We will never forget what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks revealed ... and what they will reveal in the future
The
Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he
conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war
logs obtained by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents
leaked by Manning from the Pentagon and the State Department, along
with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning
down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters
journalists, provided copious evidence of the hypocrisy,
indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies, bribery
and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its
foreign relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks
allowed us to see the inner workings of empire—the most important
role of a press—and for this they became empire’s prey.
U.S.
government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange
from The New York Times and the British newspaper The
Guardian, both of which also published the leaked material from
Manning, by implicating Assange in the theft of the documents.
Manning was repeatedly and often brutally pressured during her
detention and trial to implicate Assange in the seizure of the
material, something she steadfastly refused to do. She is currently
in jail because of her refusal to testify, without her lawyer, in
front of the grand jury assembled for the Assange case. President
Barack Obama granted Manning, who was given a 35-year sentence,
clemency after she served seven years in a military prison.
Once the
documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks
were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The
New York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and
foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run
WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a
black propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This
coordinated smear campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document
prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and
dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the U.S. to eradicate the
“feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity”
and destroy Assange’s reputation.
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