The Next Woodward and Bernstein Could Go to Jail
With the Julian Assange indictment, the Trump administration is launching its boldest attack on press freedom yet. And the #Resistance is cheering it on.
With the Julian Assange indictment, the Trump administration is launching its boldest attack on press freedom yet. And the #Resistance is cheering it on.
Julian Assange’s prosecution is being used as a test case to unravel First Amendment protections that the press has long taken for granted. Yet some important left-wing elected officials aren’t fighting back.
Since 2007, WikiLeaks has challenged entrenched power to reveal evidence of state crimes, political dirty dealings, and other secrets. Its efforts have provoked severe repression by the US government and its allies.
The crimes of the War on Terror are an assault on justice and democracy across the planet. The Belmarsh Tribunal, inspired by the Vietnam War tribunals organized by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, is demanding accountability for those crimes.
Let’s have a debate over the Left and the state. But not on the libertarians’ distorted terms.
Chelsea Manning was recently jailed for refusing to testify in a grand jury investigation against Julian Assange. Her refusal is an act of resistance against the abusive use of grand juries and prosecutorial intimidation.
The reporter John Pilger, who died at the end of 2023, showed what a life committed to attacking the powerful through journalism and taking the side of the oppressed looks like.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is wildly popular among Mexicans at home and abroad. It’s not just because of his domestic policies: AMLO is also playing a key role in challenging US dominance in Latin America.
The raid and possible prosecution of Donald Trump is a welcome break from decades of elite impunity. But to mean something, it must be a turning point in holding those elites accountable, not an exception.
Donald Trump won the presidency claiming he was a radical opponent of the political establishment. That was always a lie — and his four years in the White House revealed he was just another reactionary, capitalist billionaire.
The Biden administration recently organized the Summit for Democracy to fight rising global authoritarianism. But Washington bears central responsibility for the widening inequality, rising political cynicism, and withering of democracy worldwide.
If you’re a US ally looking at Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Syria and Ecuador’s raid on its Mexican consulate, you’re probably thinking, “I can get away with something similar because the most powerful country in the world will let me do it.”
There’s good reason to speculate that the Pandora Papers, the massive leak exposing the tax-dodging practices of the global superrich — which includes plenty of Russians and Chinese, but almost no Americans — is a CIA plant. Nevertheless, it’s a newsworthy story that deserves the attention it’s gotten.
As Israel wages war on the Palestinian people, Western media outlets have not delivered the sharp analysis that the situation demands. We badly need the kind of critical reporting that WikiLeaks supplied on the crimes of the “war on terror.”
Israel routinely refuses to extradite its own citizens — including people who’ve flown there purely to escape justice. Its Law of Return rewards criminals who can claim a vague connection to Israel, even as it denies innocent Palestinians their homeland.
With the Chicago Tribune's publishing company on the verge of being swallowed up by the hedge fund industry, capitalism’s ongoing destruction of the free press through downsizing and asset-stripping has become the number one threat to American democracy.
Since Donald Trump’s election, hyperbolic warnings about a descent into fascism have been constant background noise, even as he has repeatedly shown his weakness. But that noise has made it harder to hear the alarming signals of the past several months, as the White House has prepared the ground for a major power grab in a second Trump term.
Albert Botran is a Catalan MP whose communications were spied on by the Spanish state using spyware from Israeli firm NSO Group. He writes for Jacobin on how the scandal shows the enduring grip of antidemocratic forces over the country’s institutions.