Don't Extradite Assange
“[I]t is our responsibility to stand by a true journalist whose sheer courage ought to be inspiration to all of us who still believe that freedom is possible. I salute him.” John Pilger
The WikiLeaks founder, journalist Julian Assange, sits in Belmarsh Prison awaiting his fate. Will he be extradited to the United States, or will he be freed? The campaign that has been waged against Julian is in response to his heroic work in exposing the recent crimes of American imperialism and revealing the intrigue at the heart of power diplomacy. In these efforts, WikiLeaks and Julian were assisted by equally heroic whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning: people in the ‘heart of the machine’ who saw the evil at work and decided to expose it to the world. As John Pilger reports (see www.johnpilger.com), there has been a determined effort to ‘get’ Julian Assange. He writes: ‘In 2008, a top secret US State Department report described in detail how the United States would combat this new moral threat. A secretly-directed personal smear campaign against Julian Assange would lead to "exposure [and] criminal prosecution". The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its founder. Page after page revealed a coming war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and democracy. The imperial shock troops would be those who called themselves journalists: the big hitters of the so-called mainstream, especially the "liberals" who mark and patrol the perimeters of dissent. And that is what happened. I have been a reporter for more than 50 years and I have never known a smear campaign like it: the fabricated character assassination of a man who refused to join the club: who believed journalism was a service to the public, never to those above.’ If the worst happens and Julian Assange is extradited to the USA, then a serious breach of justice will be done. Journalism will have been criminalised and all our freedoms will be undermined.