John Rachel

New Zealand citizen journalist Suzi Dawson, herself a whistleblower who has taken political asylum in Russia to avoid persecution by the New Zealand government, listed what she considered the ten most important achievements by Julian Assange and Wikileaks.  This was in a interview with Jimmy Dore, October 27, 2018.

Here they are:

1)  “Wikileaks has been keeping the historical record intact, and is actually combating the digital loss as web pages and websites are constantly being taken down from the internet by the powers that be.  In this current paradigm they’re actually scrubbing entire websites and domains at every opportunity.  They’re trying to erase information from our living history.  And Wikileaks’ founding charter says that any information that’s at risk of censorship or deletion can find a safe harbor at Wikileaks.”

2)  “Wikileaks enables victims of persecution to have admissible evidence to fight their cases in court.  40,000 cases around the world have had Wikileaks documents submitted as evidence to the court.”

3)  “They’ve maintained a 100% accuracy record over ten years of publishing.”

4)  “Wikileaks is still publishing despite the full force of the Empire being used against them.  Intelligence agencies, financial service providers, hostile media and law fare, and of course now Julian Assange’s solitary confinement, we still see Wikileaks releases being published.”

5)  “Wikileaks has established a digital library of over 10 million documents, containing pristine datasets, the full relevance of which will only become apparent years into the future.  Every current news story can be further informed by doing a key word search to see what Wikileaks archives contain about topics or persons or places that may be relevant to that news story.”

6)  “Wikileaks has established a whole new way of doing journalism.  They also initiated the first anonymous drop boxes, which we now see that a similar technology is being used by media outlets across the globe.”

7)  “Wikileaks has become the vanguard of press freedom, always pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable in publishing.  And that is incredibly important because as they are pushing those boundaries further and further out, it allows independent media and citizen media to fill that space in between.  We can go further and do more significant things because Wikileaks is out there taking the heat for us.”

8)  “Wikileaks has published leaks on every country in the world without geopolitical bias.”

9)  “Wikileaks leaves no source behind, and not only do they go above and beyond to support their sources, they’ve actually established other organizations to support other at risk journalists and whistleblowers, such as the Courage Foundation, and we now have proven that Julian Assange was involved in the establishment of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.”

10)  “Julian saved the life of Edward Snowden, who is renowned as the greatest whistleblower of our generation, and was brought to you by Wikileaks.”

Julian Assange should be getting a Nobel Prize, not being persecuted.

What can we do to save this courageous, heroic man?  This is not just about one man, as admirable and honorable he is as a person.  This is about freedom of speech, freedom of dissent, being able to stand up to power and avoid complete and total, across-the-board repression by burgeoning corporate-state totalitarianism.  The media is already a pitiful shell of what it once was.  Silencing the Julian Assanges of the world will just accelerate the demise of public discourse built on honest investigative reporting.