Stratfor email: U.S. Has Sealed Indictment of Assange

 A January 2011 email  from Fred Burton, Vice President for Intelligence at Stratfor reveals that the US Department of Justice has a sealed indictment against Wikileaks founder and spokesman Julian Assange.

Fw: [CT] Assange-Manning Link Not Key to WikiLeaks Case
Email-ID     375123
Date     2011-01-26 15:23:28
From     burton@stratfor.com
To     secure@stratfor.com
Not for Pub --
We have a sealed indictment on Assange.
Pls protect
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Sean Noonan
Sender: ct-bounces@stratfor.com
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:16:53 -0600
To: CT AOR
ReplyTo: CT AOR
Subject: [CT] Assange-Manning Link Not Key to WikiLeaks Case
January 25, 2011 3:37 PM
Assange-Manning Link Not Key to WikiLeaks Case

A report that investigators have so far failed to establish a direct link between the founder of the document-dumping website WikiLeaks and the Army private accused of providing the site with hundreds of thousands of secret State Department cables won't derail the military's case as much as it might seem.
The case against Army Pfc. Bradley Manning didn't hinge on investigators uncovering a direct link to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange anyway,


But no one ever thought there was direct contact between Assange and Manning, Martin reports. Assange meeting or e-mailing Manning would be like the director of the Central Intelligence Agency meeting or e-mailing a CIA agent. The theory of the case is that Assange orchestrated the leak through cut outs deliberately designed to immunize himself from charges of espionage.
In his own e-mails, Manning refers to himself as a source for Assange even though he did not give the documents to Assange but allegedly to a third person while home on Christmas leave, Martin reports.

The Espionage Act of 1917 


The chilling intent and affect of the Espionage Act as described by Naomi Wolf:

The Espionage Act was crafted in 1917 -- because President Woodrow Wilson wanted a war and, faced with the troublesome First Amendment, wished to criminalize speech critical of his war. In the run-up to World War One, there were many ordinary citizens -- educators, journalists, publishers, civil rights leaders, union activists -- who were speaking out against US involvement in the war. The Espionage Act was used to round these citizens by the thousands for the newly minted 'crime' of their exercising their First Amendment Rights. A movie producer who showed British cruelty in a film about the Revolutionary War (since the British were our allies in World War I) got a ten-year sentence under the Espionage act in 1917, and the film was seized; poet E.E. Cummings spent three and a half months in a military detention camp under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of saying that he did not hate Germans. Esteemed Judge Learned Hand wrote that the wording of the Espionage Act was so vague that it would threaten the American tradition of freedom itself. Many were held in prison for weeks in brutal conditions without due process; some, in Connecticut -- Lieberman's home state -- were severely beaten while they were held in prison. The arrests and beatings were widely publicized and had a profound effect, terrorizing those who would otherwise speak out.