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In June 2022, when Russia's International Ministry introduced that it was contemplating “more durable measures” towards United States media retailers in response to US sanctions on Russian media, the US State Division complained that the Kremlin ” The media was engaged in a full-scale assault on “freedom, entry to data and reality”.
This sort of hypocrisy was nothing new; In spite of everything, the world's self-proclaimed best democracy has lengthy made it clear that fundamental rights and freedoms are issues that ought to solely be upheld by its enemies. The shameless double commonplace allows the US to do issues like crack down on Cuban political prisoners whereas concurrently working an unlawful US jail on occupied Cuban territory – or name out China for alleged “spy balloons” and with Additionally spies on China and everybody else. Planet.
And on Wednesday, February 21, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accomplished one final authorized effort to keep away from extradition to the US, the nation's personal “full assault on media freedom, entry to data and the reality” was as soon as once more full. Was on show.
If extradited, Australian-born Assange might withstand 175 years in jail on espionage fees – a hefty sum coming from a rustic infamous for illegally spying by itself residents. Has an intensive historical past. In actual fact, Assange's solely “crime” was utilizing WikiLeaks to show the reality about US navy crimes, as within the notorious “Collateral Homicide” video launched in 2010.
The video footage, which dates again to 2007, reveals the bloodbath of a dozen folks by helicopter-borne US navy personnel in Baghdad, who didn’t discover it vital to cover the extent of the bloodbath they had been finishing up.
Two staff of the Reuters information company had been additionally among the many Iraqis killed. Speak about an assault on media freedom.
The US says that by publishing such materials, Assange has actively endangered the lives of harmless folks in Iraq, Afghanistan and past. However as I've talked about earlier than, it looks like a surefire method to not endanger the lives of harmless folks in such locations could be to keep away from blowing them up within the first place.
Certain, it's frequent data that the US has killed quite a lot of civilians in lots of international locations, though the official narrative nonetheless maintains that every one killing is in the end finished within the title of freedom, democracy, and different noble objectives – sports activities or Fairly than leisure, because the “Collateral Homicide” manufacturing may recommend.
Why, then, does the secrecy and hyper-condemnation of Julian Assange's persona require such excessive publicity?
Lastly, the US can’t afford to have its world benefactor guise too persistently or utterly challenged – as a result of an excessive amount of “entry to data and reality” would give the nation any pretext for wreaking havoc around the globe. Whatever the final consequence, the lengthy US struggle on Assange has already set a horrible precedent when it comes to freedom of the press and different important freedoms.
Certainly, Assange's bodily and psychological destruction is deliberate to discourage different publishers and journalists from committing the crime of pursuing the reality, simply because the US has successfully labeled actuality. To that finish, pending extradition to the US, Assange has been held in Belmarsh jail in southeast London for the previous 5 years, the place the British authorities has confirmed faithfully cooperative in its lengthy efforts to result in his demise.
Shortly after Assange's arrest and imprisonment in 2019, Nils Meltzer, the United Nations Particular Rapporteur on torture, warned that the person's life was at risk, and that he displayed “all of the signs typical for extended publicity to psychological torture”. .
Meltzer, now professor of worldwide legislation on the College of Glasgow, additionally commented on the time that, “Whereas the U.S. authorities prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing details about critical human rights violations, together with torture and homicide, its “The officers liable for these crimes proceed to function with impunity.”
Perhaps Melzer ought to have gone to jail too?
And as Assange's extradition struggle now attracts to an in depth, it seems just like the US could lastly be killing the messenger definitively – and never simply symbolically. As his spouse Stella Assange lately advised reporters, “If he’s extradited, he’ll die.”
However the persecution and struggling of Julian Assange constitutes a dying sentence for any presumption of democracy and justice in the US, a rustic whose Structure supposedly enshrines freedom of speech and the press.
At any price, the injustice of the persistent under-reporting of Assange's trial within the American company media has already been achieved in what Nationwide Safety Company whistleblower Edward Snowden has described as “a very powerful press freedom case on this planet.”
In different phrases, this information ought to be main information for the business itself. However making the reality disappear is simply one other method of destroying it – and in that respect, Julian Assange is already lifeless.
The views expressed on this article are these of the writer and don’t essentially mirror the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.