possibly under the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who explains why he strongly rejects the constitutional basis for any prosecution of Julian Assange for his group's publication of documents that they did not themselves illegally obtain.
KEVIN BANKSTON: I fear that a lot of the hyberbolic and hysteric commentary about WikiLeaks has created more heat than light and isn't really clarifying the situation. But I think that regardless of whether you or I or anyone else think the release of the diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks was responsible or irresponsible or is overall a good thing or a bad thing for democracy in the U.S. or is journalistic -- or, to use a term that's been hardly overused lately, terroristic -- the fact remains that our First Amendment strongly protects the right of WikiLeaks or the New York Times, or you or I to publish and to read these cables. There's a lot of complaint about well, some of this may not be particularly newsworthy or why was it important for this stuff to be published? But it's not the burden of a publisher to demonstrate why what they're publishing is important. The presumption in our system is that if you are publishing it, it is important and it is protected.
Rather, the burden is on the government if it wants to restrain publication or prosecute somebody to meet a very high burden and demonstrate that specific information in a specific cable is going to cause direct, immediate or irreparable harm to the United States. And if they can't do that, our First Amendment demands that the speech stay up. And ultimately, that is a bargain that we've made as a country and in the end, it's a powerful and important bargain, one that we've staked our all on.
BETWEEN THE LINES: We hear that the U.S. Justice Department under the Obama admnistration is studying prosecution of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. What legal standing does the U.S. Justice Department have to go after Julian Assange, who is an Australian citizen, and certainly not subject to all U.S. laws, is he?
KEVIN BANKSTON: Well, there are certainly practical concerns in terms getting jurisdiction over Julian Assange. It is possible they would be able to extradite him from Sweden when he goes to face the separate sexual assault charges that have been brought against him there. It's a bit hard to comment on an indictment that hasn't come down yet and a criminal complaint that does not exist yet. But the law most often cited in regard to WikiLeaks is the Espionage Act of 1917, which rather broadly criminalizes the receipt or dissemination of national defense information. As you note, 1917 is a long time ago, and there have been a lot of intervening Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment and reiterating how strong our First Amendment is and how strongly it protects our ability and the ability of the foreign press, to the extent they're speaking to us Americans, the right to publish true political speech. And that's exactly what we're talking about here when we discuss the documents of the United States government, which are by definition, political speech and very strongly protected under our First Amendment. So, I think the question we need to ask ourselves, though, if and when a prosecution is brought against Julian Assange, is what's preventing such a prosecution against the New York Times or any other innocent recipient of this information who attempts to report on it or publish it? Indeed, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who's been the source of some of the most hysterical commentary here, has in fact, suggested that the New York Times should be criminally investigated for reporting news based on these cables and for possessing these cables, which I think should send a shudder down the spine of any American who cares about free speech and a free press.
BETWEEN THE LINES: When Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman talks about investigating the New York Times and any other publication by extension, that reprints portions of these leaked diplomatic cables published initially by WikiLeaks, what standing would that kind of investigation have without jeopardizing the constitutional guarantee of the right of a free press and free speech?
KEVIN BANKSTON: I think that such a prosecution would threaten the First Amendment rights -- not just of the person prosecuted, but everyone else to the extent it would chill us, it would frighten us, it would create a fear around these documents that I don't think is warranted. And, to try and create an antidote to that fear, what we've published on our site is a memo from the Congressional Research Service, or CRS, which is Congress' bipartisan objective legal office to write memos for them about what the law really is.
And we have gotten a hold of a very recent memo from CRS about WikiLeaks and the laws that might apply and how the First Amendment might create hurdles to prosecuting WikiLeaks, and it makes very clear something we already knew, but I think the public needs to hear more of, which is: a prosecution against a publisher for publishing true information that they did not illegally obtain, but rather was provided to them would be absolutely unprecedented under American law. It's something that just doesn't happen. That's a fact that I think a lot of the rhetoric here is ignoring. And I think that a prosecution of that nature would represent a sea change and pose a real, new threat to our system of free speech.
Contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation by calling (415) 436-9333 or visit their website at www.eff.org.
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