Biden's Atrocious Assange Policy
"A confident government that is unafraid of the truth embraces a free press,” proclaimed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. But he was referring only to the Chinese government crackdown on Hong Kong journalists early last year. Unfortunately, the Biden administration continues rushing to destroy one of the most important truth tellers of our times.
Julian Assange has been locked away for four years in a maximum-security prison in Britain. Assange was initially charged in 2019 with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” for allegedly giving advice to Army Corporal Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning on dealing with government files. 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.
It Began with WikiLeaks
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 ACLU warned that prosecuting him for WikiLeaks’ publishing operations would be “unconstitutional” and sets a “dangerous precedent for U.S. journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public’s interest.”...
After filing the initial charge, Trump’s Justice Department added 17 charges against Assange for allegedly violating the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information....
Few Americans are aware of the Iron Curtain shrouding U.S. foreign policy. Consider the U.S. military intervention in Syria. Beginning in 2013, the Obama administration began covertly providing money and weapons to Syrian rebels fighting the government of Bashar Assad....
Assange declared years ago, “If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth.”...
Related
Julian Assange - A Fight We Must Not Lose, by Chris Hedges, 12 May 2023:
The detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British, Swedish and U.S. governments are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite, will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment.
The legal lynching of Julian, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.
Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Donald Trump criminalize journalism and demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Under what law did the CIA violate attorney-client privilege, surveil and record all of Julian’s conversations both digital and verbal with his lawyers and plot to kidnap him from the Embassy and assassinate him?...
Fear the puppet masters, not the puppets. They are the enemy within.
This is a fight for Julian, who I know and admire. It is a fight for his family, who are working tirelessly for his release. It is a fight for the rule of law. It is a fight for the freedom of the press. It is a fight to save what is left of our diminishing democracy. And it is a fight we must not lose.
US Officials Confronted on Assange Hypocrisy, by Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News, 4 May 2023:
... There is nothing about the Assange case that is on-message with the White House narrative. Just the other day Biden said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that “journalism is not a crime,” yet his persecution of Assange is deliberately designed to criminalize journalism....
There’s simply no way to reconcile the U.S. government’s story about itself with its efforts to normalize the extradition and persecution of a journalist under the Espionage Act....
The Julian Assange Media Blackout Must End
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The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time
More articles on the persecution of Julian Assange
A Radically Different World Since Assange's Indictment - video, by Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 29 January 2024.