By Caitlin Johnstone
April 16, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- Seven progressive
Democrats from the House of Representatives have
signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick
Garland calling for the Biden administration to
drop the charges against Julian Assange and
cease seeking his extradition.
It’s a good letter as far as these things go.
It lists the major press freedom advocacy groups
and human rights watchdogs who have called for
Assange to be released, correctly identifies the
threats this case poses to press freedoms around
the world, and avoids sneaking in any of the
classic
smears against Assange that normally work
their way into high-level mainstream objections
to the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder.
It’s an undeniably good thing that this letter
happened.
That said, I’d like to bump this portion of
the letter into the spotlight for a moment and
highlight a some bits for emphasis:
The prosecution of Julian Assange for
carrying out journalistic activities
greatly diminishes America’s credibility as
a defender of these values, undermining the
United States’ moral standing on the world
stage, and effectively granting cover to
authoritarian governments who can (and do)
point to Assange’s prosecution to reject
evidence-based criticisms of their human
rights records and as a precedent that
justifies the criminalization of reporting
on their activities. Leaders of
democracies, major international bodies, and
parliamentarians around the globe stand
opposed to the prosecution of Assange.
Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on
Torture Nils Melzer and the Council of
Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja
Mijatović have both opposed the extradition.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese
has called on the U.S. government to end its
pursuit of Assange. Leaders of nearly every
major Latin American nation, including
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva, and Argentinian President
Alberto Fernández have called for the
charges to be dropped. Parliamentarians from
around the world, including the United
Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, have all
called for Assange not to be extradited to
the U.S.
This global outcry against the
U.S. government’s prosecution of Mr. Assange
has highlighted conflicts between the
America’s stated values of press freedom and
its pursuit of Mr. Assange. The
Guardian wrote “The US has this week
proclaimed itself the beacon of democracy in
an increasingly authoritarian world. If Mr.
Biden is serious about protecting the
ability of the media to hold governments
accountable, he should begin by dropping the
charges brought against Mr. Assange.”
Similarly, the Sydney Morning Herald
editorial board stated, “At a time when US
President Joe Biden has just held a summit
for democracy, it seems contradictory to go
to such lengths to win a case that, if it
succeeds, will limit freedom of speech.”
This to my mind is the most impactful part of
the letter, in the sense that it’s the part
that’s most likely to actually grab the
attention of those responsible for Assange’s
ongoing persecution. Indeed, it appears to have
been deliberately crafted to do so.
Imprisoning Assange in Belmarsh while working
toward the unprecedented step of trying a
publisher under the Espionage Act does indeed
undermine the United States’ moral standing on
the world stage, and does indeed grant
governments the US doesn’t like the ability to
dismiss Washington’s hand-wringing about human
rights as cynical performative hypocrisy. But
while the authors of the letter to Biden’s
attorney general frame this as something
illegitimate that is done contrary to facts in
evidence, in reality the moral authority of the
United States to criticize the human rights
records of foreign nations has been irreparably
destroyed. Not just within the reality tunnels
of foreign propagandists, but in actuality.
When people talk about “moral authority” it’s
often in an abstract, philosophical way, like
it’s a matter of logical coherence: “You’ve no
moral authority on this subject because you are
a hypocrite and your stated position contradicts
your own actions.” Like it’s just an argument
about whether the correct intellectual
checkboxes have been ticked, and if they have
not it means you get to wag your finger at them
and declare a mental checkmate. But the question
of moral authority boils down to something much
more tangible than that.
Moral authority is a measure of one’s
qualifications for leadership on moral matters.
If I am known as a moral person who makes moral
decisions, it makes sense for people to look to
me for leadership on questions of morality. If I
am known as an immoral person, then nobody’s
coming to me for moral guidance, because they
understand that I do not have the qualifications
for that role.
So when people try to frame Assange’s
persecution as a matter of public perception and
fighting foreign narratives about the US, they
are incorrect. The issue is not that Assange’s
persecution makes the US look bad, the issue is
that it proves the US
is bad.
And of course we didn’t really need Assange’s
persecution to figure that out for ourselves.
The US is the only government on earth who has
spent the 21st century killing people
by the millions in wars for geostrategic
dominance, who’s been strangling populations
with starvation sanctions and blockades around
the world, who is circling the planet with
hundreds of military bases with the goal of
global domination, and who’s been continually
increasing the risk of nuclear armageddon with
its rapidly escalating agendas geared toward
securing unipolar hegemony. Assange’s case just
makes its complete lack of moral standing much
clearer.
This will all still be the case even if
Assange is released. The US empire will still
have spent years imprisoning a journalist for
the crime of good journalism, will still be the
world’s worst warmonger, and will still be the
world’s most egregious violator of human rights.
Its moral standing is dead and buried, and the
world should stop following its lead in creating
a just and ethical world. It simply does not
have the qualifications to do so. In fact, no
power structure on earth is less qualified.
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in this article are
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