Outside the UK court, Assange’s supporters demand his release. Niklas Halle’n/AFP
News is something which someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising. This was how the 19th
century American publisher William Randolph Hearst understood news. There is a message for journalists: News is not in media statements, politicians’ pressers or what we see on the surface. Someone does not want the people to know the truth and it is the journalist’s duty to dig it out from where it remains buried and present it to the people despite the challenges and threats.
This is what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is now only a few steps away from extradition to the United States, ventured out to do. But powerful governments which are suppressing news do not want him to tell the truth.
The US wants Assange tried on charges that he conspired with the US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning to access and publish classified information from Pentagon data bases. Assange’s supporters say the extradition poses a danger to his life.
But the story of 50-year-old Assange is not what meets the eye. He is a public enemy of the so-called western democracies. Five democracies – the US, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia and Ecuador – ganged up to silence him, for Assange exposed a dark secret – that nations which strut about the global stage as champions of human rights and promoters of democratic values are the biggest villains of the piece or peace.
In October 2006, Assange launched WikiLeaks, a platform for whistleblowers who were disturbed by the secret schemes of their governments. Although the platform is today not as dynamic as it used to be and is being branded by the Western nations and the corporate media as a tool of Russian intelligence, WikiLeaks has published thousands of classified documents. Until Assange found asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 as a guest of Ecuador’s socialist government after he was slapped with trumped-up sexual assault charges by the Swedish authorities, WikiLeaks, in its belief in unbridled freedom of expression, had been awakening the credulous masses from their slumber. It was telling them that the governments they thought were paragons of virtues and squeaky clean were indeed made up of murderers and monsters, fascists and fraudsters. WikiLeaks’ type of journalism was empowering the people. It believed in open government and exposed the fascist actions of the so-called democratic states.
WikiLeaks revealed in detail how the US military carried out civilian carnages in Iraq and Afghanistan; how countries colluded and built up fabricated cases for wars; how prisoners were ill-treated at the US-run notorious gulag-like prisons in Guantanamo Bay and classified information about the 9/11 attacks.
While the United States and Britain take small countries such as Sri Lanka to the United Nations Human Rights Council to maintain the charade that they are the world’s human rights crusaders, WikiLeaks postings show they commit war crimes with impunity. For instance, leaked Pentagon papers reveal that in Afghanistan, after a convoy of US marines came under a suicide bomb attack near Jalalabad, the marines made a frenzied escape, opening fire with automatic weapons. As they fled along a six-mile stretch of highway, they hit almost anyone in their way -- teenage girls in the fields, motorists in their cars, old men as they walked along the road. Nineteen unarmed civilians were killed and 50 wounded.
In their military reports, no soldier gave the account of the rampage. The details, however, transpired in a subsequent 17-day inquiry. At the end of the inquiry, no one was punished, despite strong evidence from Afghan officials who witnessed the bloody trail left behind by the US soldiers during their trigger-happy ride back to the Jalalabad base. It is also said US military investigators, who went to the scene of the carnage, threatened the journalists there and got them to delete the photographs they had taken.
The WikiLeaks revelations also included more than 250,000 unredacted US diplomatic cables dating from December 1966 to February 2010. The ‘Cablegate’ exposé which was condemned by the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “an attack on international community” revealed how the US had conducted secret drone strikes in Yemen, details of US efforts to get information on United Nations representatives, a push by Saudi Arabia’s royal family to have the US strike Iran and a description of Russia under Vladimir Putin as a “virtual mafia state.”
They also revealed Secretary Clinton’s grouse that some US allies were arming and funding extremists in their bid to overthrow Syrian President
Bashar al Assad.
These revelations are too much for governments that preach but practise not transparency. Events followed one after another for Assange after the sex-assault charges in Sweden, which Assange believes is a US acolyte willing to extradite him to the US no sooner the UK police arrest him and hand him over to the Swedish police.
Abandoned by his country Australia, Assange faces torture and life incarceration if extradited to the US, his supporters say. As he feared, with the socialists losing the Ecuadorian elections, the outcome of which the US is said to have engineered, the new Ecuadorian government on April 11, 2019 permitted the UK police to enter the embassy premises, arrest Assange and drag him out. He was then moved to the Belmarsh high security prison.
On December 10, dismissing a lower court ruling that had blocked the extradition of Assange from Britain, the UK High Court ruled in favour of the US government, in a judgment that has come in for wide criticism, for it seemed to have given more weight to relations between two friendly countries than principles of laws. Worries over Assange’s health issues such as suffering a mild stroke and suicidal tendencies in prison were not given due consideration by the bench, say his supporters who are demanding his immediate release so that he could continue his journalistic work of exposing the rot underneath the veneer of fake democracy.
The ruling appears to be a reflection of establishment thinking. Assange tried to free public-spirited journalism from its shackles so that it could challenge the deception of the Western democracies and their corporate media. While evil journalism works in collusion with fascist rulers in democracy cloak, public-spirited journalists strive to expose deception and corruption. This is why some governments see public-spirited journalism as a security threat. There exists an unbridgeable gap between what some governments say in public and what they do in secret. Famous US investigative journalist I.F. Stone once said “every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed”.
