The
United States government is seeking
to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange for one reason: to punish him for publishing
true and embarrassing information about US crimes and intimidate every journalist in the world from doing so
again.
If the US government succeeds in doing this, it
will strike a devastating blow to the fundamental elements of democracy
throughout the world—the freedom of the press and the related ability of
citizens to know what their governments are doing.
I say “throughout the world” because It's
important to understand that the US government in this case is asserting its
prosecutorial authority over someone who is not an American and whose journalistic
activity took place outside the United States. The United States is
demonstrating its ability to get a foreign government to arrest and extradite journalists
who are neither Americans nor citizens of its own country and send them off to
the United States to face charges under American law. It's not only a brazen
attempt to quash press freedoms; it's a further extension of the United States’
arrogant assertion of extra-territorial—indeed, universal—jurisdiction of its
laws.
As Jonathan Cook says, those
who accept this have “signed off on the
right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the
world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special
form of rendition for journalists.”
