The UN rapporteur on torture has written a scalding op-ed in support of Julian Assange, in which he says the publisher was the victim of a smear campaign. Now he claims many leading MSM outlets are snubbing the piece.
Demonstrators protest outside of Westminster Magistrates Court in support of Julian Assange. ©REUTERS / Hannah Mckay
The op-ed by Nils Melzer (https://medium.com/@njmelzer/demasking-the-torture-of-julian-assange-b252ffdcb768) was published Wednesday on the occasion of International Day in Support of Torture Victims. Melzer describes his personal path to the realization that Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, is not a rapist, not a hacker, not a Russian spy, and not even “a selfish narcissist, skateboarding through the Ecuadorian Embassy and smearing feces on the walls.” Western media and officials have claimed that Assange is all of those things.
"In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed."
Melzer says the purposefulness and scale of the campaign against Assange elevated it from mere slander or even state persecution to full-fledged psychological torture in his eyes.
https://twitter.com/NilsMelzer/status/1143974572628303872
The piece ends with a list of the media’s ‘big guns’, which Melzer says were offered the op-ed to publish but wouldn’t. The list includes the Guardian, the Times, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the Washington Post, and Reuters. The text was subsequently published on Medium, a blogging website.
Assange is currently locked up in a top-security British prison awaiting extradition hearings. He is wanted in the US on multiple charges that may result in a sentence of up to 175 years in prison. His supporters say the case sets a dangerous precedent in criminalizing the publication of truthful information embarrassing to Western governments.
Holding governments accountable by exposing their misdeeds is the job of the free press, to which those listed by Melzer supposedly belong. Some observers also note that maintaining silence on Assange’s case amounts to complicity in the wrongdoings against him.
The case against Assange was aimed not only at keeping him at bay, but also at “shutting down dissent,” renowned journalist John Pilger recently said.
"It’s mainly about shutting down investigative journalism."
Original: https://www.rt.com/news/462805-assange-oped-rejected-msm/
All what this is about is to show that those who dare to go against the lies the powerful people feed the masses to keep the status quo will suffer a horrible fate. This is no better than when Romans hanged the limbers at the city entrances of those who their consider dangerous or inconvenient people.
To think that deep down our society has not evolves from this outrageous characteristics for more than two thousand years make me really sad.
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It all comes back to our Federal Court system. When the Federal Court of Appeals in Florida said that News Media is "not responsible for the truth and that they do not need to verify the stories they publish" began the ending of "Free Impartial Press" and we now only get the same propaganda published everywhere else in the world.
According to the Oligarchs in this Country, it's citizens are nothing more than the ENEMY.
Keep up the good fight, don't let the bad guys win...
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We now has the means to power up an alternative journalism! Steem can very well for as an alternative to traditional news media. We have a platform that could reward freelance journalist, we also have an immutable ledger that will serve to keep track of who is bullshiting people. We could reward professional, objective an pertinent journalism through our platforms economic model... It just take guys who has enough resources to back such an initiative.
Best regards.
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