June 13, 2022
Julian Assange’s wife’s video, posted in May, about how the U.S. is seeking revenge against the WikiLeaks founder, has been viewed more than a million times on Twitter.
“The US and UK like to talk about political prisoners abroad but they have created a political prisoner of their own. At every stage, the law has been abused to victimize Julian: he has been silenced, he has been disappeared,” says Stella Assange.
The Australian activist’s spouse, a human rights lawyer, argues that her partner is in prison for exposing war crimes by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fact that “torture has been normalized and institutionalized.”
“And this superpower has taken revenge,” Stella Assange stressed.
She criticizes the UK’s stance for approving her husband’s extradition order to the “country that conspired to assassinate him,” a plan that involved more than 30 intelligence officials, including high-ranking personnel.
“It is unbelievable that a country would conspire to assassinate a journalist because of what he has published. It is precisely what the British government criticizes if it happens in other states,” she recalled.
Stella stressed that the U.S. government “is the only one that has committed crimes in this case,” and that by prosecuting Assange for doing a good thing, “they deny him the existence and validity of what he reported.”
The US is not a member of the International Criminal Court so the only liability that exists for the country is the exposure through WikiLeaks, she explained. For this reason, “they are not simply prosecuting Julian but they are also putting in prison the memory of the victims” of war crimes committed by Washington.
In this regard, she noted that Assange is being prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which when passed triggered concerns among constitutional jurists that its broad wording could be leveraged to persecute the press.
The Trump Administration’s decision to enforce this law, according to Stella, “is the single greatest attack on the First Amendment,” considered the “gold standard worldwide for freedom of the press.”
She urged current U.S. President Joe Biden to rescind the case, otherwise -he warns- it “will be used by future governments to silence dissent and silence the press”.
She also referred to the absurdity and danger of the fact that “it means that anyone anywhere is subject to the U.S. Espionage Act”. In this regard, Julian is not a U.S. citizen, Julian is Australian and worked as a journalist in the United Kingdom. “He owes no allegiance to the U.S. government,” she concluded.
Assange faces 175 years behind bars for receiving information from a source and publishing it on WikiLeaks.
“This advances the absurd notion that a country can limit press freedom beyond its borders, that it can retaliate against foreign journalists abroad,” she said.
Stella blamed the media for not properly covering what is happening and not allowing the public to understand the possible consequences of this case for all journalists around the world.
In the video, the woman recounts the prison conditions to which Assange is subjected and how they affect his state of health, in addition to showing episodes of her visits to her husband accompanied by her two children, aged three and four, the eldest born in 2017 when his father was a refugee in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
“The fact that he has been deprived of his family for no reason, just because of the spiteful and cruel sense of revenge by a superpower he exposed has to come to an end. No one should be treated in this way,” Stella said.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano Argentina