“I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude.” ~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
It wasn’t until 1969 that the Supreme Court’s modern First Amendment jurisprudence made it clear that whenever there is a clash between the government and a person over the constitutionality of the person’s speech, the courts will give every benefit and draw every inference to the speaker, and none to the government. This is so because the freedom of speech is a natural right, and thus it is always to be presumed constitutional and lawful.
I have argued elsewhere that because the essence of government is the negation of liberty, this presumption against the government should always be the case. Even when it purports to be protecting liberty, the government – because its existence without unanimous consent is based on stealing liberty and property – should always be presumed wrong, immoral, unconstitutional and unlawful. But the courts have only made that so in the case of the freedom of speech.
I offer this brief philosophical and historical background in order to examine just how twisted the government’s views on speech have become in the Trump and Biden years, as the Department of Justice in both administrations has persecuted mercilessly and sought to prosecute aggressively the Australian journalist Julian Assange for his exercise of the freedom of speech.
Assange was the head of WikiLeaks, an international digital journalistic enterprise that specializes in publishing formerly secret matters about governments. In 2010, WikiLeaks acquired secret U.S. videos showing an attack on civilians and journalists in Baghdad perpetrated by Apache helicopters. The 2007 attack killed a dozen civilians and two Reuters employees. The George W. Bush administration had egg on its face, as it had previously denied that this attack had taken place.
The video also contained audio that revealed the cavalier, childish and remorseless attitude of the military personnel who perpetrated the deaths of these innocents.
In the ensuing weeks and months, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of pages of secret classified materials and diplomatic cables, which further embarrassed the Bush and Obama administrations. The government claimed that this was the largest security breach of secret materials in American history. The documents revealed crimes and death on a grand scale.
WikiLeaks’ source for these secret materials was an Army intelligence specialist, Bradley Edward Manning. Manning was arrested and charged with numerous offenses, not the least of which was providing aid and comfort to an enemy, for which he was exposed to the death penalty. Manning pleaded guilty to some of the charges and was tried and convicted on the remainder of them.
He was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison. In 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence to time served, and she – by now, Bradley had transitioned to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning – was ordered released just hours before the inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency.
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