They Can Not Extol United States Press Freedom while Seeking to Extradite and Prosecute Publisher Julian Assange by Dave LIndorff!
(2023-05-07 at 16:07:44 )

They Can Not Extol United States Press Freedom while Seeking to Extradite and Prosecute Publisher Julian Assange by Dave LIndorff!

Enough with the 1st Amendment hypocrisy of United States President Biden and his AG Merrick Garland!!

Julian Assange, trapped for years without charge and in solitary confinement in a British maximum security prison as the US seeks his extradition for publishing evidence of US war crimes.

Todays make or break for President Joe Biden and his wimpy attorney general Merrick Garland on the issue of a free press.

The United States Constitution, flawed as it is as a founding document, is unequivocal on the matter. Its much cited and touted First Amendment states;

"Congress shall make no law..abridging freedom of speech or of the press."

There are no caveats, no ambiguous words or placements of commas as in the case of the controversial Second Amendment.

You either have a free press, or you do not!!

And you cannot claim to have a free press in a country that seeks to arrest, try and convict a journalistic publisher for publishing news - especially news about government and military criminality that was widely disseminated by the nations leading news organizations.

That is what is being done, and has been attempted by three successive United States presidential administrations, using a century-old and from its initial Congressional passage highly controversial Espionage Act to attempt to capture, extradite and prosecute the founder of Wikileaks, one of the most important and successful publishers and distributors of important information from whistleblowers seeking to expose government abuses.

Joe Biden, speaking today on World Press Freedom Day, cynically declared press freedom to be "a pillar of democracy," and then declared, referring to two incarcerated Wall Street Journal and freelance reporters incarcerated in Russia and Syria, "Evan Gershkovich and Austin Tice weigh heavy on my mind today, No family should have to endure the pain I have seen their families bear."

He went on to say, "But in far too many places around the world, autocrats and their enablers continue to repress a free and independent media - through censorship, retribution, threats, lawsuits, harassment, disinformation, detention, and physical attacks."

The president need not look far to find a place where that is happening. It is in his own Oval Office (and his bathroom mirror), and just a three-minute walk down Pennsylvania Avenue in the office of the United States Attorney General Garland that the First Amendment is being trampled and a journalist is being cruelly attacked in the interest of the United States national security apparatus that President Biden heads.

Efforts to lock up and silence Australian citizen Julian Assange on espionage charges began in the Obama administration in April 2010 when hjs publication Wikileaks released publicly to major media organizations in the United States and around the globe videotape from a United States attack helicopter gunsight camera showing the massacre by machine-gun fire of a group of unarmed civilian Iraqis in a Baghdad square, including two Iraqi video journalists. The tape inclued audio showing the gunner and the chopper pilot laughing as they mowed the men and two young boys down. The United States caught, tried and imprisoned the enlisted United States Army private, Chelsea Manning, who provided Wikileaks with that horrifying tape with Obama finally releasing her early under public pressure.

Since then the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and before during Mannings imprisonment, the State Department, the Justice Department and the White House have engaged in a vile, secret and deceitful international campaign, including bugging of a foreign embassy and bribing of a foreign government (and even plotting a never executed kidnap and murder attempt against and a call by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a drone attack on Assange in the United Kingdom), all in an effort to silence him and to let journalists around the world know the price to be paid for publishing negative or embarrassing truths about United States foreign policy or its militarys unpunishable war crimes.

This behavior, continued under the Biden administration, which has been pushing the British government and its shamelessly compliant legal system to approve its extradition request for Mr. Julian Assange, so that it can try him in a United States legal system where he would not be allowed to use a First Amendment defense for his actions.

President Biden could make some kind of amends for the atrocity that has kept Mr. Assange in some form of captivity since 2012, the last four of them in solitary confinement in a high security prison designed to hold violent killers and terrorists, by declaring before World Press Freedom Day, that the prosecution of Mr. Julian Assange will be ended immediately and that efforts to extradite him are ended. If he does not do that (and it does not look like he will), World Press Freedom Day will have to be recognized as a joke in the United States of America,

President Bidens failure to end the persecution of Mr. Julian Assange should make United States journalists denounce him as a fraud and a hypocrite whenever he seeks to criticize other autocracies for their repression of or arrest of journalists.

The British government should also for the same reasons, act today to declare that in the interest of a free press it is rejecting the United States request for Mr. Julian Assanges extradition and is releasing him from jail and from any old charges relating to his skipping bail on a trumped up Swedish case that has long since been dropped, making him a free man in that country.

Joe Biden is not just a hypocrite!!!

His actions, and his inaction in this particular case, are reducing the United States Constitutions First Amendment to what President George W Bush reportedly at one point in his presidency referred to as "just a scrap of paper"!!

History will record this day as one of Joe Bidens most ignominious. The suffering and worried Gershkovich and Tice families, with whom the president claimed to empathize, should know that President Bidens continued persecution and hounding of Mr. Julian Assange only gives a pass to leaders in Russia and Syria to hang on to their journalist captives.

The irony is that the entire rest of the world knows that the United States vaunted "free press" claim is a Potemkin fraud!!

Either you have it or you do not, and clearly we do not here in the United States!!!

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!