In June 2022, when Russia’s international 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 Division of State huffily complained that the Kremlin was “engaged in a full assault on media freedom, entry to data, and the reality”.
This kind of hypocrisy was nothing new; in any case, 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 permits 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 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 on full show.
If extradited, the Australian-born Assange faces as much as 175 years in jail on spying prices – which once more is fairly wealthy coming from a nation with an intensive historical past of illegally spying by itself residents. In actuality, Assange’s solely “crime” was to utilise WikiLeaks to show the reality of US army crimes, as within the infamous “Collateral Homicide” video that was launched in 2010.
The video footage, which dates from 2007, reveals a bloodbath of a dozen folks in Baghdad by upbeat helicopter-borne US army personnel, who didn’t discover it needed to hide the extent to which they have been getting off on the slaughter.
Among the many murdered Iraqis have been two staffers for the Reuters information company. Speak 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. However as I’ve identified earlier than, it will appear that one surefire technique 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 information that the US has killed a complete lot of civilians in a complete lot of nations, though the official narrative nonetheless maintains that each one killing is finally carried out within the title of freedom, democracy, and different noble targets – slightly than for sport or enjoyable, as may be steered by the “Collateral Homicide” manufacturing.
So why, then, the necessity for such over-the-top pretences to secrecy and the super-vilification of the individual of Julian Assange?
Ultimately, the US can’t afford to have its international do-gooder disguise too relentlessly or totally challenged – since an excessive amount of “entry to data and the reality” would relieve the nation of its alibi for wreaking havoc the world over. Whatever the remaining consequence, the protracted US conflict on Assange has already set a chilling precedent by way of press freedom and different important liberties.
Certainly, 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 of the signs typical for extended publicity to psychological torture”.
Melzer, who’s now a professor of worldwide legislation on the College of Glasgow, additionally remarked on the time that, “whereas the US Authorities prosecutes Mr. Assange for publishing details about critical human rights violations, together with torture and homicide, the officers chargeable for these crimes proceed to get pleasure from impunity.”
Perhaps Melzer ought to have been jailed, too?
And as Assange’s extradition battle now involves an in depth, it appears the US might in the end get to definitively kill the messenger – and never simply metaphorically. As his spouse Stella Assange just lately advised reporters, “If he’s extradited, he’ll die.”
However Julian Assange’s persecution and torment additionally represent a dying sentence for any approximation of democracy and justice in america of America, a rustic whose structure supposedly enshrines freedom of speech and the press.
At any price, injustice has already scored a serious victory with the continual underreporting in US company media of Assange’s trials, which Nationwide Safety Company whistleblower Edward Snowden has described as “an important press freedom case on the planet”.
In different phrases, this needs to be main information for the information business itself. However disappearing the reality is one other technique 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 replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.