A Free Press is Not Free

What Julian Assange's plea deal portends for our most precious freedom...

“If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.”

~ Julian Assange

Joel Bowman, with today’s Note from the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Our “offices” are closed over the Christmas/New Year’s break, dear reader… but we didn’t wish to leave you in the lurch. So over the coming days, we’ll be featuring a few high- and low-lights from the year just gone. And what a year it was!

We recall, for example, waking one sweltering June morning in a Laotian jungle to the long-awaited news that Julian Assange was finally free. And yet, as always, the devil was in the details. While the plea deal brought sunlight to Mr. Assange’s face for the first time in years, it cast a long shadow over press freedom in general.

Read on for our initial report on the verdict, below. And as always, please fee free to share our work with friends and family over the holiday break. Cheers ~ JB

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[NB. This article was originally published on June 25, 2024, from Luang Prabang, Laos.]

Our beat here is Free Markets... Free Minds... Free People. That is, economic liberty, intellectual liberty and, ultimately, personal liberty. 

Imagine our delight, then, when we woke this morning to the news that Deep State Enemy #1, Julian Assange, had been released from the UK’s highest security prison. We’ll always recall where we were – ironically, touring a Marxist-Leninist state here in Southeast Asia – when we heard the news...

Here is the long-awaited announcement from Mr. Assange’s groundbreaking organization, Wikileaks (posted on X):

JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE

Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.

This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible.

After more than five years in a 2x3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.

WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people's right to know.

As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.

Julian's freedom is our freedom.

Congratulations to Mr. Assange, his family and his many supporters, who span the political divide. Given the grave circumstances he was facing, this was the only choice he could have made. It is our sincere hope that other political prisoners – Edward Snowden and Ross Ulbricht, for starters – find a similar freedom, and soon. 

As always, however, the Security State did not leave the crime scene without extracting its own pound of flesh... 

The Devil and His Details

As part of Mr. Assange’s plea deal, according to documents made public by the US Department of Justice (below), “the defendant will plead guilty to the charge [...] of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the United States [...] and be sentences by the Court for that offense.”  

Not exactly a clear win for freedom of the press, in other words. As the independent US presidential candidate, RFK, Jr. posted on his X account regarding the deal...

Julian Assange struck a plea deal and will go free! I am overjoyed. He's a generational hero.

The bad news is that he had to plea guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense info. Which means the US security state succeeded in criminalizing journalism and extending their jurisdiction globally to non-citizens.

Woodrow Wilson’s Ghost

The charges Mr. Assange is expected to plead guilty to are drawn from the infamous Espionage Act 1917, a Frankensteinian abomination conceived under the iron administration of (who else?) Woodrow Wilson. The Act, especially requested by Wilson himself, who practically begged Congress for it in his 1915 State of the Union address, was designed to suppress dissent regarding US military operations, specifically recruitment. 

The Act made it a crime to (emphasis ours):

• To convey information with the intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote its enemies' success. This was punishable by death or imprisonment for not more than 30 years or both.

• To convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies when the United States is at war, to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. This was punishable by a maximum fine of $10,000 or by imprisonment for not more than 20 years or both.

Thus was the Act invoked to suppress free speech in such landmark cases as Schenck v. United States (1919), in which the bloviating eugenics enthusiast, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, uttered his absurd and terminally misunderstood line:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic...

As we have written about in this space before, the defendants in the case, a group of Yiddish-speaking, German-American pacifists, including one Charles Schenck, were tried under Wilson’s Espionage Act for circulating a pamphlet urging draft-age Americans to resist induction. The incriminating pamphlet, which you can – and really should – read in full here, carried the headline:

“Long Live The Constitution Of The United States; Wake Up America! Your Liberties Are in Danger!”

All told, 15,000 copies of the one-page (front and back) publication were circulated, in which was quoted Section 1 of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Schenck argued that the draft amounted to involuntary servitude, as “a conscripted citizen is forced to surrender his right as a citizen and become a subject.”

Alas, it is that same detestable Espionage Act, used to imprison pacifists, journalists and whistleblowers for more than a century – from newspaper editor Victor L. Berger to anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, former Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society president Joseph Franklin Rutherford and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and, of course, Julian Assange himself – which now reaches its censorial claws into the 21st century. 

A Censorial Specter

In pursuing a plea deal with Mr. Assange, US prosecutors could have dropped the Espionage Act charges against the defendant (brought, by the way, under the Trump administration)... 

Likewise, prosecutors could have based the deal on Assange pleading guilty to the lesser misdemeanor of mishandling classified documents (the deal reportedly offered in March at the behest of the Australian government)...

And they could have opted for a hacking conspiracy charge, which would not have carried the same chilling implications for journalism and press freedom in general...

Instead, prosecutors pressed ahead with the original charges, even after Mr. Assange won the right last month to appeal against his extradition in the high court in London, determined that the Espionage Act charges should stick. As Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Guardian (one of the papers that originally published the Wikileaks war diaries):

“A plea deal would avert the worst-case scenario for press freedom, but this deal contemplates that Assange will have served five years in prison for activities that journalists engage in every day... 

“It will cast a long shadow over the most important kinds of journalism, not just in this country but around the world.”

Lest we forget that Mr. Assange’s Wikileaks organization spent the better part of the past two decades shining light on government secrecy and exposing actual crimes committed by various States and State actors.

This it did by releasing to the public hundreds of thousands of pages of leaked documents including the Iraq War Logs, Global Intelligence Files and files on the developing situations in Syria, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, to name just a few.

The State’s entire case against Assange and his organization brought into high relief the meaning behind that old adage, “Don't shoot the messenger.”

In the end, Mr. Assange has paid a tremendous price defending his individual right to freedom of speech and the public’s right to freedom of the press. Today marks a personal victory for one courageous man... but the precedent established in his case will hang heavily on press freedom for years to come. 

Contemplating this brave new world, we do well to recall the words of Ed Snowden:

“When exposing a crime is treated as a crime, you’re being ruled by criminals.”

Now, more than ever, we must stand for free markets... free minds... and free people. 

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

P.S. That a free press remains foundational to a free society should be obvious. It’s no mere coincidence that the Founding Fathers included it as part of the very First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

~ The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America

Almost 250 years after those words were written, the inalienable right to such freedoms is perhaps more precious – not to mention precarious – than ever. 

In an age where governments themselves often conspire with the mainstream media to misinform citizens, to obfuscate critical facts regarding their own shady dealings, and to propagandize us all with “The Narrative,” it’s critical that we establish and guard free and independent platforms...like right here on Substack, where thousands of citizen journalists, independent writers and opinion columnists stake their claim free of censorship. 

To that end, we are eternally grateful to our Notes members for supporting the work we do here. Our mission is promoting free markets... free minds... and free people. 

If you value these ideas as we do, as pillars of a free and open society, we hope you will consider joining our growing community and supporting our work, here: