The Slow-Motion Execution Of Julian Assange Continues
The decision by the High Court in London to grant Julian Assange the right to appeal the order to extradite him to the United States may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. It does not mean Julian will elude extradition. It does not mean the court has ruled, as it should, that he is a journalist whose only "crime" was providing evidence of war crimes and lies by the U.S. government to the public. It does not mean he will be released from the high-security HMS Belmarsh prison where, as Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Julian there, said he was undergoing a "slow-motion execution."...
Editors and publishers of five international media outlets -The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and DER SPIEGEL - which published stories based on documents released by WikiLeaks, have urged that the U.S. charges be dropped and Julian be released...
The judicial lynching of Julian was never about justice...
Free speech is a key issue. If Julian is granted First Amendment rights in a U.S. court it will be very difficult for the U.S. to build a criminal case against him, since other news organizations, including The New York Times and The Guardian, published the material he released.
The extradition request is based on the contention that Julian is not a journalist and not protected under the First Amendment...
Julian committed the empire’s greatest sin - he exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies, routine violation of human rights, wanton killing of innocent civilians, rampant corruption and war crimes...
The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Julian is extradited and convicted, it will become one... If there is no freedom of speech for Julian, there will be no freedom of speech for us.
Related
Julian Assange Is Being Murdered by a Fake Case that Has No Basis in Law, by Paul Craig Roberts, Lew Rockwell, 12 June 2024:
In the 1970s Pentagon Official Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times published them. It helped to end the war by showing Americans how they had been deceived by Washington. Washington tried to prosecute Ellsberg and the New York Times, but the presiding judge declared a mistrial citing government misconduct so severe as to “offend the sense of justice.”
Four decades later documents were leaked by Manning to Assange at Wikileaks who made them available to the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published some of the documents, and the leaked information was published by Wikileaks. Assange was not the leaker but had the role of the New York Times in the 1970s. The documents exposed US war crimes and deceptions by Washington of allies...
The broader issue is that Assange’s persecution is achieving the criminalization of truth if told about government misdeeds. The inability to hold government accountable doesn’t seem to bother anyone in media or government and very few among the population...
The Destruction of Julian Assange, by Jacob G. Hornberger, The Future of Freedom Foundation, Lew Rockwell, 11 June 2024: "Don't ever mess with us or we will do to you what we did to Assange."
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