Newsweek Publishes Propaganda From Actual SPY Attempting to Gain Support for Prosecution of Julian Assange

Newsweek isn’t even being discreet about their embrace of outright Deep State propaganda anymore.

On Saturday, the increasingly-irrelevant outlet published an article from actual intelligence agency spy Naveed Jamali, in which he attempts to gain support for the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

“Like many current and former members of the intelligence community, I’ve been frustrated by the unwillingness of our government  to act against Assange and Wikileaks,” Jamali admits in his ranting article.

Caitlin Johnstone reports:

“Jamali is currently a reserve intelligence officer for the United States Navy, and is a former FBI asset and double agent. He is also like many intelligence community insiders an MSNBC contributor, and is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a think tank which has featured many prominent neoconservative war whores like Donald and Frederick Kagan, Max Boot, and James Woolsey. Any think tank with the words ‘foreign policy’ in its title is nothing other than a group of intellectuals who are paid by plutocrats to come up with the best possible arguments for why it would be very good and smart to do things that are very evil and stupid, and Naveed Jamali sits comfortably there.”

Jamali’s op-ed, titled ‘Prosecuting Assange is Essential for Restoring Our National Security,’ argues that Assange is not a journalist. Amazing, considering the fact that the damn thing was written by a spy masquerading as a journalist.

Assange is an award-winning publisher who has provided more insight into the internal workings of governments around the world than any legacy media outlet. Though his methods may be unique, all journalists rely on leaks, scoops and secrets to do their reporting. He just happens to be better at it than anyone else.

As Matt Taibbi recently wrote in a must read op-ed for Rolling Stone, “There’s already a lot we don’t know about our government’s unsavory clandestine activities on fronts like surveillance and assassination, and such a case would guarantee we’d know even less going forward. Long-term questions are hard to focus on in the age of Trump. But we may look back years from now and realize what a crucial moment this was.”

The Newsweek propaganda piece additionally argues that the US government should be allowed to keep any secrets that they want from the US public.

“And really that’s the only thing these paid manipulators are ever telling you when they smear Assange or argue for his prosecution: powerful people need to be able to lie to you and hide information from you without being inconvenienced or embarrassed by WikiLeaks. If they say it often enough and in a sufficiently confident tone, some trusting, well-intentioned people will overlook the fact that this is an intensely moronic thing for anyone to believe,” Johnstone argued.

Even President Donald Trump’s attorneys have quietly made the case in defense of WikiLeaks throughout legal filings responding to a lawsuit filed by Democrat Party donors who allege that the campaign and former advisor Roger Stone conspired with Russians to publish the leaked Democratic National Committee emails.

Buried within hundreds of pages of case filings, in a motion filed last October, Trump campaign lawyer Michael A. Carvin argued that under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (47 U.S.C. § 230), “a website that provides a forum where ‘third parties can post information’ is not liable for the third party’s posted information.”

“That is so even when even when the website performs ‘editorial functions’ ‘such as deciding whether to publish,’” the filing contends. “Since WikiLeaks provided a forum for a third party (the unnamed ‘Russian actors’) to publish content developed by that third party (the hacked emails), it cannot be held liable for the publication.”

Carvin went on to argue that this defeats any claim of conspiracy, as a conspiracy is an agreement to commit “an unlawful act.”

“Since WikiLeaks’ posting of emails was not an unlawful act, an alleged agreement that it should publish those emails could not have been a conspiracy,” the filing asserted.

In a later filing, which we have previously reported on, Carvin argued that WikiLeaks is protected under the Bartnicki First Amendment Test.

The motion, filed on December 29, argued that a defendant may not be held liable for a disclosure of stolen information if the disclosure deals with “a matter of public concern” and provided that the speaker was not “involved” in the theft.

Given that WikiLeaks does not steal or hack the documents that they publish, this precedent set by the case of Bartnicki v. Vapper should also apply to Assange. The organization publishes material that is given to them if it meets their editorial criteria, which is that it must be of political, diplomatic or ethical importance and it must not have been published elsewhere.

It is remarkable that the Trump administration has significantly ramped up the prosecution of Assange, given his own lawyer’s understanding of the grave threat this poses to press freedom. It is even more remarkable that Newsweek, while pretending to be a news outlet, would allow an intelligence agency spy to lobby against their own press freedom on their pages.

 

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