Democracide
The trials of Julian
Assange: A death sentence for democracy
America’s ‘full assault on media
freedom, access to information, and the truth’ is once again on full display.
Al Jazeera columnist
Published On 22 Feb 202422 Feb 2024
A protester
stands outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Wednesday, February 21,
2024., where Julian Assange's lawyers are on their final UK legal challenge to
stop the WikiLeaks founder from being sent to the United States to face spying
charges [Kin Cheung/AP Photo]
In June 2022, when Russia’s foreign
ministry announced that it was considering “stringent measures” against United
States media outlets 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 sort of hypocrisy was nothing
new; after all, the world’s self-appointed greatest democracy has long made it
clear that basic rights and freedoms are things that only its enemies must
abide by. The shameless double standard enables the US to do stuff like make a
ruckus over Cuba’s political prisoners while simultaneously operating an illegal US prison on occupied Cuban
territory – or call out China for an alleged “spy
balloon” while simultaneously spying on China and everyone else on
the planet.
And on Wednesday, February 21, as
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange completed on
last legal attempt to avoid extradition to the US, the country’s own
“full assault on media freedom, access to information, and the truth” was once
again on full display.
If extradited, the Australian-born
Assange faces up to 175 years in prison on spying charges – which again is
pretty rich coming from a nation with an extensive history of illegally spying
on its own citizens. In reality, Assange’s only “crime” was to utilise
WikiLeaks to expose the truth of US military crimes, as in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video that was released
in 2010.
The video footage, which dates from
2007, shows a massacre of a dozen people in Baghdad by upbeat helicopter-borne
US military personnel, who did not find it necessary to conceal the extent to
which they were getting off on the slaughter.
Among the murdered Iraqis were two
staffers for the Reuters news agency. Talk about assaults on media freedom.
The US insists that, by publishing
such content, Assange actively endangered the lives of innocent people in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and beyond. But as I have pointed
out before, it would seem that one surefire way to not endanger
innocent lives in such places would be to refrain from blowing them up in the
first place.
To be sure, it is common knowledge
that the US has killed a whole lot of civilians in a whole lot of countries,
although the official narrative still maintains that all killing is ultimately
done in the name of freedom, democracy, and other noble goals – rather than for
sport or fun, as might be suggested by the “Collateral Murder” production.
So why, then, the need for such
over-the-top pretences to secrecy and the super-vilification of the person of
Julian Assange?
In the end, the US can’t afford to
have its global do-gooder disguise too relentlessly or thoroughly challenged –
since too much “access to information and the truth” would relieve the nation
of its alibi for wreaking havoc across the world. Regardless of the final
outcome, the protracted US war on Assange has already set a chilling precedent
in terms of press freedom and other essential liberties.
Indeed, the calculated physical and
mental destruction of Assange is meant to deter other publishers and
journalists from the crime of pursuing the truth, as the US has effectively
undertaken to classify reality itself. To that end, pending his extradition to
the US, Assange has been held for the past five years in Belmarsh prison in
southeast London, where the British government has proved faithfully complicit
in the protracted efforts to bring about his demise.
Shortly after Assange’s arrest and
incarceration in 2019, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture Nils
Melzer warned that the man’s life was at risk, and that he exhibited “all the
symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.
Melzer, who is now a professor of
international law at the University of Glasgow, also remarked at 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.”
And as Assange’s extradition battle
now comes to a close, it seems the US may at long last get to definitively kill
the messenger – and not just metaphorically. As his wife Stella Assange
recently told reporters, “If
he’s extradited, he will die.”
But Julian Assange’s persecution and
torment also constitute a death sentence for any approximation of democracy and
justice in the United States of America, a country whose constitution
supposedly enshrines freedom of speech and the press.
At any rate, injustice has already
scored a major victory with the chronic underreporting in US corporate 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 other words, this should be major
news for the news industry itself. But disappearing the truth is another way to
kill it – and in that respect, Julian Assange is already dead.
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