U.S. Assault on
Assange Betrays America's Founding Principles
"The
U.S. is betraying one of its founding principles: the freedom of information.
And it's doing so at a time when it faces the loss of power over global
information for the first time since the Cold War. ... With its current steps
against WikiLeaks, the U.S. now forfeits any right to call China to account over
its persecution of Internet activists."
The reputation of the United
States has been damaged by the publication of confidential documents disclosed
by WikiLeaks. That is true. It began in April, with the obscene video of the
execution of unarmed men in Baghdad by an Army helicopter, accompanied by
commentary of the bored crew [video below]. The episode came to an end with
frank reports from U.S. ambassadors around the world, whose confidentiality the
government was unable to protect.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
But now the image of the U.S.
is sustaining even more damage as it tries to silence, by any means possible,
WikiLeaks and its CEO, Julian Assange, and by so joyously welcoming his arrest.
The U.S. is betraying one of its founding principles: the freedom of
information. And it's doing so at a time when it faces the loss of power over
global information for the first time since the Cold War. "The
first serious information war has begun," writes the
U.S. civil rights activist John Perry Barlow. "The
battlefield is WikiLeaks."
He’s right. With the doctrine
of the “free flow of information,” the U.S. has dominated the information flow
and a large part of its contents for decades. It states that everyone has a
right to gather, transmit, and distribute news everywhere, without limitation.
This was a fabulous doctrine as long as U.S. companies alone had the power,
resources and logistics to take advantage of it. That has already changed with
the arrival of the Internet, although companies like Apple, Windows, Google,
Facebook and Amazon are perpetuating U.S. dominance, even on the supposedly
democratic global Net. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, however, are the first to
use the power of the network on the U.S.. That’s why they are being persecuted
so mercilessly; and that’s why the U.S. government is violating a basic rule of
democracy.
It is not without irony that
Hillary Clinton, at the beginning of the year at a conference in Washington,
used the Free Flow of Information doctrine to flog internet censorship in China
and Egypt. She quoted President Barack Obama, who justified the
necessity of free access to the Internet this way: "It helps citizens
hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas and encourages
creativity.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
With its current steps
against WikiLeaks, the U.S. now forfeits any right to call China to account over
its persecution of Internet activists.
Daniel Ellsberg, who decades ago
revealed to Americans the truth about the Vietnam War by publishing the Pentagon Papers,
clearly recognizes the dimensions of the action against Assange. In an open letter to
Amazon, which withdrew their Web Services platform from WikiLeaks under
pressure from Washington, he writes: “I am disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and
servility.”
He shows that it's not the
government in Washington, but the criminalized Julian Assange, who is in line
with a great American tradition: the fearless struggle for freedom of
information.
