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      julian assange

      Julian Assange of the WikiLeaks website holds up a copy of The Guardian newspaper

      Collateral Murder and the Persecution of Julian Assange

      Perhaps the greatest crime that Julian Assange committed in the eyes of both Democratic and Republican governments was this: he dared to tell the American people some of the terrible things their government had done.

      Matthew Hoh
      Feb 18, 2023

      The first time I was asked to comment publicly on Julian Assange and Wikileaks was on MSNBC in April 2010. Wikileaks had just released the Collateral Murder video. The video, leaked by Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, was taken from the gunsight of a US Apache helicopter as the helicopter's crew killed 12 unarmed Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007. Two Reuters journalists were killed and two small children were severely wounded (the Apache's crew killed the children's father as he attempted to assist wounded civilians). For three years, until Wikileaks released the video, the U.S. military claimed a battle had taken place and that aside from the two journalists, all the dead were insurgents.

      The Army declared the journalists killed in the crossfire. The wounded children were ignored, even though the Apache's crew had recognized at the time they had shot children. "Well, it's their fault [for] bringing their kids to a battle." the helicopter pilots said on the video minutes after shooting them. There had been no battle.

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      julian assange
      An activist puts up a banner reading "Free Assange" in front of the US embassy in Germany

      Belmarsh Tribunal Makes the Case for Julian Assange's Immediate Release

      The Assange prosecution poses a fundamental threat to the freedom of speech and a free press.

      Amy Goodman
      Denis Moynihan
      Jan 28, 2023

      “The first casualty when war comes is truth,” U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson of California said in 1929, debating ratification of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a noble but ultimately failed attempt to ban war. Reflecting on World War I, which ended a decade earlier, he continued, “it begins what we were so familiar with only a brief period ago, this mode of propaganda whereby…people become war hungry in their patriotism and are lied into a desire to fight. We have seen it in the past; it will happen again in the future.”

      Time and again, Hiram Johnson has been proven right. Our government’s impulse to control information and manipulate public opinion to support war is deeply ingrained. The past twenty years, dominated by the so-called War on Terror, are no exception. Sophisticated PR campaigns, a compliant mass media and the Pentagon’s pervasive propaganda machine all work together, as public intellectual Noam Chomsky and the late Prof. Ed Herman defined it in the title of their groundbreaking book, “Manufacturing Consent,” borrowing a phrase from Walter Lippman, considered the father of public relations.

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      Julian Assange
      Julian Assange

      'Freedom for Assange and Journalism Are at Stake': Belmarsh Tribunal Comes to DC

      "As long as the Biden administration continues to deploy tools like the Espionage Act to imprison those who dare to expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe," said one of the tribunal's co-chairs.

      Brett Wilkins
      Jan 20, 2023

      As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London's notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on U.S. President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.

      "From Ankara to Manila to Budapest to right here in the United States, state actors are cracking down on journalists, their sources, and their publishers in a globally coordinated campaign to disrupt the public's access to information," co-chair and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman said during her opening remarks at the National Press Club.

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