Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has been silenced. Assange was prevented from communicating with the outside world in his final 13 months at the Ecuador embassy in London, where he had obtained sanctuary from extradition to the United States. The silencing has continued in a British prison where Assange has been detained pending extradition to the US since British police forcibly removed him from the embassy in April.
Similarly, communication by Chelsea Manning has been much curtailed after Manning reveled United States military secrets. First, Manning served seven years in United States military prison after being convicted for the leak. Released from prison in 2017, Manning has been condemned to jail for most of the time since March of this year for refusing to testify for a grand jury involved in the US government’s effort to prosecute Assange.
Tag: Espionage Act
In a new video commentary at Fox News, Andrew Napolitano, a constitutional scholar and former New Jersey state judge, argues that instead of prosecuting Julian Assange of WikiLeaks for the exposure of United States military wrongdoing “we should be thanking him.” Pointing to the US Supreme Court backing the legality of media publishing the Pentagon Papers exposing US military secrets related to the Vietnam War, Napolitano further asserts that Assange, like publishers of the Pentagon Papers, is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.