by Travis Mateer

The extradition of Julian Assange for his role in exposing the crimes of US imperialism will trigger a new phase in the long, cruel punishment of an individual for truth-telling, putting a conclusive nail in the coffin of press freedom.

Eight years ago I was singing a different tune at the 4&20 Blackbird blog because a documentary titled We Steal Secrets did an effective job casting doubt on the messenger of Wikileaks. Though I was too easily swayed by the documentary at the time, I did have a decent observation about the strength Occupy Wall Street derived from its leaderless approach as a contrast to what Assange was experiencing by the corporate media attack dogs of empire:

Maybe this is just my own biased perceptions, but I seem to remember, in regards to the early reporting of the OWS protests, a palpable desire by the media to find personalities to stand-in for the discontent that was being expressed. Not providing those characters seemed to confuse and upset the establishment media.

Despite all the difficult groundwork a non-hiearchal structure takes to maintain, in hindsight it was a smart move, because to this day it’s the idea of OWS that persists, and not the face of some blond-haired Aussie who relished the fame he finally caught.

I’m showing my susceptibility to media propaganda here by accepting the general attack-the-messenger framework when it comes to Assange. It should NEVER have mattered what kind of fame-seeking personality Assange might have had before facilitating ground-breaking data dumps. The information released for the public to acknowledge, or ignore, should have been the focus.

When you look at the wikipedia page for We Steal Secrets, this part does NOT stand the test of time (emphasis mine):

Associate Producer Javier Botero said, “The sealed indictment has been a huge part of Assange’s arguments about an American-Swedish conspiracy. He also brings it up at several points in his annotations as key evidence for why our film is wrong. But the whole thing is just based on one boastful line in a 2011 leaked email from an ex-government official; no other evidence has ever come out.”

Well, here’s some reporting on that sealed indictment after it became Unsealed in April of 2019

The United States has unsealed an indictment against Julian Assange, accusing the WikiLeaks founder of conspiring to steal secret government files. Assange was arrested earlier today by authorities in the United Kingdom.

In the indictment, the government alleges that Assange worked with Chelsea Manning to obtain classified documents. Prosecutors say that Manning accessed classified government files, provided them to Assange, and later worked with Assange in an attempt to crack the password of a classified government network.

The indictment outlines communications between Manning and Assange from the spring of 2010. WikiLeaks later released a major cache of State Department cables, and Manning was charged in the incident. She was sentenced to prison, but the sentence was commuted by President Obama. Last month, she was again jailed for refusing to testify about WikiLeaks.

How this gets reported hardly matters at this point. The information war has moved from suppressing what the military/industrial complex is doing in foreign lands to suppressing what the medical/industrial complex is doing in our hospitals and through our screens.

Julian Assange was killed a long time ago by American indifference to truth. I guess salacious character assassination is more culturally palatable than coming to terms with how deeply we’ve been lied to by our government.