On Thursday, I wrote about the testimony of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at a Tuesday meeting of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). Assange’s testimony provided an informative overview of his persecution for helping expose disturbing government secrets.
In his testimony, Assange stepped back at times from the particulars of his story to address broader issues related to government that are important for proponents of freedom of speech and press, and opponents of warmongering, to understand. Then, in his answering of questions after his testimony, Assange provided some insightful description of a dangerous government tendency that it is important for people to understand.
Assange described a persistent, powerful, and often successful effort to direct government to act against the liberty and well-being of the people. This, he indicates, supported the United States government taking action against Assange that appeared barred by the First Amendment of the US Constitution and judges in Britain giving great deference to the US effort to seek Assange’s extradition to the US.
Regarding the action of the US government against him, Assange stated:
We performed a legal analysis to understand what the abilities and limitations were within Europe for publishing documents from a number of different countries, including the United States. We understood that, in theory, Article 10 should protect journalists in Europe. Similarly, looking at the US First Amendment to its Constitution, no publisher had ever been prosecuted for publishing classified information from the United States — either domestically or internationally.
I expected some kind of harassment, legal process. I was prepared to fight for that. I believe the value of these publications was such that it’s OK to have that fight, and that we would prevail because we had understood what was legally possible.
My naivete was believing in the law. When push comes to shove, laws are just pieces of paper and they can be reinterpreted for political expediency. They are the rules made by the ruling class more broadly, and, if those rules don’t suite what it wants to do, it reinterprets them or, hopefully, changes them, which is clearer.
In the case of the United States, we angered one of the constituent powers of the United States — the intelligence sector, the security state, the secrecy state. It was powerful enough to push for reinterpretation of the US Constitution.
The US First Amendment seems pretty black-and-white to me. It’s very short. It says the Congress shall make no law restricting speech or the press. However, the US Constitution and those precedents relating to it were just reinterpreted away.
And, yes, perhaps, ultimately if it had gotten to the Supreme Court of the United States and I was still alive in that system, I might have won, depending on what the makeup was of the US Supreme Court. But, in the meantime, I had lost 14 years in the house arrest, embassy siege, and maximum security prison.
So, I think, this is an important lesson that when a major powerful faction wants to reinterpret the law it can push to have the element of the state – in this case the US Department of Justice — do that, And it doesn’t care too much about what is legal; that’s something for a much later date. In the meantime, the deterrent effect that it seeks, the retributive actions that it seeks, have had their effect.
In addition to the US Justice Department deferring to the CIA to subvert legal protections, Assange comments in his answers that “all judges, whether they were finding in my favor or not, in the United Kingdom, showed extraordinary deference to the United States, engaged in astonishing intellectual backflips, to allow the United States to have its way on my extradition and in relation to setting precedents that occurred in my case more broadly.” “That’s to my mind,” continued Assange, “a function of the selection of UK judges, the narrow section of British society from which they come, their deep engagement with the UK establishment, and the UK establishment’s deep engagement with the United States, whether that’s in the intelligence sector, BAE which is now the largest manufacturer in the United Kingdom—a weapons company, BP, Shell, and some of the major banks.” Continuing, Assange explained:
The United Kingdom’s establishment is made up out of people who have benefited from that system for a long period of time, and almost all judges are from it. They don’t need to be told explicitly what to do. They understand what is good for that cohort, and what is good for that cohort is keeping a good relationship with the United States government.
Later in the Q and A period, Assange returned to discussing this concerning aspect of law, providing this warning: “I think we should understand a bigger picture, which is that, whenever we make a law, we create a tool that self-interested bureaucrats, companies, and the worst elements of the security state will use and will expand the interpretation in order to achieve control over others.”
Assange has suffered much for his efforts to expose government wrongdoing. Coming out of a period of silence, he is again providing great educational benefit to people by explaining ways in which agents of government enforcement work to ensure that supposed legal protections are swept aside when those legal protections sufficiently challenge entrenched interests. It is an important lesson for people to learn, and Assange has proven himself a capable teacher.
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