The CRS report warns that an attempt stage a prosecution for the WikiLeaks disclosures would raise questions over "government censorship" and US attempts to exercise "extraterritorial jurisdiction."
It cites the precedent of the publication in the New York Times and Washington Post of the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the US intervention in Vietnam, in 1971 and the refusal of the US Supreme Court to grant the government's request for an injunction barring the papers from printing the material.
Given the sharp shift to the right by the high court along with the rest of the political establishment, however, there is every reason to fear a very different ruling today in relation to a government attempt to railroad Assange on espionage charges. And, as the CRS points out, such charges are punishable by death.
Leading US politicians and commentators have called for Assange to be declared an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks a terrorist organization and, openly and shamelessly, for the WikiLeaks founder to be "assassinated" or "taken out." This chorus of public demands raises the obvious question of whether Assange would even make it to court if he were extradited to the US. The logic of this public campaign is that he would instead be "disappeared" into the CIA's gulag of "black sites" or murdered.
The vendetta against Assange has promoted condemnation from several heads of state and international officials, who, for their own political reasons, have highlighted the reactionary and hypocritical character of Washington's attempts to punish WikiLeaks for exposing the true character of American "diplomacy."
Thus, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, speaking in Brasilia on Thursday, declared that WikiLeaks has "my solidarity in disclosing these things and my protest on behalf of free speech."
Lula added, "I don't know if they put up signs like those from the Westerns saying, 'wanted dead or alive'...Instead of blaming the person who disclosed it, blame the person who wrote this nonsense. Otherwise we wouldn't have the scandal we now have."
And speaking in Moscow, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ridiculed US pretensions as the guardian of democracy in light of the attempt to suppress WikiLeaks. "If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That's what, democracy?" said Putin.
"So you know, as they say in the countryside, some people's cows can moo, but yours should keep quiet," Putin said, using a Russian adage similar to "the pot calling the kettle black." Meanwhile the Russian press reported a statement from an unnamed Kremlin official suggesting that Assange be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize as a means of protecting him.
And at the United Nations, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, condemned the pressure begin placed upon "private companies, banks and credit card companies," to cut off services to WikiLeaks.
"They could be interpreted as an attempt to censor the publication of information, thus potentially violating Wikileaks' right to freedom of expression," Pillay said at a press conference in Geneva.
Meanwhile, an announcement this week by the State Department on the decision that Washington will host UNESCO's World Press Freedom Day next May has drawn international ridicule.
In what seemed like unintended self-parody, the State Department declared: "New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression. At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information."
While undoubtedly intended as a barb against the Chinese government and its attempts to control access to the Internet, the "concern" expressed by the State Department reads like an indictment of Washington's own attempt to "censor and silence" WikiLeaks and cut off the damning flow of information about US imperialism's criminal activities around the globe.
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