Celebrate Julian Assange’s Birthday

 Banner Drop on the Brady Street Bridge overpass

 Monday July 3 at 4:30 pm

 Join us for this nationwide Banner Drop on Julian's birthday on the Brady Street Bridge over Lincoln Memorial Drive in Milwaukee. 

We will drop 20-foot banners for traffic going each way that say FREE JULIAN ASSANGE and Journalism is not a crime.

Ramp access is available from both sides, Prospect Avenue and Lincoln Memorial Drive.

Chris Hedges: The Imminent Extradition of Julian Assange & the Death of Journalism

JUNE 19, 2023

TRUTHDIG

The Case Against the Case Against Julian Assange

As the WikiLeaks founder faces a life sentence in American prison, a new book sheds additional light on the official campaign to silence him.

Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange

By Kevin Gosztola 

The Censored Press / Seven Stories Presshttps://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-case-against-the-case-against-julian-assange/

Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the  Select Committee,

My name is Matt Taibbi. I’ve been a reporter for over 30 years, and an advocate for the First Amendment.  Much of that time was spent at Rolling Stone magazine. Over my career, I’ve had the good fortune to be recognized for the work I love.  I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for independent journalism, and written ten books, including four New York Times bestsellers. I’m now the editor of the online magazine Racket, on the independent platform Substack.

I’m here today because of a series of events that began late last year, when I received a note from a source online.

It read: “Are you interested in doing a deep dive into what censorship and manipulation… was going on at Twitter?”

A week later, the first of what became known as the “Twitter Files” reports came out. To say these attracted intense public interest would be an understatement. My computer looked like a slot machine as just the first tweet about the blockage of the Hunter Biden laptop story registered 143 million impressions and 30 million engagements.

But it wasn’t until a week after the first report, after Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and other researchers joined the search of the “Files,” that we started to grasp the significance of this story.

The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.

What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.

Join Julian Assange's father (John Shipton) and brother (Gabriel Shipton) for a conversation at Oriental Theater, 2230 N. Farwell Avenue, Milwaukee April 8 at 6 pm.  The movie IHAKA, about Julian's family's search for justice, begins at 6 pm. Then John and Gabriel will field questions from those in the audience.  Get your tickets early for this historic event.  Tickets are on sale now.

If questions, please contact Ann Batiza at 414-238-3903.

Former National Lawyers Guild President, Marjorie Cohn says, "Prominent lawyers, journalists and human rights defenders say prosecuting Assange poses a grave threat to journalism." Her article highlights many of the speakers at the January 20 Belmarsh Tribunal, held at the Washington DC Press Club and chaired by Amy Goodman of Democracy NOW!.  The speakers included notables such as Ben Wizner of the ACLU, Jeremy Corbyn, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and others.  She begins:

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg joined other leading journalists, attorneys and human rights defenders to call on the Biden administration to drop its extradition request and indictment against journalist and WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, citing the grave threat Assange’s prosecution would pose to journalism worldwide.

“Every empire requires secrecy to cloak its acts of violence that maintain it as an empire,” Ellsberg testified during the Belmarsh Tribunal held on January 20 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The tribunal is named after London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, where Assange has been held for nearly four years, fighting extradition to the United States. The Belmarsh Tribunal, inspired by the Russell-Sartre tribunal of the Vietnam War, was sponsored by Democracy Now!, Defending Rights & Dissent, Courage Foundation, DiEM25, The Intercept, The Nation and PEN International.

Assange is charged with violations of the Espionage Act for exposing evidence of U.S. war crimes and faces 175 years in prison if convicted.

Amy Goodman devoted 50 minutes of her broadcast Monday, January 23, to a highlight reel from the Belmarsh Tribunal about Julian Assange. Daniel Ellsberg, Jeremy Corbyn, Noam Chomsky and others are featured. She starts the series of clips with the words of the ACLU's Ben Wizner,

"No government in any kind of system will voluntarily disclose its own crimes. For that we need brave sources who have first hand evidence and we need a free press and brave publishers who are willing to bring this information to the people to whom it belongs." - Ben Wizner, Belmarsh Tribunal

The link for this entire segment of Democracy Now! is here:  

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/1/23/belmarsh_tribunal_dc_julian_assange_wikileaks