PRESS FREEDOM AT STAKE IF ASSANGE IS EXTRADITED, BUT BIG MEDIA IS ABSENT. Late April, 2019. Single-item pullout.


You're in the right place! This is the link for just this story, as an archived "stand alone."

This feature appears in the FULL EDITION, with all the other stories published on the same date, and a TABLE OF CONTENTS of that edition, at:

https://news-events-perspectives.blogspot.com/2019/04/news-events-perspectives-associated.html
___

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

# 11 feature... 
--
From the section:
☆  "News that isn't getting covered, and Views on things..."
--
"In a democracy, people need to know if their government is interfering, subverting democracies and committing war crimes overseas. In a democracy, our courts should be busy prosecuting crimes EXPOSED by WikiLeaks, instead of turning the act of revealing them into some sort of crime to persecute and incarcerate the whistle-blower."

WITH PRESS FREEDOM AT STAKE IF ASSANGE IS EXTRADITED, BIG MEDIA IS ABSENT

Press freedom isn't just for the easy cases. Let's look at the largely unreported facts, then we hope you'll want to join us in telling the UK not to extradite Julian Assange.

"Personal likeability should not be allowed to cloud a matter of such importance in principle. The alleged offense is of such a trivial nature as to make absurd any claim for extradition." -- comment from a supporter.
The US intelligence establishment has had it out for Assange since
Wikileaks published the source code the CIA uses to find those who
followed US law as whistleblowers inside the government. The Obama
Administration infamously prosecuted and imprisoned whistleblowers,
and the current president has sworn a vendetta against "leakers."
The U.S. government will argue in a London court that the United Kingdom should extradite WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to the United States to stand trial.

The Guide stands against corporate celebrity talking heads who seem fine with that, and we join WITH every major press freedom organization, to urge the UK: DO NOT extradite Assange, but free him.

Renowned Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg 
Is Wikileaks protected as a journalistic institution? We say yes,
along with all the leading organizations founded to protect a
free press. Because the law cannot pick and choose when gov-
ernment is embarrassed by inconvenient truths of illegal wars,
coups, interfering in foreign elections, and "regime change."
told The Real News Network this week:

"This is the first indictment of a journalist and editor or publisher... And if it’s successful it will not be the last. This is clearly a part of President Trump’s war on the press, what he calls the enemy of the state."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation added:

"Several parts of the indictment describe very common journalistic behavior, like using cloud storage or knowingly receiving classified information or redacting identifying information about a source."

The Freedom of the Press Foundation agrees:

"For years, the Obama administration considered indicting WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, before rightly concluding it could not do so without encroaching on core press freedoms. Now almost nine years in, the Trump administration has used the same information to manufacture a flimsy and pretextual indictment involving a 'conspiracy' to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — based entirely on alleged conversations between a journalist and source."

But... many prominent figures in the U.S. media, cheering Assange's arrest, display more loyalty to the U.S. government than to journalism or publishing. We must step-up in their absence and defend their institution. 

We ask that you, as someone who values REAL news and what it takes to research, verify, and present it in the face of powerful interests who want it silenced, to join with us and stand up for a free press as the unfettered, unbought, Fourth Estate.

Let's not forget that Assange is being persecuted for a public service -- for which he spent the past several years in a single building in London. Civil rights attorney Chase Madar explained the importance of the documents that Chelsea Manning leaked and WikiLeaks published:

"Thanks to Manning’s alleged disclosures, we have a sense of what transpired in Iraq and Afghanistan... Thanks to those revelations we now know just how our government leaned on the Vatican to quell opposition to the Iraq War. We now know how Washington pressured the German government to block the prosecution of CIA agents who kidnapped an innocent man, Khaled El-Masri, while he was on vacation. We know how our State Department lobbied hard to prevent a minimum wage increase in Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest nation."

That list of things we know because of Manning and Assange can multiply 100-fold. BOTH OF THEM are now behind bars -- Manning is back in jail for contempt of court for her refusal to testify against Assange about events in 2010.

In a democracy, people need to know if their government is interfering, subverting democracies and committing war crimes overseas. In a democracy, our courts should be busy prosecuting crimes EXPOSED by WikiLeaks, instead of turning the act of revealing them into some sort of crime to persecute and incarcerate the whistle-blower.

That's why we, at the NEP  (News, Events, Perspectives-- Associated Journalists), join with Roots Action to take a stand for freedom of the press and transparent government.

Join us in asking the government of the United Kingdom NOT to extradite Assange.

The petition says (in full):

To the UK government:

"Do not extradite Julian Assange to the United States. Set him free. He is a publisher. He has informed us about human rights abuses and crimes committed by the U.S. government overseas -- abuses that the U.S. government has tried to keep secret from us."

You can add your name to the petition, at:

https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=13659

RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Background links:

*  The Real News Network: "Daniel Ellsberg On Assange Arrest: The Beginning of the End For Press Freedom"


*  Electronic Frontier Foundation: "Statement on Assange Indictment and Arrest"


*  Freedom of the Press Foundation: "The Trump administration’s indictment of Julian Assange threatens core press freedom rights"


*  David Swanson: "What Bradley Manning Means to Us"

*  Juan Cole: "Top 10 Ways Bradley Manning Changed the World"

*  Roots Action:  www.RootsAction.org

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

LEGALESE, CONTACTING US, 'N SUCH...

Boilerplate? Where's the main pressure gauge? And the firebox?

What "boilerplate"? Who came up with that goofy term for the basic essential informational stuff...

Visitor Privacy notice:

Whatever Google does in terms of planting cookies, tracking your web activities, and/or collecting data for analytics or whatever the hell it is they do with it -- we, the site content publishers, do NOT track you or receive any record of who you are. We can access simple counts -- raw numbers of site visitors -- by nation of origin, and that's ALL. But again, that's us and what we do and do not do. Refer to the Google legalese for what THEY do.
________________________________

Direct your peeps to our current editions / and

MOBILE-DEVICE-FRIENDLY

editions that load quickly, at:
.
.
<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>
.
POST COMMENTS using the site tools, or see next item.
.
<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>
.
CONTACT US -- Post Comments / Send Questions / say Howdy at:

.
<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>
.
JOURNALISTS, WRITERS, EDITORIAL CARTOONISTS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, ARTISTS, AND THOSE WHO CAN TELL A STORY WELL... if you would like to contribute something -- once, from time-to-time, or as a member of our ad hoc assemblage, please email managing editor Lawrence Wines, at:

news-events-perspectives-editor@outlook.com

<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>

Entire contents copyright © 2019,

Lawrence Wines & News Events Perspectives Associates.

All rights reserved.

That does NOT supersede individual copyrights held by content creators or photographers  or holders of copyrights to archived materials, but is an extra blanket of protection for everything that appears herein.

<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>-<^>
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Memorial Day 2019: a Challenging Perspective

by Lawrence Wines  It really bothers me that "honoring the service of our veterans" has become a door-opener for lemming-like support of the warconomy. Memorial Day was devised as a way to support widows and orphans of Union dead from the Civil War. By extension, because we keep having wars and so many people show-up to get killed in them, Memorial Day continued its purpose to honor the fallen of all our wars. That's not meant to diminish recognition of the necessity of military response to global fascism in the Second World War, when the outcome would determine what kind of world we would have. Nor can we be deluded into believing that valor, bravery, and sacrifice were unique to that war. Those human traits can be found in every generation, and we should recognize how problematic that is: because battlefield sacrifices are made, at terrible cost, in all manner of conflicts that influence nothing greater than which group of rich manipulators will be given the upper ha...
Read more

Complete edition, everything in one place! Late April edition, News, Events, Perspectives - Associated Journalists. Late April edition, 2019.

Image
Whether it's a newsroom or making a boiler ready to power the world's largest locomotive,  it's not the heavy lifting, but the attention to detail that's required to get it right.        THIS EDITION has everything -- science to politics, historical perspectives to arts workshops... the return of the world's largest locomotive is feature # 17. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ CONTENTS / There's plenty IN THIS EDITION ⊙   Introduction, welcome, what we're all about. (The longest thing in here.) -- ☆   The Main News -- though you might not find it any place but here ... -- 1)   GETTING MUELLER-FIED AIN'T GETTING MOLLIFIED (a very short feature) 2)   APRIL 19th IN HISTORY AND THE LEGACY THAT COULD RESURFACE ANY TIME 3)    YOUR INNOVATIVE IDEAS ARE NEEDED FOR "SPACE FOR THE OCEANS" 4)     HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HUBBLE! -- ☆    Earth Day - Earth Week Sp...
Read more

WHAT WE'RE ALL ABOUT. Reader and contributor orientation. Late April, 2019. Single-item pullout.

You're in the right place! This is the link for just this one feature. But this one is more than an archived "stand alone." It's essential orientation, and your invitation to play! This appears in the FULL EDITION, with all the other stories published on the same date, and a TABLE OF CONTENTS of that edition, at: https://news-events-perspectives.blogspot.com/2019/04/news-events-perspectives-associated.html ___ +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ WHAT WE'RE ALL ABOUT.  (The longest thing in this edition.) W elcome!  In the changing world of journalism, many experienced writers, investigative journalists, and print media reporters have lost their jobs due to corporate mega-mergers and the inevitable downsizing that follows. That's also true in television and radio newsrooms, though it's far worse in print-and-web "printed word" reporting. Over 2,400 journalists -- many of them investigative repor...
Read more