Julian Assange: the person who is guilty of journalism
Now we live in a time where the only people who get punished are the ones who reveal the crimes, and the people who commit the crimes are the ones who get protected. Julian Paul Assange is one of those journalists who is gating their punishment for sharing the truth.
Jullian Assange is an Australian hacker, editor, publisher and activist, who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks is considered Pentagon’s one of the biggest fears and CIA’s worst humiliation.
WikiLeaks challenged the gatekeeper role of traditional media through bypassing established channels, by creating a direct information pipeline to the public. Even they didn’t have the identity of the whistleblowers. It became an open-source intelligent website.
From its birth, WikiLeaks has published all types of classified government data, from corruption to government secrets. Its main goal was to hold the government and military accountable, just by exposing their wrongdoing and injustice. This democratization of information challenged editorial biases and traditional narratives, even though they indirectly challenged traditional news media and their works.
In 2010, WikiLeaks released a bunch of documents that included evidence of war crimes committed by US troops, including killing journalists, and diplomatic cables that revealed embarrassing information about US foreign policy.
All of those documents were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a US soldier who was serving in Iraq. Before uploading all this information to WikiLeaks, Manning offered these documents to The Washington Post and New York Times, but they didn’t respond.
The same year, they again published another bunch of classified data, this time from Afghanistan. Thus WikiLeaks became a national security threat to Pentagon. Since then, Pentagon trying to do whatever it takes to capture Assange and punish him for his honest journalism.
Just a few months later, Sweden charged Assange with committing sex crimes, which was later dropped for lack of evidence. And at that same time US also charged him under Espionage Act. According to Assange, Sweden would love to extradite him to the US.
That’s why he took asylum in Ecuadorian Embassy in London. At that time Ecuadorian government had a fairly bad relationship with the US, so they gave him the asylam. And he was continuing his work within that place.
In 2015, WikiLeaks published a collection of classified NSA files called Espionnage Élysée. It was a collection of classified NSA files that showed that the NSA was spying on French presidents and other officials.
In 2016, WikiLeaks published emails that proved how Clinton rigged 2016 Democratic Party presidential primaries, by someone within DNC.
In 2017, WikiLeaks published another huge pile of CIA classified data, this time it was named Vault 7, which revealed an illegal spying program of CIA. Even though this time, Assange withheld most of the details due to national security. But the published documents were humiliating enough for CIA, so they started plotting to kidnap and assassinate him no matter how.
In 2018, he started getting on the nerves of the Ecuadorian government. Because he was publishing damaging information about that time’s Ecuadorian President Lenin Mourinho, including evidence of his involvement in corruption. The president was also interested in creating a better relationship with the US. So Ecuador decided to end his asylum in 2019, just after getting a $4.2B fund from IMF.
He was arrested immediately by the UK police with no charges against him, just based on skipping bail. He is still in jail in the UK without any charges, just to be extradited to the US, where he is charged under the Espionage Act, a 1917 anti-spying unconstitutional law.
According to many, if Assange even faces a trial under this law, let alone punished, it will be the end of journalism as well as freedom of speech.
Some claim that Assange never committed such crimes, and the US knows that better than anyone. So their goal is to torture Assange to death inside the jail, so that he can never speak again, so that he can never humiliate any government ever again.
He has told the truth about things. That is what investigative, real journalism is about. It’s designed and should be to make life uncomfortable for people in office and people in power. I know that, that’s right, that’s what democracy is about challenging people. Julian challenged, so they put him in prison.
— Jeremy Corbyn, Member of Parliament and Leader of the Opposition of UK
The UN specials had confirmed that he was subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. They also claimed that Assange is medically neglected, as a form of torture.
