Julian Assange should never have been jailed and tortured for helping Chelsea Manning expose United States war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These two brave truth tellers smashed the attempts by the US to hide their war crimes and were persecuted for this.
Today we see more horrific war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, with the connivance of the United States and Australia.
But these crimes cannot be covered up.
If the West thinks its attempts to silence whistleblowers and journalists is working, it should think again.
The global movement for Palestine’s freedom has put paid to that.
After all these years of torture, the US has finally charged Assange with “conspiracy”, not of actually doing anything to harm anyone.
Like all the Western countries’ post 9/11 anti-terrorism laws, including in Australia, such efforts to stop the truth from coming out have failed.
Assange’s freedom means the West is failing to silence dissent.
It also means we must protect whistleblowers and journalists who expose the hypocrisy, double-standards and crimes of the West.
As the late , one of Assange’s more high-profile supporters, said: “It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it”.