New York Times urges U.S. to drop charges against Assange
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The New York Times and four European news organizations are calling on the U.S. Justice Department to drop its charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets.
“The U.S. government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” the editors of the Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais wrote in a joint letter published Monday.
The prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act, they said, “sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
In 2010, the same news outlets published a series of revelations stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of classified military and diplomatic cables about U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 2012, Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape allegations he denied. He remained inside the embassy until his eviction in 2019 and was arrested on a U.S. warrant. He is now being held in a British prison.
Assange is facing extradition to the United States and a sentence of up to 175 years in prison on charges of conspiring to help former U.S. Army analyst Chelsea Manning break into a classified Pentagon computer network to obtain and publish classified documents, an alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.
In their letter, the news outlets noted that the World War I-era law has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster.
“Some of us are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database,” the letter continued. “But we come together now to express our grave concerns about the continued prosecution of Julian Assange for obtaining and publishing classified materials.”
Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison after a court-martial trial in 2013. Then-President Barack Obama commuted most of her remaining sentence shortly before leaving office.
“Holding governments accountable is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy,” the news outlets’ letter added. “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”
