America’s Lapdog Britain Moves to Extradite Julian Assange
If President Biden really cared about press freedom, he would have canceled the extradition request months ago.
Every investigative journalist rightly reveres Daniel Ellsberg, the former US Marine officer who exposed so many of the lies told by the US government about the Vietnam War.
By leaking the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, Ellsberg revealed the illegal US bombing of Laos and Cambodia—and helped to end the war itself.
When Wikileaks founder Julian Assange fought his desperate battle in London’s Central Criminal Court to avoid extradition to the United States, Ellsberg tried to come to his rescue.
As well he might. Because the story of Julian Assange is an action replay of Ellsberg half a century later.
Ellsberg, like Assange, was put on trial for spying. Ellsberg, like Assange faced a lifetime in prison, only for the charges to be dismissed because of government misconduct against him.
He told the London Court that he felt an immense fellow feeling with the Wikileaks founder.
In an important statement, Ellsberg—the doyen of whistleblowers—explained that while he was serving in Vietnam, detailed knowledge of US war crimes remained confined to a tiny circle.
By contrast, he pointed out that more than 100,000 people had access to the Iraq and Afghan war logs leaked by Chelsea Manning.
And it is certainly true that the Wikileaks revelations has shone a horrifying light on crimes casually committed by the US during the so called “War on Terrorism.”
Wikileaks published a video of US helicopter gunmen laughing as they shot at and killed unarmed civilians in Iraq. Fifteen individuals were killed in the attack, including a Reuters photographer and his assistant.
The US military refused to discipline the perpetrators of this grotesque crime, who remain unpunished. But the US government has thrown the book at the man who revealed their crimes.
Wikileaks revealed that the total number of civilian casualties in Iraq was far greater than previously admitted by the US government. It disclosed the abuse meted out to the inmates at Guantanamo Bay, as well as the fact that 150 innocent inmates were held for years without charge.
Clive Stafford Smith, who has represented 87 prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, paid tribute to the importance of the Wikileaks revelations in enabling him to prove that the charges against his clients had been false.
Many other revelations, though less horrifying, were almost as embarrassing for the US and its allies. . .
POINT TAKEN: Such deep hypocrisy is a propaganda gift to Vladimir Putin. The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova used Assange’s arrest three years ago to mock the double standards of the west. “The hand of ‘democracy’” she noted, “squeezes the throat of freedom.”
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