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In LewRockwell.com, Paul Craig Roberts explains that the Deep State of the U.S. government is hell-bent on exacting revenge upon Julian Assange because he exposed their incompetence. Roberts likens Assange’s actions to those of the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers revelation, and reminds readers that no laws were found to be broken in that instance. He writes (abridged):
The corrupt UK High Court is nothing but an extension of the corrupt US Department of Justice (sic) and has done its duty to serve as Washington’s agent.
The charges against Julian Assange make no sense. Assange is not an American citizen, but the charges against him assume that he is a US citizen in the pay of a foreign government. He is charged with spying on the US. Other countries spy on us, as does our own government and commercial firms, just as the US spies on other countries and commercial firms, but no one is arrested for doing so unless it is a citizen of the country spying in the pay of a foreign government. There is no evidence whatsoever that Assange was doing that.
Assange is an independent person practicing legitimate journalism. He published leaked documents, exactly as did the New York Times when the newspaper published the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a US citizen with top secret clearances. Unlike Ellsberg, Assange was not the leaker. Assange was the publisher like the New York Times. The US government’s effort to punish Ellsberg and the NY Times failed in the courts. Ellsberg was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for “profound humanism and moral courage.”
But times have changed. In Ellsberg’s time, the US government still had enough standing to survive the deception revealed by the Pentagon Papers. But by the time of Assange, the crimes and misdeeds of the US government had hollowed out Washington’s reputation. The decision was made to make an example of Assange in order to prevent journalists from ever again revealing Washington’s war crimes and deceptions of the American people and US allies.
Paul Craig Roberts: Former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House.
