{"id":237995,"date":"2023-06-26T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T11:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=237995"},"modified":"2023-06-26T09:28:31","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T08:28:31","slug":"why-julian-assange-must-be-freed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/06\/why-julian-assange-must-be-freed\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Julian Assange Must Be Freed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking in London on Behalf of the Jailed WikiLeaks Founder<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Racket News<\/p><\/div>\n

24 Jun 2023 – At Parliament Hill in London today<\/a>, there was a demonstration on behalf of jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Present was the famed rendering of Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden made by sculptor Davide Domino. The statue includes an empty chair for the next whistleblower. I had the honor of standing on that chair to give a short address:<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a confession to make. Once, like a lot of journalists, I didn\u2019t like Julian Assange. It wasn\u2019t just that WikiLeaks was breaking one huge story after another<\/a>. He had fab hair. He wore skinny jeans. He even modeled at fashion week<\/a>!<\/p>\n

What can I say? I was jealous. We\u2019re in London, so I can quote Shakespeare, can\u2019t I?<\/p>\n

Beware the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Jealousy, that monster, impairs one\u2019s thinking. It impaired mine. I didn\u2019t have a reason to dislike Assange. So I invented one. I decided I didn\u2019t like the concept of \u201cradical transparency<\/a>.\u201d I thought: \u201cYou can\u2019t just dump all of those secrets on the public. That\u2019s irresponsible!\u201d<\/p>\n

I was so brainwashed that I forgot, as many people do, that secrets do not belong to governments. That information belongs to us. Governments rule by our consent. If they want to keep secrets, they must have our permission to do so. And they never have the right to keep crimes secret.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an American. Many of you are from the U.K. In our countries, we\u2019re building skyscrapers and huge new<\/a> complexes<\/a> to store our secrets, because we don\u2019t have room to keep them all as is!<\/p>\n

Why do we have so many secrets? Julian Assange told us why. From an essay he wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When governments become authoritarian, they inspire resistance. Techniques must then be developed to repel that resistance. Those techniques must then be concealed.<\/p>\n

In short: the worse a country is, the more secrets it has. We have a lot of secrets now.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Left,<\/strong> robots tend to the FBI\u2019s Central Records Complex in Winchester, Virginia.
Right,<\/strong> the NSA\u2019s \u201cBumblehive\u201d data center in Utah<\/p><\/div>\n

Julian Assange became famous as we were creating a vast new government-within-a-government, a system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance, and drone assassination. Many of these things we know about only because of WikiLeaks. Ostensibly, all this secrecy was needed to fight foreign terrorism.<\/p>\n

The brutal irony now is the architects of that system no longer feel the need to hide their dirty tactics. My government, openly, wants to put this man in jail for 175 years, mostly for violations of the Espionage Act. These include crimes like \u201cconspiracy to receive national defense information,\u201d or \u201cobtaining national defense information.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is \u201cnational defense information?\u201d The answer is what makes this law so dangerous. It\u2019s whatever they say it is. It\u2019s any information they don\u2019t want to get out. It doesn\u2019t even have to be classified.<\/p>\n

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\n\"\"<\/picture>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>
The amended Assange indictment<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

What is conspiracy to obtain such information? We have a word for that. It\u2019s called journalism<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My government wants to put Julian Assange in jail for 175 years for practicing journalism. The government of this country, the U.K., is going to allow it to happen.<\/p>\n

If they did this to Andrei Sakharov, or Nelson Mandela, every human rights organization in the world would be denouncing this as an intolerable outrage. Every NGO would be lining up to lend support. Every journalist would be penning editorials demanding his release.<\/p>\n

But because our own governments are doing it, we get silence.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re okay with this happening to one Julian Assange, you\u2019d better be okay with it happening to many others. That\u2019s why this moment is so important. If Assange is successfully extradited and convicted, it will take about ten minutes for it to happen again. From there this will become a common occurrence. There will be no demonstrations in parks, no more news stories. This will become a normal part of our lives.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let that happen.<\/p>\n

Free Julian Assange.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\n
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\"\"<\/a>Matthew C. Taibbi is a U.S. author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for <\/em>Rolling Stone, author of several books, a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary<\/em>, co-host of <\/em>Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on <\/em>Substack.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 racket.news<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 Jun 2023 – I have a confession to make. Once, like a lot of journalists, I didn\u2019t like Julian Assange. It wasn\u2019t just that WikiLeaks was breaking one huge story after another. He had fab hair. He wore skinny jeans. He even modeled at fashion week! What can I say? I was jealous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":237999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[229,918,2732,2709,910,2963,942,487,2964,378,651,234,911,454,572,639,292,70,126,921,113],"class_list":["post-237995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance","tag-activism","tag-assange","tag-belmarsh-prison","tag-belmarsh-tribunal","tag-big-brother","tag-cryptome","tag-ecuador","tag-human-rights","tag-john-young","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-surveillance","tag-sweden","tag-torture","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-whistleblowing","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237995"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238001,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237995\/revisions\/238001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}