On Monday Julian Assange was driven to the Old Bailey to continue his fight against extradition to the United States, where the Trump administration has launched the most dangerous attack on press freedom in at least a generation by indicting him for publishing US government documents. Amid coverage of the proceedings, Assanges critics have inevitably commented on his appearance, rumours of his behaviour while isolated in the Ecuadorian embassy, and other salacious details.

These predictable distractions are emblematic of the sorry state of our political and cultural discourse. If Assange is extradited to face charges for practising journalism and exposing government misconduct, the consequences for press freedom and the publics right to know will be catastrophic. Still, rather than seriously addressing the important principles at stake in Assanges unprecedented indictment and the 175 years in prison he faces, many would rather focus on inconsequential personality profiles.

Assange is not on trial for skateboarding in the Ecuadorian embassy, for tweeting, for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk, or for having an unkempt beard as he was dragged into detention by British police. Assange faces extradition to the United States because he published incontrovertible proof of war crimes and abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, embarrassing the most powerful nation on Earth. Assange published hard evidence of the ways in which the first world exploits the third, according to whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the source of that evidence. Assange is on trial for his journalism, for his principles, not his personality.

Youve probably heard the refrain from well-meaning pundits: You dont have to like him, but you should oppose threats to silence him. But that refrain misses the point by reinforcing the manipulative tropes deployed against Assange.

When setting a gravely dangerous precedent, governments dont typically persecute the most beloved individuals in the world. They target those who can be portrayed as subversive, unpatriotic or simply weird. Then they actively distort public debate by emphasizing those traits.

These techniques are not new. After Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to journalists to expose the US governments lies about Vietnam, the Nixon administrations White House Plumbers broke into Ellsbergs psychiatrists office in search of material that could be used to discredit him. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was falsely portrayed as collaborating with the Chinese, then the Russians. Obsession with military intelligence analyst Mannings mental health and gender identity was ubiquitous. By demonizing the messenger, governments seek to poison the message.

Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy - a timeline

The prosecution will be all too happy when coverage of Assanges extradition hearing devolves into irrelevant tangents and smears. It matters little that Assanges beard was the result of his shaving kit having been confiscated, or that reports of Paul Manafort visiting him in the embassy were proven to be fabricated. By the time these petty claims are refuted, the damage will be done. At best, public debate over the real issues will be derailed; at worst, public opinion will be manipulated in favour of the establishment.

By drawing attention away from the principles of the case, the obsession with personality pushes out the significance of WikiLeaks revelations and the extent to which governments have concealed misconduct from their own citizens. It pushes out how Assanges 2010 publications exposed 15,000 previously uncounted civilian casualties in Iraq, casualties that the US Army would have buried. It pushes out the fact that the United States is attempting to accomplish what repressive regimes can only dream of: deciding what journalists around the globe can and cannot write. It pushes out the fact that all whistleblowers and journalism itself, not just Assange, is on trial here.

This piece was written by Noam Chomsky and Alice Walker, co-chairs of AssangeDefense.org

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Julian Assange is not on trial for his personality but heres how the US government made you focus on it - The Independent

Over the past few years, authorities in many countries have become increasingly bold in their attacks on journalists, especially those who work in alternative media. Julian Assange, who began his extradition hearing at Londons Old Bailey court after a four month delay this past Monday, has become a powerful symbol of the hypocrisy of western states that claim to champion a free press.

A common argument made by centrist and rightwing leaders since Wikileaks embarrassed the American government by releasing documents leaked by Chelsea Manning in 2010 is that someone like Assange, who faces up to 175 years in prison if sent to the United States, is not a professional journalist and thus not afforded the same protections that apply to those who toil in corporate news rooms. Even more speciously, the current Secretary of State has argued that the countrys 1stAmendment doesnt apply to the publisher because hes Australian.

Worse still, in representative democracies now governed by so-called populists of the right, leaders routinely call stories they dont like fake news and demonize outlets and reporters critical of them at every opportunity. Some, like Brazils Jair Bolsonaro, evenpersonally threatenindividual journalists for asking uncomfortable questions.

At the state and local level here in North America, current attacks by authorities, not only on journalists but on the right to free assembly, have tended to be more physical in nature. While weve seen similar behavior on the part of police in confronting the press at anti-pipeline protests and other actions throughout the continent over the past decade, the context of a widespread Black Lives Matter uprising in the United States this year and the politically motivated hysteria of the far right in reaction to it has led to what appears at some times like targeted, and at others like indiscriminate violence against journalists covering the protests, in some cases leading toserious injuries.

Thanks to the work of theU.S. Press Freedom Tracker, its possible to see a troubling trend line over the course of the current U.S. presidents term. As reported by the group, there were a total of 144 attacks on press freedom in all of 2017while, As of Sept. 1, the Tracker has confirmed 238 press freedom violations including physical assaults, arrests, and equipment searches and seizures more than three quarters of which occurred while journalists were documenting the Black Lives Matter protests.

This impunity on the part of local authorities, encouraged by the countrys president and many of his surrogates, was on display on a national news network on May 29thin Minneapolis. As he was reporting on the protests following the murder of George Floyd, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez, who is African American,was arrested on cameraby the citys police.

Jimenez, aveteran reporterbased in Chicago, previously covered the trials of the officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and was nominated for an individual Emmy award when employed by local Baltimore station WBAL, where he worked prior to taking a job as a correspondent for CNN in 2017.

Its hard to argue that Jimenezs arrest didnt to some degree come about as the result of bias.More so after it wasreported by the Guardiana few days laterthat, another of CNNs correspondents, Josh Campbell, who is white, was reporting about a block away from Jimenez. He said police were polite when they approached him to ask him which outlet he was with, and they told him: OK, youre good.

Soon after Jimenezs release, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action suit in Minnesota to put an end to what it claimed was the unconstitutional targeting of journalists during the protests.

As an ACLU attorney said in astatementabout the suit, We are facing a full-scale assault on the First Amendment freedom of the press. We will not let these official abuses go unanswered. This is the first of many lawsuits the ACLU intends to file across the country. Law enforcement officers who target journalists will be held accountable.

Rather than being something unique to the United States and its current political scene, examples of this kind of bias in the policing of some journalists as opposed to others is also demonstrated by the ongoing case of Karl Dockstader, a journalist and radio host from Oneida Nation of the Thames in the Canadian province of Ontario, who has beencharged with mischief and violating a court imposed injunctionas a result of his reporting from an indigenous protest camp established on a construction site south of Canadas largest city, Toronto.

While journalists in Canada have fewer protections under the law than those south of the border, exceptions for press covering protests by the countrys indigenous people have been carved out as recently as 2019, when adecisionfrom the Supreme Court of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador found, An injunction can be a very blunt instrument. Unless carefully crafted in its scope and judiciously applied in its enforcement, it risks wrapping within its purview persons who were not part of the mischief to which the original injunctive remedy was directed and also risks unnecessarily trenching upon such other important constitutional and legal values like freedom of association, freedom of the press and, in appropriate cases like the present one, the protection of rights pertaining to indigenous interests.

No charges were brought against any other reporter at what is called the 1492 Land Back Lane protest encampment that Dockstader was covering, leading one to the suspicion that like Jimenez in Minneapolis, his identity plays a role in the case being made by Ontario police against him.

As Dockstader told Canadas national broadcaster,the CBC, I never thought I was going to have to sit my 10- and 12-year-old daughters down in our living room and talk to them about how their dad was arrested. Thats a cycle of violence that I am trying to break as an Indigenous man and I thought that an honorable career like journalism would give me an opportunity to break the cycle of violence, not to bring it into my own house It was just earth-shattering.

Back in the U.S., less troubling in terms of possible motivation on the part of authorities but arguably more worrying in terms of tactics, wasthe arrest and alleged assaultin Seattle on July 1st,of U.K. Independent correspondent Andrew Buncombe as he covered the dismantling of the CHOP (Capital Hill Organized Protest) autonomous zone in the city.

Still, outlets like CNN and the Independent have the resources and reputation to fight back against such overreach on the part of police, but what of those journalists without this kind of institutional backing?

One such reporter isEddy Binford-Ross, a student covering the protests for her high school paper, the Clypion, where she is also editor in chief covering the protests in Portland. Though wearing a helmet and other tags toclearly identify herself as press, Binford-Ross has faced tear gas and other non-lethal projectiles used by police over the course of her work this summer.

As Binford Ross explained to the SPLC (Student Press Law Center) in aninterview, Its very concerning to me that they seem to be targeting the press and, at the very least, disregarding the distinction between who is a member of the press and who is a protester. Sometimes, when I identify myself as a journalist, theyll say okay Ill leave you alone, but normally it doesnt seem to phase them.

In normal times, we often see a gradual chipping away of basic rights like weve seen in the trials of Julian Assange, where a narrative, some of it true, a lot of it based on character assassination and outright lies, has been built over time, denying the publisher the presumption of innocence. In extraordinary circumstances, like after 9/11 or in our current era of crisis, norms are smashed to bits instead of merely being degraded in individual cases over time, with consequences that are often far ranging and permanent.

Although it is in many ways a conservative document, the United States constitution set a new standard for the world in establishing the 4thEstate as a kind of unofficial branch of government tasked with informing the public, this is why oligarchs and politicians have been trying, with some success, to either terrorize or control its practitioners ever since.

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Was hacker Matthew DeHart a whistleblower, a spy or a child pornographer? Or some combination of the above? Watching the provocative new documentary Enemies of the State, your opinion may shift more than once, as director Sonia Kennebeck (National Bird) pursues both the elusive nature of truth and the seductive qualities of conspiracy theories.

Featuring interviews with the key players alongside dramatized recreations the documentary pioneer of this method, Errol Morris, acts an executive producer here Kennebeck takes us deep inside one familys harrowing ordeal and pulls the rug out from our assumptions and prejudices, offering an array of contradicting experts whose judgment and assertions shift in their credibility.

The facts are these: Air National Guard veteran Matt DeHart, who purports to be involved with on-line whistleblowers Anonymous and Wikileaks, has his house ransacked by federal investigators looking for evidence regarding child pornography allegations against Matt. He flees to Mexico shortly thereafter with thumb drives he claims contain volatile classified information regarding an FBI investigation into a CIA operation.

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His parents Paul and Leann both veterans themselves rally to their sons defense, and the next few years involve attempted defections to Russia and Venezuela, an application for asylum in Canada, a car accident on a snowy highway, allegations of government torture and interrogation using the drug Thorazine, and activists and journalists seeking to help out Matt, particularly in the wake of events surrounding Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

In the face of all these conflicting testimonies, then whats the truth? Thats the onion that Kennebeck and her editor Maxine Goedicke (Pope Francis: A Man of His Word) so skillfully unwind over the course of Enemies of the State. People prone to assume the worst about governments and the best about individuals will evaluate the presented evidence in one way, and their opposites in the other, and it isnt until the films final 15 minutes that the audience is presented with the most unassailable facts. (In the timeline of making the film, this final bit of intel came late in the game as well, or so the films intertitles suggest.)

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Without ever announcing itself as such, the film brilliantly dissects the way that conspiracy theories work and why theyre so irresistible. In an age when so many are willing to dismiss reputable, sourced news and science in favor of shadowy and even anonymous internet experts, Enemies of the State sneakily but indelibly takes us through one individual case and tests our individual ability to filter out white noise and presupposition in favor of whats irrefutable.

For a story about espionage on one hand and accusations of child endangerment on the other, the film focuses on a family that, on paper, seems to be as upright and four-square as possible: Paul DeHart, who entered the ministry after serving in both the Army and the Air Force, describes Leann and himself as the kind of kids who always sat down and followed the rules. Theyre clearly loving parents to Matt, but as the film progresses, we are left to wonder whether or not theyre playing too large a role in the life of their son as he enters his late twenties, and whether or not their distrust of the authorities represents creeping paranoia or a justified response to outrageous government interference.

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Its also a case study in extremes; its plausible, given years of disclosure of governmental dirty tricks, that accusations of child molestation would be used to silence an activist who has become privy to confidential information. By the same token, its just as plausible that someone guilty of child pornography might weave a fiction around himself and his family to explain being the target of a federal investigation. Kennebecks ability to work with both possibilities seems to have translated in access to players on both sides, from the DeHarts to the Tennessee prosecutors working the child pornography case.

Enemies of the State is a chilling watch, both for what it contemplates and for the internal path that each viewer will take while experiencing it. That some will come away from the film unwilling to accept its conclusions merely proves the films point.

Read original story Enemies of the State Film Review: Powerful Documentary Cuts to the Heart of Internet-Era Persecution and Paranoia At TheWrap

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Enemies of the State Film Review: Powerful Documentary Cuts to the Heart of Internet-Era Persecution and Paranoia - Yahoo Entertainment