Assange case: Key witness admits he lied
In 2010 I was living in Melbourne, where he&#x27;s from. There was a pro Assange petition&#x2F;demonstration in Richmond. I went over to sign. Assange was an Australian citizen. The Wikileaks leak was journalistic, as far as I could tell. The Swedish indictments seemed extremely dubious. It definitely felt like an extrajudicial persecution of a journalist.<p>Anyway, the petition did have <i>something</i> about Assange in it, besides the sign. It also demanded an immediate end to Australia&#x27;s involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan. It called the US imperialist, condemned the alliance, mentioned Israel, various global left wing causes, calls for resistance, etc. I&#x27;m not sure if it mentioned freedom of the press at all. I don&#x27;t remember the details, but it was enough that I didn&#x27;t sign.<p>The whole thing presented Assange and wikileaks totally as activists. Of course, that doesn&#x27;t mean that it isn&#x27;t a press freedom issue. It is. It also doesn&#x27;t make the pursuit of Assange ok. In some senses, it&#x27;s been worse than a Putinesque hit. Hits don&#x27;t corrupt legal systems and establish precedents.<p>It&#x27;s been much harder to think of Julian &amp; Wikileaks as a journalist than it should have been. They present on a nexus of belligerent, activist and journalist.  This technically shouldn&#x27;t affect legal processes, but... reality.<p>I do think there&#x27;s an imperative for journalism to remain journalistic, in both the hard and soft sense. Freedom of the press does, IMO, require a distinctive press, easily identified as such.