How the Media Failed Julian Assange
That's the subhed of a very important article by the excellent journalist Andrew Cockburn in the current Harper's magazine. (It's still unavailable online, but I encourage all of you to seek it out and read it.) Assange -- who was vilified by the liberal elite -- for exposing U.S. foreign assets to harm, for raping two women in Sweden, and for collaborating with the Putin regime to sabotage Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential race against Donald Trump, turns out not to have done any of those things.
What Julian Assange's Wikileaks operation -- an investigative network once used by the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel -- was guilty of was practicing journalism. As Cockburn points out, without Wikileaks, we wouldn't know about:
-- U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killing of 11 handcuffed people, among them five children
-- The CIA's massive hacking of private data, including the software that powers our cars, computers and TVs
-- The efforts by the Democratic Party establishment to derail the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders
Instead of being hailed as a free speech hero, Assange has been under confinement for over ten years. Since April 2019, he's been held in Belmarsh Prison, known as "Britain's Guantanamo," under cruel and unusual conditions. He's desperately fighting extradition to the U.S., where he'll likely be convicted of espionage charges and thrown into a super-max dungeon for the rest of his life.
Belatedly, the media establishment has rallied to Assange's cause, because corporate news organizations like the New York Times finally realized that the same espionage charges could be leveled agaInst their reporters for doing their jobs. While this media support is welcome, one journalist close to the Assange case dismisses the November joint statement on his behalf released by the Times and other major news outlets as "a tame and bloodless attempt to get on the right side of history... simply too little, too late."
If President Joe Biden and his Attorney General Merrick Garland want to be on the right side of history, they will drop all charges against Julian Assange now.
Julian Assange