Violation of the 1917 Espionage Act is the law that Julian Assange faces if he is extradited to the US from England. If found guilty of the charges under this violation, Assange faces up to 175 years in a US supermax prison. For what? many people ask. This is where it gets tricky. The 1917 Espionage Act is vague. It was called for in president Woodrow Wilson's 1915 State of the Union Address. Note the vague, flexible language (from Wikipedia):
There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue ... I urge you to enact such laws at the earliest possible moment and feel that in doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over them at once. They have formed plots to destroy property, they have entered into conspiracies against the neutrality of the Government, they have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the Government in order to serve interests alien to our own. It is possible to deal with these things very effectually. I need not suggest the terms in which they may be dealt with.
Note the flavor of contempt for "naturalized citizens" -- i.e, immigrants seen as infiltrators. Once upon a time we welcomed them (us) at Ellis Island ("Give me your outcast downtrodden future race bait Yada-yadas" -- and, boy, did they), but now they're largely seen as hombres broken bad. Sure, they serve us up in jobs no one else wants, like at Dunkin Donuts where they give with a smile and panache (IMHO), even though you're probably thinking yea, but, they live like animals -- nine families to a three decker and probably turn the place into a geodesic dome when the Census people arrive.
Assange is not an American, so how he can be tried under that law will be fleshed out by lawyers in the future. In the meantime, as if acknowledging this fact, the US, such as Mike Pompeo have publicly called him a "non-state hostile intelligence service." This makes him drone-eligible; he is being seen here by the US government as a terrorist, the reasoning for his kill not far removed from the thinking that went into Obama killing US citizens Anwar al-Awlaki, and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (and other unnamed Yemeni children), and, under Trump, an 8-year-old Awlaki girl, Nawar al-Awlaki. That's what we are now prepared to do to American citizens -- Hellfire missile them to death.
The Panama Papers, the Pandora Papers, the Pentagon Papers, the Doomsday Machine plans that Ellsberg describes in his latest book, and, most importantly, the Wikileaks: Collateral Murder, State Department cables, DNC emails, and Vault 7 details that (Assange suggests) were used to create Guccifer to set him up as a Russian agent -- all of this points to an undeclared war between the 1% and the rest of us. Under this regime, Democracy everywhere has become a lease-lend program -- as with Amazon's Kindle books, we don't buy them anymore, we lease them. Check out the fine print at Amazon and in our current state of democracy.
End the 1917 Espionage Act:
I have begun a Change.Org petition to this effect. Would you please sign it to build momentum.
