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| WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice system was suffering from a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law". |
LONDON:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice system was
suffering from a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law", as
Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency surveillance
programmes.
Speaking in
an interview with AFP at Ecuador's London embassy, where he has been holed up
for almost a year, the founder of the whistleblowing website accused the US government of trying to "launder" its activities with regard to the
far-reaching electronic spying effort revealed on Thursday.
"The
US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is
receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret
agreements. That's what's come out," said the 41-year-old Australian.
Two damning
newspaper exposes have laid bare the extent to which President Barack Obama's
intelligence apparatus is scooping up enormous amounts of personal data -- on
telephone calls, emails, website visits -- on millions of Americans and
foreigners.
Obama has
defended the programmes, saying they are legal, necessary to combat terror, and
balance security with privacy.
Assange,
whose website has enraged Washington by publishing hundreds of thousands of US
diplomatic cables and classified files on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
said the Obama administration was engaged in a bid to "criminalise all
national security journalism in the United States".
US soldier
Bradley Manning is being court-martialled for leaking the huge cache of
government files to WikiLeaks, while there has been an outcry in the US media
after the government seized the phone records of journalists at the Associated
Press and Fox News in a bid to root out government sources.
Commenting
on Washington's spying on journalists and members of the public, as well as his
own treatment by US authorities, Assange said: "Over the last ten years
the US justice system has suffered from a collapse, a calamitous collapse, in
the rule of law.
"We
see this in other areas as well -- with how Bradley Manning has been treated in
prison, with US drone strikes occurring -- even on American citizens -- with no
due process."
Manning's
long-awaited military trial finally began on Monday at the Fort Meade military
base outside Washington.
Assange
blasted the court martial as a "show trial" and warned that the
future of journalism was at stake over US prosecutors' argument that by leaking
the files, 25-year-old Manning had helped Al-Qaeda.
Aiding the
enemy is punishable by death in the US, though prosecutors are not seeking this
sentence in Manning's case.
"What's
at stake in this trial is the future of press in the United States and in the
rest of the world," Assange told AFP.
"They
are going for Bradley Manning to erect a precedent that if any person in the US
government speaks to a journalist, they are then speaking to the public, they
are then speaking to Al-Qaeda.
"They're
trying to erect a precedent that speaking to the media is the communicating
with the enemy -- a death penalty offence."
Critics say
the Obama administration has launched an unprecedented war on government
officials who leak information to the media, prosecuting more whistleblowers
under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined.
"This
is an absolutely runaway process," Assange said.
A former
computer hacker, Assange has not left the Ecuadoran embassy since June 19 last
year, when he walked in claiming asylum in a bid to avoid extradition to
Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over alleged sex crimes.
Ecuador
granted him asylum but British authorities refuse to allow him safe passage out
of the country, leaving him stuck inside amid a diplomatic deadlock.
Ecuador's
foreign minister is due to fly to London for talks over Assange with his
British counterpart on June 17.
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