Don’t look now, but free speech and journalism is under attack like never before. No, not because our president put out another angry tweet expressing how the press is the “enemy of the people.” I’m talking about the April 11 arrest of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks.

Assange had been held up in an Ecuadorian embassy in the UK since 2012, but had his asylum protection revoked, some reported due to pressure from Vice President Mike Pence in a 2018 meeting with Ecuador president Lenin Moreno. According to the Guardian Newspaper, after the arrest by the UK, “Assange was further arrested at the request of the U.S. seeking his extradition over allegations he conspired with former U.S. military analyst Chelsea Manning to download classified databases.”

And what did Manning download? Among other things, the most damning was a video “that shows American soldiers carefully and methodically slaughtering civilians, including Reuters staffers, outside of any determinable theater of war.” (Rob Urie, Counter Punch).

According to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, interviewed recently on Democracy Now, the allegations that Assange conspired or collaborated with Manning is “a theory that the Obama Justice Department tried for a long time to pursue, but found no evidence for, in order to be able to justify prosecuting Assange and not face the accusation that they were endangering press freedoms by prosecuting Assange for something The New York Times and The Guardian and every other media outlet in the world routinely does, which is publish classified information.”

Greenwald, who has reported extensively on whistleblower Edward Snowden, claimed in the interview that Assange’s arrest represents “the criminalization of journalism by the Trump Justice Department and the gravest threat to press freedom, by far, under the Trump presidency. Every journalist in the world should be raising their voice as loudly as possible to protest and denounce this.”

The ACLU agrees with Greenwald’s assessment as shown in a recent statement: “Any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations. Moreover, prosecuting a foreign publisher for violating U.S. secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest.”

Other advocates for freedom of the press chimed in, including the Freedom of Press Foundation, saying “any prosecution by the United States of Mr. Assange for Wikileaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations.” The foundation further noted that his arrest “should be vigorously protested by all those who care about the First Amendment.”

Author and free speech advocate Nozomi Hayase argued in a recent article for Common Dreams.org, that extraditing Assange into U.S. custody could potentially lead to a frightening precedent: “If the U.S. can prosecute a non-US journalist for revealing its secrets, why can’t Russia prosecute an American journalist in Washington revealing secrets about Moscow? Why can’t Saudi Arabia prosecute a journalist for revealing secrets about the Khashoggi murder?”

If the U.S. can prosecute Assange for what he published, what about other news outlets, Hayase asked. “What about The New York Times and The Washington Post? Are they going to face charges too?”

Hayase concluded that telling the truth should not become a crime. “The act of publishing information that is verified to be authentic in the public interest must not be punished. Exposing government war crimes, human rights violations and murder of civilians including journalists is not a crime. This is the very function of a free press, as a vanguard of our democracy.”

I myself, an English teacher and former reporter for the OBSERVER (among other publications) have been alarmed at the response of some in the media, who attack Assange in an apparent attempt to kill the messenger in order to distract us from the message of corruption and war crimes.

My answer to them is simply this: the crimes of the state (as demonstrated by the undisputed evidence) far outweigh the crimes of those who brought to light the crimes of the state.

Fight for freedom of the press. Fight for Julian Assange.

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