Julian Assange quotes - page 5
The real purpose of state secrecy is to enable governments to establish their own self-interested and often mendacious version of the truth by the careful selection of "facts” to be passed on to the public. They feel enraged by any revelation of what they really know, or by any alternative source of information. Such threats to their control of the news agenda must be suppressed where possible and, where not, those responsible must be pursued and punished.
Revealing important information about the Yemen war – in which at least 70,000 people have been killed – is the reason why the US government is persecuting both Assange and Zikry.
Julian Assange
The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.
Julian Assange
His steady physical and psychological deterioration has led to hallucinations and depression. He takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. He has been observed pacing his cell until he collapses, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall. He has spent weeks in the medical wing of Belmarsh. Prison authorities found "half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself "hundreds of times a day.” The executioners have not yet completed their grim work. Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the Haitian independence movement, the only successful slave revolt in human history, was physically destroyed in the same manner, locked by the French in an unheated and cramped prison cell and left to die of exhaustion, malnutrition, apoplexy, pneumonia and probably tuberculosis.
Julian Assange
The former NSA analyst [Edward Snowden] mentioned the fact that Ecuador got $4.2 billion in funds from the International Monetary Fund in early March as a sign the country was getting closer to the West, and in turn more inclined to give up Assange. "Journalists who have been covering the story haven't really been looking at that, because Julian as an individual is such a tragically flawed figure,” Snowden said. Snowden also criticized people who changed their minds about Assange after the 2016 election."A lot of Americans now hate Julian,” he said. "Even though the sort of people who are on the center to the left part of the spectrum had been singing his praises during the Bush administration, now they're on the other side because of his unfortunate political choices in the 2016 elections.”.
Julian Assange
The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics, our culture. So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police. War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian can stand up, so can you: so can all of us.
Julian Assange
WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run.
Julian Assange
Nowhere does one read.. a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of [alternative media] journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador... His real crime, and the thing the US wants... him...for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes...Because a press freedom is under serious attack these days, certainly by President Trump, but also by a corporate media itself that supports a censored internet and a two-tiered access to high-speed internet - both of which measures threaten alternative news media - and that fail to firmly support and defend the whistleblowers who often are critically important in bringing urgent stories of government and corporate wrongdoing to light.
Julian Assange
The Democratic Party- seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian "interference” rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and the corporate coup d'état that the party helped orchestrate - attacks Assange as a traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not committed a crime....
Julian Assange
A legitimate, registered, multi award-winning media organisation and its editor have legally published the truth about the biggest superpower in the world and embarrassed them and exposed them for wrongdoing - war crimes, corruption and fraud...The whole exercise has been set up to smear and silence the truth and those countries with their snouts in the trough with America have fallen into line. Ecuador, whose snout isn't in the trough, has not fallen into line.
Julian Assange
I knew years before the Pentagon Papers came out that the Americans were being lied in to an essentially hopeless war. I'm not proud of the fact that it didn't occur to me that my oath of office, which was to support the Constitution, called on me to put that information out and say, ‘64, when the war might have been avoided. But I certainly am glad that I finally came aware of what my real responsibilities were there. And I did put it out years later. At times, at that time, which published it, the "Times,” and the 18 other newspapers, which defied President Nixon's injunctions and did put it out, were in the position of Julian Assange is in now.
Julian Assange
The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure.
Julian Assange
