Dear John, There are several areas where we expected Biden to reverse Trump policies and return to Obama’s yet he didn’t – none more shocking than his efforts to prosecute Julian Assange.
Assange’s life is being destroyed for exposing US war – an ultimate betrayal in the eyes of practitioners of faux freedom. To them the role of the press is to protect the U.S. war machine, not monitor its moves or hold it accountable.
Some people may say “Wait, but didn’t Assange have something to do with Hillary’s emails?” It’s important to note that he’s being prosecuted for nothing like that. His prosecution is for revealing tapes of what are called “collateral murders” of civilians by our military in Iraq.
At the heart of this case is the issue of classified material. On the one hand, revealing classified documents can be a serious offense. On the other, authorities often misuse the system – classification is only meant to apply to material that would harm US security if revealed. By classifying anything it finds inconvenient to have revealed, our military remains shrouded in a secrecy that is dangerous to our democracy.
The truth is, what Assange did would not have been necessary had the American press been doing its job. Too often, the media seems to think its only job is to be stenographers for government press briefings. That particularly applied to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, there is no legal difference between Assange’s publishing of classified documents and the publishing of the same classified documents by the Guardian or the New York Times. That is why this prosecution threatens the free press as a whole.
Assange’s life is being cruelly crushed, and he could soon be extradited to the U.S. from Britain for trial on espionage charges that could imprison him for the rest of his life. Even if convicted (given the trial’s location, the chances are small that he would not be), as President I would pardon him immediately. To me as to many others, it is not just Assange who is on trial here. It is the very principle of a free press.
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