Making ‘Freedom of Expression’ commit suicide!

By Palitha Senanayake

This is just about to happen, and this impending calamity is not taking place in some remote corner, in some ‘banana republic’ under a despot, but in the heart of democracy and between the two champions of modern civilized values; between the US and Britain.

The extradition case of Julian Assange is currently being heard in Britain. It has now reached the stage where every single point of the Americans’ prosecution, in the original hearing in September, is being accepted by the British Supreme Court. This is despite the CIA involvement, by 30 of its officials, with Thor Deyson, their prime witness from Iceland, having recanted his testimony, plus a history of being arrested for cases of fraud. Thus, it is now accepted that ‘the activities of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, has a valid case to stand trial in the United States’ as it were, for ‘endangering the US national security establishment’.

However, there is one issue that stands between the extradition of Assange and the accepted international norms and that is Julian Assange’s health. In addition to Julian’s failing health caused by years of incarceration, there is this recommendation by Koppelman, who is a professor of psychiatry and his evaluation that Julian might, or was very likely, to commit suicide, if sent to the United States.

John Shipton, the father of WikiLeaks founder was present at this trial and his comments were, “The prosecutor outlined his case, he canvassed the assurances of the United States that Julian wouldn’t be thrown into some dungeon somewhere forgotten. Of course, we all know that those assurances or barriers because, you know, we have in front of us nine cases, where assurances were given and then reneged upon.”

The question before the civilized world now is; what is the crime Assange committed that is tantamount to endangering the US national security establishment?

WikiLeaks published documents of political or historical importance that were censored or otherwise suppressed. Notable among these had been the mails connected to the American operation in Iraq where drones and thousands of robot soldiers had been deployed against Iraqi forces and then against the Iraqi public. It also revealed many casualties the US forces were responsible for during their Afghan operation which the US army dismissed as ‘collateral’. Collateral is a term used in war parlance to describe unavoidable civilian deaths but the facts disclosed by the leaked cables pointed that the civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were, in fact, deliberate, warranting their re-classifications as ‘war crimes’.

However, the most interesting of the disclosures by the WikiLeaks cables relate to the chemical weapon attack that took place in Douma, Syria, on April 14, 2018. The US, French and British forces launched an attack on Government buildings and support infrastructure in Damascus, alleging that the Syrian government of Bashir Al Azzad had used chemical weapons against the rebel forces. Subsequently however, an investigation was conducted by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the allegation. The findings of this investigation, was again suppressed, but WikiLeaks leaked these papers that suggested that the chemicals used in the attack were not the type of chemical weapons that the Syrian Government possessed. Strangely, the attack also did not harm the rebels, as alleged, but affected the civilian population badly. All in all the investigation papers, though fell short of naming the US, the allied forces and the rebels they supported, contained sufficient evidence to suggest that the chemical attack was the result of a staged act by the rebels to make way for direct intervention by the US and allies.

Most of these revelations of WikiLeaks relate to the period of the Obama administration where Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State and the lurid mail revelations that bordered on human cruelty, in an imperial mindset, embarrassed Clinton and eventually spoiled her Presidential stakes in 2016.

WikiLeaks also published some confidential mails related to the Sri Lankan war in 2010 and those suggest that the US State department was fully aware of and was complicit, with the ground situation, but the allegations of HR violations against the SL forces was a post-conflict development, necessitated due to war victorious Rajapaksa regime’s close relationship with China.

Thus, it is now clear that the WikiLeaks founder, who never leaked mails relating to the internal mechanism of the pentagon or about the US arms industry, has in no way endangered US national security but is being punished for exposing the war crimes of the US administration. This, in fact, is the antithesis of the basic value of democratic governance that the western nations crow so much about. Media freedom is considered sacrosanct by the democratic west and they often flaunt its absence in developing countries, as being the reason for their lack of progress and development.

Naturally the world powers, especially the UK and US, whose abuse of power lay badly exposed, have been offended and hence they have imprisoned Julian Assange on trumped-up charges. The hypocrisy here is that it is not the national security of big powers that Assange exposed, but the insecurity of powerless nations in the world. However, Julian Assange, despite agitations by many journalists and those who truly believe in the freedom of press, has been languishing in the Ecuadorian embassy since 2010 and then jailed in Britain, charged with all types of innuendos, ranging from rape to cyber crimes.

Ironically, mainstream world media today, led again by US and British media corporations, do not take up Assange’s case but subtly denounce the WikiLeaks initiator, and as such exposure would entail a sense of cognitive dissonance that would threaten their allegiance to the status quo narratives that justifies the world they know and love.

In a wide-ranging mainstream media reporting on Julian Assange, award-winning journalist John Pilger, blasted the Guardian for its repeated diatribe on the WikiLeaks founder. The Guardian editorial made a case for extraditing the Australian to the US, where he could face 175 years behind bars for possession and dissemination of classified information. Pilger offered his interpretation of what the insinuations actually meant. “What the Guardian was really saying was this: ‘We are the fourth estate, the bearers of true liberal principles, the guardians of sacred rights. Such as, the right to suck up to power, the right to invade countries and the right to smear those who expose our double standards and, if necessary, the right to destroy them,’ he said.

The INGO, Journalist Sans Borders, who consider protecting journalists in all countries of the world, against Government and other vested interests, to be their primary obligation and in the process they often take Governments in developing countries to task for not allowing journalists to be free in their profession. The JSF even took issues with the Sri Lankan Government’s advocacies to the local journalists, at the height of the LTTE war in 2009, that they should not report the war in a negative vein. Ironically, when the man who exposed war crimes of the superpowers is being literally sentenced to death, the JSF is deafeningly silent.

Thus it is not a case of, Journalist Sans frontiers, but rather a case of, Journalist Sans Selective Frontiers.