US efforts to jail Assange for espionage are a grave threat to a free media
I find it incredible that it took the Guardian 7 years to decide to write this article. EDIT: In fact, it's not even by the Guardian -- it's an opinion piece by an ex-Guardian editor who was (at least implicitly) part of the smear campaign against Julian Assange "back in the day".<p>Let's not forget that the Guardian sent Julian Assange <i>a basket with soap and socks</i> when he took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy[1]. What kind of a message does that send? They also didn't tell anyone involved in the Snowden revelations when GCHQ forced them to destroy their copies. They also (through their tehnical incompetence) leaked documents that WikiLeaks had not published, then blamed WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for the disclosure. Not to mention the ludicrously false and harmful articles they published about him meeting Manafort and co-ordinating disclosures with the Trump campaign alongside many other government puff pieces disguised as "journalism".<p>Now, all of a sudden, they feel it's a good idea to try to help him. It's too late for that. The right time to try to help him was 7 years ago. Doing it now is for the birds, it's pure political theater so they can pretend (in 15 years) that they were "on the right side of history". Absolute bullshit.<p>Then again, saying something is better than nothing. Here in Australia there is no public discussion about Julian Assange (an <i>Australian citizen and journalist being tried under US terrorism laws</i>). Even more ironic is that we recently had a bit of a "freedom of the press" scuffle because the ABC was raided by the Australian Federal Police because of some coverage from 2017 over Australian Army war crimes. I find it incredible that <i>nobody</i> mentioned Julian. At all. What an absolute disgrace today's press is.<p>[1]: <a href="https://youtu.be/vwjazrixP1Q?t=5255" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vwjazrixP1Q?t=5255</a>