The Justice Department is using the Patriot Act to exact revenge on Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. I will prove this in the following letter I wrote to Congress.
You may borrow from or copy my letter:
I’m outraged that the Patriot Act has been deployed to attack Wikileak’s domain name server, Dynadot. (http://wikileaks.org/US-espionage-investigation-against.html)
Federal agents want to do an un-Constitutional search on Dynadot because Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, who is a non-citizen living outside the U.S., supposedly violated the U.S. Espionage Act. But these attacks on anyone associated with Assange and Wikileaks are a travesty of justice, as can be demonstrated by these facts from last year (http://gawker.com/5702397/if-wikileaks-broke-the-espionage-act-so-did-the-new-york-times):
* The New York Times published government cables obtained through Wikileaks before Wikileaks itself reported them. But the New York Times has not been attacked by the Feds for this supposed act of espionage.
* The White House was also give an opportunity to request redactions to some of the cables, and The Times agreed to “some, but not all” of the White House’s requests.
* And Wikileaks itself had given the White House the same opportunity for redactions, but the White House refused to cooperate directly with Wikileaks. (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/20/wikileaks)
If Wikileaks is guilty of espionage then so is The New York Times.
Thus, the Feds’ failure to go after The Times proves that Wikileaks is not guilty of espionage either.
In 1971’s Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court said,
“The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information.” (http://bit.ly/pqUNSu)
Wikileaks and the New York Times have merely been exercising their First Amendment rights in exactly this way, while also respecting legitimate federal concerns, as reflected by the offer to allow some redactions.
The assault on Wikileaks is merely petty retribution because of the incompetence and wrongdoing that Wikileaks exposes.
Please do everything in your power to protect Wikileaks. Introduce resolutions for this purpose. Threaten to freeze funding for the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security if they continue their unjust witch hunt against Wikileaks.
And REPEAL THE PATRIOT ACT to help prevent such abuses in the future.
END LETTER
You can send your letter using DownsizeDC.org’s Educate the Powerful System.
And you can Like this item on Facebook by clicking the button at the top of this page.
Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.