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The Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London has granted permission for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the US, where he faces up to 175 years in prison. WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson stressed that the court had effectively signed the death penalty for Assange.
“16 months ago, this court decided that extraditing Assange would be a risk to his life, would be a death sentence. Now this court has been ordered to issue that death sentence,” Hrafnsson said.
Assange’s defence lawyer can appeal to the High Court in London until May 18, but as the attention of the world community is focussed on Ukraine, there is every possibility that the High Court’s decision will just be equally controversial. Essentially, British authorities are taking advantage of the fact that Assange will not get enough public attention.
More alarmingly, the Anglo Alliance (USA-UK-Australia), for all its rhetoric of liberty and freedom, have spearheaded one of the most vicious campaigns against a journalist in human history. Assange as an Australian citizen is isolated and ignored by Canberra, imprisoned in the UK, and sought for extradition to the US – making a complete Anglo Alliance assault against investigative journalism.
Essentially, the Anglo Alliance is warning journalists and publishers that they will be targeted and persecuted if they interfere or expose their war crimes and corruption. This is all the more crucial in this period of time as the Western mainstream media and their establishment backers are running a vitriolic propaganda campaign for Ukraine, endlessly disseminating fake news that is continuously exposed – such as Ghost of Kyiv, Snake Island, etc.
Julian Assange gained notoriety after the release of documents exposing the illegal actions of the US military during their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Journalists published data on the killing of civilians by US soldiers on the WikiLeaks website. At the same time, the portal revealed information about the conditions of detention at Guantanamo Bay prison.
From June 2012, Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, but was stripped of his diplomatic asylum and detained on April 11, 2019.
Following the court decision, Australian Finance Minister Simon Birmingham could only meekly say: “We have confidence in the independence and integrity of the British justice system” and that the Australian government was not arguing against the extradition. In this way, entrapped in the historical Anglo imperial capital of London, Assange has been abandoned by the Anglo colonial offshoot of Australia and now relies on 25 human rights groups and sympathisers to challenge extradition.
The human rights group say that Assange’s persecution poses a “grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”
However, according to Fidel Narváez, a former diplomat at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, “the greatest responsibility” for the persecution of Assange “falls on the media that do not fulfill this task of challenging the official agenda of governments and the prevailing political powers. If the US imposes an agenda of persecution on its whistleblowers, in this case on journalism that has revealed crimes, it is shameful that the mainstream media simply echoes that persecution, that they take as truth what Assange’s persecutors have said about him, instead of defending one of their own.”
Narváez, who was a diplomat in London when Assange entered the embassy and requested political asylum in 2012, maintained that the most powerful media are companies with an “economic and commercial logic”, so behind their owners there are “big businessmen, millionaires or groups that are aligned with the establishment of the different countries, and in this case, especially of the US.”
The former diplomat also pointed out that Assange believed that wars could not be possible without the complicity of the large Western media outlets, which “remained silent in the face of abuses and crimes.”
This is seen today with the Western media being unrelenting towards Russia’s military operation in Ukraine despite remaining utterly silent as the Ukrainian military and their neo-Nazi Republican Guard allies, such as the Azov Battalion, terrorized and persecuted the people of Donbass since 2014.
And it is perhaps for this very reason that, as war fever and Russophobia in the West has peaked to unprecedented heights in the 21st century, the Anglo Alliance is sending out warnings to journalists that if they do not follow the official narrative, they could very well end up like Assange too.
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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
