Tuesday 16th of April 2024
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we all owe assange a tremendous debt…...

Caitlin Johnstone: Assange is doing his most important work yet

 

Thanks to him, we know what Western leaders' claimed support of free press is really worth

 

By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

 

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has authorized the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States to be tried under the Espionage Act in a case which seeks to set a legal precedent for the prosecution of any publisher or journalist, anywhere in the world, who reports inconvenient truths about the US empire.

Assange’s legal team will appeal the decision, reportedly with arguments that will include the fact that the CIA spied on him and plotted his assassination.

“It will likely be a few days before the (14-day appeal) deadline and the appeal will include new information that we weren’t able to bring before the courts previously. Information on how Julian lawyers were spied on, and how there were plots to kidnap and kill Julian from within the CIA,” Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton told Reuters on Friday.

And thank goodness. Assange’s willingness to resist Washington’s extradition attempts benefit us all, from his taking political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 until British police forcibly dragged him out in 2019, to his fighting US prosecutors in the courtroom tooth and claw during his incarceration in Belmarsh Prison.

Assange’s fight against US extradition benefits us not just because the empire’s war against truth harms our entire species and not just because he cannot receive a fair trial under the Espionage Act, but because his refusal to bow down and submit forces the empire to overextend itself into the light and show us all what it’s really made of.

Washington, London and Canberra are colluding to imprison a journalist for telling the truth: the first with its active extradition attempts, the second with its loyal facilitation of those attempts, and the third with its silent complicity in allowing an Australian journalist to be locked up and persecuted for engaging in the practice of journalism. By refusing to lie down and forcing them to come after him, Assange has exposed some harsh realities of which the public has largely been kept unaware.

The fact that London and Canberra are complying so obsequiously with Washington’s agendas, even while their own mainstream media outlets decry the extradition and even while all major human rights and press freedom watchdog groups in the Western world say Assange must go free, shows that these are not separate sovereign nations but member states of a single globe-spanning empire centralized around the US government. Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more attention is being brought to this reality.

By standing his ground and fighting them, Assange has also exposed the lie that the so-called free democracies of the Western world support the free press and defend human rights. The US, UK and Australia are colluding to extradite a journalist for exposing the truth even as they claim to oppose tyranny and autocracy, even as they claim to support world press freedoms, and even as they loudly decry the dangers of government-sponsored disinformation.

 

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, it will always reek of hypocrisy when US presidents like Joe Biden say things like, “The free press is not the enemy of the people — far from it. At your best, you’re guardians of the truth.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, people will always know British prime ministers like Boris Johnson are lying when they say things like, “Media organisations should feel free to bring important facts into the public domain.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, more of us will understand that they are being deceived and manipulated when Australian prime ministers like Anthony Albanese say things like “We need to protect press freedom in law and ensure every Australian can have their voice heard,” and “Don’t prosecute journalists for just doing their jobs.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, US secretaries of state like Antony Blinken will have a much harder time selling their schtick when they say things like “On World Press Freedom Day, the United States continues to advocate for press freedom, the safety of journalists worldwide, and access to information on and offline. A free and independent press ensures the public has access to information. Knowledge is power.”

Because Assange stood his ground and fought them, UK home secretaries like Priti Patel will be seen for the frauds they are when they say things like “The safety of journalists is fundamental to our democracy.”

Extraditing a foreign journalist for exposing your war crimes is as tyrannical an agenda as you could possibly come up with. The US, UK and Australia colluding toward this end shows us that these are member states of a single empire whose only values are domination and control, and that all its posturing about human rights is pure facade. Assange keeps exposing the true face of power.

There is in fact a strong argument to be made that even all these years after the 2010 leaks for which he is currently being prosecuted, Assange is doing his most important work yet. As important as his WikiLeaks publications were and are, none of them exposed the depravity of the empire as much as forcing them to look us in the eye and tell us they’ll extradite a journalist for telling the truth.

Assange accomplished this by planting his feet and saying “No,” even when every other possible option would have been easier and more pleasant. Even when it was hard. Even when it was terrifying. Even when it meant being locked away, silenced, smeared, hated, unable to fight back against his detractors, unable to live a normal life, unable to hold his children, unable even to feel sunlight on his face.

His very life casts light on all the areas where it is most sorely needed. We all owe this man a tremendous debt. The least we can do is try our best to get him free.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/557402-assange-extradition-press-freedom/

 

 

SEE ALSO:

laughing at vlad who is decent enough not to laugh at us…...

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW #########################

expect no justice…..

 

By ROBER BRIDGES

 

After years on the run from various governments, Wikileaks editor Julian Assange now appears to be heading to the United States, where he can expect to face an election-year show trial built upon a mountain of media-supported lies.

This week, the UK Home Office announced, with no small degree of irony, that extraditing Assange to the United States, where he is wanted for his role in leaking thousands of sensitive government documents, would not impinge upon his “right to a fair trial and … freedom of expression.”

That is fresh, considering that it is precisely the question of ‘freedom of expression’ that made the Australian-born editor and activist the world’s most wanted man in the first place. It is hard to calculate what effect Assange’s extradition, should it occur, will have on press freedoms around the world. The word ‘chilling’ comes to mind. 

Julian Assange’s grand foray onto the world stage occurred in 2010, when WikiLeaks published close to 750,000 classified military and diplomatic documents provided by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

Arguably the most devastating batch was The Iraqi War Logs, which represents the biggest military leak in the history of the United States. The records provided irrefutable evidence that American and British officials had deceived the world when they claimed there was no official tallying of civilian deaths in the Iraq war. In a user-friendly dashboard, Wikileaks allowed millions of people to locate 66,081 civilian deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities for the period from January 1, 2004 to December 1, 2009. This is the sort of transparency few militaries relish.

While revelations of Iraqi civilian deaths were shocking, they were not necessarily surprising. After all, by this time the American public had already been introduced to lurid places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, humanitarian no-go zones where the torture and abuse of inmates pulled back the curtain on a sick and twisted side to the military mind few could have imagined. Moreover, there was no way for the United States to sweet talk its way out of these allegations, which were there for all to see in black and white.

What is it, then, that has really made Julian Assange America’s most wanted man, who faces up to 175 years in prison merely for playing messenger? Let’s not forget that other news media, including The Guardian, New York Times, and Der Spiegel, among many others, also published the damning information, yet it is Assange who faces espionage charges in the United States.

 

What is the real reason that Julian Assange was forced to seek refuge in June 2012 at the Ecuadorian embassy in London after Sweden issued a warrant for his arrest over allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been dropped? Perhaps it has more to do with his uncovering of illegitimate activity inside the Democratic Party than any excessive deaths and atrocities on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan?

In the run up to the 2016 presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, WikiLeaks released a devastating trove of emails either hacked or leaked from Clinton’s campaign email account. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) attempted to conceal the damage by promoting the tale that ‘Russian hackers’ had infiltrated the organization’s computers. Meanwhile, the more ‘conspiratorial’ explanation is that they were delivered to WikiLeaks via a staff member inside the DNC. More on that later.

One consequence of the leaky plumbing, aside from severely damaging Clinton’s presidential bid, was that it forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. In an embarrassing self-own, the emails showed Democrats working to undermine the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a fellow Democratic nominee, in an effort to boost Clinton.

But the story, at least for the Democrats, gets worse.

Less than a week before the elections, WikiLeaks released another batch of DNC emails, this time showing that interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile (a CNN contributor who took over for the disgraced Wasserman Schultz) had fed questions to the Clinton camp that would be asked during a CNN town hall debate against Trump. As far as ‘endangering US democracy’ goes, the Russians had nothing on that one. In fact, many furious voters were demanding that Clinton forfeit the presidency to Trump before any elections were even held.

A heavy footnote to this story is how Julian Assange and WikiLeaks got the DNC emails in the first place. On the one side is the story that ‘Russian hackers’ had cracked the DNC computers; on the other side, that an internal source within the DNC passed off the material. Regarding the second possibility, just days before the DNC email scandal broke, a DNC manager by the name of Seth Rich was gunned down on the streets of Washington, DC. This led conspiracy theorists to speculate that the young man might have been the source of the leak. Rich was murdered on July 10, while WikiLeaks issued the first of its DNC material on July 22.

While Assange refused to name the source of the DNC emails, it did not go unnoticed that WikiLeaks posted a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer or murderers of Mr. Rich.

Finally, it is certainly the greatest coincidence that Julian Assange may be paraded in chains along Pennsylvania Avenue in the midst of a tense election year, and at a time when the Democrats desperately need a good distraction from the accumulating bad news, mostly on the economic front.

And as everyone knows, and no one better than Donald J. Trump, nobody is more enthusiastic about hosting show trials than the Democratic Party. Should Assange’s appeal process fail and he be extradited to the US, nobody should be surprised when the mainstream media, loyal to the Democratic Party, forgets that the prisoner before them is a fellow journalist with a duty to call out government malfeasance, seeing him rather as the individual who may have cost Hillary Clinton the throne in 2016 against the loathsome Orange Man.

Julian Assange can expect no justice in the US, nor even any sympathy, which is why London should never have agreed to extradite him to the Empire of Lies in the first place.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/557429-assange-extradition-trial-us/

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

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BY GUS THE ELDER....

 

As the UK is preparing to "go to war against Russia" for no reason, one can see in the Julian Assange saga, the duplicity and the hypocrisy of a lost Empire. THERE IS NO REASON FOR THE UK TO PREPARE FOR WAR AGAINST RUSSIA AS THERE ARE NO REASONS TO KEEP JULIAN ASSANGE IN PRISON... Ukraine has long been declared a "corrupt" country by the West, has been a divided "country" for more than 150 years, is ruled by a little tinpot despot called Zelenskyyy-y, who has lied to the Ukrainian people about his intent, who wants to destroy the 1000 year old Russian culture of Ukraine just to please pissy masters in Washington and London.

Everyone in the West touts that Zelensky was elected on 73 per cent of voters, but by September 2021, his popularity had dipped way below 20 per cent. Why? To be elected, Zelensky had promised a rapprochement with Moscow and a respect of the Minsk Agreements. Once elected he reneged on these promises, while continuing the bombing of the autonomous Donbass region, under instruction from his master puppeteers in Washington.

Russia demanded a firm commitment from the US/NATO/EU in regard to security, back in 2021, but the West refused to negotiate. Why?

The secret (not so secret and alluded to from time to time by the boffins of the Pentagon) is to weaken Russia to destroy it. We have exposed this in Defending the Heartland and many other articles on this site for possibly 10 years. Though in the pipeline for years, the US had set up the final TRAP IN UKRAINE TO TEMPT THE RUSSIAN BEAR by 2014. Even Poroshenko has admitted that the Minsk agreements were only temporary to buy time to "rebuild" the Ukrainian military for a full-on conflict against Russia. Putin made the decision to destroy this trap before it became fully operative, as the Ukrainian army was about to invade the Donbass.... Putin has shown some extraordinary restraint by avoiding to destroy many targets in Ukraine.

 

So now we have the imbeciles comanding the British forces muscling up on steroids....

 

Russia and the UK haven’t engaged one another directly in battle since the Crimean War of 1853-1856. It was that conflict which became the subject of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the disastrous cavalry charge against Russian troops during the 1854 Battle of Balaklava which nearly wiped out British forces. Britain must prepare to return to continental Europe to fight and win a conflict against Russia, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the new Chief of the General Staff of the British Army, has said. 

“There is now a burning imperative to forge an Army capable of fighting alongside our allies and defeating Russia in battle. We are the generation that must prepare the Army to fight in Europe once again,” Sanders wrote in a letter to the troops after taking over from his predecessor, Gen. Sir Mark Carleton-Smith earlier this week.

 

 

Sanders emphasized that he was the first British chief of general staff “since 1941 to take command of the Army in the shadow of a land war in Europe involving a continental power,” carefully wording his comment to avoid mentioning NATO involvement in the 1990s Yugoslav Wars, including the 78-day-long bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

 

The general suggested that the crisis in Ukraine highlighted the Army’s “core purpose” of protecting Britain “by being ready to fight and win wars on land.”

 

Sir Patrick’s sentiments have been echoed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who wrote in an article for The Sunday Times that the UK and its allies must “steel” themselves for a “long” slog in Ukraine, and that the West needs “to enlist time on Ukraine’s side.”

 

 

Hello? Are you this frigin' stupid and MAD???? THE ENTIRE BRITISH ISLES WOULD BE WIPED OUT IN 15 MINUTES SHOULD ONE "official" British army operative sets foot in Ukraine.... The WW3 nuclear warming has been in place at least since 1959 as per newspaper articles PUBLISHED here, on this site... RUSSIA DOES NOT WANT WAR, RUSSIA DOES NOT WANT TO CONQUER UKRAINE EITHER (nor Poland nor Tumbouctou), BUT IT WISHES THAT RUSSIANS IN THE DONBASS REGION BE LEFT ALONE and that Russian security be respected by Ukraine not becoming a member of NATO. NATO is a fascist organism which the West has been using to get closer to Russia's HEARTLAND, by lying about its intent since early 1990s. Bill Clinton was the main instigator of this deceit, including the destruction of Yugoslavia, while getting his cocked sucked. And America is god's fucking country....

 

NOW IT IS HOPED THAT THIS CONFLICT WILL SEE ITS END BY JULY 30TH ACCORDING TO THAT OLD GUY, Whatiszname.... AND BY THE END OF TODAY hopefully ACCORDING TO GUS THE ELDER... with stupid Zelenskyyy-y either being shot, either resigning his presidency, either by signing a DECENT DEAL WITH RUSSIA. The intervention is lost for Ukraine no matter how much the WEST is going to "help". This "help" is only going to bring the entire planet to the brink of WW3 — and please do not blame PUTIN for this.... Blame the West's duplicity that keeps Assange in prison as well...

 

IT'S TIME TO GROW UP....;

please, volodymyr, sign a deal with russia, before morons like bojo kill more of your kids….

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.....................