Weekly Update --- 'Iraq War Diaries' At Ten Years: Truth is Treason
Punishing Assange for telling us the truth
Punishing Assange for telling us the truth
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Iraq War Diaries: Truth is Treason
00:03:25
|
|
| Hello everyone and thank you for tuning in to the Weekly Report, Iraq War Diaries. | |
| At 10 years, Truth is Treason. | |
| The purpose of journalism is to uncover truth, especially uncomfortable truth, and to publish it for the benefit of society. | |
| In a free society, we must be informed of the criminal acts carried out by governments in the name of the people. | |
| Throughout history, journalists have uncovered the many ways governments lie, cheat, and steal, and the great lengths they will go to keep the people from finding out. | |
| Great journalists like Seymour Hirsch, who reported to us the tragedy of the Milai massacre and the horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are essential. | |
| Ten years ago, last week, Julian Assange's WikiLeaks organization published an expose of U.S. government wrongdoing on par with the above Hirsch bombshell stories. | |
| Publication of the Iraq War Diaries showed us all the brutality of the U.S. attacks on Iraq. | |
| It told us the truth about the U.S. invasion and the occupation of that country. | |
| This was no war of defense against the nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. | |
| This was no liberation of the country. | |
| We were not bringing democracy to Iraq. | |
| No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified U.S. Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the U.S. attack was a war of aggression based on lies where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured. | |
| We learned that the U.S. military classified anyone they killed in Iraq as enemy combatants. | |
| We learned that more than 700 Iraq civilians were killed for driving too close to one of the hundreds of U.S. military checkpoints, including pregnant mothers-to-be rushing to the hospital. | |
| We learned that the U.S. military personnel routinely handed detainees over to Iraq security forces, where they would be tortured and often killed. | |
| Ten years after Assange's brave act of journalism changed the world and exposed one of the crimes of the century, he sits alone in solitary confinement in a U.K. prison. | |
| He sits literally fighting for his life. | |
| If he is extradited to the U.S., he faces 175 years in a supermax prison for committing espionage against a country of which he is not a citizen. | |
| On the Iraq war, we have punished the truth tellers and rewarded the criminals. | |
| People who knowingly lied us into the war like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, the Beltway neocon experts, and most of the media faced neither punishment nor professional shaming for their acts. | |
| In fact, they got off scot-free and many even prospered. | |
| Julian Assange explained that he published the Iraq War Diaries because he hoped to correct some of the attacks on truth that occurred before the war and that continued on since that war officially ended. | |
|
President Trump's Critique of the Iraq War
00:00:38
|
|
| We used to praise brave journalists not afraid to take on the bad guys. | |
| Now we torture and imprison them. | |
| President Trump has made a point of singling out the U.S. attack on Iraq as one of the stupid wars that he was committed to ending. | |
| But we wouldn't know half of just how stupid and evil it was were it not for the brave actions of Julian Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning. | |
| Journalism should not be a crime, and President Trump should pardon Assange immediately. | |