In association with DC Action for Assange Consortium News, is pleased to bring you this live event at the Cleveland Park Library in Washington DC and streamed live by CN Live around the world. We will shortly screen Juan Pasarelli's powerful film, The War on Journalism, after which we will be joined by the director in a recorded message. Juan has for years been the videographer for WikiLeaks seen on the cramped balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, crouching down to film Julian Assange. After we speak with Juan, or after he delivers his recorded address, we will be joined here at the library and live on CN Live by CIA whistleblower, John Kiriakou, sitting on my right on your left. We will also be joined later by First Amendment activist and writer Chip Gibbons. And then online from California is Pentagon Papers whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg. And from New York, the New York Times general counsel during the Pentagon Papers case James Goodall. And then also online, we have journalist, Stefania Morizzi and Kathy Vogan, our producer, who has prepared a video report for us. At the conclusion of the program, we will have time for questions. The way I'm organizing this is half an hour for the film and Juan's message. Then in half an hour, we're gonna spend just debunking five myths about Julian Assange. And then the last hour will be devoted to a general discussion, the panelists and questions from you in the audience. So we ask that you come forward when you have a question to sit in this chair so that you can be on screen and we can get you on the microphone. So now I'm gonna turn it over to Ingrid. From DC Action for Assange, who has a few words and then we'll see the film. Ingrid. Welcome everyone, it's a gorgeous day. So thank you for choosing this serious topic, our First Amendment rights. It's fitting that we're in a public library, still a bastion of free speech and peaceable assembly. We do have a legal requirement. This is not a library sponsored program, using a library meeting room in no way constitutes endorsement by the DC Public Library. The views presented are solely those of the DC Public Library. So much the better. I'm Ingrid Munkevich and I wanted this event because it seems many never knew much or have forgotten about Julian Assange. And the lack of mainstream coverage has allowed misconceptions to fester. So this will be a primer on the case. But I also hope that by stepping forward, we'll find others in the community who share our concerns. DC Action for Assange was formed in response to the Biden administration doubling down on Trump's decision to prosecute Assange. There's information on the back table about regular vigils, protests and a larger rally on October 8th. Now we'll start the film and see you on the other side. Thank you Ingrid. And I think you said that we're on the land that once belongs so they're not the Indians. Is that correct? Oh, okay. I thought you were being serious when you told me that. Someone else told you that, maybe. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Now we will begin the film. Kathy. I'm press. I don't care. Get down. I am press. I don't care. Get down. Okay, I'm down. I'm down. I'm down. I'm press. Please. We are at an extremely dangerous moment in the history of this country. Donald Trump wants to jail journalists who publish stories he doesn't like. Do you mind telling me why I'm under arrest, sir? Why am I under arrest, sir? And he's wielding the espionage act like a chainsaw against journalistic sources. We're gonna find the Lakers. We're gonna find the Lakers. They're gonna pay a big price for the Lakers. Let's sink in for a second. At the same time that the US government is chasing journalists all over the world, they have decided that all foreign journalists have no protection under the First Amendment in the United States. So that goes to show the gravity of this case. Exactly what it looks like. Exactly what it looks like. We're just taking a video. Oh, whoa. Emily, can you hear off? Emily, are you okay? And I'll ask the same question, will you commit to not putting reporters in jail for doing their jobs? Well, I don't know that I can make a blanket commitment to that effect. We will utilize the authorities that we have, legally and constitutionally, if we have to. It's another attack on free press. Just like Julian Assange, after publishing information that exposed government corruption, Glenn Greenwald from the Intercept has been charged. The claim the Brazilian government used against me was one modeled after the Assange indictment. It's a war on freedom of speech and it's a war on journalists. The US government is asserting universal jurisdiction to reach over to any journalist anywhere in the world that reports on it in a way that it doesn't like and prosecute them. Mr. Assange was arrested this morning at about 10 o'clock at the Ecuadorian embassy. This precedent means that any journalist can be extradited for prosecution in the United States for having published truthful information about the United States. Come on, fire. First they came for Julian, then we come for everybody else. Our children, our friends. There is a war on journalism and Julian is at the center of that. But the point is that what happens to him can happen to any journalist who does his or her job. How did we get here? The case against Julian Assange started a decade ago but today it is the case that will define oppressed freedom and by consequence, your freedom of speech. This is my philosophical background, how I see this work that we're doing and maybe one other component is that while we can all write about our own political issues we can all push for particular things we can believe in. We can all have particular brands of politics but I say it's actually all bankrupt and the reason it's all bankrupt and all current political theories of bankrupt in particular lines of political thought is because actually we don't know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions, how they operate in practice is Titanic organizations, how they behave inside not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentation. Until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don't even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up the sort of the intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories to greater and lesser extent of course are bankrupt. In 2011, a secret grand jury was meeting in Alexandria, Virginia to consider indicting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act. This isn't about who Julian Assange is because that's been used so much as a distraction and I think so much of the negative press about Assange has been exactly about that. It's been exactly about, oh, we'll get people to ignore what the issues are because we'll get them to be distracted that this is not an issue about press freedom. It's actually about an individual. It's not, it's about press freedom. It doesn't matter who the individual was in that position. That position needs to be defended and in this case, it is Julian but the role that he undertook is one that absolutely needs defending by the rest of the media. The Obama administration concluded that there was no way to charge Assange without endangering press freedom. However, in 2019, the Trump administration took a different approach. In an unprecedented move, the Justice Department has indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in publishing US military and diplomatic documents exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Assange faces up to 170 years in prison under the new charges, 10 years for each count of violating the Espionage Act. Julian Assange has been indicted under the Espionage Act with 17 separate counts related to his work as a publisher with WikiLeaks for having received and published classified information. Journalists around the world, at The Guardian, at The New York Times, and Despiegel, at LeMond also received and published that information but that's true of journalists around the world all the time receiving information from government including from the United States government. It does not make them spies and it does not make it espionage. Assange is charged with soliciting and receiving classified information. That's what I do for a living. I solicit and I receive information. I ask questions and I hope to obtain answers and where there's evidence available I try to get the evidence. Journalists in the so-called mainstream in its various forms are now realizing that it concerns them. They come for Julian Assange, they'll come for you. All these practices of encryption, helping your sources provide information legally are important for letting citizens and the world know what's going on. Otherwise, we're dependent on our government to tell us what's up and I don't think that's a dependable way to get information out to citizens. They won't do that. Welcome to the State Department. I think we have some interns in the back. Welcome. Good to see you in this exercise in transparency and democracy. Is that what it is? WikiLeaks is the most extraordinary development in journalism in my lifetime. WikiLeaks meant that everything you read was authentic, was accurate. You could judge it on its face value. There's no journalism. Even the best could never be 100% authentic and accurate. In 2010, WikiLeaks started publishing the largest collection of US military and diplomatic secret documents in history. WikiLeaks first published a video of two American Apache helicopters murdering 11 people in Baghdad, among them two Reuters journalists. This video alongside maybe the images from Abu Ghraib are, in a sense, what the napalm girl photo tells us about the Vietnam War. So it captures so many elements of the callousness, the bloodlust, and the horror of the Iraq War. Light them all up. Come on, fire. If you watch it through, there's no way to go after it. You can't be rationalized. It can't be excused. You don't need to be a specialist to see that US soldiers have been intentionally massacring people. Come on, buddy. Even if some of them had carried arms, once they're wounded and out of combat, targeting them becomes a warcraft. So it's obvious. It's Bushmaster 7. Go ahead. Roger. We have a follow-up. It's Bushmaster 7. Roger engage. 360 degree killing. That was the so-called philosophy of the war. In other words, you killed everything within 360 degrees. The collateral murder video wasn't an isolated incident. WikiLeaks then published the Afghan and Iraq war logs, nearly half a million documents of detailed incident reports conducted by the US that depicted the true cost of those wars. I'm not surprised by the data. What I am is deeply upset by the data. It's impossible to read the data. When you read about a six-year-old being tortured to death with a drill, when you read about an entire family being wiped out in a split second because some 18-year-old American soldier has decided that the car was going too fast and just opened fire, when you hear about people being locked in a prison for two months and suspended from the ceiling by the Iraqi military. When you read stories about entire towns being decimated or children being killed by hellfire missiles fired from US Apache helicopters because they were gathering firewood, all these stories are horrific. It's painful. It is up to a court to decide clearly whether something is in the end of crime. That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material. Example is the Task Force 373 high-mars missile strike on a house which killed seven children. Well, we would like to see this material, the revelations that this material gives be taken seriously, investigated by governments, and new policies put in place as a result, if not prosecutions of those people who have committed abuses. No one has been prosecuted for this. We have clear evidence for systematic torture. Again, the whistleblower is the one who's being prosecuted, but not the perpetrators. Well, just the third time since he was arrested over two years ago, alleged Army whistleblower Bradley Manning was seen by the public this week. His three-day pretrial hearing wraps up today before a military court at Fort Mead in Maryland. Manning faces 22 charges, including the capital offense of aiding the enemy, as well as violating the Espionage Act, computer fraud and theft of records. The 24-year-old private is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, including secret files on the Iraq and Afghan wars. Manning's attorneys are seeking the dismissal of 10 of the counties. A few months after, WikiLeaks released Cablegate. That's the scale of it, a vast leak of thousands of documents from US embassies and other diplomatic outposts across the globe in all those countries. There are stories from every country involved that will embarrass, intrigue, and potentially complicate international relations. Among the specifics, worries about security at a Pakistan nuclear facility. Concern about alleged links between the Russian government and the mafia, plus allegations and examples of corruption within the Afghan government. Britain's Guardian newspaper said some cable showed Saudi King Abdullah repeatedly urging the US to attack Iran to destroy the program, and that leaders of other Arab nations referred to Tehran as an existential threat. Those documents- I think for the general public, it was quite a revelation that people who have all the privileges of diplomats actually were behaving like thugs. Italy's foreign minister calls the document release the September 11th of World Diplomacy, in that everything once accepted as normal has now changed. It was truth-telling of the most powerful kind, the most fearsome kind, almost, and of course, there was a reaction. The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure. I think the man is a high-tech terrorist. He's done enormous damage to our country, and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law. The way to deal with this is pretty simple. We've got special office forces.  This guy's a traitor, a treasonist, and he has broken every law in the United States. The guy ought to be... And I'm not for the death penalty, so if I'm not for the death penalty, I don't want to do it. Illegally shoot the son of a... He's going to talk about WikiLinks. You had nothing to do with the WikiLinks. That's disgraceful. You do think it's disgraceful? They should be, like, death peddled or something. That reaction we now see encapsulated in the almost desperate bid by the United States to put Julian in a black hole and throw away the key. That's what they're talking about if he's extradited. There is an attempt now, a very worrying attempt in the United States to erect a new precedent, which is that in the national security sector, that any journalist that corresponds with a source is, meaning espionage, if at some time a classified communication is made.  That's absolutely true. And yes, that's absolutely true, too. I haven't spotted that. I was so excited about it. This conceals the fact they called it air support because the Reaper UA League which proceeded to loose off a health ban, is that of which most probably mean that two children are shackled at the same time. With increasing pressure due to the publications, Julian Assange feared an imminent extradition to the U.S. and in 2012 was forced to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. The government of Ecuador is loyal to their tradition of protecting those who seek to rampage in their territory or in the places of diplomatic submissions, has decided to concede asylum in Ecuador. I'm not pursue journalist for shining a light on the secret crimes of the powerful. There must be no more foolish talk about prosecuting any media organisation, be it Wikileaks or be it the New York Times.  Can everyone hear me? Hello, Cambridge, can you hear me? I can hear you, Andrew, I can see a room. Hi, hi, everyone. That's not a way to hear you. My name's Ed Snowden, I'm 29 years old. I work for Booze Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii. 29-year-old young man in a foreign jurisdiction that he had no experience with. The subject of the largest intelligence manhunt the world has ever seen and the realities were for Edward Snowden, who he was going to be smashed. And at that moment, he reached out and asked us for help. We managed to get him out of Hong Kong. But when he landed in the Moscow airport, the American government had cancelled his passport. While all of these news organisations around the world, all of these publishers were trying to get a piece of the story. There was only one publisher that actually said, we want to help the source, we want to make sure he's okay, we want to make sure that no matter what happens, he has somebody on his side. And that was WikiLeaks. At the time Snowden passed, diplomatic doors were closed. That was a lock of doors in the United Kingdom. That closed the possibility of discussion and negotiation. That was the price given by freedom. Snowden was the freedom of Julian. Asange was aware of the possible consequences of helping Snowden. I think that is an important lesson that actually an organisation that specialises in defeating surveillance for national security cases was the organisation that was able to do this. Yes, we had some diplomatic contacts and we certainly had the will and the desire to not see another Chelsea Manning. But I think a lot of it, we couldn't have done that if we hadn't specialised in these secure communications techniques. Despite the increasing threats and deteriorating conditions in the embassy, WikiLeaks continued to publish. Some of the CIA's most sophisticated and effective spying tools apparently pried open tonight with the help of WikiLeaks. The anti-secrecy group says it's obtained thousands of files. The CIA is equipped with a variety of hacking tools to crack into phones, cars, computers, even smart TVs. As a result of these publications, in 2017 the newly appointed director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, in an unprecedented manner, dedicated his first public address to a publisher. Julian Assange and his kind are not the slightest bit interested in improving civil liberties or enhancing personal freedom. They have pretended America's First Amendment freedoms shielded them from justice. They may have believed that, but they are wrong.  The private security company UC Global, hired by Ecuador to protect Assange, cut a deal with the CIA to spy on Assange and the Ecuadorian diplomats. Together with these is the immediate accessibility to the newest major exposition, convention, and meeting facility in the city of Las Vegas. In 2016, the owner of UC Global, David Morales, flew to Las Vegas to attend a security fire. As soon as Morales returned from this fateful trip to Las Vegas, he began bragging to his employees back in Southern Spain that we will from now on be playing in the First Division using a soccer metaphor, a football metaphor. But they were violating their contract with Ecuador and secretly working for the Americans via Sheldon Adelson. The CIA laundered payments to UC Global through Las Vegas Sands, a company owned by Trump mega donor Sheldon Adelson. I have recorded, listened to your conversations, I have all your personal documentation, your passport. During a lot of time, it has been one of my main objectives. An elaborate plan was set up between Morales and the CIA to install surveillance cameras with audio capabilities and implant covert microphones in strategic places such as below this fire extinguisher in the embassy's meeting room and behind this box in the toilet. Assange held meetings in this toilet for fear of being spied on. The CIA's increasing obsession to entrap Assange alarmed a UC Global staffer who blew the whistle when asked to target Assange's family and even plot an attempt against his life. They came forward and they spoke to our lawyers and they exposed what had been going on there because they had played a part in it and they said that what their boss had been telling them is that they were working for the CIA and that those instructions about getting Gabriel's DNA that was coming from the other side of the Atlantic. These instructions were coming from the United States. It reads like some really terrible spy novel. Plots to kidnap, plots to possibly poison Julian Assange while he was in the embassy.  And it is real. It's hard for people to understand that such lawlessness is possible. So there's incredible criminality that has been going on in order to gather information about Julian's lawyers and his family and journalists who were visiting him. I mean, it's shocking and I'm very fearful. I've been in a permanent state of fear for years. UC Global sent video, audio and other information about Assange, WikiLeaks staff, his visitors and the Ecuadorian diplomats to a CIA server. They also recorded Assange's medical consultations and went as far as recording Assange's privileged legal conversations with his lawyers. When Daniel Ellsberg was on trial for the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, his case was thrown out because it came out that Nixon had ordered a raid on his psychologist's office to try and get information which was embarrassing to Ellsberg. So of course that should have happened and that was right that happened. Assange has been surveilled by the CIA. That by itself should mean the case is thrown out. There's no chance you can have a fair trial if the people who are prosecuting have been surveying the defendant as he's been having privileged conversations with his lawyers. It's completely irregular that it hasn't been thrown out on those grounds already. I mean, really it's outrageous. I didn't expect to find torture, to be honest. I thought, well, this is the UK that've arrested him. They'll treat him well. Maybe there's some issues, procedural issues, but I was genuinely shocked then that we found all the symptoms that you would find typically in a person who has been exposed to psychological torture. And in that context, I have to stress that psychological torture is by no means torture light. It is very serious. In fact, psychological torture was initially systematically developed by the Nazis. When they were not able to break resistance fighters with physical means, they developed psychological torture because it was even worse. He was arrested in in April 2019 within a couple of months, probably less. He'd lost up to 15 kilos in weight. And his brother Gabriel, who I went into see him with once, was shocked when he held his arm and realized how thin he was. He was subjected to a psiops operation, I would think. It certainly had its effect on him physically and no doubt mentally. Torture is being used against Julian Assange to intimidate the world, to show them if ever you get the idea to disclose our secrets and to expose our dirty laundry to the world, this is what's going to happen to you. I feel like Julian's life might be coming to an end.  And it's a well-known pattern, you know, whistleblowers. People who expose the powerful, they destroy them. Throughout the 10 years that the Assange case has been ongoing, there have been a number of irregularities. The destruction of evidence by prosecutors, arbitrary detention, lack of access to his lawyers, judges with alleged conflicts of interest, mistreatment, illegal espionage, and the political nature of the charges themselves.  Julian Assange is now in a high-security prison in conditions which are quite close to solitary confinement where he is at serious risk of contracting COVID, simply because of an indictment from the Trump administration in respect of publications for which he's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, publications for which he won the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism. That's how stark this situation is. We started by looking at the husband of the Chief Magistrate, Lady Arbutinot, who's made a number of rulings on Assange's case. We found that her husband was a conservative defense minister. He financially benefited from corporations that had been exposed by WikiLeaks. We then did an investigation of her son, who is a cyber security expert and the vice president of a private equity group, and we found that this private equity group was heavily invested in a firm called Darktrace, which was set up by the British intelligence establishment. So huge conflicts of interest. She has never recused herself in the case, which is irregular in itself, because I've talked to lawyers who have said if there's any hint of conflict of interest, judges will recuse themselves very early on, but she never has. It's just constant. It's constant. Yeah, we've had this issue before about Marsh's work. Apparently they didn't know about the both. So this is a constant problem, whether I'll turn up for a prison visit with him down at the prison and they won't have brought him out, which means I sit there on my own for an hour while he's coming in, or while we're coming into the prison, this delay is getting him because this huge queues and security isn't working properly. So I don't actually get him to see him until half an hour after the actual visit time has started and he's sitting there on his own wondering whether anyone's turning up. And it just means that a two-hour visit ends up being only an hour or less, and we lose time. And so while we turn up to court, we're told that we'll have the whole day with him. And instead, when we get there, we're told no action, there's no facilities, you can only have an hour with him. And this has been constant for months and months and months on end, which has really limited our ability to get through any of the evidence with him. This is a huge, complicated case. I'm not sure about that. There's such a amount of evidence to get through. I saw just a symbol, really, of the American state's affront at having his secrets put out in the public domain. That's what it comes down to. And it's why I think of it as a political case. He's been blamed for a whole series of things, which is patently untrue, but the impetus behind the extradition request has not stopped, which tells you it wasn't to do with those things.  But most of the rest of the world will see it as legitimate journalism. Now, what makes you think Julian Assange is going to get justice? In the United States. In a court in East Virginia, where the jury is selected from the population, where 85% are employed by CIA, NSA, DOD, or DOS. I hired O.J. Simpson's jury consultant in my case. He has never lost a case. He represented O.J. Simpson and William Kennedy Smith and George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. He's a winner. And we got him a security clearance. He came to Washington and he reviewed all the documents. And at the end of it, he said to me, if we were in any other district in America, besides the Eastern District of Virginia, I would say let's go for it. We're going to win. But the Eastern District of Virginia, he said your jury would be made up of people from the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and Intelligence Community Contractors, or their family members. He said, you don't stand a chance in the Eastern District of Virginia. That's why they charged you there. I fear the same thing for Julian, that they charged him in the Eastern District of Virginia because it's called the Espionage Court, because no national security defendant has ever won a case there. And then we see now how the British judiciary, who has a long tradition of rule of law, a proud tradition of that, has delivered a complete travesty of a trial where the defendant has not had the right to prepare his defense, where he has not had access to his own lawyers, where we have court judges refusing to consider objections for conflicts of interest. Even in the UK, he's not going to get a Fair Act tradition trial. So this is no longer in the hands of the judiciary. The judiciary is unwilling or unable to deal with this, according to the rule of law. This is now in the hands of the public and in the hands of the media to inform the public about what is going on. On February the 24th, 2020, the first part of Julian Assange's extradition hearing took place. I'm here from Reporters Without Borders. We've been monitoring all week. Today we were again concerned about Mr Assange's well-being and frankly the treatment is dehumanizing, the fact that he is an afterthought almost twice now this week. Proceedings have started without a realization that he was not even yet present. Julian is not receiving a fair hearing. To start with, he can hardly and barely hear what's going on at the courtroom. He cannot communicate with his lawyers without being observed and overheard by officials from the State Department, from the embassy and from the Eastern District Court of Virginia. So how can he actually have a fair opportunity? And he, as he said, when he was communicating, attempted to communicate with the judge, there's been enough spying on the communication between me and my lawyer. The remainder of the extradition hearing recommences on September 7th, 2020. Due to COVID restrictions, Assange has not been allowed to see his lawyers in over six months. On June 24th, the U.S. Department of Justice published a replacement superseding indictment on its website, but it was only delivered to the court three and a half weeks before the hearing and after the deadline to present new evidence had come and gone. This left Assange and his defense team with little time to adequately prepare a defense. Facing 175 years in prison, Julian Assange will likely not see his lawyers until the day of the hearing. This is not about left or right in politics. We can unite on this. Please tell everybody that you know that they have to side with Assange and fight against the extradition. If they tell you, I would rather fight for the environment or dense animal cruelty or gender equality, tell them. They are about to take every right away from you. You will not be able to fight for any other cause. We are talking about the fundamentals here. We must fight against the extradition. We must save Julian Assange. Hello all. Thank you very much for watching the film tonight and gathering here to discuss the case of Julian Assange. I'm very sorry I won't be able to be with you tonight, but I wanted to talk briefly about the reasons I made the film and the reason I made it how I did. It was 12 years ago when Weakleague started publishing the war crimes that you saw in the film, the torture and murder of innocent civilians, which were systematized throughout 20 years in the case of Afghanistan. And it spread out throughout the Middle East because it has been such a long time and because there's been an orchestrated campaign by five countries, Sweden, Australia, Ecuador, the United States and the United Kingdom, to attack and demonize Julian and attack him in all fronts from judicial to military. It is very important to go back and remember what he actually is in prison for, which is for allowing us to know that there were 15,000 unnamed civilians killed in the Iraq war that a family, as I show in the film, was executed, including a baby executed shot in the head and their bodies left to be bombed by one of their airplane bombers and try to eliminate all sorts of evidence of what they had done. And other publications that have changed the world have allowed the, for example, Chey Gossians, people inhabiting the Diego Garcia island, to go back to their island after winning international court lawsuits against the U.S. and the U.K. using WikiLeaks documents, as well as Kali-Leid el-Masri, a German citizen who was mistaken by an al-Qaeda operative and kidnapped and rendered and tortured and sodomized. And he won his legal battle against Macedonia, his original captors, through documents of WikiLeaks. And WikiLeaks publications have not only gone on from the stuff that we saw in 2010, but have continued. And WikiLeaks has continued to create enemies because of these publications, culminating in the CIA becoming its main enemy in 2017.  It's important to remember that there's only one publisher in the West that has been a target, military target of the United States for this long, for 12 years, and that's just WikiLeaks. The earliest mention we have of it being a military target of the U.S. was in 2010 when there was a task force made by the Pentagon. And it was manned up to 120 people, 24 hours a day. Since then, we know of task forces in the NSA, in the CIA, in the FBI, and other intelligence and defense agencies.  This case must be dropped. It is more than a political case. It is a persecution of the worst kind. And we must remember the work of Julian Assange to be able to tell the world why he is where he is and how they're making an example of him being tortured according to the Special Rapporteur on torture to send a message to others who try to there do the same thing that Julian did. This is what will happen to you if you do what Julian Assange did. Finally, I would just like to say to anyone who will be in Berlin and the Berlin audiences that might tune in that there's an exhibition planned on the 7th of October about exactly the work of WikiLeaks and it'll gather some of the most world's influential artists including Ai Wei Wei and Sarah Lukas from the UK and German painter Daniel Richter among others to celebrate the work of WikiLeaks and remember it. So if you're around Berlin, go to Noisy Leaks The Art of Exposing Secrets and you can check out the website NoisyLeaks.space Have a good evening everybody and keep up the good fight. Well, that was a brilliant film I thought, very powerful. John Kiriakur is going to sit next to me. So we've got time, it's 10 minutes, 10 minutes to 3. What about that? Okay, all right, I'll speak louder. We're all going to have to speak louder. So we avoid feedback. So just to update from the last bit from that film, Assange of course remains locked up in Belmont's prison in London in June. The British Home Secretary signed his extradition order after the High Court ruled it in favor of a US appeal to overturn the lower courts ruling rejecting extradition because of Julian's propensity to commit suicide and because of the harsh conditions of US prisons. The High Court based its ruling solely on assurances or promises given by the US that Assange would be held in strict isolation and that he'd have access to medical care. The Alexander Detention Center where he would be held if he's sent here of course has no doctor on staff and in October Assange suffered a mini-stroke. Assange's lawyers have appealed the Home Secretary's decision and signature and also several points of law from the lower courts ruling such as the political nature of the case and its threat to press freedom. We're waiting for the High Court to decide whether to accept any of this application for these points of appeal that could come any day. Wong mentioned the Pentagon Task Force. Now Assange has been a victim of an effective mass disinformation campaign planned as long ago as March 8, 2008 when a secret 32-page document from the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessment Branch of the Pentagon described in detail the importance of destroying the quote feeling of trust that is WikiLeaks Center of Gravity. It was WikiLeaks itself that published this leak document which said this attempt to destroy the feeling of trust around Assange would be achieved with threats of exposure and criminal prosecution and unrelenting assault on reputation. That was in 2008 so it's no surprise then that there have grown up since that time several myths about Assange that came I believe from this planned disinformation campaign and my effort now here in the next 20 minutes or so is to demolish five of these myths about Julian Assange. Number one myth number one Assange is not a journalist. Robert Perry found a consortium news in 1995 he was an Associated Press investigative journalist one of the best of his generation. He exposed many of the Iran Contra stories including the name of Oliver North. I took over a consortium news in 2018 when Bob passed away and I have a background at the Boston Globe in the Sunday Times of London and the Wall Street Journal so we know a little bit about journalism Bob did and I do and Bob wrote this about Julian Assange in December 2010 12 years ago in an article that he called he entitled Journalists Are All Julian Assange and Bob wrote that the process for reporters obtaining classified information about crimes of state most often involves a journalist persuading some government official to break the law by turning over classified documents essentially Bob said that he himself had encouraged his sources to break a small law i.e. legal document to prevent a larger war from being committed such as in wartime. He also says Bob that the corporate media has shunned Julian Assange to their own peril because U.S. mainstream outlets may breathe easier now but may find themselves caught up in a little legal predicament or that could be applied to them later. For all of this Julian Assange faces as we saw 175 years in prison for publishing information in the way that all investigative journalists including Robert Perry did. Now it really ultimately doesn't matter whether he's a journalist whether we call him a journalist or not because the First Amendment applies to all citizens there's no doubt Assange and Jane engaged in journalistic activity working with his sources conrolling them to get information as Bob Perry did yet he's being charged with espionage. He's charged under the Espionage Act that conflicts with the First Amendment as we shall discuss further in a moment with two men who know a thing or two about that including three men John Curiova sitting next to me. Myth number two Assange is a rapist a contrary to widely held popular belief Julian Assange was never charged with rape. Two women went to the police in Sweden to have them get a STD test. At least one of them says she was railroaded into bringing sexual assault allegations and this is based on you saw Nils Melser who was at that time the U.N. Rapporteur on torture he knows Swedish he's read the police documents he's written a fabulous book I think there's a copy in the back there and he's shown that these women never claimed rape and that at least one of them admits that he was railroaded into this. Assange was allowed at the time to leave Sweden he went to London where suddenly an arrest warrant was issued and it was because there's more to this story than just the sexual allegations that he decided to go into the Ecuador embassy namely he was afraid that Sweden would send him over to the United States and those fears were dismissed at the time as being overblown and paranoid but of course now he's indeed been indicted and the trans-united United States is Stefania Morici with us let's see yes Stefania can you come in now Hi Stefania thank you for joining us today please pick up the story Stefania of course is an investigative journalist for El Fato Cortidiano which is an Italian daily newspaper she joins us from Rome Stefania speak a little more about the rape case because you know the political side of this very well Yes of course because I spent many years working I have spent 13 years working on the Julian Assange case and I have invested something like seven years trying to litigate my FOI request in Sweden in the US in the UK and Australia because four governments are denying me these documents and this stands you a lot when you have four governments trying to use all sorts of legal resources to stop a journalist accessing this documentation so my investigation on this case started precisely with the Swedish case because at that time I had to work on all the documents even before collateral murder so even before WikiLeaks became a very famous media organization and I had realized that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks journalist took were taking huge risks so when in after publishing after started publishing the Afghan war laws he ended up in this Swedish case just not even four weeks after he had started publishing the Afghan war laws I realized that the way the Swedish prosecutors were conducting the investigation made no case made no sense no sense at all I have been following as many other journalists many crime case so I have a precise idea how criminal investigation works so if a prosecutor has some solid evidence the prosecutor immediately go ahead the prosecutor immediately question the person under investigation and he charge in and he put him on trial whereas in the Julian Assange case it was complete nonsense after five years the prosecutor so this this case was nonsense from the very beginning it was open immediately not even four weeks after he had started publishing the Afghan war laws and before it was immediately closed by the Swedish prosecutor by the Stockholm prosecutor chief prosecutor and the day after he was questioned and two days after the rape case was reopened by a different prosecutor and since then it remained for seven years at the preliminary stage without Julian Assange being questioned and charged or without being the dismiss the allegations being dismissed so it was put in a limbo and after five years he had remained under investigation an Italian prosecutor told me so why this case doesn't make any progress and I explained the Italian prosecutor well it doesn't make any progress because the Swedish prosecutors don't want to go to London to question him and the prosecutor told me this doesn't make sense at all to me because we Italian prosecutors travel the world to question very dangerous mafia people so why the Swedish prosecutors cannot fly from Stockholm and go to London takes two hours flights and question him and decide whether to charge him with rape or whether to drop the case so the Swedish the Italian prosecutor told me you should try to discover why they don't want to go there because this is the key of the case and this was in 2015 when Julian Assange had already spent 18 months under house arrest and three years inside the Ecuadorian embassy I mean I had visited him inside the embassy from the very beginning and I immediately realized the huge impact on his health on his mental and physical health of this confinement inside an embassy without not even an hour outdoor you know this is I immediately understood this so in 2015 I decided to file a FOI request in Sweden because I had no other way to try to understand why he was not charged he was not questioned he was there was this paralysis the case was completely paralyzed I was lucky maybe because they were distracted maybe because they inside the prosecutor's office maybe there was someone who disagreed with the way they had managed this case however as a matter of fact they provided me some very important documents and the documents provide evidence that it was the UK authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service who had told the Swedish authorities don't come here don't come to London to question him and by doing so they have contributed to create this judicial and diplomatic work which kept Julian Assange arbitrary detained according to the UN authorities for seven years and even further because at the end of the day it was it was due to this decision not to drop the investigation or to charge him it was due to this paralysis that they were able the UK authorities were finally able to arrest him in 2019 so this decision by the Swedish by the Swedish prosecutors were crucial to keep him trapped in London for nine years and so I discovered that it was the Crown Prosecution Service this agency is crucial this agency is crucial because it is a very same public agency which today is in charge of the extradition to the U.S. so this agency is the one who told the Swedish prosecutor don't come here and created this quagmire don't don't you dare come here is not the words they used to find you yes I got documents saying that in 2013 even the Swedish prosecutors were unhappy about this paralysis it was completely paralyzed the criminal investigation was paralyzed and there was a diplomatic paralysis because he could not get out of the embassy he could was confined in the embassy so in 2013 even the Swedish prosecutors started to think about this paralysis and in and they told to the Crown Prosecution Service that they were considering to to drop the extradition case and to leave the European arrest warrant and the UK authorities were not in favor of this and you wonder why why what kind of interest why the Swedish authorities why the British authorities wrote this kind of email saying don't you get get caught fit because they were considering to drop the extradition case you know thank you Stefania I'm sorry we have a very tight schedule because unfortunately CN Live has gone on in the past for five hours but this one I think John was probably on one of those so you're right yeah so John was 40 hours let me tell you one last thing you've done yes please let me well not only this at the end of the day thanks to this litigation I discovered that the UK authorities had a Crown Prosecution Service as I said they have the one in charge of the the extradition process to the US in this day they destroyed crucial documents about the case they destroyed crucial documents about a criminal case which was ongoing highly controversial high-profile and five years later I discovered this in 2017 they are still to provide any sensible explanation on why they destroyed these documents they refused to provide an explanation which is completely suspicious and in Sweden there are new development and I put this all in my book which will come out in November because in Sweden you have very suspicious things as well which I discovered after they destroyed the documents what's the name of your book, Stefania? the book is secret power WikiLeaks and its enemies so we come out in November thank you very much Stefania please hang around if you can so you could take part in the discussion at the end should point out that the British British prosecutor has also said an email obtained by Stefania Thua-Foier that don't told the Swedish prosecutors don't consider this a normal extradition case so they knew exactly what's going on now I want to go on to myth number three before I do back to the journalist thing I didn't mention that of course Assange has won many journalism awards dozens including the Walkley Award which is the Australia's version of the Pulitzer Prize and the Gary Webb Award was given by Consortium News to Julian Assange and there are many journalists to organizations committee to protect journalists reporters without borders the International Federation of Journalists and many others that are supporting Assange saying drop the charges so if he wasn't a journalist I doubt those organizations would one conspicuous outlier here is the National Press Club in here in Washington that refuses to say a word about Assange despite pressure being brought on them and I wonder why they were invited by Skip here to watch this thing and I somehow I think they're watching a football game now instead so I want to go on to myth number sorry myth number four which is lost from place there okay Assange fixed the 2016 election that's myth number three now I'm speaking on because I wrote a book about this it's called How I Lost by Hillary Clinton that's the title published by OOR Books in New York and with a forward by Julian Assange so I know a bit about this and let's just put it this way the on the eve of the last presidential election in 2020 the night before the election Mueller allowed through a FOIA request the release of some of the unredacted parts of his massive report looking into so-called Russian and Trump campaign collusion and it showed there that he could not prosecute Assange because there was no way Assange would know that he was speaking according to Mueller to GRU Russian military intelligence now when I read the original report with that redacted obviously that's occurred to me how would Assange know so there was no prosecution of Assange now there's no proof that Russians were involved either this is an indictment and my argument is it doesn't matter even if the Russians were the source why because these documents were true these were accurate emails that showed corruption in the DNC five members of the DNC including the executive what was her name down in Florida she resigned Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned immediately after the release of these weekly documents why so it doesn't mean even if when you're a journalist is interviewing orally a source you have to look at their motives you don't know whether why they're telling you this you have to double check and get second and third sources but when you get a document and it's authenticated and it's newsworthy that's it you publish it now CNN, The New York Times, The Garden they all have drop anonymous drop boxes which Julian Assange and WikiLeaks pioneered so that theoretically Russia could put a document they stole from the United States in CNN's anonymous box and they'll publish it if it's newsworthy so they were they used by the Russians it's true it doesn't matter who the source is so that's what I want to say about the endangering the election but there's also uh number four, myth number four Assange endangered U.S. informants this is the key point of the U.S. prosecution that we heard in the exhibition here he endangered the lives of informants now in the film called Risk by Lawyer Poitras you see Julian Assange on the phone with the State Department asking them can you help this is the way before he published these files the cables these the State Department cables diplomatic cables can you help us to redact this and the State Department told Assange to take a hike so they had an opportunity themselves the U.S. government to help to redact names of informants and they declined we now learned from Australian journalist Mark Davis who was with Julian Assange in the Guardian offices in London as they were preparing the publication of these leaks and Mark Davis has set on the record in a meeting in a Sydney that we broadcast on CNN Live that he was with Assange and it was only Assange who cared in that weekend about informants names being redacted not the Guardian not the New York Times not their Spiegel and he spent the whole weekend awake trying to redact as many as he could before publication and then guess what Luke Harding and David Lee in a book a few months later published a password in their book to the unredacted files which had all the names not the ones that were released in which some of the names had been redacted why they did that we don't know but a newspaper in Germany called the Freitag then published the unredacted documents and then Krypton which you might know here in the U.S. John Young who owns Krypton they published the unredacted this is all before WikiLeaks today published unredacted files with the informants names and John Young testified at Julian's extradition hearing and said that the police never question him about that why have they questioned Julian Assange who published those unredacted files after all of those others because he wanted informants to know that their names might be in those documents and to run to safety General Robert Carr testified at Chelsea Manning Sport Martial that no informant was known to be harmed the Guardian said that the counterintelligence official Carr who led the Pentagon's review he said that there was no instances were ever found of any individual killed or enemy forces as a result of having been named in the releases false that myth that Julian Assange has endangered informants myth number five myth number five is that Julian Assange is a hacker and Julian Kathy Vauban our executive producer has recorded a film that she can show right now Kathy Thanks John Thanks Joe Before I start I'd just like to pull out a quote from Juan's film it's Julian Assange back in 2011 he says there is a very worrying attempt in the United States to erect a new precedent in the national security sector that any journalist who corresponds with the source is committing espionage if at some time a classified communication is made if I am a conspirator to commit espionage then all these other media organizations and the principal journalist in them are also conspirators to commit espionage So is Julian Assange a hacker? Well the argument has been he is not a journalist but a hacker and the first part is an obviously ludicrous statement as Joe Laurier has explained Let's look at the findings of a forensic examiner who was called on day 14 of Assange's extradition hearing to give testimony in relation to the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge That charge is regarded by some as the least of Assange's worries since it only carries a five-year maximum prison sentence I would argue it's the most important keystone charge because it shifts legal and public perception it's the hook that enables all the other charges Well according to Vice President Joe Biden back in 2010 who when asked if Julian Assange was criminal a somewhat gnarly question within the context of the First Amendment he began with if he conspired and the information wasn't just dropped on his lap Proving Assange conspired with Manning to obtain defense information would set him apart and open the door to charging him with espionage This is the charge that drives a wedge between Assange and any other journalist and perhaps inspires fear in those who on a regular basis correspond with their national security sources The late Michael Ratner alerted us to a grand jury investigation in 2011 along these lines Joe Laurier and I have been reporting from the Assange courtroom since February 2020 I wrote about Ella's testimony and its significance in the consortium news article why the crumbling computer conspiracy case is so vital to the U.S. The expert witness Patrick Ella worked for the U.S. Army for 13 years He was a command digital forensic examiner and computer chromes instructor with oversight of more than 80 digital forensic examiners He was tasked by the defense with analyzing private chat logs allegedly between Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange that had been submitted by the U.S. as evidence of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion by Assange The U.S. claimed cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log onto the computers under a username that did not belong to her Such a measure would have made it more difficult for investigators to identify Manning as the source of disclosures of classified information Ella found that the narrative alleged in the U.S. indictment as conspiracy between Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning didn't make sense Ella said the U.S. couldn't prove nor was he asked to prove that the moniker Manning was conversing with was Assange Manning already had security clearance to access the files as the indictment itself points out and she had already given WikiLeaks most of her material before this alleged hack Manning's top secret access was only permitted on her login for which she had the password Logging in as another username meant she would have been logged out Nor would logging in as another user have given Manning anonymity as the government alleges since the physical IP address of the terminal was recorded regardless of who was logged in From the Manning court martial it emerged that the government knew who was on shift at the time In the Lidavella's testimony the U.S. scenario of Assange's conspiracy with Manning was shown to be unfeasible The hacking charge fell apart so the U.S. went looking for something else in an attempt to show Assange encouraged and worked with hackers They presented a second superseding indictment that was accepted by the British court 14 months after the original deadline The charge crumbled again when testimony from a new witness FBI informant Ziggador Thordeson that Assange had directed people to hack was recanted One senses a desperate move because Thordeson was a convicted fraudster and pedophile and a repeat offender and we hear of the FBI being kicked out of Iceland by its Minister of the Interior where they had gone to scrape the bottom of the barrel Ziggie gave his chat logs with the FBI to Stundan a prominent Icelandic news outlet supporting documents suggest they were authentic Stundan journalist Bjartmar Alexandersson followed up with many hours of somewhat surreal interviews with Ziggie who didn't appear capable of saying the same thing twice I think we can reasonably say that Julian Assange is a journalist and as long as he continues to be shown innocent in court he is not a hacker That's the way justice works A new appeal has been submitted Let's keep our eye on the point the US government has misrepresented the core facts of the case to the British courts Thank you Thank you, Cathy Logan, for that So to recap Myth number one Assange is not a journalist false Number two Assange is a rapist false Number three Assange fixed the 2016 election false Myth number four Assange indigent US informants false and number five Assange is a hacker false and I want to just follow up to say that Joe Biden in that 2010 meet the press appearance he did say we can't charge him if we can't prove that he actually took part in the stealing of documents if it was just given to him it's a journalist and the Obama administration did not prosecute him because they knew they'd have to prosecute the New York Times and which also published the exact same documents that WikiLeaks published from what's happening with Joe Biden now he's the president why is there no pressure why is there nothing happening with the Justice Department dropping this case well Joe Biden says he doesn't want to interfere but we know that so-called Chinese wall between the White House and the Department of Justice is quite thin indeed in almost every administration I think the CIA which is absolutely furious about Vault 7 as we saw in the film which led to the discussion of killing or kidnapping Assange it's got to be putting pressure on Biden still not to drop it and the Democratic Party establishment still smarting it because they believe myth number three that he fixed the election and caused Hillary to lose those two pressures I think are being brought to bear on Biden right now he'd get here a hell of a lot from the DNC and the CIA we're going to move on now we have an hour and five minutes still left and we're going to now turn it over to our featured guest Dan Ellsberg and James Goodall and then open it up for a discussion now you know there's a lot of enumerable there are a lot of people who are charged and are charged who are innocent with serious crimes what's so special about Assange because it's not just about him it is indeed about press freedom and there's no two better people that I could think of who can speak about the First Amendment than James Goodall who was the ex the time of the Pentagon Papers case the New York Times general counsel and of course Daniel Ellsberg who was the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times the Washington Post and numerous other newspapers and every other day pretty much to keep that story front and center so we are very happy to be pleased we are very happy and pleased to be joined by James Goodall in New York I believe and by Daniel Ellsberg in California James I want to start with you to keep Daniel just another few minutes waiting tell us what you thought of the film and the importance that it said and then in our discussion so far about the First Amendment issue here well the First Amendment issue is the key issue in the case we start with the Espionage Act and we ask ourselves does it apply well asking that question forgets our experience in the Pentagon Papers case when I first looked at the Espionage Act I said it didn't apply the government came in and said stop the presses it applies they went to the judge in New York City whose name was Gerfine and he said in his decision and everyone's forgotten about this it doesn't apply the government then subsequently dropped the allegation that the Espionage Act applied to the Pentagon Papers case leading what the First Amendment now in the Assange case the government says the same thing the Espionage Act applies to Julian Assange and therefore we've vindicted them under a variety of sections the issue is however not whether the Espionage Act applies so much as whether the First Amendment permits its application the Espionage Act let's face it we all know it's a 1917 First World War law that has no bearing really in this type of case but the government has been using it for years to apply to situations which it was never meant to apply to namely leaking of documents therefore the argument that the Espionage Act doesn't apply is going to be difficult because so many cases other than the one that was really counted the one to which I referred have said the Espionage Act applies and lo and behold what did we discover in the Trump case that the government used the Espionage Act to apply to Trump I'll leave further discussion of the Espionage Act and its implications when Dan comes on and get to the important point which is even if the Espionage Act applies it only can apply if the facts justify the application of the First Amendment and that its application effect that doesn't apply and protect the Julian Assange so to make a long story short the issue in the Julian Assange case is doesn't meet the First Amendment now which First Amendment in the Pentagon Papers case the government was required to prove that I'm looking now at the language of the Pentagon Papers case that publication caused immediate and irreparable damage to the nation or its people that's the test that one would argue applies to Julian Assange and for a variety of reasons he can't meet that test because the test is so uh expansive and requires so much proof more to the point to tie back to what Joe's been talking about when we look at myth number four basically what the government has to prove to meet the kind of test that I talked about is that there was damage to the sources of the information that Julian Assange published and as Joe pointed out the government with respect to most of that information cannot prove that case they tried to prove it once when Manning who was the source of the information was tried and they tried to prove it in the extradition case they cannot apparently find one witness who can say that that witness's life was jeopardized because of the publication in order for the government to win this case it has to be able to prove that in addition Joe has pointed out that the information in question much of it was published by other entities than Assange this was after Sanz tried to scrub it as Joe pointed out and it was subsequently published by two websites in the United States there is no liability under the espionage act for that type of publication therefore what is left is publication that Assange did before we got that event earlier on with respect to Afghanistan sources same problem the government cannot come up with any witnesses apparently that say they've been damaged since the government can't come up with that proof the cases should be thrown out under the first under the first amendment so one one thinks about the application of the espionage act it is an act that is very rubbery it's got a lot of elasticity but in a sense it does make any difference because the government can't meet the first amendment test of course the jeopardy in this case is that the government comes up with a weak first amendment test and the courts apply it and the press for some reason sits on the sidelines and doesn't support the application of the first amendment so Joe those are my thoughts A on the espionage act and B more importantly to the central issue in this case which is the application of the first amendment as a protective vehicle for Assange thank you very much James we're going to bring Dan Elbergen now now there's a bill that Rashida Talib has put in Congress which would carve out an exception for journalists they could not be then prosecuted on the espionage act because as it is now any person who has unauthorized possession or dissemination can be prosecuted that means a journalist can be but up until now no until Trump no journalist had ever been published sorry and indicted for that reason FDR tried it tried in World War II with the Chicago Tribune because they published information about the midway battle and the grand jury refused to indict and the Nixon actually panel of grand jury because of Dan's case they had it in Boston they were going after New York Times reporters but when it was discovered that Dan's psychiatrist's office have been bugged and his phone the reporters said aren't we being bugged too they dropped the case then so this is only time it's happened and unfortunately because it has happened it proves in my view and I don't know if Dan agrees that the espionage act is was in secret and British official secrets act because the British official secrets act has indeed gone after journalists on numerous occasions for publication was never done in the espionage act until Assange which in my view now makes it more than ever critical to challenge this on first amendment grounds it should not be allowed that a journalist be prosecuted because it is in complete conflict it's unconstitutional that part of the espionage act because it conflicts with the first amendment let me bring in Dan Ellsberg Dan let us know your thoughts like thank you Joe I was the first person prosecuted in the United States for a non espionage act many people interpreted my indictment is accusing me of espionage actually the prosecutor in the courtroom moved that the word espionage not be used in the courtroom and the judge approved that on the grounds that it would prejudice the jury and it would be ridiculous to charge me with espionage at that point and they didn't so it was the first use of the so-called espionage act 18793 paragraph D&E or a non espionage act of giving information to the American public I pled not guilty in that case although there was no question that I had and I agreed I stipulated that I'd carried out the acts charged in the indictment and the basis for that not guilty was not only that it was my right to put the burden of proof on the government but many even the jurors we found after the case thought that I'd admitted guilt when I said that I yes I took those acts how could I plead not guilty well the best basis for that was that the clear language of the act which I did violate as it is in which virtually all of the people who have been indicted under Obama and Trump did violate the clear language of 793 or paragraph E in particular for an authorized disclosure was a clear cut violation of the First Amendment of the United States blatantly especially for someone like Assange and as Joe said Nixon actually initially sought to get members of the New York Times indicted for that and then their grand jury always didn't didn't follow through on that but even in the case of a source United States it was obviously against the idea of democracy for which our First Amendment is an absolutely vital foundation and was obviously a violation of that to apply that so broadly to the dissemination of information to the American public about crimes lies breaking laws pardon me deception by the government and really it is probably would still be accepted by almost any Supreme Court I faced back in 71 that there could be an constraint on the First Amendment which says no law shall be enacted which abridges freedom of the press but a law that says secret communication of information of defense significance to a foreign nation secretly especially in time of war especially to an enemy almost any Supreme Court would say that yes we could accept that degree of abridgment but the idea of giving information to the American public which is absolutely included in the language of 793E which by the way was enacted in 1950 not in 1917 it was an amendment restatement in conditions by the way a period of McCarthyism basically and is up health since then that's a blatant violation of the First Amendment I didn't in other words as legal scholars argued at the time violate a constitutionally valid law that of course has to be determined in the end by the Supreme Court but the Supreme Court has never chosen to address that case the question of whether these provisions of the Espionage Act are constitutional there have been at least two appeals to the Supreme Court but they've never accepted them to this day so that's never been decided of course the present Supreme Court is very obviously can't be interpreted to I can't be expected with the same reliability to look conscientiously at the requirements of the First Amendment but not entirely not either some of the extremely whitewing judges have been in fact fairly good on the question of protecting some civil liberties so you can't entirely predict but it would be hard the upside of this is that legal scholars who've looked at this now say there should be either an amendment or actually the simple ending of the Espionage Act as it is now stated and replaced with an Espionage Act that would apply only to spies who intend to aid a foreign government or the United States by clandestine transfer of information but not applying in any case something that is not as important for spies as it is for everyone and whistleblowers there must be in any law relating to information the ability for the defendant to argue before the judge correct his or her intentions in doing this why he or she thought this would benefit the United States help its security what the actual impact was and what it was reasonably expected to be no defendant in these cases on the Espionage Act has had that ability which means they can't tell the jury why they did what they did I was not able to answer the question from my defense lawyer why did you copy the Pentagon Papers you couldn't get that passed it was irrelevant across the objections of the prosecutor in fact my lawyer said to the judge your honor I've never heard of a case this was a famous a pellet lawyer Leonard Boudin I've never heard of a case in which the defendant couldn't tell the jury why he or she did what he did and the judge said you're hearing one now because it was the first time the Espionage Act had been applied that means no defendants and there have been a dozen a couple dozen since me actually not much until this century really a case in 1985 and one about 10 years later but a couple of dozen since then using the Espionage Act not one of which gave the defendant a fair trial whistleblowers who in nearly every case I'll mention a couple exceptions that are significant here but in nearly every case intended to improve the welfare the security of the United States by revealing wrong misdoing especially involving the prosecution and continuation of a wrongful war at the loss of many lives or in the case of Ed Snowden massive criminality by the national security agency under the president in surveilling nearly everyone or you could say everyone and not only in this country in ways that would allow a police state to act on that information from one day to the next as Snowden put it we have a turnkey tyranny we don't have a tyranny or we this this program would not be occurring right now it wouldn't be occurring in a country without a First Amendment and yet we may lose that First Amendment and from what day to the next we could become like the government of East Germany in terms of surveillance that East Germany has never you couldn't even imagine now because the technology didn't exist him let me be very specific here before I end in two ways a couple of the people who have been indicted were not clearly whistleblowers for whatever reason they withheld in their own archive or their own safes and whatnot material not clearly intended to be put out to the public but they were possessing material that they got in the course of their their authorized duties that was stamped secret or not secret and they were indicted for that because indeed 793 the paragraph E clearly states retention of this it doesn't say classified but information relating to the national defense not giving it to authorized authorities holding it was illegal and a couple of people have been in prison for doing just that President Trump is accused of that right now under the espionage act so let me make clear that I'm using a principle here which is that the espionage act is unconstitutional in this country a threat to democracy a threat to the First Amendment by making clear that I apply that to everyone starting with myself one year ago in August I think it was or quite a bit me I released hundreds of pages of top secret documents the things that's been made a great deal of right now that President Trump has top secret documents in his possession well I had had these top secret documents relating to Taiwan streets crisis of 1958 and I had them for 40 years and I put them out to some extent on the web and in various other ways during that but I did it quite openly last year by giving to New York Times to Charlie Savage and the New York Times which published them and thereby Savage and I both becoming clearly prosecutable by the criteria of the Justice Department under this provision of the espionage act why did I do that because then as now really and in the future we were facing an acute possibility of a nuclear crisis in the Taiwan Straits exactly like the crisis that arose in 1958 and I thought it was not too late and not too early for the American public to know how closely had come to nuclear war by decision of President Eisenhower at that time and should judge the risks of giving the president that degree of freedom to use nuclear weapons so I put it out I haven't heard from the Justice Department though I made it clear that I understood that what I was doing was violating their interpretation of the espionage act let's move now to to one other person I've said for many years now I would be defending Stephen Bannon whose political values I despise and whose actions but he is a journalist among other things and if he had on Breitbart News done what Julian Assange is accused of doing I would be arguing that he should not be prosecuted I've said that and Bannon was not prosecuted for that yet he's prosecuted for other things that he deserves prosecution for Donald Trump deserves prosecution for many many countless crimes that I think he is definitely deserves indictment for and for each of those he deserves a fair trial but he couldn't get a fair trial under the espionage act under any of these unlike just like any of the other people I've mentioned including myself he is holding top secret documents that's been established just as I was he is holding documents marked sensitive communication sensitive communication intelligence sort of sensitive compartmented in intelligence SCI greater than top secret ah wow except that every document published by the press given them by Edward Snowden was sensitive compartmented information it was about illegal use of communications facilities by the NSA which the public certainly needed to know and which led to enormous discussion in congress of affecting the law so the mere fact that it is stamped SCI like at Snowden's or top secret I can understand people getting very excited about that in the eagerness to indict Trump all I'm saying is we don't know what the content of those are it might be that he could would have very great trouble arguing that it was in the interest of the United States for him to hold that material that particular material but not just because it's a top secret okay that's the point I wanted to make I wanted to bring in no one should be indicted under that for this reason absolutely but here's someone sitting right next to me who was indicted under that so we have two people on this panel indicted under the SNAJ Act and I'm referring of course to John Kiriakou John of course leaked the information well he said it on the press about torture in the CIA so I'm going to turn over to John that will come back to you Dan and to James without question thanks everybody I would like to reiterate a lot of what uh Dan Ellsberg said this this is a in my view a clearly unconstitutional law the reason why it's been on the books for the last 105 years is because there really hasn't been anybody withstanding to appeal it to appeal a conviction under it to the Supreme Court we thought maybe we had a chance with with Chelsea Manning maybe with Jeffrey Sterling that didn't work out for one reason or another but the law is is unacceptable as it is it's un-American frankly it's unconstitutional I agree with Dan that we need a law to protect the country from foreign spies who who intend to do us harm right every country should have protection like that but this law isn't that it's meant specifically at least in the last decade or two to target journalists and whistleblowers and people whose politics are unpopular I spoke not too terribly long ago long ago with Ed Snowden who said that he is willing to come home he is willing to face decades in prison if he can get up in court and explain to the American people why he did what he did and the Justice Department said absolutely not there is no such thing under this law as an affirmative defense there has to be an affirmative defense you saw the the documentary what happened to those American soldiers who committed war crimes and murder right before our very eyes nothing nothing happened to them but the person who reported it is on trial for his life now the whole system is backwards I also want to say something about the eastern district of Virginia and I know I know most of you at least a little bit and I know you're probably tired of me talking about the eastern district of Virginia sorry never never tired of you but if this if this extradition happens we have to be out in front of that courthouse every single day we have to be in the courtroom every single day because most of the American people aren't following this issue most of the people who would be in an edva jury pool aren't following this issue I was speaking before the event started with Ingrid who said that she had mentioned to a friend of hers that this event was taking place we were talking about Julian Assange and the response was oh isn't he a spy that's what we're up against the government has largely has largely framed the debate around Julian and the extradition and the upcoming trial we have to reframe it we have to explain to people why what Julian did was a public service he's not even American and he did it as a public service to the American people we wouldn't know what crimes our country was committing in our name without Julian Assange having told us we wouldn't know that the CIA has the technical capability to take over control of your car and force you to drive into a tree off a cliff had Julian Assange not told us so we owe him that you know maybe we can eventually come up with a schedule or something but my more immediate point is we've got to show people who are going to walk into that courthouse to be part of a jury pool how important this issue is that there really are two sides that Julian Assange is a hero and not a criminal or a spy that we owe him a debt of gratitude and that the issue is important enough for us to be out there every day talking about it the Assange family if I could say one more thing the Assange family has accused me of being overly optimistic over the last couple of years I admit that I have been but push has come to shove and there's no wiggle room here there's no room for us to relax or to you know hope for the best you know what they say in graduate school hope is not a strategy it's not and so we've got to be out there every day and then even after we win this thing and Julian wins it we have to then move to Capitol Hill to get this law scrapped and rewritten so thank you very much I'm going to turn over to Chip Chip Gibbons who is a writer and an expert on the Espionage Act and First Amendment law and Chip please sure thank you so much for having me on this panel it is good to be with I think all of my friends on the panel I think we've all done things before together and hopefully will again oh sorry louder yeah we have to scream I agree with the analysis that the Espionage Act is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment but I would not necessarily want to take that case before the current Supreme Court so I think what we really need to be working on doing is first making sure Julian is not brought to this country and second getting Congress to amend the law I think there's a case for just scrapping it in its entirety which I would not be opposed to but at the organization that I work for Defending Rights and Descent we've worked for a number of a number of offices including Tlaib and Omar's on amending the law in some fairly common sense ways right right now what is Section 793 cover it covers unauthorized communication or retention of national defense information where the person has reason to believe that could harm national security or aid of foreign power national defense information is not defined it's never been defined in a meaningful way it predates the classification system although fascinating enough you can't challenge the classification of information in an espionage act case Daniel Hale was forbidden the drone whistleblower was forbidden for doing that reason to believe that sounds like you have some chance of an offense under reason to believe but the way the courts have interpreted this for government insiders not for outsiders it gets more complicated is that if you knew information was classified and you signed a non-disclosure in agreement and you know you went to classification training you had reason to believe that would harm national defense because I'm sure they drill into your head that any disclosure of anything that's classified even stupidly classified the sky will collapse on you but at the same time though you can't challenge the classification of the document because courts have ruled that the espionage act covers both proper class properly classified documents and improperly classified documents so that's a very sort of Kafka-esque sort of thing so if all the government has to prove is that you gave a document that's to someone who was not entitled to have it what you released why you released it what you hoped to accomplish and what the impact of that was is not relevant to the trial and you are forbidden from telling the jury that and that makes perfect sense right if I'm on a jury and you tell me oh we're bringing in someone under the espionage act I'll say ah who'd they spy for ISIS China or Russia oh no it's this guy and he gave information to the media about how the NSA was spying on you Congress changed the law although not as much as they should have a court found the program to be illegal and likely unconstitutional and the journalists all got full of surprises I'm not returning a conviction right I mean you're just not so it makes perfect sense from the government why they want to hide this so they have this system where the game is extraordinarily rigged I covered the Daniel Hale case for for Jacob and magazine they were told they could not challenge the classification of the documents they could not raise selective prosecution because the largest leaker of U.S. government secrets is the U.S. government the every prosecution under the espionage act is a political prosecution because if you leak information about how great the drone program is to some gullible journalist you don't get indicted under you don't get prosecuted but if you show Barack Obama is lying and that 90% of the people targeted for six months in Afghanistan under operation aim maker or not the intended targets you're going to jail but you can't bring up the fact that it's a selective prosecution and Daniel Hale the prosecution submitted a motion and these are their words not mine to forbid him from talking to the jury about his good motives prosecutions were good motives not mine and the judge ruled Daniel Hale could not talk to the jury about his good motives so if you are facing a jury trial under this sort of Kafka s system it's a show trial it's it's not a real trial so we need to amend the espionage act to a limited scope so it only applies to those people who have a duty to protect classified information or a duty of non-disclosure so you know not me not journalists but people who work in the in the security establishment that the government has to prove that person intended to harm national security not this weird reason to believe stuff that they have an affirmative public interest defense and I would argue raising the intent requirement creates a negative backdoor public interest defense but we also want an affirmative one and to allow the defendant to testify about the purposes of their disclosure before a jury so the jury can hear oh yeah we were spying on you and I didn't really like the fact that the government was violating your Fourth Amendment rights and let's see if the jury throws the book at them in Eastern District they probably will but in most other parts of the country they might not and finally to get rid of this vague category of national defense information and require it with properly classified information at the time of disclosure so that the information can't be retroactively classified like they tried to do Tom Drake and it can't be information that was wrongfully classified in order to cover up war crimes and at that point I think you would have a better chance at a fair trial and that's what we need to be pushing for in addition to pushing for making sure drilling is never brought to this country as a defendant which I still hold out that the European Court of Human Rights will end this whole travesty because I don't have faith in the Eastern District thank you very much Chip for that we have about 15 minutes for a discussion amongst the panelists and then questions from the audience so Stefania if you want to but I'm going to ask everyone to please leave this to a two-minute intervention and if you don't you'll hate me for the rest of my life for your life rather because I'm going to cut you off I'm also apologizing to our online audience for me speaking very loudly because there's a live audience here Stefania you want to weigh in and then we'll go to Dan and James and John Goodall James Goodall I had to write the first Stefania whether I want to add anything to what they said would you like to make a two-minute intervention if not one move on yes I mean I really care about telling that I have worked on all these documents I have published all the WikiLeaks documents even Vault 7 and I remember how tense it was to publish the CA documents because while working on the cables we were dozens of journalists maybe hundreds of journalists Vault 7 we were a very small set small group of journalists so I still remember we were terrified about the CA discovering we were publishing the documents before we could go out with the documents why I tell this to you because after working for so many years over a decades on these documents I have never had any problem I was not putting Jane I was not even questioned so you realize how unfair what a monstrous injustice as Ken Loach the British film director writing the forward to my book this is a monstrous injustice dozens hundreds of journalists have published like me these documents and we never had the trouble we were never put in jail whereas he has never known freedom again the last time I met him as a free man was 28 September 2010 12 years ago I worked on this case for the last 13 years and the last time I met him as a free man was 28 September 2010 12 years ago I worked on this case for over a decade I never met him as a free man after that date and this is all only for revealing work crimes only for revealing torture only for revealing extrajudicial killings so okay you accept this if you are a journalist I have a you know we never think about this I feel tremendously guilty why I'm free and he's not free he has never no freedom again why I'm free why I'm not special quite the opposite is brilliant more brilliant than me as a journalist why I'm free why I can go around freely for the around the world and travel and keep doing my job but whereas he cannot do it I mean I think if you are I mean if you are a human being and you care about honesty and you have an ethic an ethic you are ethically you know you cannot accept this I cannot accept you I have been fighting for this case because I absolutely want to win this case me despiace Mr. Van Jema two minutes if I need yes sorry I must stop you there we have to win this case we will go to we will go to thank you we will now go back to James Goodall and I want to also point out yes Stefania did work with Julian on these documents she was one of the journalists working including the fact that they tried to get stuff on Trump there's a big another myth out there part of the one that he about the 2016 election is that they had stuff on Trump and they didn't publish it and Stefania can testify that they did get something and they checked it out had already been published and in that film by lawyer Poitras you see Sange on the phone telling someone we got stuff on Hillary Clinton and we're hoping to get stuff next week or soon on Trump they never did yeah it's a complete lie so let's go on to James Joe I think you might well mention Stefania's forthcoming book on this case she did already Dan she did mention it again yes okay Stefania's book is forthcoming in November so in English it's already out in Italian and we'll be able to see it in English in November James he needs to be unmuted okay Jeremy yeah you're two minutes are up no I'm kidding I want to make the point that should be obvious which is that A the government is well organized on its understanding of the espionage act which was not true years ago secondly its objective is clear to me is to reverse the Pentagon papers case and the reason I say that in the real world no one's going to enjoy anybody on the internet because the internet will beat the government every time so the government's only remedy will be after publication which is what the espionage case is about and that being so it's very important that the party's involved in this case and by that I mean all the members of the press come up with a high first amendment standard which can't be met by the government because otherwise the government will end up winning the case and reversing the Pentagon papers case because no one will try to bring a Pentagon papers case anymore they will wait and sue and if they have a first amendment test that's favorable to them they'll win so that's the double reason why this case is important very good thank you James let's go back to Dan Dan do you agree to keep this to two minutes you're cutting off Joe that's a little bit my agreement wouldn't be worth much that's the truth okay we have a law right now that criminalizes revelation of criminal activity by the government that has been classified and criminal activity which by the government which occurs every hour of every day under Democrats and Republicans will be classified if it has anything to do with the military establishment the military industrial conflict interventions or whatever will be classified if it's criminal it will be classified that's a major reason embarrassment not only criminal what the Pentagon papers revealed actually was not in general domestic criminal law as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning did reveal in terms of torture covered by domestic law in my case clear deception in the Taiwan Straits cases which I the top secret material I revealed last year which is on the web to reveal criminal activity it just reveals that President Eisenhower and all of his advisors were making the unconscionable reckless irresponsible almost insane threats of initiating nuclear war the Putin is making right now or that Biden may well be rating again or the Taiwan Straits in Taiwan and I thought the public should have a chance is not clearly criminal by the way let me jump for a moment here in terms of actually changing the law there are there were good amendments to the law allowing public interest to France and allowing people to explain their motives of whistleblowers by Tulsi Gabbard in the last months of her being in Congress and are now in in a resolution by Omar represents Omar in slave now very good they need to support they're not the most public popular members of Congress the ones Trump said without concern or their country of origin they should go back where they came from but actually those require careful assessment and they constitute very good amendments finally why have I not been prosecuted for what I say over and over I have taken the acts that are as clearly indictable as any of the people who have been prosecuted under the last several administrations I can only guess why haven't first of all it's 50 years old but the history is hardly irrelevant and the Taiwan streets we're we're facing that right now we're facing first two threats by Putin right now so it's very relevant but I don't think they want to argue why stuff 50 years old should be called not secret well it is millions of pages millions probably of that are potential there for criminalizing people another factor they know that they will not get a plea bargain out of me because for one thing if they charge me with 175 years like filming massage I wouldn't take that with more aplomb let's say if you only have to it wouldn't practically speaking confront me with 100 years I'm 91 now but on the other hand I faced 115 years when I was 40 so they knew that I would take to you would have made that to the much possible and they don't want to do that thank you so much Dan okay John K. Otter has signed a statement saying he only wants one minute yeah I only need one minute I just wanted to say again that this this case this trial is a very slippery slope and it's very dangerous one of the great disappointments to me is that mainstream journalists don't seem to really care and don't seem to recognize that they are the logical next targets if Julian Assange has successfully prosecuted for providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it which is the definition of espionage from my case then why not any number of New York Times journalists or Washington Post journalists or Wall Street Journal journalists that's the next step I think that in the end the government would very much like to have something akin to the British National Secrets Act is that what it's called Official Secrets Act and this is one step to to getting them there I'm disappointed that the media just don't understand exactly how dangerous this is but again maybe that's our job to educate them thank you John Chip do you want to add something one yeah I'll take one and a half minutes I'm going to do a brief very shameless plug I have a piece in Jack I've been right now about the CIA surveillance of Julian Assange which I gave my editor on Monday and learned was published yesterday today when Stefania told me always a great way to learn about when your things been published but it talks about sort of what the CIA did to Julian Assange in the embassy because it isn't just the espionage act it's about the CIA plots to get him the NSA put him in their manhunting database the FBI demanded Obama meet with them about charging him pretty much every one of the three letter agencies has at one point come up against Julian Assange and the question is why are they so fixated on him why are they so out to get him and and in this German documentary I think it's called the US versus Julian Assange Leon Panetta and the final clip says all we can do in a situation like this is help we charge the person and put him in jail so no one ever does this again this is about sending an example that you do not publish information about US war crimes this is about scaring people into submission and silence and I would I want to end on one last point the companion piece to the church committee was a congressional investigation called the pike committee the president classified it Congress had no backbone and didn't challenge that but somebody leaked it to the village voice when the senate torture report was classified by Obama no one ever leaked it right people used to be willing to put out more documents from the security state and things like the pike committee report under this sort of war on journalism waged by the espionage act I'm afraid it already is having a real chilling effect in ways we don't know about thank you very very much for that now we're going to go to questions so please keep them as brief as you can so we can get as many in we have about 17 minutes to go just okay please well I'm David Burroughs and I just wanted to say about this eastern district report in Alexandria some of us from NCNNR including Maliki Kilbride and Max Obishevsky we made an initial complaint about the drone program in this courthouse we met with somebody in this courthouse then several weeks later we went to check up on our complaint about drones and as we were going down to this courthouse we saw this homeland security all these cars and I was joking to my friends I said oh they're here for us aren't they and I went ha ha ha well we got to the courthouse and the doors were locked on us we couldn't get into the courthouse then there is this guy Eric Grohlman I believe is nameless a short guy with weird glasses from homeland security came up to us and talked to us as we were trying to get into this courthouse and he started talking about how he loved reading the Berrigan brothers of Berrigans their whole family and so they had locked the courthouse doors on us they had obviously read our emails they knew we were coming and they were there for us so we couldn't check up on our complaint about the drones so what does that tell you about this courthouse that's a question anybody could answer thank you very much for that and our next questioner is coming to the empty chair and it's now full all right so I'm sorry unabashedly a comment but one very horrifying a thing that Julian revealed was that we heard about it today a seven-year-old child was killed with a drill the only other time I heard about that was in Ramallah in Palestine and a Jewish soldier had used an electric drill on one of the Palestinian farmers I thought that would never happen but anyway as we hear about all these crimes I'm from the Catholic worker remember Dorothy Day remember that those crimes are not being being committed by them they're being committed by all of us who pay our tax money into the federal government this mass murder machine we have to stop paying it and also I'd like to tell you all that because of all this revelations because of the films because of whatever I am convinced that 9-11 was an inside job all this murder that's gone on based on the lie of 9-11 so I urge you all to read David Ray Griffin's work on 9-11 thank you very much could you give us your name please oh Kathy Boylan from the Catholic Worker thank you very much all right we're having our next questioner and then you can come next identify yourself if you can please I'm Sue Wheaton and I would like to ask if anybody here could comment about Seth Rich a young man who had been working for the Democratic National Committee in the IT area who was killed on the streets of Washington and well right after in election time when the Russians were being blamed for giving information to Julian Assange and a UK diplomat to Uzbekistan by the name of Craig Murray said that he had given he was a friend of Julian and he had given a thumb drive to Julian Assange and I just wonder if anybody he was killed at 4 a.m. on the streets of Washington Northwest Washington during when all this was coming out and um and okay does anyone want to have any does anyone want to ask that question could I mention one thing there it should be clear that Julian is not being charged now with anything that happened after 2010 or perhaps 2011 at the latest so anything that happened in 2016 is not part of this case as far as Julian Assange is concerned that doesn't mean it's not interesting but I want to make that that's a very good point Dan that should have been made and that in fact that's another reason why it's curious why Biden will not do something to drop this case because it's not about the DNC at all it's not about the CIA vault either but it's political those two I think as I said earlier I think those are the and I'd like to add that that Julian Assange knew about Seth Rich he didn't say he's the one that gave gave it to me through Craig Murray but he knew the name Seth Rich he kind of implied that in a Dutch TV so no one wants to take that we'll have another question and then thank you please identify yourself my name is Nancy Hay I'm a long time friend of of the Dorothy Day Catholic worker house I've been at many Friday vigils with Kathy Boylan and sometimes with David Barrows also well my opinion is that there's this whole issue of the public being horrified knowing of civilians being killed and wars which a lot of this has happened I think the government doesn't want the public to know that that especially ever since 9-11 and the lives that were told about that that that our government and military has killed a lot of civilians sometimes accidentally but sometimes maybe targeting them deliberately and of course that's the thing that Julian Assange did that really annoyed them was that he revealed that fact any question for okay that's okay if you want to make a comment anyone else not please and right oh no sir after Lou your first okay okay and right thank you Colonel and right thank you so much for coming well I just like to thank you all for the great program it's really fascinating and the film was tremendous Dan Ellsberg said that he can't figure out why he is not being charged for revealing this last treasure trove of information from the 1950s well I have the answer and that's because the bureau of prisons has told the federal government they do not want that pain in the ass Dan Ellsberg sitting in prison that's it that's it keep it Julian Assange and you're right we got to get out there we got to get the streets more and we got to keep writing articles put pressure on our congress people on whoever we can find so thanks for holding that thank you for coming along we're also thank you Lou can you that's right all right Louis Wolf Co-reduction Magazine it's been stated here today that the government's the greatest leaker of all Mike Pompeo once not about two years ago spoke at a university event and which he said we practiced deception we practiced theft we practiced seizure of people in fact we had training exercises at which point he stopped himself because he was perhaps revealing something bigger than he showed had I will also mention that Barack Obama once said on a public event that there are six levels of secrecy above anything I can see think about that thank you okay do we have any other questioners here someone else is coming we don't we have a few more minutes okay we've got seven minutes skip identify yourself please skip Colton Hauser fantastic program thank you everyone related to what's been touched on a bit but related to the tens of millions of documents that are classified every year including emails I wonder if you could speak a bit more on the impact on whistleblowers of this persecution on which journalists are so dependent who are you directing that at I'll direct to anybody who'd like to take it to John can you be a little bit more specific go skip well you've spoken a bit about the chill it's going to be coming over journalists got it right but what about the chill it's going to be happening to whistleblowers yeah yeah you know a New York Times reporter told me that on the day of my arrest in 2012 literally every one of the New York Times national security sources went silent and they stayed silent for six months nobody would talk to New York Times for six months after my arrest in discovery in my case and we received thousands and thousands of pages of of documents classified documents and in those documents was one it was an email from a CIA attorney to the justice department saying that the point at the end of the day wasn't necessarily to prosecute me so much as it was to frighten anybody else who might be thinking of going public into silence you know we heard the same thing after after Ed Snowden too they want Snowden to stay in Russia because they can accuse him of being a spy and a trader and all different kinds of things and frighten other would be whistleblowers into silence and in action so yeah I think I think you raise a good point it's not just the media it's whistleblowers as well yeah and and I think this gets us into a secondary issue that we should talk about which is the overclassification of documents I mean the espionage act says national defense information not classification but it is much more difficult to prosecute someone for giving out non-classified information there's some complexities in Tom Drake's case with them trying to retroactively classify things but but usually they at least claim they're coming after people for classified releases there is massive overclassification to just hide things John and I were both at Daniel Hale sentencing and the judge said two things the name of the reporter who Daniel Hale was accused of giving information to which everybody knew because the indictment list dates he was on a panel with them and dates the articles were published and there's only one human being in the world this could be and then he mentioned something about the U.S. has drones in the Horn of Africa at this point Gordon Cromberg this ghoulish man who is the national security prosecutor jumps up and starts screaming your honor your honor that's class Joe we have lost the sound of you can you unplug what you plugged there uh to get the sort of indictments from this investigation and you know they won't even acknowledge that they investigated a leak of the drone papers because they won't confirm whether or not it's real or not they won't confirm whether or not there's a drone program I know that so we were going to turn around and say okay it was stated in open court he gave this information to Jeremy scale and I'm looking at the court transcripts public hearing you and I were there redacted rector the comments from the judge were retroactively classified by um by our friends in the uh DOJ national security division and I get stuff back that's been declassified I get stuff back that's been declassified for for my book on the FA all the time it's conical uh there was a document from 1991 about people protesting the first golf war at a courthouse the entire document was classified as foreign counterintelligence about soviet active measures declassified because of my forever but that's that's not anything that should ever have been classified so I mean may I add some of course I know you want to I I just published a book with a sky horse publishing recently it was part of a series of three and it was the CIA insider's guide to surveillance and surveillance detection and um when I got I had to submit it to the CIA for pre publication review and when they sent it back several pages were blacked out well I appealed and I said listen this is all unclassified it's it's all freely available on the internet just because it's on the internet doesn't mean it's been declassified I said well I got it from your website I got it from the CIA website it's right there for the whole world to see so they denied my appeal and took it off their website and that's not should I told him yeah I should have told him just just want to dent him I mean that's not the first time something like that has happened the project on government oversight was suing for information about area 51 and the um government refused to acknowledge that it existed and they said well the parking permit policy for area 51 is online they retroactively classify the parking permitting policies and like search their office to make sure they didn't keep a copy of it so there is yes also why you would put the parking policies for area 51 this super classified thing on the internet I mean they're they're not making the best decisions at the DOD thank you I wish we knew about that there was parking area 51 because people who came here tonight probably will be able to avail themselves of that since the parking is so better on here well we have exactly one minute left so I want to thank everyone who's come I'm I apologize to our panelists that there was such a short time for intervention because there was so little time and we have to end in one minute so we're going to turn it over to Anne Wilcox of DC Action DC Action for Assange and I want to thank everyone James, Dan, Stefania, Chip, John Kiriakou and all of our questions Anne okay thank you so thank first of all all of you who attended we had about 40 to 50 people here in the room all of you who are listening online and this will be recorded for later viewing of course I want to also thank our remote panelists that's our audience there's the audience yes okay get a view of some people have have left but there were quite a few here we want to also thank Dan Ellsberg James Goodale of course John Kiriakou who's just a rock star in terms of our local organizing here and Chip Gibbons and Sue Udry who are both here from Defending Descent and do such great work and especially I want to thank those from DC Action for Assange who are here Jonathan Blazer who ran the tech for here Joan Stollard Martha Ingrid and others who worked on this program finally we just want to remind people of our DC Action for Assange events that we have coming up in the next few weeks and months we do a twice monthly vigil at the home of Merrick Garland our Attorney General who we're trying to obviously have not go through this extradition we didn't really get into Merrick Garland's role but it's an important one so we go to his home twice a month and with banners we're allowed to do that obviously under First Amendment law so we'll continue to do that and we also have a big rally coming up on October 8th in front of the Department of Justice that's in solidarity with the hands around Parliament Action that Stella Assange and others are doing in London on October 8th we'll be at the DOJ with the number of speakers there as well we hope to have Jill Stein, Merrick Garland-Nixon and a number of other stars I believe John will be there other speakers so we'll have a rally there at the Department of Justice to again call on the DOJ not to extradite Assange to drop the charges and totally exonerate him so join us on October 8th from 12 to 3 at the US DOJ which is 950 Pennsylvania Avenue right downtown and we'll look for people there and look for us online thank you you're okay as long as you stay off of Garland's property well thank you very much everyone for coming and everyone watching online for CN Live I want to thank also Cathy Vogan our producer and our journalist who produced the video on the hacking so again goodbye from the Cleveland Park Library in Washington, DC and to all our viewers around the world on CN Live goodbye tonight this is Joel Laurier saying goodbye if you are a consumer of independent news in the first place you should be going to is Consortium News and please do try to support them when you can it doesn't have its articles behind a paywall it's free for everyone it's one of the best news sites out there and it's been in the business of independent journalism and adversarial independent journalism for over two decades I hope that with the public's continuing support of Consortium News it will continue for a very long time to come thank you so much