{"id":60252,"date":"2021-11-03T06:42:23","date_gmt":"2021-11-03T11:42:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60252"},"modified":"2021-11-03T06:42:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T11:42:23","slug":"chris-hedges-the-most-important-battle-for-press-freedom-in-our-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60252","title":{"rendered":"Chris Hedges: The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chris Hedges: The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time<\/a><\/h3>\n

If he is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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W<\/span>ASHINGTON, D.C. (Scheerpost<\/a>)\u00a0\u2013 For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange\u2019s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the \u201charsh conditions\u201d of the inhumane US prison system, \u201ccausing him to commit suicide.\u201d The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years.<\/p>\n

Assange, with long white hair, appeared on screen the first day from the video conference room in HM Prison Belmarsh. He was wearing a white shirt with an untied tie around his neck. He looked gaunt and tired. He did not appear in court, the judges explained, because he was receiving a \u201chigh dose of medication.\u201d On the second day he was apparently not present in the prison\u2019s video conference room.<\/p>\n

Assange is being extradited because his organization WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes \u2014 including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the\u00a0Collateral<\/a>\u00a0murder<\/em>\u00a0video<\/a>, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

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Chris Hedges: The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time If he is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting. WASHINGTON, D.C. (Scheerpost)\u00a0\u2013 For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9035,2001,938,2080,827],"class_list":["post-60252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-chris-hedges","tag-julian-assange","tag-press-freedom","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60253,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60252\/revisions\/60253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}