Julian Assange Persecuted for Truth-Telling
This month marks the 13th anniversary since the publication of the now globally renowned video known as “Collateral Murder”. The short video clip of approximately 39 minutes in duration shows the cold-blooded murder of 18 Iraqi civilians by American troops flying Apache helicopter gunships over Baghdad...
When “Collateral Murder” was published on April 5, 2010, it was a world-changing event and it delivered a lightning bolt for truth because it uniquely exposed the systematic war criminality of the United States and its British accomplice in Iraq...
Yet the man who published that truth, Julian Assange, is today held in a British torture dungeon...
Australian-born Assange (51) founded Wikileaks in 2006 as a publishing site dedicated to whistleblowers to help expose war propaganda. Unlike other mainstream media outlets, Wikileaks had the courage and integrity to release the video footage that became known as “Collateral Murder”...
The United States and British establishments have never forgiven Julian Assange for his truth-telling and the fatal damage he inflicted on their pretensions...
Julian Assange has been held in arbitrary detention in Britain for nearly 11 years. He was forced to seek refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in London in 2012 over trumped-up sex offence charges (which have since been dismissed). He was later forcibly removed from the embassy by British police in April 2019 and imprisoned in Belmarsh High-Security Prison. For the past four years, Assange has been kept in solitary confinement under conditions that a United Nations special rapporteur Nils Melzer describes as “torture”...
It is a shocking and frightening fact that Julian Assange has been subjected to all this persecution while on remand. He has not been convicted of any crime...
... ironically, the fate of Assange could very much destroy independent journalism and freedom of speech – the principles that Western media declare sacred...
Related
Corporate Media Are the Anti-WikiLeaks, Consortium News, 17 April 2023.
The Totalitarian Dystopia Is Already Here, by Caitlin Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, 18 April 2023:
... The goal is to keep us fighting with as much hostility as possible over issues which inconvenience our rulers as little as possible. It’s really amazing how successful they are at this...
You couldn’t design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than the one we’re in right now. One where everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free... we’re already in a dystopia where we are doing exactly as they wish...
So when I ask you to picture an anti-authoritarian figure who comes to mind, if you are lucid you won’t picture someone like Tank Man, Navalny, Gandhi, Mandela or MLK. You’ll picture someone like Julian Assange: someone who’s fighting the real power where it stands here and now.
Biden Regime's Atrocious Assange Prosecution, by James Bovard, 17 April 2023:
... Julian Assange has been locked away for four years in a maximum-security prison in Britain... But all the National Security Agency officials who have conspired to illegally intrude into Americans’ personal computers face no indictments, and likewise for the presidents who approved their crimes...
Assange was targeted by the U.S. government after his organization, WikiLeaks, disclosed hundreds of thousands of U.S. documents, including exposés of crimes committed by the U.S. military against Afghan and Iraqi civilians...
The Obama administration examined the case against Assange and concluded that he could not be prosecuted without setting precedents that imperiled freedom of the press. But that concern didn’t hobble the Trump administration....
... Trump’s Justice Department added 17 charges against Assange for allegedly violating the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information. The Espionage Act is a World War One relic that presidents are increasingly using to suppress exposure of U.S. government crimes at home and abroad...
After Britain acceded to U.S. government demands to arrest Assange, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt boasted that the arrest showed “no one is above the law.” Except for the governments whose crimes WikiLeaks and Assange exposed....
Assange’s cause may not be hopeless, as more people in America and abroad are speaking up on his behalf...
Media outlets are also belatedly taking a firm stand against the suppression of truth. On November 28, the New York Times — along with its British, French, Spanish, and German partners who published WikiLeaks revelations — published a joint open letter on the danger of the Assange prosecution: “Holding governments accountable is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy.”...
There’s an old saying: If exposing a crime is a crime, then you’re being ruled by criminals...
A Radically Different World Since Assange's Indictment - video, by Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 29 January 2024.