PeteFree.comThese totalitarian-leaning United States — Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning
© 2020 Peter Free
27 February 2020
You don't care about politics and freedom, you say?
You will, someday.
While you're sitting inside a dim 'n damp, concrete-walled shoe box.
Just 'cause you ran off at your mouth in some unapproved way.
In our happy American version of commie China.
The trouble with culture-acquired apathy . . .
. . . is that it makes us dumber than legitimately labeled imbeciles.
Consider, for instance . . .
. . . the United States' Stalinist treatment of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.
You would think that the American public would recognize a threat to their own frail persons in the Feds' emulation of totalitarianism's freedom-crushing Gestapo boots.
But no. Virtually no one among our Rabble or the propagandizing Mainstream Press cares.
After all, what's a liberty-preserving (near-dead) old guy and a (supremely courageous) transgender person — in the face of what we are told — every frickin' minute! — is overwhelming American Greatness?
A couple of pertinent essays
Former judge Andrew Napolitano succinctly summed the law regarding the United States' torturing harassment of Julian Assange:
The Pentagon Papers Case [see here] is a profound explication of one of the great values underlying the freedom of speech; namely, the government cannot lawfully punish those who publish truths it hates and fears.
Regrettably, the Trump administration is pretending the Pentagon Papers Case does not exist. It is manifesting that pretense in its criminal pursuit of international gadfly and journalist Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Sometime in 2010, Assange and his colleagues began receiving classified US Department of Defense materials from an Army intelligence officer now known as Chelsea Manning.
Manning committed numerous crimes, for which she pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama, whose Department of Justice publicly declined to prosecute Assange in deference to the once universal acceptance of the Pentagon Papers Case and the numerous court rulings that have followed it.
The Trump DOJ, however, sought and obtained two indictments of Assange, who is now charged with 17 counts of espionage and faces 175 years in prison.
Assange is currently being held in a maximum-security prison outside of London. The US has sought his extradition at a proceeding that began in a London courtroom this week.
When lawyers blatantly reject well-accepted law for some political gain, they violate their oaths to uphold the law.
When government lawyers do this, they also violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution. For them, there is no escaping the Pentagon Papers Case.
While the case turned on the concept of prior restraint of speech, it clearly reflects the views of the court that it matters not how the publisher obtained the secrets that he published.
© 2020 Andrew P. Napolitano, Punishing the Free Speech of Julian Assange, AntiWar (27 February 2020) (excerpts)
It is a fad these days to ignore the Constitution.
We've got a whole bunch'a proud folk in patch-emblazoned uniforms and not — including the Commander in Chief and his many-many minions — who are "traitors" to everything that America's founding document stands for.
This is how Tyranny works.
No sense of proportion, either
Army combat veteran, Danny Sjursen compared the Abu Graib aftermath's slap on the wrists sentencings to the Feds' lack of proportion and common sense — with regard to their draconian prison ambitions for Julian Assange.
He added that:
Assange’s real crime, from the perspective of the government, was to embarrass them by exposing widespread US war crimes and concomitant coverups.
All information, mind you, that We the People had a right to know.
© 2020 Danny Sjursen, First They Came for Assange…, AntiWar (27 February 2020)
Embarrass the Power-Mongers and off to the United States' eager imitation of Stalin's execution wall, you go.
The moral? — My contempt for the American Establishment is reinforced every day
The United States' oligarchically militaristic establishment is like a herd of muscular vermin. Giant plague-spreading rats and feces-dropping, leech-like cockroaches.
We are complicit to the degree that we do not try to sanitize our societal environments of their imprisoning presence.
It would nice — for instance — if America's voluble Second Amendment folk would pay as much attention to our First and Fourth.