The story of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was always a brutal show of how Governments work and depressingly how the whistleblower is the one hounded and prosecuted rather than those the whistleblower exposed.
While he finds himself languishing in a British prison cell tonight, arrested and detained on behalf of the US authorities, we should remember just what Assange exposed in 2010 when he released classified US military footage.
We learnt about the torture manuals for Guantanamo Bay and the extraordinary rendition campaign but most shocking was the footage of US forces shooting and killing civilians on the streets of Baghdad from an Apache attack helicopter and evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
Both horrific acts were strongly denied by the American military until it was uncovered and the following investigation into the chopper incident resulted in one soldier being exonerated and the other being suspended without pay for a month.
The person who revealed this to the world has spent seven years in hiding and now faces extradition to America but it isn’t hard to see the US Government hates leakers like him, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as we would still be in the dark and that is how they would prefer it, much rather we listen unquestioningly to the Government issued reports and sources and take their words as the truth.
We should be thankful for whistle blowers and those that are willing to expose the dirty truth such as the criminal war actions of the military and in a truly just world it would be the chopper pilots and the animals who shot a 7 month old Iraqi baby in the head while he slept in his cot and then tried to cover up the killing sitting in a prison cell, a far greater crime than revealing the deaths of innocent civilians.
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