‘Every journalist should feel a cold, icy hand running down their spine’: Assange’s extradition case examined in new RT doc
With Julian Assange’s US extradition hearing getting under way in London, RTD’s new film sheds light on why the WikiLeaks founder’s landmark case may lay the path for future prosecution of journalists.
“Every journalist in the United States should feel a cold, icy hand running down their spine at the charges that had been leveled against this publisher. Because they could be next,” writer Suelette Dreyfus says about Assange whose project published leaked documents exposing possible US War crimes in Iraq and letters exposing shenanigans against Bernie Sanders in 2016 by bosses within the Democratic Party.
“If Julian Assange being a publisher is put in prison for being a publisher, for no other reason than being a publisher, then we have no rules,” says a Swedish journalist Johannes Wahlstrom, who worked with WikiLeaks on the documentary ‘Mediastan’.
The US Department of Justice goes to great pains to argue that Julian Assange is not a journalist, but a spy who conspired with a former army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to disclose classified documents related to the national defense. However, the charges Assange is facing are “absolutely applicable to potentially other journalism or media publications,” according to Dreyfus.