Julian Assange’s Arrest, Another Nail in the Coffin of a Free Press

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was arrested by British police yesterday after 7 years of refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

It’s another sad day for the freedom of the press worldwide, and one more example of the way the U.S. bullies other nations around the world, forcing them to do America’s dirty work. (Watch reports here, and here.)

The United States is undoubtedly seeking Assange’s extradition to this country where the Trump administration is eager to charge him with conspiring to hack U.S. computers and stealing military intelligence in 2010.

A number of pundits are also linking Assange to the debunked and moribund Russia-gate conspiracy because they apparently don’t have anything better to do with their useless careers.

The entire affair would all be a colossal joke were it not for the extraordinary abuse suffered by Mr. Assange and the horrendous consequences entailed for a free press.

Here are just a few of the problems:

To begin with, the Obama Justice department worked for years to dig up enough evidence to charge Assange with the very same crime that the Trump administration wants to charge him with today. Yet, they failed to discover a scrap of incriminating evidence.

Assange is the victim of an American vendetta. Wikileaks has embarrassed the world’s sole super-power, and super-powers don’t take their humiliations  lying down.

None of this should be happening. If Trump’s Justice Department has found the evidence that eluded all of the Obama administration’s best efforts, then they should make it public, pronto.

Furthermore, Assange is not an American citizen, so it’s impossible for him to commit “treason” against the U.S., despite the many accusations made by ignorant U.S. officials.

Assange is an Australian.

For the U.S. to put a foreign national on trial for supposedly breaking U.S. security laws would set a dangerous precedent to set. But then, no one has ever accused American politicians, including Donald Trump, of excessively long-range thinking.

Many American journalists regularly print stories that rely on the breach of foreign intelligence laws.  Is Trump, or any other president, going to hand U.S. journalists over to China or North Korea or Russia or whoever else wants them when that foreign country accuses them of printing stories that reveal their foreign state secrets?

I don’t think so.

Ahem….why, then, should an American president think he has the right to do this to an Australian who has never lived in the U.S.?

Wikileaks is a publication outlet for whistle-blowers around the world.  If you are unfamiliar with the types of materials they have published in the past, check out the the following report from RT with Dan Cohen to hear about only a few of the many valuable “secrets” that have been exposed through Wikileaks.

Both Assange and others who work with Wikileaks have always maintained that they are not hackers. Yet, the U.S. continues to accuse Assange of hacking, which he obviously denies. Naturally, he could be lying, but then why has no one ever produced the kind of evidence needed to prove Assange a liar?

Wikileaks has always described itself as a publishing clearinghouse, of

sorts, for the documents obtained by whistle-blowers around the world.  It will accept such material, review it with the help of other intelligence agencies, make their own editorial decisions, and then release the (redacted) material for world consumption.

Their publications typically expose the corruption and criminality of governments and world leaders. In this regard, Wikileaks provides an extremely valuable service to the world.

This means that Wikileaks is a journalistic enterprise; it is a news outlet. As many others have pointed out, prosecuting Julian Assange and Wikileaks is the equivalent of prosecuting the New York Times or the Washington Post or Fox News for publishing and/or broadcasting government documents that have been “leaking” to them.

The establishment press’s insistence that Wikileaks is not a journalism organization is absolute rubbish, plain and simple. Many of these other journalists and newspapers have happily printed leaked intelligence information that was first handed over to them by Wikileaks.

If Assange is prosecuted, then the editors of all those newspapers, magazines and TV networks should be next in line, and the conservative pundits who actually believe that such prosecutions would be a good thing haven’t the foggiest notion of what it means to be truly “un-American.”

Both Assange and the numerous whistle-blowers from whom he has received documents over the years all insist that neither he nor anyone affiliated with Wikileaks have been involved in obtaining documents themselves by computer hacking.

The two best known whistle-blowers have been Edward Snowden and

Bradley (now Chelsey) Manning. They both insist that Wikileaks received their hacked intelligence documents when they were offered to them but had nothing to do with taking the information from government computers.

Frankly, I view both Snowden and Manning as national heroes. The American public only knows about the U.S. government’s illegal, anti-Constitutional programs of warrantless, worldwide wire-tapping and surveillance because of the material Snowden handed over to Wikileaks and other outlets.

Similarly, we only learned the truth about U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan

and Iraq, including the astonishing levels of civilian casualties during the Iraq War, because of Manning’s communications with Wikileaks.

American citizens have a right to know about the crimes committed by their government.

Despite the repeated hue and cry about these whistle-blowers “having American blood on their hands,” no one has ever produced a single piece of evidence to show that these leaks actually put a single American life “at risk” anywhere in the world.  Sure, the accusation makes for a dramatic propaganda talking-point, but in the words of a well-known T.V. commercial, no one has ever been able to produce the beef.

The collaboration between conscientious whistle-blowers like Snowden and Manning together with publication outlets like Wikileaks, provide an essential service to all the people of the world who care about freedom, democracy, justice and accountability.

Finally, since Assange is being accused of conspiring to hack U.S. intelligence computers with Bradley Manning in 2010, let’s recall what all of that entailed.

Remember, first, that Manning has always denied any involvement by Assange. His military trial, where he was convicted, failed to produce any evidence to the contrary.

Manning was working with military intelligence in Iraq when his superior officers ordered him to investigate and arrest the Iraqi “insurgents” distributing anti-American, “terrorist” leaflets allegedly fomenting violence against the new U.S. backed government.

When Manning had the leaflets translated, he discovered that they were not advocating terrorism or violence of any sort. They were actually political fliers offering legitimate criticisms of the new government.

Manning went to his superior officers with this information and informed them that the group was not threatening violence or terrorism. Rather, they were merely an opposition political party doing what politicians do in a democracy – arguing against the establishment. The leaflets were simply an example of democracy in action.

Manning’s superiors told him to be quiet and do what he was ordered to do; namely, find the critics, confiscate their materials, have them arrested and thrown into jail.

That was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.

Manning disobeyed his orders, downloaded a treasure-trove of classified material documenting American crimes, atrocities and mismanagement. He then handed it all over to Wikileaks.

One of the pieces of information released by Wikileaks was the now famous film from an Apache helicopter that came to be called the “Collateral Damage” video.  I used to show it to my classes at Calvin College.

“Collateral Damage” was filmed through a helicopter gun site. It shows the indiscriminate slaughter of over a dozen civilians, including two Reuters

journalists, walking in an Iraqi suburb. The film concludes with the murder of a father and child who were gunned down when the father stopped his van in order to pick up the wounded and take them to a local hospital.

The family’s van was riddled with bullets. Fortunately, one of the two children inside survived. You can hear the helicopter pilot talking with someone at ground control as he gets the van in his sights. After unleashing the storm of lethal bullets, one of them notes that the pilot had just shot an innocent family with children.

The pilot responds by saying, “Well, that’s what happens when you bring your kids into a war zone.”

The man’s callousness is stunning. His arrogance and stupidity, remarkable.

Never mind that it was actually America that brought the war zone into this family’s backyard; that this father was picking up his children from school when he saw strangers bleeding to death on the side of the road; that he was the Good Samaritan riddled with bullets by the heartless Pharisees of American imperialism.

The Collateral Damage video was only the tip of Manning’s iceberg of previously concealed U.S intelligence, demonstrating once again that both the secrecy and the national security designations are typically used to hide national embarrassments and conceal government crimes.

People like Chelsey Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange deserve medals of honor, not senseless, interminable persecution by abusive governments hell-bent on hiding their flagrant crimes against humanity behind a bogus curtain of national security.

Every world citizen who cares about democracy, truth and equal justice for all must protest and stand against Julian Assange’s illegal arrest.

Otherwise, Assange’s eventual trial and certain conviction on Trumped-up charges will be one more nail in the coffin of a free press.