Tuesday marks the sixth anniversary of Julian Assange’s arrival at London's Ecuadorian embassy, where he received the political asylum that has since mutated into an open-ended prison sentence. His plight illustrates a disturbing global shift away from press freedom, an oppressive climate marked by McCarthyite attacks on alternative media as enemy propaganda in a new Cold War, Left-cover censorship that uses the language of political correctness to bolster authoritarian ideologies, and controlled-opposition outlets infiltrating alternative media to falsely delineate the bounds of "acceptable" discourse. The campaign against dissident media voices has been operating at fever pitch since the 2016 US election revealed the control matrix of the ruling class was less than total. Banned from even communicating with the outside world for the past 80 days, Assange has been all but forgotten by the media WikiLeaks empowered, many of whom have allowed establishment propaganda or petty interpersonal squabbles to confuse their moral responsibility toward a fellow truth-teller ensnared in an Orwellian nightmare. As newly-elected Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno tries to make nice with the US, Assange is in danger of losing his asylum status, a development which would throw him to the wolves of Washington, already salivating to tear him to pieces for the unspeakable crime of publishing the truth. 

 

In February, UK courts upheld the bail-jumping charge that permits authorities to arrest Assange should he exit the embassy - jumping bail for rape charges that Swedish courts dropped over a year ago, charges based on accusations that were coerced and then recanted, as the basis for a case that was never prosecuted against a defendant who was never questioned. “Kafkaesque” was coined to describe circumstances like these. Despite the establishment’s record of using sex-crimes charges to discredit dissidents and the flimsy non-case against Assange, some enemies opt to smear him with the “rapist” epithet. Others cling to the threadbare Russiagate narrative, which posits WikiLeaks is a Russian dupe or willing Russian agent using the magic of evidence-free conspiracy-mongering. Still others, grasping at straws, point to what they call his support for Trump - despite his characterization of the election as a choice between cholera and gonorrhea - as proof he had gone full fascist, an ironic accusation to make against the victim of a fascist police state. What unites Assange’s enemies is their reliance on shooting the messenger, a propaganda technique that is the establishment’s last best defense against a message too powerful to suppress. 

 

Wikileaks is much more than its founder - its power comes from the leakers, not from Assange's own writing, or from some special knack he has for getting the story. If the US and UK governments do silence him - whether through extradition and imprisonment or an indefinite extension of the absurd legal limbo in which he is allowed internet access only if he does not "speak about politics" - WikiLeaks will continue to publish the world’s secrets. By setting up a decentralized, ultra-resilient platform for whistleblowers to share their secrets anonymously, he caused a seismic shift in the relationship between the oppressed and their oppressors, and that shift cannot be reversed. The threat inherent in Assange as a free man lies not in what has been published, but in what can be, and how. As Facebook and Twitter tighten the screws of censorship - #Unity4J is just one of many trending hashtags to be struck down in its prime by the Tweet Police - visionary anti-establishment techno-savants like Assange will be central figures in the mass movement toward secure social media platforms when those platforms emerge, unleashed by Kim Dotcom or whoever is first across the finish line. Dotcom has already asked Assange, Snowden and a European hacker collective for their input on a decentralized platform he is developing, understanding that strong ideals and technical expertise are both essential if techno-dissidents are to shift the paradigm away from Deep State control of the internet.

 

Government persecution of Assange is to be expected - WikiLeaks keeps the ruling class up at night worrying their misdeeds might be smeared across the morning's headlines - but his lack of support among fellow journalists is reprehensible. Whatever flaws Assange the person may possess are far outweighed by the good WikiLeaks has done for the world. In the media sphere, there is no downside to more information being available, especially free of charge. The patchwork of baseless smears and personal insults that has enveloped Assange since his internet connection was severed is pathetic and speaks volumes more about his detractors, kicking a man when he's down, than about him. Reports from visitors to the embassy suggest his physical and mental condition is deteriorating rapidly, reports met with derision from a vocal cadre of establishment lackeys calling themselves journalists on social media. But below even these sadistic pigs are the spineless appeasers who maintain their silence as Assange is smeared and deprived of his rights, cowards who sigh with relief every time the dogs of war sink their teeth into someone else. The radio silence that followed then-CIA chief Mike Pompeo's condemnation of WikiLeaks as a "hostile non-state intelligence service" - an ominous term he invented for the occasion - reflected appalling cowardice on the part of the establishment wing of the Fourth Estate, which must have quivered with pleasure as the chubby Rapture-botherer compared WikiLeaks unfavorably to so-called "legitimate news organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post." Any journalist who falls for such naked divide-and-conquer rhetoric should hang up their laptop. 

 

The Russia Excuse

 

Because of the outsize role it played in the 2016 US election, WikiLeaks found itself at the center of Russiagate, the only conspiracy theory considered socially acceptable in mainstream American society. A month after the election, anonymous Ukrainian website PropOrNot declared - on the front page of the Washington Post, no less - that over 200 popular anti-establishment media outlets on both Left and Right were actually mouthpieces for Russian propaganda. PropOrNot begged the US government to investigate WikiLeaks and 200 of its fellows as traitors, accusations WaPo was forced to wrap in a disclaimer after several of those outlets threatened libel lawsuits. The witch hunt was on - anti-war, anti-capitalist, anti-Big Government, anti-police state views were all nefarious heads on the same Russian hydra. If you were on that list and you didn’t work for the Russians, you were a useful idiot, being fed information by Russian operatives so smooth you had no idea they worked for the Kremlin. It became fashionable to smear one's opponent as a Russian bot when losing internet arguments, and Sky News infamously dragged a British retiree and a Syrian-Australian scientist onto an interview program to essentially take a live Turing test. The narrative was ludicrous, but found fertile ground in the imagination of traumatized Clinton voters, who’d been assured at every turn their victory was certain. Even two years on, in the absence of any concrete proof of Russian collusion, a devoted core of believers keep the Russiagate faith, fanning the flames with a cultic fervor as the rest of Democratic voters despair of ever again winning an election.

 

The Russiagaters weren’t done with WikiLeaks, however. The Democratic National Committee, watching progressive voters jump ship in droves after leaked documents proved its primaries were rigged against Bernie Sanders, fell back on their shoot-the-messenger playbook, naming the Trump campaign, Russia, and WikiLeaks in a lawsuit that would be adorably delusional if not for its chilling implications for a free press. The suit claims that by publishing the stolen documents, Wikileaks stole the DNC’s trade secrets - the same defense, incidentally, used by Scientology when it filed its own suit against WikiLeaks in the organization's early days. Were the argument to stand, it would silence journalists who seek to publish leaked documents even when the journalists did not steal those documents themselves - dealing a major blow to investigative reporting. Pulitzer-winning exposés like the Pentagon papers or the more recent Panama papers would be impossible to write without the leaked or stolen documents provided by whistleblowers, who commit the minor crime of theft to expose the monstrous crimes of governments and corporations. The lawsuit also implicates WikiLeaks in illegal “wiretapping” - since the “trade secrets” were transmitted over the internet, and WikiLeaks must have known they’d been obtained illegally - and ties itself in knots creatively interpreting RICO statutes. If all journalists publishing whistleblower reports could be hit with RICO suits, such reporting would take on a whole new level of peril. The icing on the cake is the copyright violation charge - the DNC’s documents, after all, were copyrighted material, which WikiLeaks was not licensed to publish! The lawsuit is absurd, but its content was never meant to be taken seriously as an indictment of the elusive Trump-Russia collusion. It was meant to shut WikiLeaks up - and to silence any investigative journalists who would follow in Assange's footsteps.

 

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called for Assange’s release in 2016 in a report that criticized excesses by both the Swedish and UK governments and refuted the notion that he is in the Ecuadorian embassy of his own free will, facing no threat of extradition to the United States. The group recommended both countries “ensure the right of free movement of Mr. Assange and accord him an enforceable right to compensation” as they are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Sweden, which had never before been found to detain a person arbitrarily by the UN WGAD, dropped its seven-year “preliminary investigation” into the rape allegations last May - an investigation the UK government had bullied them into prolonging for four of those years, reminding Swedish authorities it was “not just another extradition.” Assange has served over three times the maximum jail sentence for bail-jumping in the UK, but Judge Emma Arbuthnot upheld the warrant for his arrest in February, dismissing his concerns about extradition and the increasingly dire state of his health. 

 

US Guts First Amendment

 

Right now, the most urgent danger Assange faces is US extradition. The Trump regime, having pulled an about-face from Candidate Trump’s “love” of WikiLeaks, has made it a “priority” to arrest Assange, and a UK arrest would soon see him on a plane headed to face the same DC judge who locked up Chelsea Manning for life - a sentence that was only commuted, incidentally, because Assange told Barack Obama he’d turn himself in in exchange for a pardon for Manning. Obama, whose administration prosecuted more journalists under the Espionage Act than all its predecessors combined, couldn’t quite bring himself to pardon Manning, and the commutation “compromise” gave Assange a loophole to avoid facing the hanging judges in the capital. John Pilger and the Courage Foundation are campaigning for Assange’s safe release to Australia with a guarantee that he will not be extradited by the United States, even though the word of the US under Trump means less than ever (the regime's reneging on the Iran nuclear deal having nibbled away at what few shreds remained after the deadly bait-and-switches that disarmed and then disemboweled Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi). The idea of US extradition should be ludicrous, given that Assange has neither entered the US nor committed any crimes against it, but merely publishing stolen documents has increasingly been codified as a crime in the post-9/11 US. 

 

The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, part of a comprehensive attack on press freedom that saw legal protections for journalists and their sources eviscerated. Not to be outdone, Trump AG Jeff Sessions announced last year that his Justice Department was pursuing three times as many leak investigations as Obama’s and that they would be reviewing the department’s press policies to make it easier to prosecute such leaks. Earlier this month, agents seized the phone and email records of New York Times reporter Ali Watkins during an investigation into leaks by former Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe. Wolfe was indicted for lying to investigators about contact with reporters but not charged with leaking classified information; his indictment mentions but does not name three other reporters with whom he had contact, whose information was presumably left alone. Watkins’ information - a year’s worth of phone and email data - was seized via national security letter without her knowledge (again, without even an indictment alleging she had received classified information from Wolfe). Justice Department guidelines adopted in 2015 require the Department to exhaust all other options before subpoenaing a journalist’s information and provide advance notice to the journalist so that they might challenge the subpoena in court, but national security letters have increasingly been (ab)used to secretly obtain data on journalists and their sources. The guidelines permit secretly obtaining journalists’ data only if there’s a threat of “grave harm to national security” or “imminent risk of death or serious bodily harm” involved - hardly the case with regard to Watkins, then working for Buzzfeed, and her senate aide boyfriend Wolfe discussing Russiagate - but such rules are conveniently non-binding. 

 

The Intercept’s James Risen, recasting himself as a profile in journalistic courage despite sitting on the NSA’s “Stellar Wind” surveillance program for two years at the behest of his New York Times editors, recognized the Wolfe investigation as a flashpoint in the war on press freedom but drew the wrong conclusions, framing the episode as proof that there was a core of truth within the disintegrating Russiagate edifice, urging reporters to keep at the collusion non-story and cheering on the establishment media for “keeping the story alive when public and governmental interest has waned.” When the Intercept and Freedom of the Press Foundation published Justice Department documents detailing the department's press policies, they glossed over the real story - that press protections don’t apply to a journalist who is “believed to be a spy or…part of a news organization associated with a foreign intelligence service or otherwise acting on behalf of a foreign power.” Another reason for casting WikiLeaks and other alternative media as Russian stooges becomes abundantly clear. Obama’s Justice Department used the Espionage Act, a WWI-era law meant to prosecute spies, as a weapon in its war on whistleblowers. Trump’s goons are just taking this strategy to its logical conclusion.

 

Controlled Opposition

 

One should expect obfuscation and misleading coverage from the Intercept, whose star journalist Glenn Greenwald has not yet released 95% of the Snowden files he was entrusted to curate in 2013, including one that could have prevented some of the bloodshed in Syria if it had been released years ago. The document, which exposes the “moderate rebels” fighting the Assad regime as foreign proxies funded by the US and Saudi Arabia, would have interfered with the Intercept's anti-Assad line - even the too-little-too-late article accompanying the document falsely depicts the war in Syria as the outgrowth of an "organic, peaceful" protest movement - so the outlet sat on it until even the US State Department had admitted the anti-Assad "rebels" were deploying the chemical weapons they'd accused Assad of using. eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar's platform, which rose to prominence because of its monopoly on the Snowden material, has always acted in Omidyar's interest first and journalism's last. During Obama's presidency, Omidyar visited the White House more often than the CEOs of Google, Facebook, or Amazon, rendering invalid the notion of the Intercept as anti-establishment. In launching parent company First Look Media, Omidyar essentially paid $250 million to acquire control of Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists in possession of the Snowden documents, and now owns those documents, which allegedly include the juicy details of PayPal's business relationship with the NSA and its function within the agency's unconstitutional spying programs. Omidyar has made no secret of his antipathy towards leakers, and he clearly does not intend to release any more of the Snowden material if it can be avoided.

 

With the lies at the core of the Intercept exposed, it should shock no one that the outlet was responsible for last year’s arrest of leaker Reality Winner. What appeared to be sloppy opsec may have been deliberate betrayal - the journalists who bungled Winner’s leak were also involved in outing CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the agency’s torture program. When the Intercept publishes factually inaccurate polemics against WikiLeaks, it is not an anomalous act by an otherwise pro-transparency media platform, but a blow against the authentic competitor it wants to replace with its own controlled opposition. Micah Lee, who has called the WikiLeaks founder a "rapist, liar, & ally to fascists" as well as a "Putin fanboy" is a Russiagate true believer who convinced the Freedom of the Press Foundation to cut off Wikileaks’ funding before penning the least fact-based smear yet to emerge from the Intercept. The irony is rich, considering that the FPF was formed to circumvent the banking blockade on donations to WikiLeaks in the fallout from the Cablegate leaks. But Omidyar now funds the FPF, whose ranks have swelled to 15 members, many of whom are affiliated with the Intercept. There, they take turns hammering at Assange with baseless smears and innuendos (most recently Xeni Jardin's attempts to link Assange to Cambridge Analytica, as well as her deliberate mischaracterization of his Twitter DMs as death threats) in between shilling for terrorist movie stars the White Helmets and fanning the dying embers of Russiagate. Greenwald has much to answer for beyond merely dragging his feet in releasing Snowden’s material. The Intercept and other controlled-opposition outlets are far more damaging to independent journalists than the media establishment.

 

The Ukrainian Connection

 

Omidyar, along with the Right’s favorite bogeyman George Soros, joined USAID and other CIA-backed NGOs in funding the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, which replaced democratically-elected Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych with a coalition of far-right neo-Nazi goons backed by the US State Department and led by Arseniy Yatsenyuk (later Petro Poroshenko). The Ukrainian government is known for targeting dissident journalists both inside and outside its borders, outsourcing such thought-policing to amateur “security researchers” via open-source surveillance tools to devastating effect. Within the government, it created the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Information Policy in 2015, ostensibly to combat Russian propaganda by manufacturing its own, and designated all journalists who opposed the regime as “collaborators” - fair game for retaliation, be it harassment, arrest, or murder. Anonymous website Mirotvorets doxxed thousands of “terrorists” operating in the eastern separatist regions of Donetsk and Donbas - a list that grew to include over a thousand journalists whose only crime was receiving credentials from the contested regions - and encouraged patriotic Ukrainians to snitch on pro-Russian elements in their midst while threatening pro-Russian elements with death if they did not rat out their friends. Many journalists received death threats; some were attacked in the streets; some, like Pavel Sheremet, were killed. The attackers were not government goon squads, but propagandized Ukrainian civilians who believed they were doing their patriotic duty by attacking “traitors.” 

 

As the US becomes more hostile to journalists, it’s impossible to ignore the Ukrainian blueprint for the future. Demonizing/scapegoating of Russia? check. Spinning of contested events? check. Anonymous blacklist(s) of dissident journalists (PropOrNot, Mirotvorets)? check. PropOrNot did not inspire ordinary American citizens to physically attack dissident journalists, but by smearing them as traitors, it established a subconscious association that can be drawn upon or amplified in the future. European Values followed up on the slanders last year with an exhaustive list of 2000+ names of politicians and media figures who had appeared on RT, dismissing them all categorically as Kremlin operatives - names running the gamut from UKIP’s Nigel Farage to the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson to John Sununu, a relatively obscure figure from the first Bush administration. George Eliason described years ago how Ukrainian intelligence has outsourced the persecution of dissident journalists to civilians in a series of terrifying articles that read like a dystopian nightmare - vigilante citizens armed with NSA surveillance technology acting out their personal vendettas on law-abiding citizens who have no idea they’re being targeted - and he has documented extensively the role these shadowy figures played in the 2016 election. They did such a good job, in fact, that they’ve been rewarded with the highest prize a propagandist could ask for - the ability to determine truth and falsehood on the world’s largest social media platform. The Atlantic Council, a pro-NATO think tank funded by Ukrainian billionaires, multinational banks, weapons contractors, and other supra-governmental entities, is joining Facebook's fight against “fake news.” The truth has left the building.

 

Russian revenant-journalist Arkady Babchenko messed with the program by coming back to life after he was supposed to have fallen victim to the evil press-massacring Russians. Ukrainian media, already suffering from low levels of trust among the population, scrambled to plug the holes in the story, devising a slap-dash tale of a ruse meant to draw out Russian hitmen and emphasizing that the reason everyone fell for the original story is that it was so likely Babchenko would be murdered for criticizing Putin. The stories that had already appeared implicating Russia in Babchenko’s death, information that had been furnished by Ukrainian security services, were memory-holed, but not before they made fools of such well-known fools as the UK’s Boris Johnson. Such sloppiness made the Keystone-Kops Skirpal affair look positively credible. Journalists in Ukraine and Russia alike, though universally relieved that Babchenko was alive, expressed concern that his reanimation would further undermine the tenuous credibility of their nations’ presses. Russia is home to few independent media outlets, and press freedom in Ukraine has all but dried up since the Euromaidan revolution. The Atlantic admits that “it is still not clear how authorities, in staging Babchenko’s death, were allegedly able to confirm Russia’s involvement in the murder plot.” Yet the US media continues to take the word of Ukraine’s security services and media as gospel, republishing the claim that Babchenko’s ruse led to the discovery of a hit-list with 47 names targeted for assassination by the Russian government (up from 30 a few days previously). Fool me once, shame on you…

 

Global Crackdown

 

The persecution of Assange is just one piece of a coordinated effort at press suppression that reaches around the globe. The Department of Homeland Security is currently compiling a master list of “journalists and media influencers” - people who have committed no crime other than publishing. The agency plans to track over 290,000 news sources globally, in over 100 languages that will be instantly translated to English. Browsable by “location, beat, and type of influencer,” the database will also have profiles of each “influencer” including their contact information, previous writings, and “sentiment.” Applications closed two months ago, so it’s presumably in development now. They really don’t want another WikiLeaks, or a proper alternative to Facebook/Twitter, or - worse - a Deep-State-free Google. 

 

The DHS database facilitates the rise of a Mirotvorets for every country - a police state’s wet dream - as well as a valuable information trove to be sold to foreign governments frustrated with their own unruly press. There is no understating the potential abuses, especially at a time when (according to the latest RSF report) hostility toward journalists is on the rise worldwide. Egypt and Turkey are accusing journalists of terrorism and even imprisoning those who don’t display loyalty toward their governments; Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has told reporters they “are not exempted from assassination;” Czech president Milos Zeman has called for journalists to be “liquidated” and recently brandished a prop AK47 labeled “journalists.” Serbian PM Aleksandar Vucic followed the examples of the US, UK and Ukraine, using state media to intimidate independent journalists and accusing them of “treachery” and being foreign spies. Countless regimes were called out by the RSF report for publicly insulting the press. Germany has used the specter of “fake news” to pass one of the most restrictive anti-free-speech laws in the EU, fining social networks if they don’t remove “hate speech” quickly enough after it’s reported. Given that country’s notoriously broad definition of “hate speech” - octogenarian “Nazi grandma” Ursula Haverbeck is serving a 14-month sentence for “holocaust denial” for calling Auschwitz a labor camp - German journalists are especially screwed.

 

Criminalizing Journalism

 

Assange's imprisonment is only the tip of the UK's police-state iceberg. The country, which after all birthed Orwell and still hosts more CCTV cameras per square inch than any other nation (one for every 11 citizens), has embraced the notion of secret police, imprisoning controversial citizen journalist Tommy Robinson for reporting on the “grooming” trial of a group of Pakistani men. Robinson, formerly of the far-right English Defense League, has been smeared in the media as an Islamophobe, but whatever his prejudices, he remains a British citizen who was exercising his legal rights. He was convicted and imprisoned within five hours and a media gag order was quickly issued; articles about Robinson’s arrest suddenly disappeared into the D-notice memory hole. Robinson got his start exposing a massive child-sex ring operating with full knowledge of town officials in his home village of Rotherham and has since become a vocal critic of Islamic extremism, blaming religious doctrine and unfettered immigration for the actions of the grooming gangs. He has clashed with UK authorities before for reporting outside grooming trials, but a lawyer seeking to debunk the idea of Robinson as a victim of a police state run amok actually disproves his own thesis when he unpacks the contempt charge. When he was arrested, Robinson had been filming the defendants as they filed into the building, naming them and their charges - conspicuously adding “allegedly” in order to avoid running afoul of contempt criteria. Defendants’ names were already public, and the verdict was being delivered during that session, meaning the jury could not have been influenced by his reporting unless they were watching Robinson’s livestream from the courtroom. The use of a D-notice - a publication ban applied only where cases of national security are concerned - to squelch coverage of Robinson's arrest reeks of Stalinism. The “breach of the peace” charge used to justify the arrest itself is entirely spurious. Robinson may be prejudiced or just a victim of media demonization but he was not committing a crime. His arrest - and subsequent removal to a heavily Muslim prison where he fears for his life and where he has already been threatened - sent a message to other citizen journalists to sit down and shut up.

 

Journalists who dare to speak truth to power are frequently arrested on trumped-up or invented charges - for Robinson it was “disturbing the peace,” a patently absurd accusation for a man filming a courthouse with a cellphone. Assange’s “rape” charges involved consensual sex, and his accuser recanted soon after she was coerced into making her statement. Every activist knows someone who has been arrested for “resisting arrest,” a nonexistent crime that can carry a death sentence in the trigger-happy US, especially if the “offender” is black. Stalin’s regime infamously locked up dissidents in insane asylums - since one would have to be crazy to oppose Stalinism - and this paradigm is still operational today, though deinstitutionalization means dissidents are more commonly imprisoned with "chemical straitjackets" such as antipsychotic drugs that render them harmlessly unable to think without the expense of housing their husks. Germany still locks up history scholars for “holocaust denial,” a catch-all term encompassing everything from revisionist scholarship to neo-Nazi propaganda. In the US, concerned “friends” of Chelsea Manning called the police to her home for a “wellness check” in response to a series of depressed-sounding tweets, triggering a heavily-armed response that likely would have killed her had she been home. 

 

Israeli snipers gunned down several journalists covering the Palestinian March of Return last month despite their clearly-marked “Press” vests, equating coverage of “terrorists” with “terrorism” in a similar manner to Ukrainian propaganda. Indeed, US ambassador to Israel David Friedman issued an edict to the journalists condemning Israeli violence in Gaza -  don’t. Claiming that 9 of 10 articles are “critical of Israel,” as if that wouldn’t be logical given that it isn’t the Palestinians slaughtering unarmed protesters, journalists and medics, he lamented the lack of “hard, factual analysis” (which would presumably uncover how a baby can be a terrorist). FAIR (and anyone who’s been paying attention) note that the opposite is true - 9 of 10 articles take Israel’s side, victim-blaming on a grand scale. Friedman implies that the journalists shot by Israeli snipers must also take the blame for their own murder - after all, “hard, factual analysis” would have told them they’d be less likely to be shot covering the protests from the Israeli side. The Israeli Knesset is currently weighing legislation that would criminalize the filming of IDF soldiers. Censorship is the last refuge of scoundrels.

 

A law recently passed in South Carolina conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and criminalizes both. Israel realizes its escalating abuses of Palestinian human rights do not go unnoticed even in its accomplice and enabler the US, and that American Jews - especially younger, more liberal Jews - are distancing themselves from the reactionary Likud government en masse. The only way to deal with such political toxicity is to outlaw acknowledging its existence. The pall that has hung over open discussion of Israel in Europe is moving across the pond. The ACLU has offered only token resistance to this law, and other organizations are giving it a wide berth, fearing the powerful cudgel of antisemitism accusations as wielded by the ADL and its cohorts. As Israeli snipers fire on journalists attempting to document the situation in Gaza, Friedman’s directive adds to the bulldozer full of bullshit American media has already dumped on the Palestinian victims of Israeli crimes. Babies? Shouldn’t have been there. Kids? Human shields. Medics? “Doctors and nurses can be terrorists too.” Since 9/11, Israeli security forces have trained American cops to bring their brutal and repressive tactics back to the homeland. When home-grown uniformed death squads start gunning down journalists, we can thank Zionism.

 

...but back to WikiLeaks

 

Anyone who cares about freedom of the press can join a protest this Tuesday in the metropolis of your choice. June 19 is the 6th anniversary of his entry into the embassy. If you can’t show up for this, don’t expect anyone to show up when they come for you, because they will not stop with imprisoning Assange, or Robinson, or Kiriakou, Manning, Winner, and the endless list of whistleblowers punished for the crimes they exposed. It doesn’t matter if you think Assange is a cad, or that he went off the deep end during the 2016 election (you’d go off the deep end too if you had spent the last five years in legal limbo in a foreign embassy with only the occasional glimpse of sunlight to remind you what planet you're on, and one can hardly accuse him of supporting a candidate he likened to an STD). Assange committed no crime, yet he rots in solitary confinement. Such treatment of an individual who has done so much for the cause of transparency and truth is unconscionable. He must not be forgotten. Safe passage must be arranged to a country with no US extradition treaty. Exposing the truth should not be a capital crime.