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April 16, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
04:04
Weekly Update --- Julian Assange: Political Prisoner

Our freedoms are endangered by the US government's desire to punish Assange.

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Time Text
Attack On Free Speech 00:03:22
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the weekly report, Julian Assange, Political Prisoner.
Last week's arrest of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange by the British government on a U.S. extradition order is an attack on all of us.
It's an attack on the U.S. Constitution.
It's an attack on the free press.
It's an attack on free speech.
It's an attack on our right to know what our government is doing with our money in our name.
Julian Assange is every bit as much a political prisoner as was Cardinal Minzenti in Hungary and Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
They and so many more were in prison because they told the truth about their government.
Repressant governments do not want their citizens to know what they're up to, so they insist on controlling the media.
We are taught at the same time that we have a free press whose job it is to uncover the corruption in our system so that we can demand our political leaders make some changes or face unemployment.
That, we are told, is what makes us different from the totalitarians.
The arrest of Assange is a canary in a coal mine to warn us that something is very wrong with our system.
What's wrong?
The U.S. mainstream media always seems to do the bidding of the U.S. government.
That is why they rushed to confirm Washington's claim that the Assange indictment was not in any way about journalism.
It was only about hacking government computers.
As the New York Times said in an editorial sounding like a mouthpiece of the U.S. government, Julian Assange committed an indisputable crime.
But was it?
As actual journalist Glenn Greenwal wrote last week, what Julian Assange did in 2010, for which he's facing extradition to the U.S., is no different from what New York Times and other journalists do every day.
He attempted to help Chelsea Manning shield his identity as he blew the whistle on U.S. government crimes to a publisher.
The information in question included a video showing U.S. military personnel participating in and cheering the murder of Iraqi civilian.
Why is it criminal for us to know this?
The difference is that what Assange and Manning did embarrassed the U.S. government, which was lying to us that it was liberating Iraq and Afghanistan when it was actually doing the opposite.
Mainstream journalists publish leaks that help bolster the neocon or other vested narratives of the different factions of the U.S. government.
That's why the U.S. media wants to see Assange in prison or worse, he upset their apple cart.
The lesson is clear.
When you bolster the government's narrative, you are a brave journalist.
When you expose corruption in government, you are a criminal.
Do we really want to live in a country where it's illegal to learn that our government is engaged in criminal acts?
Why We Live In Chains 00:00:38
I thought we had an obligation as an engaged citizenry to hold our government accountable.
As long as Julian Assange is in prison, we are all in prison.
When the government has the power to tell us what we can see or not see, we no longer live in a free society.
Julian Assange will be extradited to the U.S. and he will have dozens of charges piled on.
They want him to disappear so that the next Assange will think twice before informing us of our government's crimes.
Are we going to let them steal our freedom?
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