Joe Lauria explains the latest superseding indictment against Julian Assange, who still faces extradition to the U.S. for his supposed violations of the Espionage Act. Lauria’s take is that the new indictment is simply “window dressing,” meant to make Assange look bad by smearing his reputation in the minds of those who follow the case only from afar—the indictment, it turns out, doesn’t even contain any new charges. All along, the name of the game has been trying to make Assange out to be not a publisher of information he received from others, but an actual accomplice in the hacking of those secrets in the first place. Anyone who has been following Assange’s story closely from the beginning knows that this claim is completely untrue; what Assange does is no different than what any other investigative journalist does, except that he’s much better at it. If the American government can successfully extradite and convict Assange on these Espionage Act charges, says Lauria, they must do the same for the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and every other mainstream media outlet in the country.
Discussed on the show:
- “ASSANGE EXTRADITION: Assange Hit With New Superseding Indictment, Reflecting Possible FBI Sting Operation” (Consortium News)
- “25 YEARS OF CN: ‘Journalists Are All Julian Assange’—Robert Parry, December 16, 2010” (Consortium News)
- Collateral Murder
- “Military Fails to Link Leaks With Any Deaths” (Courthouse News)
- “State Department Cables” (WikiLeaks)
- “Iraq War Logs” (WikiLeaks)
- “Afghan War Diary” (WikiLeaks)
- “In letter to the Lancet, doctors condemn torture of Assange and demand his release” (World Socialist Web Site)
Joe Lauria is the editor-in-chief at Consortium News. He is a former UN correspondent and wrote at the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal. You can follow him on Twitter @unjoe.
This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: NoDev NoOps NoIT, by Hussein Badakhchani; The War State, by Mike Swanson; WallStreetWindow.com; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; Listen and Think Audio; TheBumperSticker.com; and LibertyStickers.com.
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Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from this website. He’s the author of the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. Visit https://scotthorton.org