Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is out on bail—apparently headed for the 10-bedroom home of British former army officer Vaughan Smith, described by the Guardian as a rightwing libertarian. Assange’s lawyer joked that it would not be so much “house arrest as manor arrest” while he fights extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.
There’s no manor for Bradley Manning. As Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday, the alleged leaker of much of the WikiLeaks information—including the “Collateral Murder” video showing soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians—has been sitting in solitary confinement for seven months under torture conditions. Denied even sheets and a pillow for his bed, Manning is under constant surveillance to prevent him even for exercising for 23 out of 24 hours of every day.And nw he’s under a regimen of authority-administered anti-depressant drugs.
From the start, and as Assange has consistently pointed out, Manning and other whistleblowers are the ones who’ve put themselves on the line. Pentagon papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg calls Manning his hero. He has not been tried or convicted of any crime. And yet the 22-year-old Army private’s received none of the celebrity support that Julian Assange has.
Blogger Jill Filipovic notes that to talk about Manning, we’d have to talk about the hard stuff, the questions of what WikiLeaks means and what the consequences of leaks are, and detention in America — things that aren’t solved with high-profile cash donations.
Today, Assange is out of jail. But let’s not forget that without Bradley Manning and many others like him, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and all our new-found public information would be as in the dark as Manning is right now.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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