Free Julian Assange! Hands off WikiLeaks! By Bill Van Auken
December 08, 2010 "WSWS" -- Julian Assange, the founder
of WikiLeaks, was jailed in Britain Tuesday on charges that are
nothing more than a pretext for an act of political repression
dictated by the US government.
The aim of this judicial travesty is, in the first instance, to
punish Assange for having made public secret cables exposing
crimes and conspiracies carried out by US officials.
Second, by throwing Assange into London’s Wandsworth
prison, the US and British authorities hope not only to silence
WikiLeaks but also to intimidate anyone else from daring to lift
the lid on government secrets and lies.
It is almost certain that the ultimate goal of the shoddy legal
frame-up is to have Assange extradited to the United States to
be tried as a spy or even as an accomplice of terrorism.
Given the unprecedented and shameful public outcry by leading
American politicians and media figures for Assange to be
declared an “enemy combatant” or “terrorist” and “taken out”
or “assassinated,” not only would his ability to get a fair trial in
the US be excluded, but his very survival would be in doubt.
Those leading the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks
are representatives of a government and a ruling establishment
that is responsible for decades of criminality carried out behind
the backs of the American people—from stolen elections, to
illegal wars of aggression, to torture and other acts of
international terror.
This is a country that was dragged into a war in Iraq that has
cost hundreds of thousands of lives based upon outright lies—
reported as fact by an obedient and complicit media—about
“weapons of mass destruction” and nonexistent terrorist ties.
This and other crimes have been either concealed or justified by
means of propaganda, the invocation of state secrets or outright
lying to the public. This is what makes those attacking
WikiLeaks hate and fear its work, and what makes this work so
vitally necessary.
Last April, the WikiLeaks site made public the “Collateral
Murder” videotape, documenting a 2007 massacre in Baghdad
carried out by an attack helicopter in which 15 Iraqis, including
two Reuters journalists, were killed. Private First Class Bradley
Manning was arrested soon after, charged with leaking the
video and other documents. He is presently being held in a
prison cell in Quantico, Virginia.
This was followed by the release of some 391,000 Afghanistan
battlefield reports last July, documenting killings of civilians
that had been covered up by the Pentagon, including the
mowing down of unarmed demonstrators and assassinations by
Special Forces death squads. Then in October, WikiLeaks made
available 400,000 battlefield reports from Iraq, documenting
more carnage against civilians and the complicity of the US
military in horrific forms of torture against Iraqi detainees.
These documents laid bare to the public information that the
government had systematically suppressed, with the assistance
of a self-censoring media for which being “embedded” has
become a permanent state of affairs. They provide ample
evidence of war crimes carried out by both the Bush and
Obama administrations.
The diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks began releasing last
month—with less than 1,000 out of 250,000 thus far
published—have already uncovered similar evidence of crimes
and conspiracies, from the confirmation of a US missile strike
that killed over 50 Yemeni civilians last December, to pressure
campaigns to halt prosecutions of US officials for illegal
kidnappings and torture, to instructions to US diplomats to
gather personal intelligence—including DNA samples—on
United Nations and foreign government officials.
Those now baying for Assange’s blood, calling his actions
“criminal,” are responsible for real crimes whose victims
number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Not only the Republican right, but “liberal” Democrats have
joined in this campaign. Among them is California’s
Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein, who called in a column
published by the Wall Street Journal Tuesday for the
prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Feinstein charges Assange—a citizen of Australia—with being
indifferent to “national security” and “our vital national
interests,” interests that she, as a US senator, a multimillionaire
and the wife of a wealthy Pentagon contractor, holds especially
dear.
“Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely
on the First Amendment to defend his actions,” she writes. “But
he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our
government, whose policies he happens to disagree with,
regardless of who gets hurt.”
Dismissing claims that WikiLeaks is covered by the First
Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, Feinstein
continues, “Just as the First Amendment is not a license to yell
‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, it is also not a license to jeopardize
national security.”
The Espionage Act invoked by Feinstein has a long and
reactionary history, used to jail the legendary workers’ leader
Eugene V. Debs in 1918 along with thousands of members of
the Industrial Workers of the World and other working class
militants.
The senator articulates the same kind of police-state, lynch-mob
spirit that animated that wave of repression. According to the
Orwellian logic of the current vendetta, an “agitator” who
exposes the crimes of a government engaged in armed
aggression and torture is a criminal. And the right to free speech
can be suspended by the mere invocation of “national security.”
This will not end with Assange and WikiLeaks. A frontal
assault on core democratic rights is being prepared by a ruling
elite that lives in fear of the people, concealing its actions and
aims because it knows that the policies of social reaction at
home and war abroad enjoy no popular support.
The attack on WikiLeaks has been aided and abetted by the
cowardly media and by corporations ranging from Amazon to
MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, all of which swung into line at
the first sign of government intimidation, joining in the
campaign to silence the Internet organization and cut off its
funding.
Success in this act of state repression would set the stage for a
more far-ranging drive to suppress freedom of the Internet as a
whole, shut down other web sites that oppose the policies of the
US government, and impose an even tighter veil of secrecy over
the operations of the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House.
The financial aristocracy and its political representatives feel an
urgent need to impose a stranglehold on the flow of
information. They know that the crisis of their economic system
and their attempts to impose its full weight on the backs of the
working class, both at home and abroad, are creating the
conditions for an eruption of class struggles. Depriving such a
movement of free information and political perspective is seen
as vital by the ruling elite.
This is what makes the launching of an international campaign
in defense of WikiLeaks a life-and-death question for working
people in every country. Mass protests and movements of
solidarity must be organized to demand the immediate release
of Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning and an end to the
campaign of intimidation and repression against WikiLeaks.
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