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And in the end, they pressed him, its got to go out. well, in the end, eventually with the State Department cables and translator, it did come out through the fact that David Lee had published the password as an epigraph just for, you know, local color in one of his chapters, the entire password to the unredacted cables altogether. But if I may come back so, you know, the idea that what came very clearly in the trial was that the idea that he had deliberately shown either recklessness or unconcerned for the names of these informants or indeed had deliberately put out the names is absolutely true, untrue. That was clearly demolished, but also when it comes down to it.
The two other aspects here, we have a government professing great concern for certain people involved in the Iraq war who are informants, these are not spies for us. These are not agents. And that's covered by entirely different laws, actually. There was nothing illegal about putting out those names except the fact that the entire cache, the entire cables in which they were embedded was classified. That's the charge. But people could say, well, putting it out was irresponsible and that's what they're concerned about.
First point, which I said in court. This is the government which by pursuing an illegal war and aggression, a war of aggression, a crime against the peace, has created 37 million refugees in the Middle East, in the Middle East, wars that have come on. And they're pretending that Julian Assange is the problem here for putting out these things.
Second, even, let's say, the observer who allowed this coming out and so forth, the irresponsible, you know, was not unethical. It was unethical, let's say, irresponsible to do that.
The First Amendment in our country doesn't just defend responsible journalism. It doesn't say Congress shall make no act acting like abridging freedom of the press, to act responsibly from the point of view of the government, anything that embarrasses them or incriminated them or lowers their prestige like seditious sedition against a king, which to which our founders wanted to get away from in enacting the First Amendment.
That's what they regard as irresponsible. In fact, illegal, they would like to put people in jail. I notice the attorney general, Barr, has talked now about reinstating sedition laws, which our country, the War of Independence, was in part against the idea of having a monarch who could not be criticized. That's almost the definition of a monarch above the law, as Nixon put it. When the president does it, it's not illegal. Well, obviously, Donald Trump believes that and he's not the first.
All of our presidents have probably acted on that assumption, but they didn't want to test it too much. They tried to keep their violations of law as secret as possible. Trump's difference is that he puts it all right out on the table, pretty much he makes it clear, I think, that he wants to change the nature of this government to an executive that is beyond any law, and accountability. And I think that's what's at stake in this election.
You very unusually, we're choosing actually in favor or against someone who wants an absolutely unaccountable, executive himself, even I don't think he should be regarded as totally joking when he talks about going against the amendment to the Constitution, that limits him to two terms when he says he wants a third, fourth, fifth term. Well, fifth is stretching it in terms of life expectancy, especially as we know today with the virus. But in terms of the third term, I don't think he should be regarded as joking on that.
This could be, from his point of view, the last real election in terms he admires, above all, dictator for life by name. He said it even openly. That's one of the things he admires about them, Xi, Duterte , Putin, president for life has a good ring to him. That has to be I think people should take that very seriously when they come to the polls. And in fact, we've just seen how communicable CV 19 is for the president's example.
That puts a very great incentive to vote by mail for sure. And a lot of people are going to do that. And yet we have a president who from perhaps from his sickbed, is going to continue to urge to say mail-in ballots, which might be 40 percent of the ballots are invalid, are not to be counted. That puts a pretty good premium on taking a chance, wearing a big mask, wearing gloves, going to the polls. And notice, this is a president who is openly calling for proud boys and for others to stand by and to as many people as possible to go to the polls and watch. Watch what? Intimidate. Obviously, these the kind of tactics that the brownshirts used in Germany, the Blackshirts in Italy. And I think that's what he's what he's calling for.
So, the word fascist has not come out of my mouth that I can think of till this week because as I was growing up, that was a kind of hyperbole, that's all in the past. We fought that and we beat that in World War 2. To call somebody a fascist now, it's just a rhetorical overkill and it discounts you from like I've gone along with that up till now, use the word discriminatingly. I think the time has come now to say we are looking at a would-be fascist in the White House or wannabe. In fact, he is a fascist right now. And I'm saying that having just looked up definitions of fascism, which are wide-ranging and rather controversial, they have certain elements in common in general and anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-liberal parliamentarians.
So he doesn't believe in being constructed by Congress or by the laws or by Constitution. Another element which was not perceived in him, though, it should have been in 2016. There were people I just read in reading who said he's not a fascist, he's a Proteau, he's a right-wing populist. Let's be exact here, you know, like the right-wing populists we see in Europe. OK, fine. And here's why he's not a fascist. He's not calling for violence. That was 2016 and actually, he already was but on a small scale. He doesn't have a he doesn't have a fascist party. Well, let's think about the Republican Party at this point.
But above all, he doesn't want to overthrow the Constitution to form a government. I look at Donald Trump now, and I think he does. I think he is in the sense of the oath I took as a Marine, as a State Department employee, as a Defense Department employee, every member of the government, every member of Congress takes an oath not to a president or a fuhrer or industry, but to the commander in chief. But to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I think Donald Trump is a domestic enemy of the Constitution. Not in a rhetorical sense in the sense that I took an oath to defend and support against, and I think people who took that oath to the government right now should be thinking of what their duties are in terms of telling the truth or on the other hand, protecting him in his lies and being silent about them.
We're facing very much a constitutional crisis. We're being tested and we have a chance right now to protect ourselves from that move into fascism.
Paul JayAnd The New York Times that I think understands much of what you just said. And they're probably coming to agree with much of what you just said.
How do they not connect that this attack on Assange is just what the Obama administration said it would be. It could lead to a potential charge against The New York Times itself.
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