Julian Assange has reached a deal with the United States Department of Justice to allow him to return to Australia after pleading guilty to violating American espionage law.

Assange, 52, was released from London’s Belmarsh Prison, where he has spent more than five years and later was seen at a London airport boarding a private plane. He left around 5pm on Monday London time. Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith, is on the plane.

According to the deal, he will plead guilty to a charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified national defence information in a US federal court in Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US commonwealth in the Pacific.

He is expected to return to Australia after the court appearance on Wednesday morning.

The dramatic breakthrough follows years of cross-party campaigning by Australian politicians, multiple representations by the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, ministers and backbenchers, and agitation by a wide group of supporters and especially his family.

A federal government spokesman said on Tuesday morning: “Prime Minister Albanese has been clear – Mr Assange’s case has dragged on for too long and there is nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration.”

In April, US President Joe Biden gave a hint that progress was being made on Assange’s case. Asked if he would consider a request from Australia to drop the prosecution, he answered, “We’re considering it”.

The Young Turks: “BREAKING: Julian Assange AGREES To Plea Deal”

Assange, who previously spent years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London while he fought extradition to the US, has suffered declining health recently.

Assange was indicted in the US for the WikiLeaks release of a trove of US classified material. This had come from a former American intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning.

Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Birmingham said in a statement, “We have consistently said that the US and UK justice systems should be respected. We welcome the fact that Mr Assange’s decision to plead guilty will bring this long running saga to an end.”

Assange’s mother, Christine Ann Hawkins, in a statement provided to Sky News through an advocate, said: “I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end. This shows the importance and power of quiet diplomacy.”

His wife Stella, who married Assange while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, posted, “Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU- yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true. THANK YOU. tHANK YOU. THANK YOU.”

Assange’s father, John Shipton, told the ABC, “It looks as though Julian will be free to come back to Australia”.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On a warm evening almost a decade ago, I sat under the stars with Daniel Ellsberg while he talked about nuclear war with alarming intensity. He was most of the way through writing his last and most important book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Somehow, he had set aside the denial so many people rely on to cope with a world that could suddenly end in unimaginable horror. Listening, I felt more and more frightened. Dan knew what he was talking about.

After working inside this country’s doomsday machinery, even drafting nuclear war plans for the Pentagon during President John F. Kennedy’s administration, Dan Ellsberg had gained intricate perspectives on what greased the bureaucratic wheels, personal ambitions, and political messaging of the warfare state. Deceptions about arranging for the ultimate violence of thermonuclear omnicide were of a piece with routine falsehoods about American war-making. It was easy enough to get away with lying, he told me: “How difficult is it to deceive the public? I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we’re superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Dan had made history in 1971 by revealing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, exposing the constant litany of official lies that accompanied the U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War. In response, the government used the blunderbuss of the World War I-era Espionage Act to prosecute him. At age 41, he faced a possible prison sentence of more than 100 years. But his trial ended abruptly with all charges dismissed when the Nixon administration’s illegal interference in the case came to light in mid-1972. Five decades later, he reflected: “Looking back, the chance that I would get out of 12 felony counts from Richard Nixon was close to zero. It was a miracle.”

That miracle enabled Dan to keep on speaking, writing, researching, and protesting for the rest of his life. (In those five decades, he averaged nearly two arrests per year for civil disobedience.) He worked tirelessly to prevent and oppose a succession of new American wars. And he consistently gave eloquent public support as well as warm personal solidarity to heroic whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, Katharine Gun, Daniel Hale, Matthew Hoh, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Mordechai Vanunu, Ann Wright, and others — who sacrificed much to challenge deadly patterns of official deceit.

Unauthorized Freedom of Speech

Dan often spoke out for freeing WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose work had revealed devastating secret U.S. documents on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the end of a visit in June 2015, when they said goodbye inside Ecuador’s embassy in London, I saw that both men were on the verge of tears. At that point, Assange was three years into his asylum at that embassy, with no end in sight.

Secretly indicted in the United States, Assange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy for nearly four more years until London police dragged him off to prison. Hours later, in a radio interview, Dan said: “Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic.”

Buy the Book

Unauthorized disclosures were the essence of what WikiLeaks had published and what Dan had provided with the Pentagon Papers. Similarly, countless exposés about U.S. government war crimes became possible due to the courage of Chelsea Manning, and profuse front-page news about the government’s systematic violations of the Fourth Amendment resulted from Edward Snowden’s bravery. While gladly publishing some of their revelations, major American newspapers largely refused to defend their rights.

Such dynamics were all too familiar to Dan. He told me that the attitude toward him of the New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize with its huge Pentagon Papers scoop, was akin to a district attorney’s view of a “snitch” — useful but distasteful.

In recent times, Dan detested the smug media paradigm of “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad.” So, he pushed back against the theme as rendered by New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote a lengthy piece along those lines in late 2016. Dan quickly responded with a letter to the editor, which never appeared.

The New Yorker certainly could have found room to print Dan’s letter, which said: “I couldn’t disagree more with Gladwell’s overall account.” The letter was just under 300 words; the Gladwell piece had run more than 5,000. While promoting the “Ellsberg good, Snowden bad” trope, the New Yorker did not let readers know that Ellsberg himself completely rejected it:

“Each of us, having earned privileged access to secret information, saw unconstitutional, dangerously wrong policies ongoing by our government. (In Snowden’s case, he discovered blatantly criminal violations of our Fourth Amendment right to privacy, on a scale that threatens our democracy.) We found our superiors, up to the presidents, were deeply complicit and clearly unwilling either to expose, reform, or end the wrongdoing.

“Each of us chose to sacrifice careers, and possibly a lifetime’s freedom, to reveal to the public, Congress, and the courts what had long been going on in secret from them. We hoped, each with some success, to allow our democratic system to bring about desperately needed change.

“The truth is there are no whistleblowers, in fact no one on earth, with whom I identify more closely than with Edward Snowden.

“Here is one difference between us that is deeply real to me: Edward Snowden, when he was 30 years old, did what I could and should have done — what I profoundly wish I had done — when I was his age, instead of 10 years later.”

As he encouraged whistleblowing, Dan often expressed regret that he hadn’t engaged in it sooner. During the summer of 2014, a billboard was on display at bus stops in Washington, D.C., featuring a quote from Dan — with big letters at the top saying “DON’T DO WHAT I DID. DON’T WAIT,” followed by “until a new war has started, don’t wait until thousands more have died, before you tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. You might save a war’s worth of lives.” Two whistleblowers who had been U.S. diplomats, Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright, unveiled the billboard at a bus stop near the State Department.

A Grotesque Situation of Existential Danger

Above all, Daniel Ellsberg was preoccupied with opposing policies that could lead to nuclear war. “No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral. Or insane,” he wrote in The Doomsday Machine. “The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness.”

It’s fitting that the events set for Daniel Ellsberg Week (ending on June 16th, the first anniversary of when Dan passed away) will include at least one protest at a Northrop Grumman facility. That company has a $13.3 billion contract to develop a new version of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which — as Dan frequently emphasized — is the most dangerous of all nuclear weapons. He was eager to awaken Congress to scientific data about “nuclear winter” and the imperative of shutting down ICBMs to reduce the risks of nuclear war.

Five years ago, several of us from the Institute for Public Accuracy hand-delivered paperbacks of The Doomsday Machine — with a personalized letter from Dan to each member of the House and Senate — to all 535 congressional offices on Capitol Hill. “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years,” Dan wrote near the top of his two-page letter. Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”

Dan’s letter singled out the urgency of one “immediate step” in particular: “to eliminate entirely our redundant, vulnerable, and destabilizing land-based ICBM force.” Unlike air-launched and sea-based nuclear weapons, which are not vulnerable to attack, the ICBMs are vulnerable to a preemptive strike and so are “poised to launch” on the basis of “ten-minute warning signals that may be — and have been, on both sides — false alarms, which press leadership to ‘use them or lose them.’”

As Dan pointed out, “It is in the power of Congress to decouple the hair-trigger on our system by defunding and dismantling the current land-based Minuteman missiles and rejecting funding for their proposed replacements. The same holds for lower-yield weapons for first use against Russia, on submarines or in Europe, which are detonators for escalation to nuclear winter.”

In essence, Dan was telling members of Congress to do their job, with the fate of the earth and its inhabitants hanging in the balance:

“This grotesque situation of existential danger has evolved in secret in the almost total absence of congressional oversight, investigations, or hearings. It is time for Congress to remedy this by preparing for first-ever hearings on current nuclear doctrine and ‘options,’ and by demanding objective, authoritative scientific studies of their full consequences including fire, smoke, nuclear winter, and famine. Classified studies of nuclear winter using actual details of existing attack plans, never yet done by the Pentagon but necessarily involving its directed cooperation, could be done by the National Academy of Sciences, requested and funded by Congress.”

But Dan’s letter was distinctly out of sync with Congress. Few in office then — or now — have publicly acknowledged that such a “grotesque situation of existential danger” really exists. And even fewer have been willing to break from the current Cold War mindset that continues to fuel the rush to global annihilation. On matters of foreign policy and nuclear weapons, the Congressional Record is mainly a compendium of arrogance and delusion, in sharp contrast to the treasure trove of Dan’s profound insights preserved at Ellsberg.net.

Humanism and Realism to Remember

Clear as he was about the overarching scourge of militarism embraced by the leaders of both major parties, Dan was emphatic about not equating the two parties at election time. He understood that efforts like Green Party presidential campaigns are misguided at best. But, as he said dryly, he did favor third parties — on the right (“the more the better”). He knew what some self-described progressives have failed to recognize as the usual reality of the U.S. electoral system: right-wing third parties help the left, and left-wing third parties help the right.

Several weeks before the 2020 election, Dan addressed voters in the swing state of Michigan via an article he wrote for the Detroit Metro Times. Appearing under a headline no less relevant today — “Trump Is an Enemy of the Constitution and Must Be Defeated” — the piece said that “it’s now of transcendent importance to prevent him from gaining a second term.” Dan warned that “we’re facing an authoritarian threat to our democratic system of a kind we’ve never seen before,” making votes for Joe Biden in swing states crucial.

Dan’s mix of deep humanism and realism was in harmony with his aversion to contorting logic to suit rigid ideology. Bad as current realities were, he said, it was manifestly untrue that things couldn’t get worse. He had no intention of ignoring the very real dangers of nuclear war or fascism.

During the last few months of his life, after disclosing a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer, Dan reached many millions of people with an intensive schedule of interviews. Journalists were mostly eager to ask him about events related to the Pentagon Papers. While he said many important things in response to such questions, Dan most wanted to talk about the unhinged momentum of the nuclear arms race and the ominous U.S. frenzy of antagonism toward Russia and China lacking any sense of genuine diplomacy.

While he can no longer speak to the world about the latest developments, Dan Ellsberg will continue to speak directly to hearts and minds about the extreme evils of our time — and the potential for overcoming them with love in action.

A free documentary film premiering now, “A Common Insanity: A Conversation with Daniel Ellsberg About Nuclear Weapons,” concludes with these words from Dan as he looks straight at us: “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”

Copyright 2024 Norman Solomon

Via Tomdispatch.com

   Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers first because, “Vietnam is where the bombs are falling.” It took him more than four decades to gather all the documents to write this frankly terrifying look at the growing threat of nuclear omnicide.

   In brief, Ellsberg shows that the deliberate targeting of civilians in mass bombing campaigns – a central element in U.S. nuclear war plans – actually began during the Second World War, when the governments of Britain and the United States adopted the same tactic as initially used by fascist Germany and Japan. For instance, around 25,000 innocent people were burned to death in the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden. It was ever worse in Tokyo, where people, “became blazing torches unable to move in the melting asphalt.” Approximately one-hundred thousand people perished in that firestorm. And these were non-nuclear attacks.

   Contrary to the U.S. government position, there was no military justification for using nuclear weapons on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, as Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur confirmed – the Japanese government was already trying to surrender. About 185,000 people died in those unnecessary bombings. (One of the true motives for using nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians was to let the Soviets know who was the lone superpower in the post-war world).

   Ellsberg shows how the current nuclear war-fighting plans of the U.S. and Russia also target cities, with casualties expected to be literally in the billions, all around the world. Any survivors of the nuclear bombing would probably envy the dead, as they would have to not only cope with the trauma of their devastating experiences, but also with the effects of the smoke that would rise into the atmosphere, “forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more.” This “nuclear winter”, according to Ellsberg, “would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death” nearly everybody who survived the nuclear war itself.

   He also explains that it’s not just presidents or other national leaders who could start a nuclear holocaust; lower ranking officers could order a first strike (as General Jack D. Ripper did in the powerful film, Dr. Strangelove), but there is always the possibility of misunderstandings, errors, and other situations which could accidentally trigger a nuclear war that nobody intended. We have come too close to such a catastrophe many times over the years.

   During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for example, the determination and diplomacy of U.S. President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev was critical in preventing a nuclear war – but just barely. In spite of their intentions, there were several unexpected events which could have turned into an apocalypse. In one case, a Soviet submarine came under attack from U.S. destroyers and two of the three ranking officers wanted to respond with a nuclear-armed torpedo.  But as Ellsberg reports, the third officer, Vasili Arkhipov, vetoed that option – saving humanity from disaster.

   The danger is even greater now, as there are more nuclear powers (France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, China, India, N. Korea), and today’s nuclear weapons are many times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

   And the potential for unintended escalations in places like Ukraine, Iran, and Korea only increase the chances of a nuclear confrontation that nobody intends.

   Part of the problem is that most people have no idea how dangerous a situation we are now facing, and some entertain the dangerous idea that it is possible to emerge victorious after a nuclear holocaust. Actually, this question was answered in the TV sitcom, “Happy Days”, when the Cunningham family was trying to decide if they should build a bomb shelter in their backyard. When his father said that nuclear weapons were needed for the U.S. to win a nuclear war, his son Ritchie (Ron Howard) sagely replied, “Does anybody win a nuclear war?”

   Another cause of the arms race, of course, is the power of what President Eisenhower rightly called, “the military-industrial complex” which profits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and is not shy to make contributions to its allies in both political parties.

   It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the nuclear arms build-up that was started by President Obama was continued by Trump and is continuing under President Biden – a plan to modernize the three legs of the nuclear triad – submarines, bombers and land-based missiles – at a cost of over $1 trillion.

   Michael T. Klare, professor of peace studies, wrote, “the US military has…committed itself and the nation to a three-front geopolitical struggle…in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East…What appears particularly worrisome about this three-front strategy is its immense capacity for confrontation, miscalculation, escalation, and finally actual war…”

   In January, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead to just 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

   And now, with the criminal Russain invasion of Ukraine, the danger of some sort of nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was in the Cold War.

   The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the 2017 Nobel peace prize for the organisation’s efforts to abolish nuclear weapons globally. Its founder, Tilman Ruff, says America’s aggressive new nuclear policy is “a blueprint for nuclear war”.

   ICAN sponsored a prohibition treaty which was adopted by the United Nations general assembly last July, when two-thirds of the world’s countries – 122 nations – voted in favour of the treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. The treaty will come into force when 50 countries have ratified it.

   None of the nuclear states, including the US, signed on.

   Humanity is now at its most dangerous moment in history.

   We do, however, have alternatives.

   For starters, Ellsberg made a very convincing case for a drastic reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons, which would significantly reduce the risks of an apocalypse.

   The good news? The 70,000 nuclear weapons that were in existence thirty years ago have been reduced to “only” around 15,000 – so progress is possible.

   To go further, we must heed the advice of Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz. “In 2007, these four leading Cold Warriors, who served at the highest levels of government under Republican and Democratic presidents, endorsed the goal of ‘a world free of nuclear weapons’ and outlined an agenda to achieve that goal.”

   Fifty-five years after the death of Martin Luther King, we should remember that he was not only fighting for civil rights, but that he understood the connections between the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war …”

   Over $2 trillion goes to world military spending every year, and the illegal invasion of Iraq alone will cost the U.S. around $5 trillion. When we finally put an end to militarism, think of all the good that we could do when the money and resources that now go to war is invested in such common goods as eliminating poverty, cutting taxes, funding health care, and creating millions of jobs in renewable energy, reforestation, and other “green” projects.

   We must also create situations that bring out the best, not the worst, in us. One of the important insights in The Doomsday Machine is that the people Ellsberg knew who planned for nuclear war were, in his words, “not evil…They were normal Americans, capable and patriotic.”

   The ultimate solution, as former Soviet leader – and Nobel Peace Prize winner – Mikhail Gorbachev wrote: “A world without nuclear weapons: There can be no other final goal.”

   When will we actually have a “world without nuclear weapons”? Again, President Eisenhower had the answer: “I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

   We should follow the inspiration of Daniel Ellsberg by “speaking truth to power” and creating a global peace movement that will have the vision and strength to demand that governments “get out of the way” and finally rid the world of nuclear weapons – before our luck runs out.

When President Donald Trump likened a whistleblower’s White House sources to spies and made a lightly veiled reference to execution, he highlighted a longstanding peril facing those who come forward to alert the public to governmental wrongdoing.

In many instances, whistleblowers find the abusive power they have revealed turned against them, both ending their careers and harming their personal lives.

In the private sector, whistleblowers are often ignored and told their concern is not part of their job description – and are commonly retaliated against by being demoted or fired.

When a whistleblower is in the U.S. intelligence and national security sphere, they’re often speaking out about misdeeds by powerful figures – and, as a result, have frequently faced death threats, physical attacks, prosecution and prison.

The new whistleblower report that alleges wrongdoing by the president is a reminder of the vital importance of holding wrongdoers accountable, regardless of their level of power. When those acts affect national security, whistleblowing is even more important. But as I’ve found in my whistleblowing research, whistleblowers in this arena have far fewer legal protections from retaliation than those in corporate settings or elsewhere in government.

Targets of retaliation

The consequences for government whistleblowers in the last 20 years have been harsh, in part because laws about classified information have made it difficult for people to publicize wrongdoing on sensitive issues.

After William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe alleged in 2002 that their employer, the National Security Agency, mismanaged intelligence-gathering software that potentially could have prevented 9/11, their homes were raided and ransacked by the FBI as their families watched. Ultimately, the NSA revoked their security clearances and they were forced to sue to recover the confiscated personal property.

Another NSA whistleblower, Thomas Drake, alleged in 2002 that the agency’s mass-surveillance programs after 9/11 involved fraud, waste and violations of citizens’ rights. He became the subject of one of the biggest government leak investigations of all time and was prosecuted for espionage, which he ultimately settled through a plea agreement.

A third NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden has spent years in exile, fearing an unfair trial should he return to the U.S.

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning has spent years in federal prison for releasing classified documents regarding U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Difficult consequences can come not just from the government but also from the public and the media. The New York Times has come under criticism for revealing identifying details about the current whistleblower’s position.

Few protections

Most laws governing federal whistleblowers lay out a procedure for coming forward with concerns, offer protections for confidentiality, and prevent recipients of information from harassing, threatening, demoting, firing or discriminating against the person raising the complaint.

Whistleblowers reporting securities law violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission have those protections. So do whistleblowers who report on fraudulent billing or claims against the government, such as Medicare or Medicaid fraud.

It can be difficult to find a balance between the government’s need to protect highly sensitive classified information and the public’s interest in uncovering wrongdoing. As a result, protections for whistleblowers in the intelligence community lack robust protections. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 outlines a process for whistleblowers in the intelligence community to raise concerns, but doesn’t explicitly protect the whistleblower from retaliation or being publicly identified. Two executive-branch directives, created during the Obama administration, do bar retaliation against whistleblowers. However, they create a conflict of interest, because the person who determines whether there has been retaliation may be the person doing the retaliating.

Those Obama-era directives also prevent the whistleblower from seeking an independent court’s review. They do not specify whether and exactly how aggrieved whistleblowers are entitled to back pay or reinstatement of employment, which are common whistleblower remedies.

It’s no surprise, then, that in the first 10 years after the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act was enacted, no intelligence whistleblower was compensated for retaliation. While there have been no subsequent inquiries or information to determine whether intelligence whistleblowers have fared better since 2009, the law as it stands makes it nearly impossible for them to be protected.

Whistleblowers bring much-needed attention to matters of interest and importance to the public. Their courage – and willingness to face professional and personal peril – helps bring to light information that others would prefer to keep secret. That helps society as a whole fight injustice, waste, corruption and abuse of power, rather than passively and blindly accepting it.

Jennifer M. Pacella, Assistant Professor of Business Law and Ethics, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In a daring and bold move that showed his profound humanitarian side, President Obama has commuted the 35-year sentence of Chelsea Manning, a transgender woman and former military intelligence analyst who in 2010 leaked hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and also some Iraq and Afghanistan military logs to the Wikileaks organization, which shared them with the press.

Manning’s leaks are credited in some quarters with helping to galvanize Tunisian youth and activists against the brutal dictatorship of Zine el Abidine ben Ali. The argument is that people assumed that Ben Ali was authoritarian but relatively upright and that the corruption was committed by the people around him, whereas State Department cables demonstrated that he personally asked for kickbacks. It is certainly the case that opposition webzines like Nawaat.org in Tunisia translated the cables immediately into Arabic. Manning has been criticized for her scattershot publication of so many documents rather than for whistleblowing, i.e. concentrating on a particular injustice. In the case of Tunisia, some of the released cables did function as whistleblowing. France and the US in public tended to reassure the world that Ben Ali’s regime was a bulwark against radical Muslim fundamentalism and was improving the lives of its citizens. It was perhaps only just that the sordid reality be exposed to everyone, including the Tunisian people, who now have the only democracy in the Middle East. (Lebanon is too dysfunctional and dominated by a party-militia to fit that bill; Turkey is veering sharply toward authoritarianism, and Apartheid Israel with 4 million people under military colonialism doesn’t count by a long shot).

According to a UN inquiry, Manning was tortured when held for 11 months in the brig at Quantico. She was kept in solitary confinement and put under a “suicide watch” by her jailers despite the opposition of her own physician. The watch involved being made to sleep nude and enchained and being woken up many times each night to be checked, for months on end. The suicide watch was a mere pretext to subject her to the sleep deprivation techniques that are an important arrow in the quiver of contemporary torturers. She still bears the cognitive and emotional scars of this treatment, according to Glenn Greenwald, who has interviewed her.

Obama’s commutation of her sentence is all the more surprising because his administration was the hardest in recent memory on whistle blowers and on the journalists to whom they leaked. The idea that whistle blowers should have gone through channels is challenged by the substantial evidence that employees who came forward with concerns faced retaliation. One of the tools Attorney General Eric Holder used against these brave individuals, who were trying to correct some pernicious practice, was the Espionage Act of 1917. This unconstitutional monstrosity was passed at the height of the Red Scare and the immigration hysteria during World War I.

UShistory.org explains:

“Once Congress declared war, President Wilson quickly created the Committee on Public Information under the direction of George Creel. Creel used every possible medium imaginable to raise American consciousness. Creel organized rallies and parades . . .

Still there were dissenters. The American Socialist Party condemned the war effort. Irish-Americans often displayed contempt for the British ally. Millions of immigrants from Germany and Austria-Hungary were forced to support initiatives that could destroy their homelands. But this dissent was rather small. Nevertheless, the government stifled wartime opposition by law with the passing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917. Anyone found guilty of criticizing the government war policy or hindering wartime directives could be sent to jail. Many cried that this was a flagrant violation of precious civil liberties, including the right to free speech. The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision on this issue in the Schenck v. United States verdict. The majority court opinion ruled that should an individual’s free speech present a “clear and present danger” to others, the government could impose restrictions or penalties. Schenck was arrested for sabotaging the draft. The Court ruled that his behavior endangered thousands of American lives and upheld his jail sentence. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned and ran for President from his jail cell in 1920. He polled nearly a million votes.”

Obama and Holder have bequeathed yet another tool of authoritarianism (along with a revived domestic surveillance program) to the incoming Trumpian troglodytes. Instead of resorting to the Espionage and Sedition Act, they should have worked alongside Libertarian Republicans to get rid of it. Pardoning one person, however praiseworthy, doesn’t make up for developing anti-democratic techniques that have now been passed on to the most anti-democratic government in recent decades.

——-

Related video:

TYT Politics: “BREAKING: Chelsea Manning FREED By Pres. Obama”

Jeffrey Sterling learned the hard way that the feds will throw the book at anyone who embarrasses them.

Jeffrey Sterling recently stood before a judge as his sentence was read. The former CIA officer, the judge declared, would spend 42 months — that’s three and half years — behind bars. The feds had convicted Sterling on nine felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.

He didn’t sell secrets to the Russians. He didn’t trade intelligence for personal gain. He made no attempt to disrupt the American way of life.

What did he do, then?

He reported to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the CIA had botched an operation to feed false information about nuclear technology to Iran — and may have actually helped Iran’s enrichment program instead.

Largely based on this, the government accused Sterling of leaking details about the program to journalist James Risen, who wrote about it in his book State of War.

Even worse, the feds claimed that Sterling, who is black, did it out of resentment over a failed racial discrimination lawsuit against the agency — in effect using Sterling’s willingness to stand up for his rights against him.

There was no actual proof, though, that Sterling was Risen’s source. The only evidence the prosecution had against Sterling was metadata that showed he had spoken to Risen by phone.

There were no recordings, no messages, and no snitches to testify against him. For all we know, Sterling and Risen were talking about the weather. Was this guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? I think not.

Whatever the case, the worst Sterling can be accused of is exposing government failure and indiscretion. In that sense, he easily meets the legal definition of a whistleblower. Whatever information he exposed, he did it in the public interest.

But the Obama administration has abused whistleblowers. I know a little something about that myself — I was charged with three counts of espionage for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program several years ago.

If I hadn’t taken a plea deal, I could’ve been locked up for the rest of my life. I still had to endure nearly two years in a federal prison, followed by a few months of house arrest.

Sterling is the latest victim in this war on whistleblowing.

The message is clear: If you go public with evidence of government malfeasance, you must prepare yourself for the worst. The Justice Department will spend millions of taxpayer dollars to ruin you financially, personally, and professionally — and to make an example of you in the media.

And if you have the nerve to deny the charges and go to trial, the punishment will be even worse.

Sterling believed that if he could get in front of a jury and explain his side of the story, they’d see how ridiculous the entire case really was. But the government exercises such tight control over these cases that most juries would, as the saying goes, convict a baloney sandwich.

In a small sense, Sterling was lucky to get a 42-month sentence. The government had sought up to 24 years. To the judge’s credit, she recognized what one expert witness described as the government’s “overwrought hyperbole.”

And she was surely aware of the sweetheart deal — 18 months unsupervised probation and a fine — General David Petraeus recently landed. The former CIA director had given classified information, including the names of covert agents, to his lover — and then lied about it to the FBI.

In short, the Justice Department is meting out very little “justice” to whistleblowers. But if you’re part of the White House “in” crowd, you’ll get a pass.

I’m glad Sterling’s not going away for 20 years or more.

But the proper action would have been for the judge to send Sterling home to be with his wife, and castigate the Justice Department for wasting the court’s time — and the taxpayers’ money — on wrongheadedly prosecuting another whistleblower.

This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and OtherWords.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Democracy Now!: “Exclusive: CIA Whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling Speaks Out Upon Sentencing to 3.5 Years in Prison”

“Retired Gen. David Petraeus was sentenced Thursday for mishandling classified government documents, but why was his punishment relatively light?”

Newsy: “Petraeus Avoids Prison, But Whistleblowers Not So Lucky”