Freedom - Julian Assange
Dear friends,
A few musings emerge in the still air of the summer evening. It was a historic day. Julian Assange is once again a free man.
Or is he really? What does freedom mean if one must pay for it with a coerced confession of guilt? This is what I read in the twilight of this sun-drenched day: Julian Assange and humanity will only truly be free when cowardly attempts to make him a criminal are abandoned and he is honored for what he is: someone who spoke and broke through the façade, even when he knew he would lose everything.
Mattias
I agree with what Caitlin Johnstone says so well https://substack.com/home/post/p-145977916: Justice would look like Assange being granted a full and unconditional pardon and receiving millions of dollars in compensation from the US government for the torment they put him through by his imprisonment in Belmarsh beginning in 2019, his de facto imprisonment in the Ecuadorian embassy beginning in 2012, and his jailing and house arrest beginning in 2010.
Justice would look like the US making concrete legal and policy changes guaranteeing that Washington could never again use its globe-spanning power and influence to destroy the life of a foreign journalist for reporting inconvenient facts about it, and issuing a formal apology to Julian Assange and his family.
Justice would look like the arrest and prosecution of the people whose war crimes Assange exposed, and the arrest and prosecution of everyone who helped ruin his life for exposing those crimes. This would include a whole host of government operatives and officials across numerous countries, and multiple US presidents.
Justice would look like a hero’s welcome and a hero’s honors from Australia upon his arrival, and a serious revision of Canberra’s obsequious relationship with Washington.
Justice would look like formal apologies to Assange and his family from the editorial boards of all the mainstream press outlets which manufactured consent for his vicious persecution — including and especially The Guardian — and the complete destruction of the reputations of every unscrupulous presstitute who helped smear him over the years.
If these things happened, then we could perhaps argue that justice has been served to some extent. As it stands all we have is the cessation of one single act of depravity by an empire who’s only backing off to make room for newer, more important depravities. We all still live under a globe-spanning power structure which has shown the entire world that it will destroy your life if you expose its criminality, and then stand back and proudly call this justice.
It is indeed a bittersweet moment re Julia Assange. I am so ashamed of our government (especially Mike Pompeo, who claims to e a conservative and a Catholic!) for the lengthy and unjust trauma they have caused this brave man. If Biden is doing this s some sort of election ploy, may he lose bigly! He should not benefit in any way from the experience of Mr. Assange. There are so many shameful details to this horrendous saga that show that we are clearly NOT a free country. I hope what is left of Julian's very broken existence can bring him some peace and comfort. He surely deserves it.