The Julian Assange Case: Revealing War Crimes Is Not a Crime

By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News

12 April 19

he US government’s case against Julian Assange is now before the American public. It was revamped in 2017 to avoid a skirmish with the corporate media over the breadth of the “reporter’s privilege” to receive classified materials from a source. Assange is facing a charge of conspiracy with former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to “break a password” to gain access to classified information.

What we are facing is an all-out assault against one of the most significant acts of civil resistance in the history of the United States. Specifically, the civil resistance of Chelsea Manning, her whistleblowing that helped end the US combat role in Iraq in 2011, and the courage of Julian Assange in ensuring that Manning’s resistance was effective.

The daily leaks to the media from the “reliable sources” inside the Trump administration are portrayed as a rational tool used to prevent the president and other high officials from abusing their power. These Washington journalists are rewarded with the sign of the dollar.

The all-too-infrequent leaks to the media about US government war crimes are portrayed as criminal conduct. Assange and his journalist colleagues are rewarded with attacks on their integrity and threats to their freedom.

This hypocrisy must end. American citizens and civil society must lead the effort to provide a whistleblower defense in military cases – and, for that matter, in every case that involves the release of classified material or that abused term “national security.”

To end this hypocrisy, it will ultimately take a statute that will somehow make it through Congress. Only then will Edward Snowden be willing to come home and have a fair trial.

A practical first step is a call to the European Court of Human Rights to bar the extradition of Assange. Without a whistleblower defense protected by law, the courts of the United States are unable to provide Assange with a fair trial.

Until this hypocrisy ends, we are all complicit.

Nine years ago, Julian Assange collaborated with Chelsea Manning with a sweeping set of revelations depicting US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the factual background underlying these events.

After many years, a horrified American public saw in April 2010 a graphic video of hardened soldiers gloating about “dead bastards“ while innocent Iraqi civilians died in an Apache helicopter assault.

A 22-minute documentary based on this footage was nominated for a 2012 Academy Award. Ethan McCord, an Army specialist, picked up a wounded child and ran to a US military vehicle. His superiors refused to take the child to a US military hospital, and McCord was reprimanded for his response. When McCord sought psychological assistance, he was told by his staff sergeant to “get the sand out of your vagina.”

McCord and fellow Army specialist Josh Stieber wrote a public apology to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, emphasizing that the Wikileaks footage depicted not an aberration, but “everyday occurrences” in Iraq. McCord’s address to a 2010 antiwar conference can be seen here in a YouTube clip.

Ethan McCord and Josh Stieber offer an example of the nation that we could be.

What Wikileaks entitled the “Collateral Murder” video helped bring the US phase of the Iraq war to an end in 2011.

Chelsea Manning admitted releasing this video and a trove of related classified material. She said at her trial that she did it to spark public debate on US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Scott Galindez and I covered the Manning trial on behalf of Reader Supported News for many days in 2013. It was clear that the prosecution was obsessed with any way they could find an angle to attack Julian Assange for working with Manning.

Army investigator David Shaver testified to the jury that an unknown user unsuccessfully attempted to reverse engineer a password. Mark Johnson, an expert witness, testified that of the purported Manning-Assange conversations he had heard, none of them contained solicitations for files. None of us at the trial thought they had anything substantive on Assange – but it certainly wasn’t for want of trying.

Private Manning was denied the right to present a whistleblower defense to the jury – the right to argue that one’s actions were justified in order to expose war crimes. The outcome was predictable. Manning was sentenced to 35 years, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and a dishonorable discharge. They even demoted Manning from Private First Class to Private.

The next day, Manning publicly announced her intention to be identified as a woman. She launched a pathbreaking battle to force the military to honor her rights as a transgender woman while behind bars. She continued to win the respect of people throughout the world.

World opinion makes a difference. Just before he left office in 2017, President Obama commuted her sentence. Manning has continued to inspire people in the years since – and especially in the last month, when she returned to prison rather than testify against Julian Assange to a federal grand jury.

Keep in mind that Manning has answered thousands of questions about Assange – every conceivable question has already been asked.

Manning refused to testify to the grand jury precisely because criminal grand juries are tools of repression – and are not used by any civilized country other than the United States and Liberia.

In particular, grand juries are routinely used to harass dissidents. The primary approach is to force dissidents to testify against one another and weaken their political movements. No attorney is allowed to stand in the hearing room with the client. The purpose is to sow division and discord.

Chelsea Manning refused to comply for these principled reasons, and she will almost certainly remain in jail until the end of the Assange grand jury’s term.

It should be said that a review of the indictment – issued in late 2017 as the statute of limitations was running out – indicates the possible weakness of the conspiracy case against Assange. The key language cited to support the conspiracy: “Manning told Assange that ‘after this upload, that’s all I really got left.’ To which Assange replied, ‘curious eyes never run dry in my experience.’”

But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume a robust conspiracy. A situation where Assange actively encouraged Manning to provide additional files. For that matter, let’s also assume that Assange assisted Manning to reverse-engineer a password to obtain the material.

Taking measured actions to bring the truth to light is what whistleblowers do. Whether these actions were reasonable is the role of the jury to decide.

The real question is: Will Assange be allowed to use a whistleblower defense to the jury in order to justify his actions? Will Ethan McCord be allowed to testify? Or the child that he helped save?

The real answer is: No. The European Court of Human Rights should step in and halt Assange’s extradition. The government doesn’t want a fair fight. In a fair fight, the government will lose.

Bill Simpich is an Oakland attorney who knows that it doesn't have to be like this. He was part of the legal team chosen by Public Justice as Trial Lawyer of the Year in 2003 for winning a jury verdict of 4.4 million in Judi Bari's lawsuit against the FBI and the Oakland police.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Wall Street Loves Socialism for Bankers - but Not for Ordinary People

By Robert Reich, Guardian UK

12 April 19

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon decries socialism. Unless of course it’s the banks that need a government bailout

n his annual letter to shareholders, distributed last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took aim at socialism, warning it would be “a disaster for our country,” because it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse.”

Dimon should know. He was at the helm when JPMorgan received a $25bn socialist-like bailout in 2008, after it and other Wall Street banks almost tanked because of their reckless loans.

Dimon subsequently agreed to pay the government $13bn to settle charges that the bank overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors in the run-up to the crisis. According to the Justice Department, JPMorgan acknowledged it had regularly and knowingly sold mortgages that should have never been sold. (Presumably this is where the “stagnation, corruption and often worse” comes in.)

The $13bn penalty was chicken feed to the biggest bank on Wall Street, whose profits last year alone amounted to $35bn. Besides, JPMorgan was able to deduct around $11bn of the settlement costs from its taxable income.

To state it another way, Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs helped trigger the 2008 financial crisis when the dangerous and irresponsible loans their banks were peddling – on which they made big money – finally went bust. But instead of letting the market punish the banks (which is what capitalism is supposed to do) the government bailed them out and eventually levied paltry fines which the banks treated as the cost of doing business.

If this isn’t socialism, what is it?

Yet it’s a particular form of socialism. Millions of homeowners who owed more on their homes than the homes became worth didn’t get bailed out. Millions of workers who lost their jobs or their savings, or both, didn’t get bailed out. No major banker went to jail.

Call it socialism for rich bankers.

It’s a gift that keeps giving. Dimon took advantage of the financial crisis to acquire Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, vastly enlarging JPMorgan. America’s five biggest banks, including Dimon’s, now control 46% of all deposits, up from 12% in the early 1990s.

And because they’re so big, Dimon’s and other big Wall Street banks are now considered “too big to fail”. This translates into a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors who face less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans.

More socialism for rich bankers.

After the financial crisis and bailout, Congress enacted a milquetoast version of the Glass-Steagall Act, a banking law from the Great Depression that bankers killed off in the 1990s. The replacement was called the Dodd-Frank Act.

Ever since, Dimon has pushed to weaken Dodd-Frank.

When Obama’s regulators wanted to extend Dodd-Frank to the foreign branches and subsidiaries of Wall Street banks, Dimon warned it would harm Wall Street’s competitiveness.

This was the same Jamie Dimon who chose London as the place to make highly risky derivatives trades that lost the firm some $6bn in 2012 – proof that unless the overseas operations of Wall Street banks are covered by US regulations, giant banks like his will move more of their betting abroad, hiding their wildly-risky bets overseas so U.S. regulators can’t see them.

More recently, Trump’s bank regulators have heeded Dimon, and rolled back Dodd-Frank.

Dimon was also instrumental in getting the big Trump tax cuts through Congress. They saved JPMorgan and the other big banks $21bn last year alone.

Dimon was paid $31m last year. He is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.3bn.

Ironically, a few weeks ago Dimon warned that income inequality is dividing America. He said that a “big chunk” of Americans have been left behind, and, announcing a $350m program to train workers for the jobs of the future, lamented that 40% of Americans make less than $15 an hour.

True, but $350m over five years isn’t even a drop in the ocean for the Americans left behind.

Wall Street bonuses totaled $27.5bn last year, which is more three times the combined annual earnings of all American workers employed full-time at the federal minimum wage. That’s more than 600,000 low-wage workers.

If Dimon were serious about the problem of widening inequality, he’d use his lobbying prowess to help raise the federal minimum wage. He’d also try to make it easier for workers to unionize, and to raise taxes on the super-wealthy like himself.

But, of course, Dimon isn’t really concerned about widening inequality. He’s not really concerned about socialism, either.

Dimon’s real concern is that America may end the kind of socialism he and other denizens of the Street depend on – bailouts, regulatory loopholes, and tax breaks.

These have made Dimon and his comrades a fortune, but they’ve brought the rest of America stagnation, corruption, and often worse.