LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 03rd May, 2019) Washington's efforts to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from the United Kingdom are largely due to the "great embarrassment" caused by his exposure of apparent war crimes committed by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Peter Tatchell, the director of human rights organization Peter Tatchell Foundation, told Sputnik.
The statement came as Assange appeared in a London court via video link from the high-security prison Belmarsh earlier on Thursday for the first hearing on the US extradition request. Although the 47 year-old journalist refused to consent to extradition, saying he was merely "doing journalism that has won many awards and protected many people," the presiding judge scheduled an additional procedural hearing for May 30 and ordered that US submit necessary documents as part of the case by June 12.
"He's being sought for extradition to the US simply for telling the truth. What he and Wikileaks did was publish an expose of US government military war crimes, cover ups and human rights abuses. Telling the truth should never be a crime. We also ask the question, why is Julian Assange being hounded when newspapers like The New York Times, who publish the same information, are not being hounded by the US administration? That smacks of double standards and looks like a political vendetta," Tatchell said, speaking outside the court.
According to Tatchell, the US government is just "angry" about "great embarrassment" that WikiLeaks and personally Assange caused to it by exposing things like the collateral murder video, showing US troops shooting down Iraqi civilians in the July 2007 attack.
"That [such exposure] has got to be something that's in the public interest and should not be subject to cover up, and certainly not prosecution of the people who helped expose it," Tatchell concluded.
Jim Curran, the chairman of the Irish Civil Rights Association, in turn, told Sputnik that the extradition should be off the agenda until the United States formally submitted to the authority of the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes.
"I came here today because I'm totally opposed to extradition to the United States, so until the United States of America signs up to the International Criminal Court and allows its citizens to be put on trial when they carry out crimes against humanity ... I want American soldiers put on trial for these crimes," he argued, suggesting that the collateral murder footage was only the "tip of the iceberg" of alleged US culpability.
Referring to what the United States "did in Chile, in Iran with the Contra affair ... virtually every war that America has been involved in since the last World War," he reiterated that he did not want anyone to be extradited unless the US own acts were properly investigated.
As another argument against extradition, he said that "there have been miscarriages of justice here in England ... but in the United States of America there are thousands of them and there's hardly anything done about them."
Assange gained fame after WikiLeaks published a large number of classified documents, including some that exposed abuses of power and war crimes committed by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The whistleblower faces extradition to the United States on charges of conspiring to break in a government computer to leak classified information.
In April, the UK police arrested Assange after Ecuador revoked his asylum.
