Recently, the US was refused the extradition of Julian Assange based on risks to his health. His health is now considered at risk due to many years of harassment and abuse, including allegations of psychological torture, death threats to his family, alleged DNA theft from his kids, etc. All part of the wholesome judicial process, no doubt. The US has now received the leave of the UK court to appeal that decision.
Julian Assange is accused of espionage, hacking, and publication of military and other documents. Those documents referred to alleged war crimes, massive numbers of breaches of law, murder of civilians by US government contractors, and other sundry incidents.
What, you may well ask, has happened about the Wikileaks allegations? Not much. What’s happened about the security breaches? Not much. Trump pardoned some of the Blackwater contractors, and that’s about it.
The story so far
The story is that:
- Tens or hundreds of thousands of people get killed and nobody’s to blame.
- US military security is/was somehow less than that of your average supermarket cash register for Wikileaks purposes and no other parties. Anyone can walk in and out with thousands of documents, and nobody is to blame.
- Unknown numbers of people are tortured, and nobody’s to blame.
- The bad guys are the people who tell you about what’s being done by US government agencies and contractors and nobody else is to blame.
- The decade or so of legal action has so far been based on these matters. US legal actions against a vast number of breaches of law by its own government agencies have been to put it mildly selective.
A few points
- If someone gives information to a publisher, is the publisher therefore guilty of espionage? If mainstream news media like The New York Times or FOX published this information, would the same due process, or lack of it, apply to them?
- If government agencies don’t dispute the exceptionally damaging information regarding vast numbers of breaches of law in the documents, what’s the legal upshot of that? Not a lot, apparently.
- Information is a commodity, and a valuable commodity. Was any legal action taken against large amounts of destructive disinformation in the years 2016 to the present? None at all. Apparently that’s OK. As long as it has nothing to do with facts, it’s safe. If it almost starts a civil war and encourages internal terrorism, that’s OK, too, it seems.
Nothing like a few double standards to keep the jolly old highly-paid law rolling along, is there? Here’s another double standard: If Assange is guilty as charged, publishing anything at all in the US of A regarding government wrongdoing could get very tricky indeed.
This case is a bonus point extravaganza of hyper-critical legal issues. It has everything a dictatorship could want to suppress information:
- Whistleblowing on government agency crimes.
- Sourcing anti-government information of any kind which can be related to this case.
- Sourcing information about corruption in government agencies. (There’s a lot of it.)
- Publishing information regarding government wrongdoing.
- Government accountability in just about any circumstance, including murder, mass murder, and torture.
- Individual accountability for crimes under a government umbrella.
Now remind me – Who are the terrorists, again? The prosecution lawyers or the accused?
The US could become an information-free zone pretty quickly if this case goes ahead. There are enough legal precedents in the Assange case to effectively nullify the Constitution. Forget civil liberties, civil rights, and free speech.
The US government is actively defending the perpetrators and shooting the messenger, perhaps future messengers as well. Justice, like Liberty, is far more than a word. Either you have both of them or you don’t have either. Your choice, America.
