Biden and the Pentagon remain vested in a system devoted to keeping Americans clueless on the U.S. government’s foreign crimes and debacles.
The good news is that Julian Assange’s lawyers blocked his extradition to the United States, where he would face a kangaroo court hearing and life in prison.
The bad news is that Assange remains locked up in Britain’s Belmarsh maximum security prison. “Punishment by process” is the term that his wife, Stella Assange, uses to describe his plight. Almost five years ago, Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, concluded after examining Assange that he showed all the signs of prolonged psychological torture.
Two judges on Britain’s High Court ruled on Monday that Assange can file a full appeal against the U.S. government’s attempts to extradite him. He is accused of violating the Espionage Act via his 2010 Wikileaks disclosures of American military war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The ruling largely hinged on whether Assange would be permitted to invoke the First Amendment in his defense. The Justice Department lawyer James Lewis told the British court that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone “in relation to publication of illegally obtained national defense information giving the names of innocent sources to their grave and imminent risk of harm.” As I noted in a March 28 piece in The American Conservative, the U.S. government has never proven that Assange’s leaks led to anyone’s death.
“National defense information” is a blight that increasingly destroys any home for democracy in foreign policy. Each year, the federal government creates the equivalent of 20 million filing cabinets full of new secret documents. Any document that is classified is treated like a holy relic, unable to be exposed without damning the nation.
Biden officials and members of Congress clamoring for Assange’s legal impalement have offered no fix for a political-bureaucratic foreign policy that is practically designed for maximum deceit of the American people. Three years ago, Washingtonians were shocked when Afghanistan’s government collapsed like a house of cards under the Taliban’s assault, despite endless U.S. aid and bureaucratic boasts of progress. Eighteen months before that collapse, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, slammed the institutionalized cover-up: “It turns out that