When people in other countries quote the Founding Fathers to Americans, they are almost invariably seeking to strike a nerve that they hope will get the United States to change course.
Columnist Holger Schmale in this article from of Germany’s Berliner Zeitung asserts to his readers that by seeking the arrest and prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Washington is acting hypocritically and making a mockery of the ideals it seeks to promote around the world.
For the Berliner Zeitung, Holger Schmale writes in part:
The image of the U.S. is sustaining even more damage by trying to silence, by any means possible, Wikileaks and its CEO, Julian Assange, and by so joyously welcoming his arrest. The U.S. is betraying one of its founding principles: the freedom of information. And it’s doing so at a time when it faces the loss of power over global information for the first time since the Cold War. “The first serious information war has begun,” writes the U.S. civil rights activist John Perry Barlow. “The battlefield is WikiLeaks.”
With the doctrine of the “free flow of information,” the U.S. has dominated the information flow and a large part of its contents for decades. It states that everyone has a right to gather, transmit, and distribute news everywhere, without limitation. This was a fabulous doctrine as long as U.S. companies alone had the power, resources and logistics to take advantage of it. That has already changed with the arrival of the Internet, although companies like Apple, Windows, Google, Facebook and Amazon are perpetuating U.S. dominance, even on the supposedly democratic global Net. Julian Assange and Wikileaks, however, are the first to use the power of the network on the U.S. That’s why they are being persecuted so mercilessly; and that’s why the U.S. government is violating a basic rule of democracy.
It is not without irony that Hillary Clinton, at the beginning of the year at a conference in Washington, used the Free Flow of Information doctrine to flog internet censorship in China and Egypt. She quoted President Barack Obama, who justified the necessity of free access to the Internet this way: “It helps citizens hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas and encourages creativity.
With its current steps against Wikileaks the U.S. now forfeits any right to call China to account over its persecution of Internet activists.
For continuing global coverage of the WikiLeaks disclosures, READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
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