Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the infamous Pentagon Papers, testified during the extradition hearing of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday. Ellsberg warned that Assange would not see a fair trial if extradited to the US, and the whistleblower compared documents published by WikiLeaks to his leaks, and said both had been in the “highest public interest.”
Ellsberg said he was shocked that low-level documents published by WikiLeaks contained information about assassination and torture. In his days working for the US government during the Vietnam War, the whistleblower said sensitive information like that was only available to the highest levels of government. The inclusion of such information in reports that can be accessed by so many people, Ellsberg said, means the practices have been “normalized.”
Ellsberg discussed the Collateral Murder video published by WikiLeaks, which showed a US Apache helicopter indiscriminately kill over a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists.
“I was acutely aware that what was depicted in that video deserved the term murder, a war crime,” Ellsberg said. “I was very glad that the American public was confronted with this reality of our war.”
The prosecution told Ellsberg that Assange was not wanted by the US for the Collateral Murder video but for publishing documents and not redacting names. Ellsberg pointed out that when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he did not redact a single name.
When asked if he could believe that WikiLeaks releasing unredacted names did not cause any harm, Ellsberg said the US government has been “extremely cynical in pretending its concerned for these people” and has displayed “contempt for Middle Easterners” throughout the last 19 years.
The US has indicted Assange on 17 counts of espionage, and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime. If extradited, the publisher could face up to 175 years in prison.
I have not had a chance to read/listen to information about yesterday’s trial, but on Day 3 Joe Lauria from Consortium News gave a summary including information about publishing informants names. He said:
1) Publishing names of informants is actually not illegal. Only publishing names of government agents are illegal (like in the Valerie Plame case years ago). It may not be a good choice to publish informants names but it is not illegal.
2) It was 2 journalists at the Guardian that wrote a book which gave the password to the Guardian’s un-redacted wikileaks archive. When Julian became aware of this that is when he pushed out everything in order for the informants to see their names and go to safety. Also the night before the Guardian published that archive, Julian literally spent all night redacting all of the names that he could from their archive. Other journalists sitting there from other news organizations stated only Julian was actually concerned about the publishing of informants names; the Guardian journalists didn’t seem to care.
Not sure why Ellsberg didn’t mention this but this information was already disclosed to the court last week.
I doubt if anybody gets a fair trial in the U.S.
When all participants of a “system” are feeding from the same nose-bag, free from competition — and are allowed (by your neighbors and friends — hopefully not you) to
• Make the laws,
• Enforce the laws,
• Prosecute the laws,
• Hire the prosecutors,
• License the “defense” attorneys,
• Pay the “judges”,
• Build the jails,
• Contract jails out to private entities,
• Employ and pay the wardens,
• Employ and pay the guards,
• Employ and pay the parole officers,
One can’t honestly call it a “justice” system. It’s a system of abject tyranny.