In June 2022, when the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that it was considering “strict measures” against American media in response to American restrictions on Russian media, the US State Department complained to bad mood that the Kremlin was “engaged in an all-out attack on the media.” freedom, access to information and truth.”
This kind of hypocrisy was nothing new; After all, the world's self-proclaimed largest democracy has long made clear that basic rights and freedoms are things that only its enemies should respect. The blatant double standard allows the United States to do things like make a fuss over Cuba's political prisoners while operating an illegal U.S. prison on occupied Cuban territory, or denounce China over an alleged “spy balloon” while spying. to China and everyone else on the planet.
And on Wednesday, February 21, as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange completed a final legal attempt to avoid extradition to the United States, the country's “total attack on press freedom, access to information and truth” was once again in full evidence.
If extradited, Australian-born Assange faces up to 175 years in prison on espionage charges, which is quite high for a nation with a long history of illegal spying on its own citizens. In reality, Assange's only “crime” was using WikiLeaks to expose the truth of American military crimes, as in the famous “Collateral Murder” video that was published in 2010.
The video, dating from 2007, shows a massacre of a dozen people in Baghdad at the hands of optimistic American soldiers in helicopters, who did not have to hide the extent to which they were having fun with the slaughter.
Among the Iraqis killed were two employees of the Reuters news agency. Let's talk about attacks on press freedom.
The United States insists that by posting such content, Assange actively endangered the lives of innocent people in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. But as I've noted before, it would seem that a sure way to not endanger innocent lives in such places would be to refrain from blowing them up in the first place.
It is certainly common knowledge that the United States has killed a large number of civilians in a large number of countries, although the official narrative still maintains that all killings are ultimately done in the name of freedom, democracy and other noble goals. rather than for sport or fun, as the production of “Collateral Murder” might suggest.
So why, then, the need for such exaggerated pretensions of secrecy and super-vilification of the person of Julian Assange?
In the end, the United States cannot afford to have its guise as a global do-gooder challenged too relentlessly or exhaustively, as too much “access to information and truth” would free the nation from its alibi to wreak havoc everywhere. the world. Regardless of the final outcome, the United States' protracted war against Assange has already set a chilling precedent in terms of press freedom and other essential freedoms.
Indeed, Assange's calculated physical and mental destruction is intended to deter other crime editors and journalists from seeking the truth, just as the United States has effectively committed itself to classifying reality itself. To that end, pending extradition to the United States, Assange has been held for the past five years in Belmarsh prison, southeast of London, where the British government has proven itself faithfully complicit in the protracted efforts to achieve your demise.
Shortly after Assange's arrest and imprisonment 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 typical symptoms of prolonged exposure to psychological torture.” ”.
Melzer, who is now a professor of international law at the University of Glasgow, also commented at the time that, “as 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.”
Maybe Melzer should have been jailed too?
And now that the battle for Assange's extradition comes to an end, it seems that the United States will finally be able to kill the messenger definitively, and not just metaphorically. As his wife Stella Assange recently told reporters: “If they extradite him, he will die.”
But the persecution and torment of Julian Assange also constitutes a death sentence for any approach to democracy and justice in the United States of America, a country whose constitution supposedly enshrines freedom of speech and the press.
In any case, injustice has already won a major victory with the chronic lack of reporting in American corporate media about the Assange trials, which National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has described as “the press freedom case.” most important in the world.”
In other words, this should be major news for the news industry itself. But making the truth disappear is another way of killing it and, in that sense, Julian Assange is already dead.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
