Hypocrite Biden: Demands to Free Journalists, Seeks to Extradite Assange

By Staff, Agencies

US President Joe Biden has been accused of hypocrisy for demanding the release of journalists detained around the world while the US president continues seeking the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain to face American espionage charges.

The campaign to pressure the Biden administration to drop the charges moved to Washington DC on Friday with a hearing of the Belmarsh Tribunal, an ad hoc gathering of legal experts and supporters named after the London prison where Assange is being detained.

The hearing was held in the same room where Assange in 2010 exposed the “collateral murder” video showing US aircrew gunning down Iraqi civilians, the first of hundreds of thousands of leaked secret military documents and diplomatic cables published in major newspapers around the world.

The revelations about America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including war crimes, and the frank assessments of US diplomats about their host governments, caused severe embarrassment in Washington.

The tribunal heard that the charges against Assange were an “ongoing attack on press freedom” because the WikiLeaks founder was not a spy but a journalist and publisher protected by free speech laws.

The tribunal co-chairperson Srecko Horvat – a founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 whose father was a political prisoner in the former Yugoslavia – quoted Biden from the 2020 presidential campaign calling for the release of imprisoned journalists across the world by quoting late president Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost”.

“President Biden is normally advocating freedom of press, but at the same time continuing the persecution of Julian Assange,” Horvat said.

Horvat warned that continuing the prosecution could serve as a bad example to other governments.

“This is an attack on press freedom globally – that’s because the United States is advancing what I think is really the extraordinary claim that it can impose its criminal secrecy laws on a foreign publisher who was publishing outside the United States,” he said.

Assange faces 18 charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of classified documents, largely the result of a leak by the former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison but released after President Barack Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. Manning has testified that she acted on her own initiative in sending the documents to WikiLeaks and not at the urging of Assange.