Global Courant 2023-05-14 23:57:14
Imagine for a moment that the government of Cuba demanded the extradition of an Australian publisher to the United Kingdom for exposing Cuban military crimes. Imagine if these crimes included a 2007 massacre by Cuban soldiers with helicopters of a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two journalists from the Reuters news agency.
Now imagine if the Australian publisher were extradited from the UK to Cuba and faced up to 175 years in prison simply for doing what media professionals ostensibly should be doing: reporting the reality.
Finally, imagine the United States’ response to such Cuban behavior, which would invariably consist of impassioned shrieks about human rights and democracy and a call for universal defamation of Cuba.
Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to conclude that the above scenario is a rearranged version of true events, and that the publisher in question is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The hostile nation is not Cuba, but rather the US itself, responsible not only for the destruction of Assange’s individual human rights, but for a stunning array of attacks on people around the world on a much more macro level.
According to the US narrative, Assange’s WikiLeaks efforts endangered the lives of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere — though it seems a foolproof way not to endanger lives in such places would be to avoid them in the first place to blow up.
Moreover, it is baffling that a nation for which military carnage is an institutionalized pastime stinks so selectively about exposing certain gory details.
Admittedly, images of defenseless civilians being shot down at close range as video game targets by a laughing helicopter crew do little to detract from the Americans’ projected role as the “good guys” — a facade essential to the country’s self-supposed entitlement. justify wreaking international havoc as it pleases.
If Assange had wanted to save his own skin, he could have stuck to the kind of imperial propaganda that functions as mainstream journalism, a field that itself played a major role in selling the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq to the American public.
Instead, he is incarcerated at Belmarsh Prison in south-east London, awaiting extradition to the so-called “land of the free”, while serving as a real-life case study in long-term psychological torture, as documented in 2019 by the special UN Rapporteur on Torture.
In a caustic letter addressed to King Charles ahead of his recent coronation, Assange described himself as a “political prisoner, held by your majesty on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign”. He commented, “One can really know the standard of a society by how it treats its captives, and your kingdom has certainly excelled in that regard”.
The embarrassed foreign sovereign has certainly displayed excellence in that area as well, with the highest incarceration rate in the world and an impressive record of executing innocent people. Certainly, domestic attempts to sentence a citizen of another country to 175 years in prison for telling the truth are also a pretty good indication that something is very, very wrong with a society.
Then there’s the whole issue of the US penal colony off the coast of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the former CIA torture den and ongoing judicial black hole into which the US has tried to weed out some of the human consequences of its perpetual wars.
Indeed, the fact that the US feels entitled call the Cuban government for its own “political prisoners” while operating an illegal prison on occupied Cuban territory can safely be filed under the category of staggeringly sinister hypocrisy.
If only there were more journalists willing to talk about such things.
But just as you can’t cover up Guantánamo crimes by classifying prisoner artwork, you can’t hide the horrors of US policy by effectively redacting Julian Assange from existence.
It’s the old “kill-the-messenger” approach, where the “killing” takes the form of prolonged psychological erosion carried out in tandem with a campaign to normalize the idea that Assange should be behind bars forever.
Ultimately, the attack on Assange is not just your average disproportionate imperial conniption fit. Whatever the final outcome, it has already set a dangerous precedent by criminalizing not only freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but also – if you think about it – freedom of thought.
While Australian officials are increasingly fussing over Assange’s release, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declined to say whether he will raise the matter with US President Joe Biden at the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Sydney on May 24.
And as the perpetual wars of the US rage further and further out of sight, so does the perpetual war against Julian Assange.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.
