But Obama’s team ultimately decided against taking that step. The Obama administration debated whether it could be used against Assange after his organisation, WikiLeaks, published military communications from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as a huge trove of diplomatic cables. Until now, most legal observers have argued that the law would not survive scrutiny by the supreme court if it were ever used against journalists. The law bans the publication of government secrets and offers no explicit protections to the press under the amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech. The only reason the 102-year-old act does not criminalise national security journalism is because no administration has sought to put it to the test.
OBAMA ESPIONAGE ACT JOURNALISTS FOR FREE
Indicting a journalist? What the new charges against Julian Assange mean for free speech, by Julian Borger ( The Guardian)īy bringing new charges against the WikiLeaks founder, the Trump administration has challenged the first amendmentīy indicting Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, the Trump administration has crossed a line that every other US administration has shied away from: challenging the first amendment in defence of government secrets. It's a power thing, and the province of a two-party system power-sharing arrangement. This isn't a Trump thing or an Obama thing, either one. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted under the law. Anarchist Emma Goldman was also prosecuted under the act. Though he did invite Debs to meet him at the White House.Ĭongress ultimately amended parts of the Espionage Act, but the thrust of the law has remained in effect to this day. In 1921, President Warren Harding commuted Eugene Debs sentence, but he did not pardon him. He got nearly a million votes, almost three and a half percent - the most ever won by a Socialist at that time. “If the Espionage Law stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.”įrom his prison cell, Debs ran for a 5th time for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket. “I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs told the jury during his trial. Supreme Court where the justices voted unanimously to uphold the conviction of Eugene Debs. And Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. Debs and his lawyers argued that his anti-war speech was protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. JS: Soon after that speech, Eugene Debs was arrested and he was charged under a new law in the U.S. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. MR : The working class who fight all the battles, the working calls who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses had never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. Here is actor Mark Ruffalo reading part of that speech.
Eugene Debs had run for president four times as of the day of that speech. At the time, Debs was one of the most prominent socialists in the United States and his speech came on the heels of the Russian Revolution and the rise of global socialist and communist movements. involvement in World War I and he praised activists who had been organizing against the military draft or had been convicted of sedition.
Jeremy Scahill: On June 16, 1918, the prominent Socialist labor leader Eugene Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio.
Mark Ruffalo : For in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the people. THE ESPIONAGE AXE: DONALD TRUMP AND THE WAR AGAINST A FREE PRESS ( The Intercept) It's a top-down government power thing, and the unsurprising province of a two-party system power-sharing arrangement. This isn't a Trump thing or an Obama thing. Then Donald Trump takes power and immediately begins using the playbook refined and sharpened by his predecessor, President Obama.