Julian Assange Prosecution

Julian Assange Prosecution is a 'Distraction' from Executive Branch Secrecy, according to Ralph Nader

ABC News' Devin Dwyer reports that Ralph Nader, a leading consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, delivered a spirited public defense of WikiLeaks Thursday and called the prosecution of Julian Assange a “distraction” from a more disconcerting issue: the Obama and Bush administrations’ fixation with secrecy.
“If you take all of the present and probably future disclosures under the WikiLeaks initiative, the vast majority should never have been classified,” Nader told a House Judiciary Committee hearing on legal and constitutional issues surrounding WikiLeaks’ publication of secret government documents.

“The vast majority are reprehensible use of people employing taxpayer dollars, the vast majority should have been disclosed, if not never started, for the benefit of the American people to hold their government accountable,” he said.

Nader praised WikiLeaks as a "whistle blower" and called the administration’s pending legal case against Assange a “very dangerous” diversion from what he views as encroachment of the executive branch on freedom of speech and the public’s right to know.

Attorney General Eric Holder has said WikiLeaks’ actions have put the lives of Americans at risk and that the Justice Department will prosecute those involved with the leak and worldwide dissemination of the materials.


The leaking is not what will ultimately take this great country down. Nor is it It is the secresacy  

Nader said the administration’s approach amounts to a double-standard.

“If it’s okay for the Obama administration officials to conspire or collude with Bob Woodward… and leak cables and all sorts of secret information and do it with impunity, with a reporter who then puts it in a book,” he said, “it does seem that we’re on our way not to developing equal protection policy, but to the kind of discriminating policy that will make our legal system not reliable and subject to the distortions.”