There’s little to say about this, although I could go on for hours about it:
- CrowdJustice campaign by Stella Morris (partner of Assange and mother of his two sons)
- Reporters without Borders website
- freeassange.eu
- Change.org petition
One of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice.
Julian Assange
While the claims by US officials that Julian Assange’s publication of the Iraq War documents and the Afghan War documents have cost the lives of informants have been debunked and many other claims against him as well, the slanderous and political campaign against Assange goes on. For exposing war criminals, mind you. And if that’s how we’re counting, I’m wondering how many lives Assange and Manning have ultimately saved by exposing the war criminals.
So the US wants to extort … excuse me … have Assange extradited from the UK based on questionable claims, while Assange is held in a high security prison in solitary for jumping bail, for a case that isn’t even pending any longer in Sweden. And before he was moved to the prison, he held out at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for almost seven years, under conditions that have been described multiple times as amounting to psychological torture.
And if it is allowed to go on it means that any journalist from anywhere in the world can be tried as alleged spies under a law that is highly controversial and was created during times of oppression in the US.
Think about it, Saudi Arabia trying a foreign journalist for disclosing details about the Khashoggi case and seeking extradition? How – in its essence – is the case of Assange any different? Would you look at it differently if it was Saudi Arabia seeking extradition of said journalist? Well, perhaps then you should rethink your position on what journalism is and work on your biases1.
// Oliver
- Oh and don’t come at me with hogwash about rule of law in the US or democracy, I may end up laughing you off, seriously! [↩]