Human Rights, Free Speech are Conditional
That’s Why Julian Assange, Gonzalo Lira Remain Political Prisoners
Seeing stories about Human Rights Day last month, I wondered why the U.S. government continues to do nothing to free two political prisoners, Julian Assange and Gonzalo Lira, whose human rights and free speech have been ripped from them. Australian Assange founded the multi-national media organization and associated library, WikiLeaks, in 2006. A dual-citizen of the U.S. and Chile, Lira is a commentator living in the Ukraine who gained traction with his videos giving a counter viewpoint to the narrative of the Biden administration, the Ukrainian government and most Western media on the Ukraine-Russia war.
Human Rights Day, a United Nations-created day, “commemorates the day in 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” that was approved by 48 countries. Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady of the United States (1933–1945), worked three years developing the document with numerous participants and a United Nations committee she chaired.
It’s difficult to look at the devolving state of the world today and not wonder why, after 75 years, it seems like this day — Human Rights Day — is a day of lip service more than anything else. Earth has 8.1 billion people today — the largest population the planet has ever seen. Just thinking in terms of those total numbers, are there more human abuses than ever? Perhaps so.
As our own country devolves, we see acceptance of child mutilation under the misnomer of “gender-affirming care.” In Afghanistan, male children are routinely sexually abused by older men. When the U.S. military was in Afghanistan, they were told to ignore the abuse, as it was just part of the “culture.” The abuse of females in Afghanistan has worsened since Biden’s embarrassing and disastrous debacle of a withdrawal from the country in 2021. Female children are increasingly at risk for marriage in Afghanistan. But Afghanistan and the U.S. aren’t the only country stealing children’s childhoods. India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Brazil and Ethiopia have high numbers of child brides.
Just part of the culture though, right? Ditto lovely customs such as female genital mutilation.
What would Eleanor think if she were here today, learning that no small number of human abuses have occurred at the hands of Americans? Abu Ghraib comes to mind, having just read “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” an article written 20 years ago by journalist Seymour Hersh about the abuse in the Iraqi prison system during American occupation. That article referenced Vietnam and My Lai, yet another atrocity at the hands of Americans 50 years ago.
Not surprisingly, many human rights abuses come with economic and political upheaval, and war. And there is no shortage of conflicts and wars on the globe. The U.S. has been involved in too many of them and spent too much in blood and dollars. Can we attribute any positive outcomes to the conflicts in which we’ve engaged since WWII?
Much of the world is in armed conflict today. And for those areas on the map not showing armed conflict, such as the U.S., many wonder if we’re not close, given the level of division, lawlessness and corruption across government, academia, media and many other institutions — we are in a terrible situation.
Today, the U.S. government continues to fund and drive a proxy war with Russia — and when average Ukrainian citizens realize they’ve been used, they’ll likely not be happy. It’s unknown when more Americans will wake up about Ukraine, or if they will. The U.S. cost of the Ukraine meddling has been more than $100 billion, with the U.S. puppet, the Z Man of perpetual olive-green tee-shirt, recently demanding an additional $61 billion. Prior to the war, from 2014 to 2021, when folks like Victoria Nuland, now Joe Biden’s Acting Deputy Secretary in the State Department, Michael McFaul, Antony Blinken, Timothy Snyder and a cadre of neocons were plotting — Dr. Evil-like — the demise of Russia, $75 billion flowed from the U.S. to the Ukraine. Imagine what that money could have done to improve America and the lives of Americans versus “blowing stuff up” — destroying a country, causing vast environmental damage, displacing 11 million Ukrainians and killing several hundred thousand Russians and Ukrainians. Difficult to understand how getting 500,000 people killed or maimed correlates to human rights.
Looking more broadly, since 2001, military spending on conflicts of U.S. intervention has totaled $14 trillion, largely financed by debt.
Forget what these billions of dollars would have done if deployed in the U.S. Just think how not having the unsustainable debt the U.S. now carries, in part because of the insatiable warmongering of the U.S., would benefit our country. In fiscal year 2023 ending last September, $879 billion in interest was paid just on that national debt, and since then it may have hit $1 trillion (or $1,000,0000,000,000).
U.S. “leadership” also has been acting as though we could wage war with China. And then there’s the Middle East. There’s always the Middle East. At least one retired army colonel thinks we’re on the verge of Armageddon, with the Israeli-Palestinian war just the start. Atrocity upon atrocity. We can argue until the cows come home about more than seven decades of hostilities between Israel and others in the region, and where faults, wrongs and abuse lie. But only in a world in which hundreds of millions of people have seemingly gone mad would there be so little sympathy for the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, and rapes and kidnappings on October 7 — with hostages still held captive by Hamas. The current pop philosophy that divides people into categories of “oppressed” and “oppressor” has overwhelmed too many of weak mind and easy assimilation.
If we could all pause long enough to listen to just one story of human rights abuse, might more of us be touched again by humanity? Listening to the story of the young woman, Mia Shem, who was kidnapped in October in Israel by Palestinian terrorists, should challenge us to ask why the U.S. continues to back endless wars and if there isn’t a higher role for us to take. Held hostage for two months, Shem said the only reason she wasn’t raped by her kidnapper was because “his wife was outside the room with the children.” Shem lived through the horror of being wounded, kidnapped and barely treated for her injuries, with her freedoms stolen for two months, a hostage not knowing what was going to happen — if she would live or die, be freed in short order, years or never.
Shem lived through a horror repeated in other forms against so many others throughout the world in seemingly neverending human abuse. Have we learned nothing since WWII and Mrs. Roosevelt’s push for human rights? Again, the question: Have America’s continuing war efforts across the world since WWII made the world a better place?
After listening to Shem’s first-hand account of her capture and imprisonment, my mind turned back to the political imprisonment of Assange and Lira. The WikiLeaks founder and the YouTube commentator were not imprisoned by terrorists, but by governments — which, some might consider behaving akin to terrorists.
In April, Assange will have been held in London’s Belmarsh prison for five years. Prior to that, he was in the Ecuadoran embassy in London for seven years. Twelve years for pissing off the U.S.A. government. A timeline of his persecution starting in 2010 is here.
Lira was first arrested in the Ukraine on April 15, 2022, by the SBU (the Security Service of Ukraine) and released several days later — some sources reported it was because of a public outcry from followers.
Arrested again in 2023, Lira was charged and imprisoned. While in jail, he said he was beaten and had a rib broken. After a conditional release, he planned to leave the Ukraine and try to make it to Hungary to seek asylum, but again was arrested and not released. In December, it was reported he had pneumonia.
Lira has been imprisoned for “what are pure opinion crimes,” according to Alexander Mercouris of The Duran. “If the Ukrainians didn’t like what he was doing, they always had the remedy of … expelling him from their country,” said Mercouris.
Assange’s crime is embarrassing the U.S. government. Wikileaks released material of war crimes, specifically that the U.S. had not revealed it had killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan and that tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians had been killed by Iraqi forces, and prisoners tortured, in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Last month, both Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk brought much-needed attention to the political imprisonment of Gonzalo Lira. Tucker previously has talked about the Assange case, interviewing Julian’s father, John Shipton, and brother, Gabriel Shipton.
The U.S. State Department has a duty to protect Lira. But, the U.S. State Department doesn’t care. Listen here. Lira’s father said his son is incommunicado. “An American citizen by birth is in jail because he was exercising his right of freedom of speech,” said the senior Lira. “His defense … is in the hands of a court-appointment Ukrainian attorney that doesn’t speak any English. The U.S.A. government, with its silence in the face of this scandalous incident, suggests a degree of complicity, or at least tacit approval of Gonzalo’s arrest, since nothing else convincingly explains the conspicuous lack of response.”
As others have said, I have no doubt all the State Department would need to do is call their man in the Ukraine, the Z Man, to put Gonzalo on a plane to the states, or Chile. When you’re footing the bill, you can ask for small favors.
Pretty sure the same could be done with Assange. All the U.S. Department of “Justice” has to do is drop their charges against Assange. Despite pleas for President Trump to pardon Assange before he left office, it was extremely disappointing that he did not. Perhaps Mike Pompeo, Trump’s Secretary of State, held undue sway over Trump’s decision. Pompeo, who previously served as the CIA director, considered having Assange assassinated — another reason American voters should never consider Pompeo as a presidential candidate, let alone fit for any elected office or government position.
Should Donald Trump be in the White House in 2024, he should prioritize having the DOJ drop charges against Assange and/or pardon the man — he’s served enough time in this farce. Trump has had four years to determine he made the wrong decision. Should Robert Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy or Ron DeSantis move into the White House next year, I would hope they too would pardon Assange within their first days in office. It’s obscene and outrageous what the United States government has done to Assange for telling the truth, with the support of other Western countries.
I’m not as hopeful for Lira. If Biden and his regime continue to refuse to do the right thing on behalf of Lira, he may not survive Ukrainian prison hell, given the news of pneumonia and that he has other health conditions, it’s been reported. What Lira may need is a Carlos Ghosn-like stunt to save his ass — a real Hail Mary.
Ghosn is the former Chairman & CEO of Nissan, CEO of Renault, and chairman of AvtoVAZ and Mitsubishi, who was responsible for saving Nissan from the brink of bankruptcy and leading a successful turnaround of the Japanese automaker. He was a hero for a long time before his abrupt incarceration. He was arrested in Japan in November 2018 on accounting irregularities and treated like a common thief in ensuing months. A year later, he escaped from Japan with the assistance of a private security contractor and former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier. Ghosn said that he chose escape because he could “no longer be held hostage by a rigged Japanese justice system where guilt is presumed, discrimination is rampant and basic human rights are denied.”
So, Gonzalo needs some private security contractors and a million bucks, because there’s no indication the Biden regime and the State Department will do jack shit for this American citizen.
When America fails a citizen whose human rights are being denied, I wonder what Eleanor would say about using a private security contractor to make a great escape to safety.
Maria Fotopoulos writes about the connection between overpopulation and biodiversity loss, and from time to time other topics that confound her. On FB @BetheChangeforAnimals and givesendgo.com/calliescathouse.
