Media Lens Message Board: Getting to Assange through Manning- Glen .

Getting to Assange through Manning http://uruknet.com/?p=m72959&hd=&size=1&l=e In The New York Times this morning, Charlie Savage describes the latest thinking from the DOJ about how to criminally prosecute WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.Federal investigators are "are looking for evidence of any collusion" between WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning - "trying to get out whether Mr.

Assange encouraged or even helped" the Army Private leak the documents - and then "blame him as a conspirator in the leak, not only as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them."To accomplish this, it is especially significant to "carry Private Manning to show against Mr. Assange."I wish to form two points about this. First, the Obama administration faces what it perceives a serious dilemma:it is - as Savage writes - "under acute pressure to build an exercise of [Assange] as a check to promote mass leaking)," but nothing Assange or WikiLeaks has done actually violates the law.claiming that WikiLeaks does not only receive and publish classify information, but rather actively seeks it and helps the leakers, is the DOJ's attempt to distinguish it from "traditional" journalism.As Savage writes, this hypothesis would entail "the regime would not get to confront awkward questions about why it is not also prosecuting traditional news organizations or investigative journalists who also discover information the government says should be kept secretincluding The New York Times." But this note is totally illusory.Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren't typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter.Journalists nearly always take affirmative steps to promote its dissemination.They try to cajole leakers to go over documents to assert their claims and consent to their publication.investigative journalists routinely - really, by definition - do just that which the DOJ's new theory would try to prove WikiLeaks did.To indict someone as a criminal "conspirator" in a leak on the reason that they took steps to promote the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as often as charging Assange with "espionage" for publishing classified information. Second, Savage's story appears to shed significant light on my narrative from yesterday about the repressive conditions under which Manning is being detained.The need to have Manning make incriminating statements against Assange - to get him to call that Assange actively, in advance, helped Manning access and leak these documents - would be one obvious reason for subjecting Manning to such inhumane conditions:if you need to get better treatment, you must incriminate Assange.In The Huffington Post yesterday, Marcus Baram quoted Jeff Paterson, who runs Manning's legal defense fund, as saying that Manning has been extremely disturbed by the weather of his detention but had not gone public about them in respect to his attorney's efforts to negotiate better treatment.Whatever else is true, the DOJ seems intent on pressuring Manning to incriminate Assnage.It would be bizarre indeed to get a lot with the leaking government employee in order to incriminate the non-government-employee who just promulgated the classified information.But that may very good at least partially explain (though apparently not remotely justify) why the Government is holding Manning under such repressive conditions:in place to "have" him to say what they ask him to say in rank to indict WikiLeaks and Assange. * * * * * UPDATE:Several others make similar points about the DOJ's prosecution theory, including Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin ("the conspiracy theory also threatens traditional journalists as well"); former Bush OLC Chief and Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith ("it would not recognize the Times and dozens of other media outlets in the many cases in which reporters successfully solicit and set to have classified information and documents directly from government officials" and "would be a fatal step for traditional press freedoms in the United States"); Politico's Josh Gerstein ("Reporters seek classified information all the clock in phone conversations, in secret meetings and other contexts" and so "the distinction . . . strikes me as patently ridiculous"); and The American Prospect's Adam Serwer ("the slippery slope is simply the slightest bit less outrageous" than charging Assange under the Espionage Act). .All of this underscores one inescapable fact:there is no way to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks without criminalizing journalism because WikiLeaks is occupied in pure journalistic acts:uncovering and advertising the secret doings of the world's most powerful factions.It is that conduct - and not any supposed crime - which explains why the DOJ is so desperate to prosecute.