Sarah Palin’s recent declarations on Wikileaks and the Obama administration show that she is apparently unaware of the facts, but could she really that uninformed ?
The Pentagon and other US government agencies have been looking to find ways of prosecuting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange or Wikileaks itself, but apart from the fact that doing so is proving to be extremely difficult in legal terms, any prosecution of Assange would also threaten press freedoms.
Sarah Palin, like some other politicians, sometimes waits to see what others are saying before coming up with her own opinions on major issues because usually her knowledge of the finer points involved isn’t too strong.
Her point of view is this. She says that the government has mishandled the situation and that the Wikileaks releases raise “serious questions about the Obama administration’s incompetent handling of this whole fiasco." She also says that the Obama administration should have acted earlier to stop Assange putting the documents online but did not do so.
She goes on to say that "Assange is not a 'journalist,' any more than the 'editor' of al Qaeda’s new English-language magazine Inspire is a 'journalist, he is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”
Her words display an apparent lack of understanding of the complex issues involved which should not be taken lightly because Palin is a potential presidential candidate and that makes what she has to say all the more noteworthy.
Firstly, concerning the very idea of prosecuting Assange and/or Wikileaks, the Supreme Court’s judgment in the 1971 Pentagon Papers case is well worth reading because it can be interpreted as being of jurisdictional importance. The Supreme Court said that there were insufficient reasons to stop the papers’ publication by the New York Times even though Daniel Ellsberg procured them by using illegal means. The court said that the government’s general claims of national security interests being at risk were not strong enough to warrant an injunction. This has generally been interpreted to mean that a government would need to prove that a characterized and particularized specific risk existed, that which does not seem to be the case for Wikipedia or Assange. No specific military operations have been put at risk and that is one of the reasons why no steps have been taken to prosecute Assange so far. There simply are too many legal problems as things stand. But Palin seems to be feigning to not know that.
There is also a problem behind her assertion that "Assange is not a 'journalist…” That may or may not be true, but even if is true, that in itself brings up another problem. Wikileaks is not configured like a traditional newspaper and it cannot be subjected to the kind of demands that are put on the press to minimize the publication of material which may threaten national security such as Britain’s DA-Notices (Defense Advisory Notices.) Not only that, Assange has agreed not to repeat his earlier mistake of publishing names if doing so would constitute a risk to those people’s lives, thus cooperating more in an effort not to become the subject of prosecution. And as Wikileaks is not based in the USA it would be difficult to pin him down in legal terms in an American court.
There is the question of his nationality too. He is Australian, not American. Despite what Palin says, Assange is not a terrorist acting against the USA. He may be a major thorn in the administration’s side but that would not be enough to get a court to agree to him being brought to the United States against his will. And even if the USA wanted him to be extradited I doubt that the extradition laws in many countries would allow it.
Although Palin appears to be convinced that Obama’s administration has neglected its duty, American government legal experts are aware of the actual problems, which is why they have been trying to find ways of having Assange charged for months, although they haven’t yet filed charges against him. There may even be moves afoot to change existing law, which was manifestly not conceived with Internet-based whistleblowers in mind. But that would not contain a retroactive element which could be applied to Wikileaks.
Finally, and most importantly, there is the issue of press freedom. Prosecuting Assange would represent a radical change in the American approach to free speech and the First Amendment. Journalists and newspapers are rarely if ever prosecuted in America and that is how it should be. It could be argued, and indeed I did argue in a recent article, that Assange’s actions are irresponsible. I am no fan of Assange’s way of going about his business, the secrecy which shrouds his organization – secrecy which is the antithesis of what quality journalism should be – or his paranoid and domineering personality.
But prosecuting him would be a disaster for freedom of speech. You don’t have to like Assange to realize that there are no real grounds for prosecuting him today and that any attempt to do so would pave the way for future abuses of press and personal freedoms.
Is Sarah Palin aware of the enormous difficulties facing any attempts to prosecute Julian Assange and their implications for civil liberties? If she is, then she is cynically using the issue in order to score cheap political points by making declarations and demands she knows have no possibility of being followed up in the real world. And if she is not aware of the issues, serious questions need to be asked about her ability to run a hamburger stand, never mind a country.
No comments:
Post a Comment