Rather than pillory Julian Assange, and ‘shop’ him to the US Administration to meet whatever fate, the Gillard government should stand up for him…and for the world’s right to free speech, even if honesty and transparency doesn’t suit the Americans, CLA member Jim Collier (photo) told a rally in Launceston. (Youtube video included in the full article)
Civil Liberties Australia on Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Presented by CLA member Jim Collier to a Public Rally in Launceston in support of Assange & Wikileaks.
29th January 2011
Civil Liberties Australia unreservedly supports Julian Assange’s right to operate as a journalist/blogger and to post leaked material online. By doing so he commits no legitimate offence we’re aware of in the USA or Australia.
In fact he is following in a proud US tradition, along the lines of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with leaker ‘Deep Throat’ in the Nixon era and the now revered leaker Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers at the time of the Vietnam War.
If the person who leaked the material to Assange has broken a US law it would be the same law that leaker Ellsberg would have broken in the case of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and …Ellsberg is now a US hero.
If Assange himself has broken a US law it would be the same law that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke in the Watergate-Deep Throat case which led to the impeachment and departure in disgrace of President Richard Nixon.
Both journalists are American heroes with at least one movie and many books about them and their leaking/reporting ways.
What was the problem in both the Pentagon Papers and Watergate cases? US military and Administration official were caught lying!
As regards Assange and the Australian Government;
- Civil Liberties Australia is alarmed that a government can so readily abandon an Australian citizen as Prime Minister Gillard and Attorney-General appeared to do at the outset of this matter.
- Civil Liberties Australia recalls how even extremely conservative Australians eventually rebelled and forced the Howard Liberal Government to do something to help David Hicks, whom that government had abandoned to fabricated American laws and prison-without-reason at the Guantanamo Bay hellhole in Cuba.
Now, it seems, the Gillard Labor Government is going one better and refusing to stand up for an Australian citizen whose only proven crime is being a good journalist/blogger.
It makes you wonder what is the value of an Australian passport if the Australian Government’s first response is to try to help a foreign power find a charge to lay against an Australian passport holder.
Civil Liberties Australia would prefer the Australian Government spent its resources assisting Assange defend possibly fabricated sex crimes being made against him.
Remember, they were made once, them dropped by a Swedish prosecutor and only recently reinstated by another prosecutor at the time of the latest leaks.
Civil Liberties Australia would like to nominate Julian Assange for Australian of the Year: he has done more to eliminate lies, deceit, humbug and hubris in international affairs than anyone in the Gillard (or, for that matter, Howard) Governments or in …the US Government!
The US might decide to charge Assange with sedition, historically a charge laid at the whim of English kings, this is a political ‘offence’ not used in the USA for half a century and one formally and officially discredited in Australia by a change in legislation in 2010!