Episode 272 – Assange: In Defense of Journalists & Whistleblowers with Kevin Gosztola

Macro N Cheese – Episode 272
Assange: In Defense of Journalists & Whistleblowers with Kevin Gosztola
April 13, 2024

[00:00:00] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:00:45] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is Kevin Gosztola. Let me tell you real quickly a little bit about Kevin, before we dive into this. Kevin is a guy, who I was able to really get to know his work, after having worked with Jordan Chariton [of the podcast, Status Coup] on an interview regarding the state of Julian Assange.

And it’s quite a sad and awful tale of US empire and the vassals that support it and the levels at which they will go to prevent information from making it out to the public. And so, I’ve been really frustrated. There’s a genocide in Gaza right now, and we can’t even get legitimate information about that!

We’ve got a presidential election, where people are trying to tell us to not pay attention to this genocide, but divert our eyes elsewhere. And Julian Assange, they’re trying to send him to the United States to stand trial, where the US is barely willing to even consider saying they won’t give him the death penalty.

So, this podcast- to me- is going to be far more than Julian Assange. It’s going to be about what is happening to us as a society in terms of what we can say, the freedom of the press and the levels at which the state- which is supposed to represent “we the people,” but clearly does not- will go to keep us from understanding the world around us.

So let me introduce Kevin. Kevin is a journalist. He’s a press freedom advocate and the author of Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange from Censored Press and Seven Stories Press. He publishes “The Dissenter Newsletter” at dissenter.org, and has spent the past 10 to 15 years reporting on Assange, WikiLeaks, the war on whistleblowers, press freedom, and government secrecy.

We’ve also talked to Bill Black, who took on the Keating Five during the savings and loan crisis. And we’ve talked to John Kiriakou and we’ve discussed whistleblowers with him. We have talked to so many whistleblowers, and this is tying that all together for us, because it’s really bad. And I don’t know that we have agency to fix it.

And so I wanted Kevin to come on and tell us a little bit about that. Kevin, thank you so much for agreeing to join me today, sir.

[00:03:17] Kevin Gosztola: Hello, Steve. It’s good to be talking with you.

[00:03:19] Grumbine: Absolutely. You have done an incredible amount of work, detailing and documenting all the WikiLeaks releases and the information that came from it. And also, the horrific abuse that Julian Assange has had to go through to get the truth out to us all. Tell us about your work and what you’ve uncovered.

[00:03:43] Gosztola: Yeah, that’s a good place to begin. My background- for people who perhaps need to know a little bit about me, in order to believe that I’m an authentic voice- I started doing this work when I was in college, and I actually thought that I wanted to be a filmmaker. So, I was going to school, learning about documentary primarily.

And in the meantime- as a backdrop- we had President George W. Bush’s administration, and I joined protests against the war in Iraq. I was appalled and opposed to torture that we were learning about. We’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which involved US military officers- as well as contractors- that were working in that prison.

And we were learning details about CIA torture, and all of this led up to- eventually- when the documents came out from WikiLeaks, I took interest. And to refresh everyone’s memory- and also for those who maybe don’t have an idea of what WikiLeaks published- in 2010 and 2011, we saw documents on the Afghanistan War and Iraq War.

These were military incident reports. They showed the transactions- or small acts- that take place on a daily basis in war zones. Things like friendly fire incidents, when you have reported incidents of human rights abuses, when there are people who blow through military checkpoints and you have incidents.

So, it was very minutely focused. These were historical documents. They did not reveal troop movements. They were all historical records and they showed what we were doing in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, in war crimes that were happening on a daily basis. And with Iraq, the documents uncovered 15,000 civilian deaths that were not previously known.

And a project called Iraq Body Count has done some fantastic data journalism with these documents, and they continue to do this for a number of wars. Then, you have the over 250,000 diplomatic cables that get published at the end of 2010, and all the way through 2011. And at that point, when I saw this cache of documents- this database- as they were being posted, I recognized that not all of the documents were being reported on.

We were not getting all the scoops that we could get, that you could squeeze out of these documents. And so, I started writing my own articles, I generated my own following, I was having people engage with my coverage of WikiLeaks. I was an intern at The Nation magazine, I got some very good newsroom experience for six months from January to June of 2011.

And during that period, the world events of that time were remarkable. And not only did you have the protests that were happening in Wisconsin- against Scott Walker, but you also had the Arab Spring- as it was dubbed. These uprisings happening in Middle East and Northern Africa. And some of these cables are said to have helped fuel the uprisings, as we learned about the corruption of Ben Ali in Tunisia- that the United States knew very well, but did nothing to challenge.

So, as I am covering these documents, I recognize that I am benefiting from publishing these stories. So, naturally I should take an interest in the source of the documents. The source of the documents was a private named Chelsea Manning- US Army whistleblower- and she provided these documents. We also got documents later on in that year- in around April, I believe in 2011- that showed us all of the false intelligence- that has been made up or collected about- the nearly 800 people in Guantanamo that were detained by President George W. Bush, as part of the global war on terrorism. So, we come to see how there’s just a handful of men- and these false confessions from them- have contributed to the justification for keeping these people in a military prison. There’s basically a US gulag on Cuba, on territory that the United States has claimed and refuses to return to Cuba. So, all of this information. I take an interest in how Chelsea Manning is being abused, where we hear reporting that she’s being inhumanely treated at this Quantico Marine brig, it becomes a scandal.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendes, takes an interest in her mistreatment. And then from there, I dedicated myself to covering her court martial, which unfolds from December 2011, through August of 2013. When she is convicted, she was charged with violating the Espionage Act.

These charges are very similar to the charges that Julian Assange is facing. And then she received an extraordinary sentence of 35 years in military prison. And from that point forward, I took an interest in the ‘war on whistleblowers’ that President Barack Obama was presiding over. During his time in office, he prosecuted more people with the Espionage Act, for leaking information to the press, than all previous presidents combined. And so, that’s when I was introduced to people like John Kiriakou- as you mentioned in the intro to our discussion- and Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower. And mind you, when we do the trial- when the trial unfolds- that’s when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden comes forward.

So now, we have all these documents about NSA mass surveillance, to go along with the hundreds of thousands of documents from WikiLeaks that Chelsea Manning provided. This is how I really became engaged with this issue.

[00:10:21] Grumbine: It’s incredible. You’re making me have flashbacks, bringing up some of these names. I was on a panel discussion with Chelsea Manning, ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here with Chelsea Manning.’ It was just one of those weird things, because what she did was so important, it was so vital and so often forgotten, the absolute risk that people take, in blowing that whistle.

The other person I mentioned, Bill Black, calls himself a “serial whistleblower.” John Kiriakou went through the ringer the hard way coming out of the CIA. Tell me, what is it- in your mind- that we really should focus on in this period? Bringing it all together, it seems like there’s a common theme going on.

[00:11:10] Gosztola: Let me begin, just because you mentioned to me that you spend a lot of time on economic issues. So, I think sometimes while we need to focus on what Julian Assange is doing, we also should realize that whistleblowers- or in this case- Julian Assange is not a whistleblower. Sometimes I think he- inappropriately- is described as a whistleblower, because of- I don’t know, we can get into it if you would like, but he performed the role of a publisher or he is a journalist. He didn’t have access to the information. The person who’s the whistleblower is Chelsea Manning. I think it confuses our understanding of the events that unfolded, if we describe him as a whistleblower. Although I recognize that some people might be using that label in a way that is, because they see him as a heroic figure who informed us of corruption, that the United States was engaged in, which was being hidden behind closed doors. But with that said, at the end of my book, Guilty of Journalism, I collected 30 documents from WikiLeaks that I say the government doesn’t want you to read. And I included several that, the umbrella that I put them under, was corporate power.

And so, I’ll just give you, for example, there was a cable that revealed that the US government had backed US corporations, in an effort to stop Haiti from raising the minimum wage to $5 per day. That was in 2009. This was a story that we saw reported out by The Nation, actually. This was done by a newspaper in Haiti called “Haiti Liberté.”

And the US embassy aided Levi’s, Hanes contractors to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers. The Haitian parliament was willing- according to this report- to give workers a $0.09 per hour pay increase to 0.31 per hour, to make t- shirts, bras, and underwear, for US clothing giants like Dockers and Nautica.

But that was something that diplomats wound up helping these corporations oppose. Obviously, we can come back and talk about any of these if you would like. I also have Pfizer was found to have hired investigators in Nigeria to blackmail the Nigerian Attorney General, so that he would drop lawsuits against the corporation’s drug testing on children.

We also find in these documents, evidence that the US government was planning a trade war against Europe, for refusing to adopt agricultural biotechnology from Monsanto. So, genetically modified crops, the GMOs. And then- I’ll close with this one- this is very topical- because we’ve seen recently even, a whistleblower who mysteriously was found dead from Boeing under extraordinarily suspicious circumstances. So a Saudi Arabian King requested that the US government make his plane like Air Force One, if they wanted him to purchase a fleet of Boeing aircraft. US authorized the upgrade.

So we see in these cables that US diplomats are acting as salespeople for Boeing. And not only that, they are also trying to help Boeing beat their competitor- Airbus, by securing contracts with foreign governments.

[00:14:54] Grumbine: Wow, that is what you call a very cozy relationship. I think corporatism is the cousin of fascism. That is terrifying. You made a great distinction. You were making the distinction between a publisher and a whistleblower, and I instantly saw my error. But I think it’s worth exploring, because we’re dealing with two things, freedom of the press and actual whistleblowers- people taking the courageous step of exposing corruption and lies that the public should be aware of.

And both of them are public services. Can you break down that difference a little bit better? I think it’s worth discussing.

[00:15:36] Gosztola: Right. So, journalism can be courageous, but I don’t think you would disagree with me that if you are working inside of a government agency or a corporation and you reveal information, you’re taking on more risk than the journalist, who would publish that information and reveal these truths to the public.

But the reason why Julian Assange often gets described as a whistleblower and why I am leery of allowing that to happen, and why I begin my book by saying, ‘Julian Assange is a journalist”, I think it is so important. I can somewhat understand where press freedom groups are coming from. I’m glad that they have spoken up in defense of Julian Assange, but I do not fully agree with them that it doesn’t matter whether you think Julian Assange is a journalist or not. The fact is, he engaged in the acts of journalism and those are supposed to be protected under the FirstAmendment. The problem with that is, the Justice Department and their prosecutors, and those who attack Julian Assange- or believe that he should be prosecuted- are denying him this journalist label deliberately to make it harder for his legal team and all of us who recognize this injustice, to stand up for him. Because if he’s not a journalist, then why should he be protected from this prosecution? It opens the door to debate about the allegations that are being leveled against him.

But, if you see what he’s being accused of doing, as standard news gathering activities- as I do- then it becomes more difficult for the Justice Department to defend their case, their political case. And so, part of the history, and part of what has dogged Julian Assange and made it difficult for WikiLeaks to do their work, is that media partners that were granted access to information turned against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, because of something they didn’t like between them and the relationship.

And also the New York Times very deliberately presented itself as ‘above’ Julian Assange and they refused to see Julian Assange as a partner on the documents. They treated him more like a information broker or a source. They actually say that “he’s a source, he’s not someone we’re working with.” So, he’s never seen as an equal.

And that’s apparent too. When we look at one of the more shameful pieces that were published, during the time that WikiLeaks were publishing these documents from Chelsea Manning, we had executive editor, Bill Keller, going on about all of the quirks of Julian Assange. Like ‘he has smelly socks.’ He’s describing Julian Assange, like he’s some kind of a bag lady.

It was extraordinarily disrespectful and it fed into the demonization of Assange and WikiLeaks, at a time when the US was ramping up an investigation and mounting this war on WikiLeaks, that has unfolded over the last 10 to 15 years, at this point. And so, by doing this dance- where the New York Times says that Julian Assange is a “source”, and not a journalist or a media organization, like the New York Times- they believe that they are somehow protecting themselves, but they’re actually not doing anything that would stop a Justice Department from prosecuting them, for publishing this kind of information. Which is just to say that- look forward to 2025- if Donald Trump is in office again, and the Justice Department has different people; just because they went to the trouble to make a distinction about Julian Assange, doesn’t mean that the Justice Department isn’t going to look at precedents that have been set, and target them… because those people in the Justice Department are opposed, and see the New York Times as enemies of the state.

So, there’s a lot of complexity here and I might’ve lost a few people who are listening to me, but it’s a swirl going around and around. The most important thing is that Julian Assange performed journalism, is a journalist, and those who deny that reality are actually making it easier for the US government to target journalists.

[00:20:29] Grumbine: So with that in mind, when I read the news, the stories are almost all the same, and they’re almost always told from the position of glorifying the government. I’m not anti-government, I’m anti-this-government, but I’m not anti-government in general. So there’s some clear collusion going on. There’s some manufactured story and everybody repeats the same story.

I’m sure part of that is laziness. Not everybody can research every story, but there’s just way too much cohesion. And then when someone comes out with something that counters that story, they’re instantly treated like an enemy. In this case, we’ve gotten so far away from actual freedom of the press that I don’t think we’d know what to do with freedom of the press. What is your take on the state of the freedom of the press right now?

[00:21:28] Gosztola: I would say to you that we have reached a dangerous moment where the Justice Department is taking it upon themselves to decide who is and who is not a journalist, or who is and who is not deserving of protection under the First Amendment. After they make that arbitrary calculus, they then proceed to go forward with prosecuting these individuals.

And I’ll give you an example. It’s not just limited to Julian Assange. There is an individual in Florida, who was recently indicted during the past two months. His name is Timothy Burke, and he is being prosecuted by the economic crimes division of the Justice Department. And they say in the indictment against him that he was “scouring the internet”, which by the way, stands out to me as something remarkable because that’s what I do all the time.

Anybody who does this work that is online journalism sits around on the internet and scours it looking for interesting developments or something that people didn’t see, a document, maybe it’s a video clip that has been hiding that hasn’t gotten a lot of views. And if I see something that I can get access to, whatever it is, it’s a video feed, audio or whatever, and share it with people and it makes news and garners a lot of attention, I feel like I’ve done my job. So Timothy Burke was able to, through access that he was granted, he didn’t do any hacking, although that’s what he’s been accused of. He was able to find an unencrypted feed that contained an unedited interview between Tucker Carlson and Kanye West. And this interview was seen by tens of millions of people because these clips that got posted by Timothy Burke.

We find that Fox News and Tucker Carlson were trying to help Kanye not seem like he has a lot of mental illness and also that he’s an anti Semite. And it was incredible to see these clips. Fox News got angry. They turned to the Justice Department and it wasn’t long after that the FBI raided this individual’s [Burke’s] home, raided this journalist’s home.

Timothy Burke is now facing serious charges. And also the possibility that all of the equipment from his newsroom, his home newsroom, these laptops that he had, he has computers, hard drives, anything on it, all of the reporter’s notes or any databases or archives of material that he has collected from, let’s say sources or the videos that he’s done.

He’s a video guy. Timothy Burke worked at Deadspin. He was with Gawker. He collected videos for these publications. So if the US Justice Department wins their case, all of these pieces of equipment can be seized and confiscated. They become the property of the US government. Back to your original question, how does this feed into the general state of freedom of the press?

We are seeing this from the federal government on down to the county or city level. We had a very disturbing episode happen in Kansas. It was towards the end of last year, there was a 97-98 year old, founder/co-founder of a newspaper called the Marion County Record. Their newsroom was raided by some cops who were upset by, I believe it was a story that the publication was working on.

She wound up dying the next day, even though she was in perfect health, because she was so traumatized by this raid. And in both of these examples, and then let’s add in Julian Assange, you have authorities that are making an arbitrary decision that all of a sudden, that person no longer is a journalist, no longer deserves protection, and so we can go in and we can target them.

[00:25:52] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

[00:26:15] Grumbine: With that in mind, get us up to speed on Julian Assange. I think a lot of people probably really didn’t understand what he actually published. I know you brought up Chelsea Manning and the findings that came from that, but there were multiple dumps of DNC lies that were told during the Bernie Sanders campaign.

There was tons of information that WikiLeaks thankfully brought to our attention. I think the world will never be the same after a lot of the revelations that came from that. But can you take us through that timeline?

[00:26:49] Gosztola: Yeah, so the documents that Julian Assange has been charged for publishing, are only documents that Chelsea Manning provided to Wikileaks. However, there are other disclosures that are other publications that are of note, and I’ll get to them, but the most remarkable one, is probably a set of documents that people know very little about. And that set is known as Vault 7, and they were published in 2017, and these were documents about the CIA’s Cyber warfare or their hacking capabilities.

This is a power that we never had a democratic debate about. I never saw a congressional hearing where there was a discussion about whether the CIA should be going around targeting different governments or groups with malware and planting bugs in devices. We learned from these documents that Samsung TVs had devices that were planted in them. So when you turn them on, they might just be activated and they could be used to snoop on targets. We learn about vulnerabilities in Apples, their operating system, and also the way that they’re able to break into the Signal or WhatsApp messages that we believe that those were being safely encrypted, but that they’ve developed ways in order to violate the privacy that users think they have through those apps. And this is a set of documents that sets off the chain of events that I believe has led us to this case against Julian Assange. Because I very quickly just say that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, there was no indictment against Julian Assange.

What they struggled with was the fact that if they were to indict Julian Assange and make allegations against him that they believe were criminal, then they would have to accept there were New York Times editors and reporters, also people at the Washington Post, people at the Guardian, that had engaged in that exact same conduct.

And they would, if they were going to apply fair justice, have to prosecute those people as well. And they weren’t going to put those people on trial. So they decided to pass on prosecuting Julian Assange. Donald Trump comes into power and he appoints as Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, who has a different view about leaks, has a different view about protecting freedom of the press.

He also picks Mike Pompeo to run the CIA. And Mike Pompeo is embarrassed when these Vault 7 materials get published. And they’re all over and he can’t even bear to go face Donald Trump. There’s an article that was published by Yahoo News in September of 2021. And it’s an amazing article if people have not read it.

There were over 30 sources from the Trump administration and US intelligence agencies that Michael Isikoff and Zach Dorfman and Sean Naylor, all national security reporters talked to. They worked on this reporting, I think over a long period, and they came up with some incredible information about the CIA’s war on WikiLeaks.

And part of what we learned is that Pompeo didn’t want to go face Donald Trump, and say that WikiLeaks had just happened to the CIA because that was something that he’d have to take responsibility for happening on his watch. And in the end he becomes this obsessed person who is seeking revenge against Assange.

His first public speech that Pompeo gives is directed at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And they decide to designate WikiLeaks as a non state hostile intelligence service so that they can go after it and spy on Julian Assange while he is in the [Ecuadoran] embassy. There’s evidence that they worked indirectly, at least, if not actually directly with a Spanish private contractor called UC Global, which had the contract for security for Ecuador’s London embassy, where Julian Assange lived under diplomatic asylum from July, 2012, until he was expelled and arrested on April 11th, 2019.

So this set of documents [Vault 7] is really important because it sets off this campaign, their allegations that the CIA sketched out plans to kidnap, poison, or kill Julian Assange while he was in the embassy. There was a fear in the Justice Department that he would be put on a plane, a rendition flight. Much like war on terrorism suspects had been subject to, they had been taken to black sites. And so the Justice Department panicked.

They didn’t have an indictment against Julian Assange and these actions by the CIA spur the Justice Department to quickly charge Julian Assange with something, anything, because they’re fearful that he might arrive in the United States and they would need to arraign him. They would need to go before a judge and produce an indictment against Julian Assange.

So there’s that, but the different documents that we have are usually sets of emails that they’ve uncovered. Sometimes they’re about security firms that have spying capabilities who are deploying spyware. There’s emails from Syria. There’s emails, as you mentioned from the Clinton campaign. There’s Democratic National Committee emails that show how the Democratic presidential primary is greased in such a way to favor the person that the Democrats most want to end up as their nominee.

And then you have other documents that go along with the Chelsea Manning documents. And before that, they were working on publishing information from a few African countries like Kenya, that they had actually helped out by publicizing some corruption within their governments.

[00:33:41] Grumbine: Over the last several months, he’s been in Belmarsh [prison] and UK for years. He has been in horrible conditions, inhumane conditions that we wouldn’t do to a serial killer, quite frankly. And have we gotten to where he’s been extradited? Are they still trying to have that two week window of figuring out whether or not the US will guarantee he’s not going to be killed? Where are we at with that extradition? And can you tell us a little bit about where he’s been, in Belmarsh in prison.

[00:34:11] Gosztola: That’s a That’s good question. And just to tell you, it’s hard for reporters to follow. And if it’s hard for reporters to follow, it’s almost impossible for the general public to keep up with all the legal machinery and what is happening on a daily basis. But Julian Assange has not been extradited. Julian Assange is unlikely to be extradited in the next few months.

He could be extradited before the year is over. However, he still has the ability to pursue an appeal. As of the moment, as I talked to you, he was most recently granted an opportunity to have an appeal hearing. But the problem is that the appeals court in the United Kingdom looked at the United States government and said, if you can make us a few promises about how he won’t face the death penalty and about his free speech rights while he is on trial, then we will let you avoid an appeal.

We won’t have a full appeal hearing. And so if that happens and it’s very likely that it would happen, the last place that Julian Assange can go to to prevent extradition is the European Court of Human Rights, and he can petition them, and then if they agree to take up his review, they’ll hear his case.

But, beneath all of this, the thing that is most troubling is that Julian Assange remains in prison and he is not allowed to be out on bail. And a case before the European Court of Human Rights, even if that is a positive development, because he is not extradited to the US for a trial, that could take a couple of years. And his health condition has deteriorated tremendously due to the way that he has had to live due to this campaign against him that he has so far survived, but it has meant that he has not had access to sunlight.

It has meant that he has not had access to, when he was in the Ecuador embassy, he couldn’t get dental care. He didn’t have the kind of healthcare that he needed. He’s getting better medical treatment in Belmarsh. And I think it’s better than what he would receive in US detention or in a US prison, but still recently at the end of 2023, he had a bad cold.

And he was coughing. And when he was coughing, he broke a rib and he broke a rib because he has osteoporosis. And he’s a 52 year old man, but 52 year old people don’t usually have this kind of trouble, but they would if they were not being allowed access to sunlight, if they were not able to go outdoors and get recreation, if they were kept indoors, they would suffer this way and Julian Assange has suffered immensely.

[00:37:17] Grumbine: This is in no way indicative of how I feel about Donald Trump, but I find it interesting that the guy who turned up the screws on Julian Assange and the conditions by which Julian Assange is not even allowed out of the jail for sunlight, while Donald Trump, who is facing all these charges, no matter how politically driven they are and the fact that he quote unquote, led the insurrection on January 6th. This concept of fair and equal treatment under the law. I know this isn’t in the US but the idea that Julian Assange for simply publishing the works of other whistleblowers is dealing with this. While a guy who supposedly tried to overthrow the US government, he could stay out as long as he comes up with half a billion dollars in bond money, which he’ll come up with it, I’m sure. Because that’s the way justice works in the world.

Rich people are always above the law, but I do find it quite the contradiction that we can with a straight face, watch the guy who turned up the screws on Assange walking scot free and running for President while Julian Assange rots in the cell and waiting to find out if he’s going to come back to a US where Donald Trump re emerges as President to take him on once again.

The irony, the sheer absurdity of it is mind blowing.

[00:38:51] Gosztola: It is tragedy and farce. And when you ask people who have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act, who believe they were making conscientious decisions when they come forward, they look at what’s happening with Donald Trump and they look at what happened with Joe Biden. We saw a special counsel decide and determine that he was not deserving of any criminal charges because he mishandled classified documents. He took and he took sensitive information about the Afghanistan war with him that if anybody else that was lower ranked had taken that kind of information, the hammer would have been brought down upon them very quickly. He even said, even though it’s admirable in the special counsel’s report, it says that he objected to Obama having a surge during the Afghanistan war.

And even though he took those documents so that he could, I suppose, memorialize that history, have that in his private collection, so he could always show that he was on the right side of history. That doesn’t exonerate him. The Justice Department doesn’t do that for anybody else. There are whistleblowers like Daniel Hale, a drone whistleblower who just got out of prison.

He was subjected to the harshest conditions that someone who leaked information to the press, he gave these documents to Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept. He was put in a communications management unit, which is basically like a little Gitmo. And we have two of these in Terre Haute, Indiana, and then Marion County, Illinois.

And they’re primarily used to go after Muslims. That’s what George W. Bush intended them for when they were created. But he went through harsh treatment. And then you have Reality Winner who received the longest sentence for anybody convicted of an unauthorized disclosure to the press, it was 60 months, basically.

And she served her sentence in a women’s prison in Texas. Terry Albury is an FBI whistleblower. Recently he was prosecuted while Donald Trump was president. And he revealed that the FBI was coercing again, primarily Muslims, people with brown skin into becoming informants. If they don’t become informants, they were being threatened.

They were being put on the no fly list or other watch lists. It would make it impossible for them to travel, impair their freedom of movement. Meanwhile, you have people like David Petraeus, who take all kinds of sensitive documents from their briefings with Presidents and high ranking intelligence officials, share them with his biographer that he’s having an affair with, and then they get published in this fawning biography.

Or you have someone like Leon Panetta, who does a banquet event, and the director or the writer for Zero Dark Thirty is in the audience while he’s, you know, exposing the identities of SEAL Team Six that raided Osama Bin Laden’s compound. And he’s not supposed to reveal their names, but nothing ever happens to these people.

It’s the lower ranked people. And then in this particular instance, as we’ve been discussing, it’s Julian Assange, because he does not subscribe to the dominant culture of the US prestige media, as I refer to them, he is singled out and attacked by the US government.

[00:42:27] Grumbine: I want to make sure that you are given the opportunity to give our listeners the most important stuff that they need to hear about this right now. I guess we can bring this back to Julian Assange or any other issue in this space that you feel somebody trying to get up to speed and know about what’s going on would be most beneficial in knowing. Every day, I wake up asking myself, what new lie I’m going to find out. I don’t wake up with excitement and enthusiasm for a new day. I wake up feeling like I’ve been gaslit and lied to. And that goes from watching Genocide Joe still maintain lesser evil status as he funds in the face of all kinds of resistance, the genocide in Gaza and a proxy war in Ukraine, and also trying to use Israel as a proxy to Iran.

We’ve got so much going on now that I just feel like ‘who’s got our back?’ And there’s no journalism to speak of. So you coming on here has been a huge deal for me. With that in mind, what is important? What do we need to know?

[00:43:43] Gosztola: I think the passage of time is an asset for the US government. The more that this drags on, there’s more information. There are more developments. It’s impossible for me to keep track of them all. It’s harder and harder when I do hour long shows like yours to fit in all the essential information, all the essential details that people need to know to fully understand this.

For those people who have never heard of Julian Assange, it becomes more of a challenge to fully and comprehensively share his story and what he has survived. Well, I think that’s intentional. I think that the passage of time is its own injustice. He has been under some form of arbitrary detention since the end of 2010.

And that was recognized by a United Nations working group on arbitrary detention. At that point in 2016, he had been in Wandsworth prison in London. He had done 550 days of house arrest in the UK. And then he lived for four and a half years of asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy. And he faced extensive surveillance during that time.

So what I would leave people with is if there’s anything about what you’ve heard on this show that makes you care about doing something to try and stop this government from blowing a hole in our first amendment, because that’s what will happen if Julian Assange is put on trial, it will mean that the US government has this authority to use these laws the way that they have done to Julian Assange.

And that’s what makes it a presidential case. That’s what makes it something that you have civil liberties, human rights, press freedom organizations from around the world, parliamentarians in European countries. You have the whole country of Australia who have stood up for Julian Assange because he’s an Australian citizen, and they are aghast that the US, an ally, one of these Five Eyes countries that have access to all this US intelligence that is shared because Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the United States as well as Australia are supposed to be this grouping. I guess they’re supposed to see themselves as stewards of US empire. And so they are aghast that the US government is doing that. That this is happening under Joe Biden, and it has not stopped.

So I’m going to leave you with what the Assange Defense Committee is doing. What [his wife] Stella Assange and his brother Gabriel Shipton are trying to do, which is to get more people on Capitol Hill engaged with this topic, with this issue, with this injustice. Because he’s one of the best known political prisoners in the world right now, and every time Joe Biden opens his mouth or one of the officials open their mouths and say that journalism is not a crime because they’re talking about Evan Gershkovich, who is detained by Vladimir Putin in Russia right now.

I think they need to be reminded that they are the reason why a journalist is being kept in prison in the UK and that they are making freedom of the press or journalism more unsafe around the world. And there’s a resolution. There’s a House resolution, 934, that people can go find. I’ll give you a link to it so that you can share it with your listeners and you should see who signed on to it.

Who are the people who support freedom of the press in Congress? And who doesn’t? Because this is a very basic resolution. It says, if you support freedom of the press, then you have to demand that the Justice Department drop the charges against Julian Assange. So you’ll see a handful of Democrats, you’ll actually see a handful of Republicans who are doing the right thing. But missing are hundreds of people in the House of Representatives who need to sign on to this, who need to get with the program and recognize that if anything they say is supposed to have meaning when they talk about rights under the Constitution, they need to stand against this case that has been leveled against Julian Assange.

[00:48:27] Grumbine: Let me ask you one final question. Who are some of the other people that we might want to tell our listeners to check out, because there’s a lot more than just Julian Assange going on. And there’s a lot of people doing really good work. I know a few of them, but I’m interested in who you would recommend as good sources for good information about these things.

[00:48:50] Gosztola: So that’s always a difficult question because what I do is time consuming work. And admittedly, I probably don’t have that great of a diet when it comes to going from news source to news source. But I can tell you people that I trust and the shows that I feel are doing a pretty good job of collecting information.

You mentioned that you were introduced to me through Status Coup and I’m a fan of what Jordan [Chariton] does day in and day out. I have a colleague named Rania Khalek, who co-hosts a show called the Freedom Side on Breakthrough News with Eugene Puryear that has a global focus. And they are constantly bringing in voices from conflict zones and areas in which capitalism is basically destroying the societies of those countries from within.

And they have very good interviews on their shows. And I see good reporting from The Lever. I see good reporting from, I think The Intercept does pretty good work. I think The American Prospect does pretty good work. And these are places that I turn to when it comes to whistleblowing in particular and press freedom. I try to stay up on the advocacy work that Freedom of the Press Foundation is doing.

This is a collective of people that launched this organization a few years after WikiLeaks, they first were trying to help WikiLeaks get around a blockade that PayPal had imposed. So they were making it possible for donations to get to WikiLeaks. And then as they move further along and Daniel Ellsberg, the great Pentagon Papers whistleblower was part of this organization.

They went on and have continued to do work. Edward Snowden’s on the board of this organization. They do tracking, they track state by state in the United States. They have a whole project called the US Press Freedom Tracker, so you can see where raids are happening, when journalists are subpoenaed, when there are attacks on the press, those are being documented.

That’s what I would say.

[00:51:13] Grumbine: I really appreciate it. Everybody’s got a source and my expert is better than your expert. And there’s a lot of zero sum thinking out there. But people are just thirsty for truth. And with that, let me just ask you, where can we find more of your work? I know that you’ve got a podcast you host, I know you do other journalism, but where can we find more of your work?

[00:51:35] Gosztola: So if you go to the dissenter.org, that’s my newsletter that I post for people and I’m regularly covering not just whistleblower and press freedom stories, but what I think are underreported whistleblower and press freedom stories. Because oftentimes we are told to support a whistleblower or we are told that this is an attack on freedom of the press.

And the US government is telling us that and I’m not saying that we should be skeptical all the time when we’re given that message, but it may not be my role to play to focus on that case. I want to go find the people like Chelsea Manning. Like Terry Albury, Reality Winner and others who are being ignored, horribly ignored and deserve to have their story told, deserve to not have their sacrifice go unnoticed.

And so that’s what I do with the Dissenter Newsletter to cover government secrecy there as well. And I do have a podcast and it’s at the newsletter. I co-host the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast and I’ve been doing that for over 10 years. Primarily using it as a space to dig into issues that are not just the focus of my newsletter.

[00:52:53] Grumbine: Fair enough. We recently had Mickey Huff of Project Censored come on here and talk about the state of the free press in 2024 and all the crazy stories that were just ignored. I don’t think they ignored it. I think that’s intentional. Thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it, Kevin. My name is Steve Grumbine. I’m the host of Macro N Cheese. Real Progressive’s is a 501c3 non for profit. All donations that we receive are tax deductible and no donations too small and no donations too large. We survive by your support. If you feel like the information we’re putting out there is worth your time, we would love to have you support us either by sharing our content on social media, which we simply just do not have enough help with, or a donation, which helps us keep the lights on. Thank you so much to my guests, Kevin. Thank you again to you for listening. This is Macro N Cheese, and we are out of here.

[00:54:06] End Credits: Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by the fantastic team of volunteers at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To support our work, please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.