Julian Assange: Free Speech Warrior

The hypocrisy of the fake free speech warriors at The Australian is exposed in the Murdoch rag's editorial on the arrest of genuine free speech warrior Julian Assange:

"It is not known when Assange might face a US court, but he should. He could not hide forever. In the interests of all Western nations and the fight against terror, US security and military services need to protect sensitive information and close loopholes that allowed so much data to be extracted and dispersed." (Assange must be accountable, 13/4/19)

Here is Assange's compelling rationale for the over 2 million US diplomatic cables published up to 2015 from his introduction to The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire (2015):

"While national archives have produced impressive collections of internal state communications, their material is intentionally withheld or made difficult to access for decades, until it is stripped of potency... What makes the revelation of secret communications potent is that we were not supposed to read them. The internal communications of the US Department of State are the logistical by-product of its activities: their publication is the vivisection of a living empire, showing what substance flowed from which state organ and when.

"Diplomatic cables are not produced in order to manipulate the public, but are aimed at elements of the rest of the US state apparatus, and are therefore relatively free from the distorting influence of public relations. Reading them is a much more effective way of understanding an institution like the State Department than reading reports by journalists on the public pronouncements of Hilary Clinton, or Jen Psaki.

"Whilst in their internal communications State Department officials must match their pens to the latest DC orthodoxies should they wish to stand out in Washington for the 'right' reasons and not the 'wrong' ones, these elements of political correctness are themselves noteworthy and visible to outsiders who are not sufficiently indoctrinated. Many cables are deliberative or logistical, and their causal relationships across time and space with other cables and with externally documented events create a web of interpretive constraints that reliably show how the US Department of State and the agencies that inter-operate with its cable system understand their place in the world.

"Only by approaching this corpus holistically - over and above the documentation of each individual abuse, each localized atrocity - does the true human cost of empire heave into view." (pp 5-6)