With the moves by the United States to extradite Julian Assange from Britain to the US, the question that should be raised is, did Assange leak or did he publish?
It’s an important and crucial point of difference.
The leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Elsberg in 1971 demonstrated that the Johnson administration had “systematically lied” about the Vietnam war.
The papers were then published by the New York Times, and from there ended up in the Supreme Court. The SCOTUS found, 6-3 in favour of the New York Times as a publisher, had a right to publish and was justified in doing so under the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of the press.
If it’s determined that Assange is the publisher and not the leaker, as he has said on numerous occasions, that is, that someone else hacked then leaked.the material and he simply provided Wikileaks as the publishing platform, then that same benefit would apply to him you would think. Open and shut one would have thought.
I’m surprised that as a former journalist Bob Carr in his interview with Alan Jones this morning didn’t raise this.