On Friday the British Minister of the Interior, Priti Patel, approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States. The Wikileaks founder will be able to appeal, but if the decision is confirmed he would face a trial for espionage and, probably, life imprisonment.
His fault is that he helped publicize a number of crimes committed by the US military and their allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It shed light on the abuses inflicted on Guantanamo prisoners and revealed that more than 150 innocent people have been detained for years without charge. He released the video of American soldiers shooting at a group of unarmed Iraqi civilians on board a helicopter, killing fifteen of them, including a Reuters photographer and his assistant.
One of the paradoxical aspects of his story is that the United States has not tried or punished the soldiers suspected of being responsible for these crimes, but has been trying for years to try and punish Assange.
The reason, Peter Oborne wrote in the Guardian, is that by punishing Assange they want to dissuade anyone who works in the media from publishing investigations based on secret documents.
“Disclosure becomes espionage, exemplary journalism becomes conspiracy. This is why Wikileaks was and is defined as a terrorist organization. The alleged terror consists in revealing the terror, ”Heribert Prantl added in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Among the main arguments used by his detractors is that Assange is not a journalist. But he is irrelevant: much of the Wikileaks revelations have been published and amplified by US and worldwide newspapers.
And then, as Prantl notes, “freedom of the press does not apply only to those who have attended journalism school or to those who have a journalist’s card in their pocket. In the days of the internet, a journalist is also someone who runs a site. In this way, Assange did an excellent job for freedom of the press ”. â—†