In June 2022, when Russia’s overseas ministry introduced that it was contemplating “stringent measures” in opposition to United States media shops in response to US restrictions on Russian media, the US Department of State huffily complained that the Kremlin was “engaged in a full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth”.
This kind of hypocrisy was nothing new; in spite of everything, the world’s self-appointed biggest democracy has lengthy made it clear that primary rights and freedoms are issues that solely its enemies should abide by. The shameless double customary allows the US to do stuff like make a ruckus over Cuba’s political prisoners whereas concurrently working an unlawful US jail on occupied Cuban territory – or name out China for an alleged “spy balloon” whereas concurrently spying on China and everybody else on the planet.
And on Wednesday, February 21, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accomplished one final authorized try and keep away from extradition to the US, the nation’s personal “full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth” was as soon as once more on full show.
If extradited, the Australian-born Assange faces as much as 175 years in jail on spying fees – which once more is fairly wealthy coming from a nation with an in depth historical past of illegally spying by itself residents. In actuality, Assange’s solely “crime” was to utilise WikiLeaks to show the reality of US navy crimes, as within the infamous “Collateral Murder” video that was launched in 2010.
The video footage, which dates from 2007, exhibits a bloodbath of a dozen folks in Baghdad by upbeat helicopter-borne US navy personnel, who didn’t discover it mandatory to hide the extent to which they had been getting off on the slaughter.
Among the murdered Iraqis had been two staffers for the Reuters information company. Talk about assaults on media freedom.
The US insists that, by publishing such content material, Assange actively endangered the lives of harmless folks in Iraq, Afghanistan, and past. But as I’ve identified earlier than, it will appear that one surefire strategy to not endanger harmless lives in such locations can be to chorus from blowing them up within the first place.
To make sure, it’s common data that the US has killed an entire lot of civilians in an entire lot of nations, though the official narrative nonetheless maintains that every one killing is finally executed within the identify of freedom, democracy, and different noble targets – reasonably than for sport or enjoyable, as is likely to be urged by the “Collateral Murder” manufacturing.
So why, then, the necessity for such over-the-top pretences to secrecy and the super-vilification of the individual of Julian Assange?
In the top, the US can’t afford to have its world do-gooder disguise too relentlessly or completely challenged – since an excessive amount of “access to information and the truth” would relieve the nation of its alibi for wreaking havoc the world over. Regardless of the ultimate end result, the protracted US battle on Assange has already set a chilling precedent by way of press freedom and different important liberties.
Indeed, the calculated bodily and psychological destruction of Assange is supposed to discourage different publishers and journalists from the crime of pursuing the reality, because the US has successfully undertaken to categorise actuality itself. To that finish, pending his extradition to the US, Assange has been held for the previous 5 years in Belmarsh jail in southeast London, the place the British authorities has proved faithfully complicit within the protracted efforts to result in his demise.
Shortly after Assange’s arrest and incarceration in 2019, the United Nations particular rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer warned that the person’s life was in danger, and that he exhibited “all the symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.
Melzer, who’s now a professor of worldwide legislation on the University of Glasgow, additionally remarked on the time that, “while the US Government prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.”
Maybe Melzer ought to have been jailed, too?
And as Assange’s extradition battle now involves a detailed, it appears the US could in the end get to definitively kill the messenger – and never simply metaphorically. As his spouse Stella Assange not too long ago informed reporters, “If he’s extradited, he will die.”
But Julian Assange’s persecution and torment additionally represent a loss of life sentence for any approximation of democracy and justice within the United States of America, a rustic whose structure supposedly enshrines freedom of speech and the press.
At any charge, injustice has already scored a serious victory with the continual underreporting in US company media of Assange’s trials, which National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has described as “the most important press freedom case in the world”.
In different phrases, this needs to be main information for the information business itself. But disappearing the reality is one other strategy to kill it – and in that respect, Julian Assange is already lifeless.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/2/22/the-trials-of-julian-assange-a-death-sentence-for-democracy?traffic_source=rss
