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I watched, for the second time in a few months the film “THE POST” starring Meryl Streep celebrating the US Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling that the WASHINGTON POST and other papers could publish the PENTAGON PAPERS which revealed the criminality of US Governments from the Presidency of Harry Truman onwards.
The Court had cited the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the first of Ten Amendments known as the Bill of Rights.
Fifty one years later the First Amendment is a dead letter. The Australian journalist Julian Assange, first held on a trumped up accusation of a rape in Sweden, was arrested in Britain, took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London in 2012 where US agents plotted to murder him, and has spent years in British Jails and is expected to be shipped in shackles to the United States to face up to 175 years in jail.
His offence? Publishing documents which, in a world dedicated to justice, wouldshut away many political, military, industrial, judicial, propaganda and academic leaders of the Free World, for many years and require them, if released, to make amends for the damage they have done.
The so-called “Patriot Act,” passed when George W.Bush was President nullifies the First Amendment.
Australia is indifferent to the plight of Assange and the Murdoch Press has nowhere come to his support.
The IRISH STATE is happy to assist United States Criminality and for its territory to be used as Airstrip Two as in Orwell’s Dystopian 1984.
Good God, I’m old enough to remember when Conor Cruise O’Brien registered his disapproval of Stormont’s banning Sinn Fein’s UNITED IRISHMAN.
While Richard Nixon in 1974 was still clinging to office ( nearly three years after the publication of the Pentagon Papers), the Cruiser, as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, was showing a
Washington Post correspondent, readers’ letters in THE IRISH PRESS, and saying how he was going to clip the wings of its Editor, Tim Pat Coogan.
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