- The Guardian
- Issue #2014
The march – “His free speech is our free speech.”
CPA members in Adelaide attended the recent rally in support of journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. In light of British Home Secretary Priti Patel’s decision to grant extradition to the United States, those assembled called on Australia’s new Prime Minister to exercise diplomatic protection over Assange and bring him home.
Wikileaks has been instrumental in exposing many of the US government’s war crimes. These include the widespread torture and killings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, collusion with Al Qaeda in Syria, hiding prisoners in Guantánamo Bay from the Red Cross and many others. It has revealed evidence of the CIA’s surveillance of US & allied countries’ civilians and its interference in elections the world over.
Wikileaks’ award-winning work has made it undeniably clear to the public that the war crimes of the US government are not just individual aberrations but rather a deliberate policy consistent with the strategies of US imperialism.
After examining Assange in 2020, UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer reported that he was suffering the symptoms typical of prolonged exposure to psychological torture. Assange’s supporters, including various journalists, civil liberty groups, international observers and Assange’s wife, Stella Morris, are concerned that the further abuses that are likely to be inflicted on him in a US prison would drive him to take his own life.
The capitalist powers have been colluding for several years to use Julian Assange to send a clear message to any journalist who might expose their treachery: This could happen to You.