[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQZMo2vhv0U&rel=0]
John Pilger
Transparancy and accountability are moral issues that are essense of public life and journalism
journalists are agents of people not the power
this is not deu process its deu revenge.
a powerful gracious
principal campaigner is john
you know when i first met julian assange
almost 10 years ago i asked him why
he had started wikileaks and he replied
transparency and accountability are
moral issues
that must be the essence of public life
and journalism unquote
now i’d never heard a publisher
or an editor invoke morality
in this way julian believes a journalist
of the agents of people
not power but we the people
have the right to know about the darker
secrets of those who claim
to act in our name if the powerful
lie to us we have the right to know
if they say one thing in private and the
opposite in the
in public we have the right to know if
they conspire
against us as blair did over iraq
then and then pretend to be democrats
we have the right to know if this
morality of purpose
it’s this morality of purpose that so
threatens the collusion of powers that
want to plunge
much of the world into war and now wants
to bury
julian alive in trump’s fascist
america in 2008
a top secret u.s state department report
described in detail how the united
states would combat this new
moral threat a secretly directed
personal smear campaign against julian
assange would lead to and i quote
exposure and criminal prosecution
the aim was to silence and criminalize
wikileaks
and its editor page after page revealed
a war on a single human being
and on the very principle of freedom of
speech
and freedom of thought and democracy
the imperial shock troops will be those
who call themselves journalists the
bigger
the big hitters of the so-called
mainstream
especially the liberals who mark the
perimeters of descent
and that’s what happened i’ve been a
reporter for more than 50 years
and i’ve never known a smear campaign
like this one the fabricated character
assassination of a man
who refused to join the club who
believed
journalism was a service to the public
never to those above
julian shamed his persecutors
he produced scoop after scoop he exposed
the fraudulence of wars promoted by the
media
and the homicidal nature of those wars
the corruption of dictators the evils
of guantanamo he forced us in the west
to look in the mirror
he exposed the official truth tellers in
the media so called
as collaborators those i would call
vichy journalists none of these
impostors believed julian when he warned
that his life was in danger
that sweden was a set up and he was
right
and he was repeatedly right the
extradition hearing
here this week is the final act
of the campaign to bury julian assange
it’s not due process it’s due revenge
the american indictment is clearly
rigged
a demonstrable sham so far the hearings
have been reminiscent
of their stalinist equivalents during
the cold war
today the land that gave us the magna
carta
is distinguished by the abandonment of
its own
sovereignty in allowing a malign foreign
power
to manipulate justice and by the vicious
psychological
torture of julian a form of torture as
niels melser
the u.n expert has pointed out that was
refined by the nazis
because it was more effective in
breaking its victims
every time i visited julian in belmont
prison i’ve seen the effects of this
torture
when i last saw him he’d lost more than
10 kilos in weight incredibly
his wicked sense of humor was still
intact
as for julian’s homeland australia
australia has displayed only a cringing
cowardice
as it is secretly colluded with a
lawless power
against its own citizen who ought to be
celebrated
as a national hero
it’s said that whatever happens to
julian in the coming weeks
will diminish freedom of the press
but which press the guardian the bbc
the new york times the jeff bezos
washington post
know the journalists in these
organizations can breathe freely
the judas has on the guardian who
flirted with
julian exploited his landmark work
made their pile then betrayed him
have nothing whatsoever to fear
they are safe because they are needed
freedom of the press now rests with the
honorable few
the exceptions the dissidents on the
internet
who belong to no club
who are neither rich nor laden with
pulitzer prizes
but produce fine disobedient
moral journalism those like julian
assange
meanwhile it’s our responsibility
to stand by a true journalist
whose sheer courage ought to be
inspiration
to all of us who believe that freedom
is still a possibility i saluted
very much john thank you for that um
it’s vitally