by Jeff Franklin

Created on: December 09, 2010

“Don’t shoot the messenger for the bad news, I’m just the messenger….”   How many of us have all heard it?  Indeed, it’s a common sense, logical, reasonable and good philosophy.  But just the antipodal opposite of this is being applied in today’s biggest news headline.  The messenger is all but “being shot”!

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is sought by many countries, especially the USA, who would literally crucify him if they had the chance to.

But let’s take a deep breath, step back, and see how asinine all his “prosecutors” are, at least as far as the issue of WikiLeaks is concerned.

The US wants to prosecute him under the Espionage Act or any other “law” that they can “justify” under the guise of “national security”.  In reality, they cannot legally prosecute him because of some facts that certain “prosecutors” in the US seem to deny:

1) Julian and company are just REPORTERS of info they get.  They do not STEAL classified information.  For that, blame goes to certain armed forces and government personnel who steal sensitive, or potentially/possibly classified information from the ORIGINAL secret source, AND THEN, provide it to people they want to in media such as WikiLeaks.  So common sense tells me that “the villain” here is the PROVIDER of the info, NOT the publisher of the info.

2) Julian Assange is a foreign national of Australian citizenship, and thus, the US (even the CIA) has no jurisdiction of extraditing a foreign national without the explicit permission of his or her country of citizenship.  The US can put pressure on Austrailia to have him “prosecuted” there, but EACH government would first have to agree that a crime has indeed been committed for the definition of the “prosecution”.  

3) There is no crime, because, reporting or publishing is a RIGHT assured everyone, at least in the US, by the 1st Amendment of the Constitution.

4) If the “prosecution” wants to play hardball by excuse of the 1917 “Espionage Act”, then let’s fire right back by something even more powerful:  The US Freedom of Information Act!  By it and its very spirit, it proclaims that the American public HAS THE RIGHT TO KNOW about dangers, abuses or potential abuses of power by everything from the financial institutions and private corporations to the public government and the military, and everything in between! 

So with that said, I say Julian is more of a person advocating the cause of the common man (through exposing the evils of politics and dark capitalism) than anyone I can think of in modern history.  Perhaps, we should sit back and take a more objective look at this.  Should Julian Assange and WikiLeaks really get something more like the Nobel Prize than criminal accusation?

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