Monthly Archives: March 2024

How much is a non-binding assurance worth from people who probably want to see you dead?This is the linchpin question as a British court deliberates on the Biden administrations latest conniving to bring Julian Assange to America for his legal destruction.

Since Julian Assange was indicted in 2019 for 17 charges of violating the Espionage Act, the U.S. Justice Department has sought his extradition from Belmarsh, the supermax prison in Britain where he has spent almost five years.The fight against extradition is probably the last best chance for even a facade of due process for Assange.

On Tuesday, the British High Court announced that it had effectively accepted assurances from U.S. politicians to British politicians that the Assange case is non-political, but the British judges did recognize three potential grounds for appeal.That courtgave the U.S. government three weeks to provide satisfactory assurances that Assange is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed, and that the U.S. court would not be prejudiced against him because he is a foreigner.

None of the British or American officials recognized the supreme irony of the court decision. Assange and Wikileaks exposed deceptions and depredations by many governments around the world. Yet his legal fate depends on whether the British government chooses to trust the U.S. governmentregardless of the endless lies that Assange exposed.

Stella Assange, Julians wife, scoffed that the decision was astounding: What the courts have done is to invite a political intervention from the United States, to send a letter saying, Its all okay.Amnesty International stated, While the U.S. has allegedly assured the UK that it will not violate Assanges rights, we know from past cases that such guarantees are deeply flawedand the diplomatic assurances so far in the Assange case are riddled with loopholes.

If Assange is brought to the U.S., his fate will be settled in an Alexandria, Virginia federal courtroom notorious for stacking the deck against anyone who exposed government crimes or wrongful killings. Ask John Kiriakouthe former CIA agent and torture whistleblower who was convicted there and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Ask Daniel Halethe whistleblower who exposed the coverup ofmass killings of innocent people by Obamas drones, convicted and sentenced to prison for 45 months.EdwardSnowden was charged in the same court but prudently omitted showing up for a kangaroo trial.

Assanges fate threatens to be a bellwether for the destruction of journalists who vex officialdom. David Davis, a Conservative member of Parliament, warned, The successful extradition of Julian Assange would effectively criminalize investigative journalism as espionage. It would set a legal precedent allowing the prosecution of anyone who breaks the duty of silence on classified American information and state sponsored crime.Jodie Ginsberg, chief of the Committee to Protect Journalists, warned that Assanges prosecution would have disastrous implications for press freedom. It is time that the U.S. Justice Department put an end to all these court proceedings and dropped its dogged pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder.

The U.S. government has been vilifying Assange ever since he and Wikileaks commenced revealing that thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis were killed by the U.S. military. Vice President Joe Biden denounced Assange in 2010 as a high-tech terrorist.But even Biden admitted at that time: I dont think theres any substantive damage from the Wikileaks revelations.Look, some of the cables that are coming out here and around the world are embarrassing, he said.

Federal agencies also never proved that any of the information that Assange and Wikileaks released was false.At the court martial of former Army Corporal Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, who leaked the documents, prosecutors failed to show that any information Wikileaks disclosed had led to the death of a single person in Afghanistan or Iraq. That conclusion was re-confirmed by a 2017 investigation by PolitiFact. But Assange was guilty of violating the U.S. governments divine right to blindfold the American people.

The fact that Assange disclosed classified documents is sufficient to seal his legal doomat least according to how the game is played in federal courts. After Britain arrested Assange on behalf of the U.S. government in 2019, Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, whooped that Assange is our property and we can get the facts and the truth from him. But Manchin had no recommendations on how Americans can get the facts and the truth from the federal government.Federal agencies are creating trillions of pages of new classified secrets each year.

Ironically, while howling for Assanges scalp, the Biden White House purportedly launched a new war on secrecy and is especially concerned about potentially illegal [government] activities that have been shielded from the public for decades, POLITICO reported in late 2022.A Biden administration official, speaking anonymously, declared that it is in the nations best interest to be as transparent as possible with the American public. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, groused, We spend $18 billion protecting the classification system and only about $102 million on declassification efforts... That ratio feels off in a democracy. But inside the Beltway, rigging the game 176-to-1 is close enough for government work for transparency.Thus far, Bidens war on secrecy has apparently not gone beyond self-serving White House statements.

Perhaps the most important testimony for Assange dribbled out during a sometimes scatter-brained interview last October conducted by Special Counsel Robert Hur.As Hur was pressing President Biden about the stashes of confidential documents discovered illicitly stored in his garage, his den, his think tank, his office, etc., Biden declared, We over-classify everything.... And 99.9 percent of it has nothing to do with anything I couldnt pick up and read out loud to the public.Special Counsel Hur deigned not to file charges against Bideneven though his violations of federal law had plenty of similarities to the conduct that spurred 40 felony charges against former President Donald Trump. The bizarre dichotomy in the Biden and Trump cases is showcasing the arbitrariness and absurdities of federal classification policy.

Another key to the Assange case is whether he is permitted to rely on the First Amendment, as the British judges wrote.Assange cant rely on the First Amendment when telling the truth is the only war crime now recognized by the U.S. government. Defendants on espionage act cases routinely face so many piled-on court charges that they plea bargain, muzzling themselves as the price for not being locked up forever.

There are lessons from an early American landmark court case that could help resolve the Assange case. In 1735, John Peter Zenger was charged with seditious libel for an article he published on the Royal Governor of New York. Zengers criticism was accurate but that was irrelevant.In Britain and its colonies, truth was no defense against seditious libel; thus, any criticism of the government risked personal destruction.But a jury of New Yorkers heroically refused to convict Zenger, thereby revolutionizing both freedom of speech and the relation of citizens to government.

Could a similar legal standard be used to end persecution of anyone who publicly reveals official documents that never should have been classified? Instead of rubberstamp convictions, the government should be obliged to prove that a disclosure harmed the public interest or endangered the nation.That would also undermine the perverse incentive that perpetually propels overclassification.Unfortunately, it would not be possible to get the same positive impact simply by relying on jury trials.Since that federal court is inside the Beltway, the jury pool would be overstocked with people who work for the feds and/or believe everything they hear on National Public Radio.Washington jurors are prone to behave like Soviet mobs in the 1930s who howled for death sentences for anyone the Communist Party accused of being a wrecker.

Almost all the media coverage of the Assange case is failing to credit him for revealing how blindfolding citizens defines down democracy. Self-government is a sham if citizens are prohibited from knowing what elected officials are doing in their name. Politicians and Washingtons best and brightest have long been accustomed to covertly and recklessly intervening around the world with none of the usual checks and balances of democracy.But there is never a penalty for officialdom deceiving the public they claim to serve.

Bidens Justice Department and Assanges lawyers have reportedly discussed a possible plea deal that would drop the most serious charges against him. Fair play would be satisfied ifAssange pleadsguilty to lese majesteembarrassing the government by exposing its follies, frauds, and crimes. I still believe that Assange deserves a presidential Medal of Freedom, as I recommended in USA Today in 2018.

But that would never satisfy people like Hillary Clinton,who joked about seeing Assange dead, or former CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who plotted on kidnapping and killing Assange. Hell-raisers like Assange are necessary to prevent America from becoming an Impunity Democracy in which government officials pay no price for their abuses.

The next hearing in the Assange case will be May 20 in London, a few weeks after the annual World Press Freedom Day. Biden marked that day last year by proclaiming, Courageous journalists around the world have shown time and again that they will not be silenced or intimidated. The United States sees them and stands with them. Except, of course, for any courageous journalist that Biden seeks to destroy.

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Convicting Julian Assange Would Mean the End of Free Speech - The American Conservative

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Column: Banning TikTok is a blow to free speech - Redmond Spokesman

Professor Philip Hamburger has posted a response to my critique of his post on the social media free speech cases currently before the Supreme Court. The latter, in turn, responded to my earlier argument that courts should focus on coercion in Murthy v. Missouri. For those keeping track, this is now the fifth post in this series.

In his latest post, Prof. Hamburger accuses me of repeating my "errors." But I remain unrepentant. It is in fact Hamburger himself who has doubled down on his mistakes.

Most notably, he continues to neglect the significance of the fact that the First Amendment protects "freedom of speech." By its very nature, freedom is voluntary choice. Therefore, it cannot be restricted in the absence of some kind of coercion. That's true even if Prof. Hamburger is right (as he surely is) to describe the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment as a "limit on government." The limit it imposes on government is preventing it from using compulsion to restrict speech. By contrast, it does not prevent the government from using persuasion to influence private speech, or from engaging in coordination with private speakers.

Prof. Hamburger continues to emphasize the fact that the First Amendment bans "abridging" of freedom of speech, as opposed to the ban on "prohibiting" freedom of religion. I agree this means free speech gets somewhat greater protection than religious freedom does. But the thing that it is protected against must still be some form of compulsion. Absent compulsion, there can be no restriction of freedom. the distinction in wording just means that relatively mild forms of coercion that may not rise to the level of "prohibition" might still qualify as "abridgement."

Hamburger claims my view would allow the government to "buy off" its critics. But conditioning government benefits on the exercise of constitutional rights (or refraining from exercising them) raises other constitutional problems. Among other things, it implicates the doctrine of "unconstitutional conditions," which prevents the government (at least in many instances) from discriminating on the basis of speech with respect to the distribution of government benefits. Thus, for example, the government cannot adopt a law restricting Social Security benefits to people who express support for the Democratic Party, or at least refraining from criticizing it. Activities like persuasion or "jawboning" do not qualify as such discrimination.

Prof. Hamburger also doubles down on the dubious claim that social media platforms don't have free speech rights over the material they post on their websites. But, as discussed in my previous post, platforms do in fact exercise editorial control over what speech they allow on their sites, through their terms of service. In that respect, they are similar to media entities like Reason or the New York Times.

Hamburger responds that the platforms sometimes took down speech even without changing their terms of service. But he is missing the point. The existence of terms of service with substantive limitations on the types of speech platforms allow on the site shows that it is not the case that they are "public squares" where anyone can say whatever they want. Rather, they are private property where the owners exercise editorial control over speech. They can do that through terms of service. But, unless prohibited by freely undertaken contractual obligations, they can also do that in other ways.

In his latest post, Prof. Hamburger continues to promote a double standard under which he has an extremely broad view of what is prohibited by the First Amendment when it comes to non-coercive government persuasion to bar social media posts, but a very narrow one with respect to Texas's and Florida's attempts to force social media firms to host speech they disapprove of. He now tries to justify this by claiming that social media platforms are "common carriers." This analogy is badly flawed for reasons I outlined here.

Social media firms have never been legally considered common carriers in the past. And state governments cannot make them so just by legislative fiat. If they could, the same strategy could be used to force other private entities to publish speech they disapprove of, by passing laws declaring them to be "common carriers," as well. Thus, they could force Fox News to air more left-wing views, compel the New York Times to publish more right-wing ones, and so on.

Prof. Hamburger accuses me of departing from libertarian principles, due to my focus on coercion. But the distinction between coercion and voluntary action is actually fundamental to libertarianismand, indeed, to most other forms of liberalism. It is, in fact, usually opponents of libertarianismparticularly left-wing onesthat seek to efface the distinction between the two, thereby justifying government intervention to protect people against supposedly oppressive voluntary relationships. Such arguments are a standard justification for restrictive labor regulation, for example, where it is said that voluntary agreements to work more than certain amount of hours or for pay below the minimum wage are actually "exploitative" coercive.

Finally, Prof. Hamburger complains about my pointing out that speech can be a "public bad," and worries that it is somehow a justification for suppression. I think it is pretty obvious that at least some speech is a public bad, in so far as it can lead to horrific government policies. That was true of Nazi and Communist speech, for instance.

It doesn't follow that the government is justified in suppressing such speech. Even speech advocating awful ideas is still an exercise of an important individual liberty. And there isto make an obvious pointgood reason to distrust government judgments about which speech is harmful and which is not. Thus, there should be at least a strong presumption against allowing the government to deal with this public bad through coercive censorship.

By contrast, the use of non-coercive suasionwhether by the government or private partiesdoesn't pose anything like the same risks. Private entities who differ with the government's position will remain free to publish opposing views. And so long as there is a market demand for such views, there will be incentives to publish them. If the government persuades, say, Twitter or Facebook, to take them down, that just creates a market incentive for others to publish them.

In sum, there is good reason to worry about government use of coercion to either suppress speech (as the Biden Administration may well have done in Murthy v. Missouri), or to compel it (as Texas and Florida are trying to do). But the First Amendment does not bar the governmentor anyone elsefrom using non-coercive persuasion.

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More on Coercion, Social Media, and Freedom of Speech: Rejoinder to Philip Hamburger - Reason

The guidance, which has been opened for consultation, covers a variety of scenarios surrounding free speech and academic freedom and is due to come into force in August 2024.

One scenario it puts forward is a university accepting students on visiting scholarships funded by their home government where scholars must accept the principles of the ruling party of [their home] country.

Depending on the circumstances, these arrangements may undermine free speech and academic freedom at [the university]. If so, that university is likely to have to terminate or amend the scholarship agreement, the scenario reads.

Many universities across the UK currently accept international students on government funded scholarships from multiple countries where it is widely suspected that academic freedom is much less prevalent, including China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others.

Is it better to educate people who have strings attached to them by their own governments or to refuse to educate them? Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, told The PIE News

On paper, the purity of refusal makes a lot of sense and we should of course always strive not to compromise on what we stand for.

The reason it could conceivably seem challenging to some institutions in the short term, however, is that four-in-10 people across the globe live under authoritarian regimes, and many of these regimes make day-to-day life quite grim for their local populations, he said, noting the Economists Democracy Index.

China is one of the most prevalent countries being discussed due to concerns around how it has previously curtailed academic freedom of its students in various countries, including the US and Sweden.

The director of freedom of speech and academic freedom at the OfS told the BBCs Today program that a variety of international institutions across the UK in response to a question regarding Confucius Institutes and each one will be examined based on the evidence that we have.

Its important these students arent discriminated against based on the views or actions of their government

Were seeing reports that there may be concerns related to connections with foreign institutes this applies everywhere. Any such arrangements, insofar as it creates restrictions on academic freedom and speech, not only for the students and academics that come, but also students in English universities, is a cause of concern for us, said Arif Ahmed.

The guidance clearly takes aim at those Confucius Institutes and the China Scholarship Council, according to international education advisor Peter Brady, who predicted universities may take the pragmatic option of closing the institutes and not renewing CSC agreements.

The reason universities require academic freedom is to keep them free from government intervention, having a government body intervening in the area of academic freedom is a bit of an oxymoron, Brady also argued.

The Russell Group said its initial assessment sees areas that could have unintended consequences, especially surrounding discrimination against international students on scholarships.

Whilst some receive scholarships funded by their home nation to attend university in the UK, this does not mean those individuals necessarily share or represent the views and political position of their home state.

Its important these students arent discriminated against based on the views or actions of their government, a spokesperson told The PIE.

Universities UK called the issue extraordinarily complex in an already complicated landscape, adding it is essential that any decisions made on the basis of this consultation are considered and proportionate.

A new complaints scheme will also be launched in August alongside the guidance, allowing people to submit their own concerns about breaches of academic freedom through a portal.

Brady noted, however, that the OFS complaints system will be open, possibly creating the opportunity for any member of a group opposing one country or another to register complaints about the commitment the student has made to gain the scholarship.

International partnerships could also be affected by the guidance in other scenarios, but Ahmed said each case would be judged on its own facts.

There have been public reports about concerns people have about international arrangements.

If we see evidence through the complaints scheme that gives us reason to think that there is a breach of the free speech guidance then we will firmly act, he confirmed.

The draft guidance also refers to the funding of universities, wherein if universities are partly funded by a commercial entity in from a different country and attempts are made to ideologically test incoming staff as its laid out in one scenario or there are notable challenges to their academic freedom, arrangements may need to be terminated or amended.

While the guidance promotes a debate on how universities approach the issue and how it could impact or undermine their own approach to academic freedom, Hillman still believes at its core that education is the most important aspect.

Educating people from countries with unpalatable regimes can nonetheless build understanding of the benefits of democracy, transparency and openness.

We must hope this new guidance builds understanding among undemocratic regime that UK education is built on our values. Time will tell if it works out like that, Hillman added.

One might argue that it may push universities to develop transparent ethical systems to review these relationships. But under these guidelines, even if the universities have taken into consideration the ethical issues and decided to enter in an agreement the OfS will be the ultimate arbiter, Brady noted.

Both the Russell Group and UUK also said that they would continue to consider the implication of the document.

Link:
OfS free speech guidance: time will tell if it builds understanding - The PIE News