By Joziah Thayer

Most of the people applauding the arrest and imprisonment of journalist Julian Assange are either still salty about Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump or were directly implicated in leaks published by WikiLeaks. Obama officials like Michael Hayden, James Clapper, John Brennan, and Jim Schuto who now have primetime spots on network news channels to demonize, propagandize, slander, demean and gush over the arrest of Julian Assange.

Anyone who tells you that the arrest of Julian Assange is right in any way lacks moral standards. If they are a journalist— and they claim Assange is not a journalist— then they expose themselves as actually not being a journalist at all. Julian Assange was nationalized as an Ecuadorian citizen. Under Ecuador’s constitution no citizen can be extradited to any foreign nation. Ecuador claims to be stripping Assange of his Ecuadorian citizenship, but that in and of itself is actually unconstitutional according to Ecuadorian law. Not only is President Moreno of Ecuador violating constitutional laws in Ecuador but he is also violating international laws on asylum.

Headlines in print and ceaseless commentary on cable news networks painted Assange as a fugitive who was finally caught for the heinous crimes he committed. You know, crimes like exposing war crimes committed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. And how can we forget the fact that he is a Russian agent who is an arm of the Kremlin, who also worked with Russia to hack into the DNC. The man who stole the Hillary Clinton and John Podesta emails and exposed the fact that Hillary Clinton and the DNC rigged the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders. Of course, Julian Assange is the enemy! To suggest anything less makes you a treasonous traitor to this Constitutional Republic.

This is what well-established oligarchies in the Media Industrial Complex, the Military Industrial Complex and the Cyber Military Industrial Complex that Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond exposed in 2012 want you to think. They want it indoctrinated into the minds of people around the world that Julian Assange is a criminal, a hacker; but he doesn’t steal your personal information and sell it on the dark web, he exposes powerful countries and the most powerful people’s most guarded secrets in those countries.

Julian Assange exposed the media establishment as frauds and exposed our entire political system for being a feigned democracy. We are by definition a Constitutional Republic, and in the definition of Constitutional Republic it has language about representative democracy — America is a psephocracy and the world’s oldest surviving federation. The first Right our founding fathers wrote down was freedom of speech, yet today we have become a country that uses its own powerful influences to silence not only American citizens but citizens of other countries as well.

If we allow Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States it will set the stage for unhinged nations who oppress freedom of speech to justify cracking down on dissenting views. It tells Saudi Arabia that it’s okay to kill a journalist in a foreign embassy; it tells Israel it is okay to shoot people who clearly have PRESS written across their chest; it tells the United Arab Emirates, China, Iran, Sudan, and any other “oppressive” regimes the mainstream media and government officials endlessly lie to us about that it is okay to oppress freedom of speech, if that speech speaks truth to power.

Today to be a good journalist is to not look past the headlines to page 17 like I.F. Stone famously said, it is to adhere to the pack, to trap yourself in a carefully crafted echo chamber reverberating regurgitated talking-points formulated in labs of well-funded think tanks. Julian Assange shattered the walls of these echo chambers and delivered truthful information to people all over the world. WikiLeaks inspired revolutions and toppled governments without firing a single bullet; WikiLeaks did it by spreading information and knowledge which terrifies global powers.

Julian Assange is sitting in a maximum security prison in the U.K. for exposing war crimes. The men who savagely murdered Jamal Khashoggi and dismembered his body had their travel visas revoked. The U.K. arrested an award-winning journalist on a seven-year-old bench warrant and sentenced him to 50 weeks in jail. This is, in my opinion, a move coordinated between the United States and the United Kingdom in order to keep Assange from seeking asylum with a country that doesn’t extradite to the United States and to prevent Assange from properly defending himself.

As Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept brilliantly wrote about shortly after Julian Assange was arrested, the indictment against him is incredibly weak and is essentially prosecuting Assange for protecting his source, Chelsea Manning. Chelsea Manning also sits in a cage once again after being held in contempt for not testifying against WikiLeaks. What the United States government is doing to Chelsea Manning violates constitutional law. Under the United States Constitution, no person shall be forced to be a witness against themselves.

The Constitution also states:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Whether you’re Right, Left, Libertarian, or Progressive what is happening to Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning should scare you, it should shake you to your core if it doesn’t then you lack morality. This isn’t a legal debate or a political debate, this is about human rights. American fighter pilots shot 30 mm cannons down on innocent civilians and journalists from an Apache helicopter in Iraq and then laughed about it; those same soldiers then fired a missile into a van driven by a father taking his kids to school.

The United States Military killed two war correspondents working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen; they killed the father of the van, Saleh Matasher Tomal, and severely wounded his children. Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning did not fire those 30 mm cannons, the United States government did. If you condemn Julian and Chelsea then you condone the war crimes they sacrificed their liberties to expose.

Written by Joziah Thayer – You can find more of my articles here – Follow me on Twitter @ Dapeaple

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Image credit: The Anti-Media