The threat to Julian Assange is a threat to democracy itself
November 2021
Even as I write, the Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange is STILL IN BELMARSH PRISON in England, fighting in court the American request to take him for torture in Virginia. Yes, that is exactly what I just wrote: torture is what they will inflict if they can get Assange, the torture of solitary confinement that they influcted on Bradley Manning, in order to break his spirit. The Americans have been persecuting Assange for ten years, because he runs Wikileaks.
I consider Wikileaks journalism to be 1) a public service that helps uncover crime and corruption; and 2) an inevitable spin-off from the internet.
Look at the picture above. Compare it to the picture below of Assange with the mother of his children. The failing health of Assange after years of de facto unjust imprisonment in England is one of the arguments his lawyers advance for not allowing him to be handed over to the American InJustice System.
Caitlin Johnstone is a journalist [a self-proclaimed “rogue journalist”] and a brave, articulate woman whose writing gives me pleasure (because she writes well and tells the truth) and anger (because of the injustices she covers).
Caitlin writes in TRANSCEND this week about U.S. military massacres of civilians in Syria, and about Pentagon cover-ups. America’s war-crimes are not even investigated by American officials, let alone prosecuted. American war-crimes far outweigh those of China or Cuba or Iran or North Korea or …… (here you may place the name of whatever country that Washington has declared to be a new “enemy”).
Julian Assange and South African-born lawyer Stella Morris.
How has it happened, I ask myself, that the U.S. military has become like any repressive Banana Republic military, able to kill civilians with impunity and gloat about it? Its killings are, like its waste and corruption, subjects that elected officials will not (perhaps dare not?) touch. The Pentagon has become an out-of-control, obscene killing machine without any oversight. If it is the Pentagon that is all-powerful, maybe American “democracy” has become a sham.
Here is an example of that threat to democracy, in Caitlin’s words:
“Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed US war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.
The precedent the US government is trying to set with its persecution of Julian Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the US war machine, not just in the United States but around the world. If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about US war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.
This is what’s at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.”