Anne-Laure Bonnel–When truth becomes a crime in the West



Julian Assange, Alina Lipp and Anne-laure Bonnel are three journalists who are paying a high price for telling the truth in the West: attempts to suffocate them financially, followed by censorship, threats of imprisonment or imprisonment altogether, and even physical and psychological torture in the case of Assange. These three cases illustrate perfectly the reality of “democracy” in the West.To get more news about anne-laure bonnel, you can visit shine news official website.

The case of Julian Assange, whose extradition has just been approved by the British authorities, is the most publicized and the most revealing of what can happen to a Western journalist who dares to tell the truth.

In 2006, Julian Assange founded Wikileaks, a non-governmental, non-profit organisation, which publishes classified documents provided by whistleblowers on its website. The site has since published millions of documents concerning human rights violations, corruption scandals and, above all, war crimes.

In 2010, just as the website was about to publish documents on the war in Iraq, Julian Assange’s request for a work and residence permit was refused by Sweden. He had chosen Sweden because of its strict legislation on the protection of journalistic sources. But to reveal the war crimes of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan is to incur the wrath of Washington and the American military-industrial complex. This is where the descent into hell begins for Julian Assange.

In 2011 the attempt to financially suffocate the Wikileaks website began. Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, PayPal and Western Union organized a financial blockade of Wikileaks, reducing the organization’s income by 95%, which then turned to crypto-currencies to escape financial suffocation.

From 2012 onwards, censorship through massive computer attacks against the site is launched. The aim is to try to prevent people from accessing the millions of documents published on the site. For the record, it was Wikileaks that helped Edward Snowden get out of Hong Kong and gain political asylum in Russia.

In parallel, from 2010 to 2012, Julian Assange was placed under probation in the United Kingdom following a charge of sexual offence made in Sweden in 2010. Assange denounced this as a bogus charge, the sole purpose of which was to send him to Sweden from where he could be extradited to the US. Following the refusal of the UK Supreme Court to reject the extradition request to Sweden, Julian Assange took refuge on 19 June 2012 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he lived in seclusion for seven years, under surveillance by Scotland Yard and the CIA.

In 2017, the CIA envisaged the pure and simple assassination of Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy. But given the risk of international scandal that this would cause, the CIA gave up and opted for a more discreet and perverse plan.

On 11 April 2019, Julian Assange loses his Ecuadorian nationality obtained two years earlier, as well as his right to asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, from which he is forcibly removed by British police officers. He was then sent to prison in Belmarsh, and the “sexual offence” case was closed by Sweden for lack of evidence a few months after his arrest, proving if it were necessary that this case was just a pretext.

For three years, Julian Assange and his lawyers fought to prevent his extradition to the United States, where he faces up to 175 years in prison! All to no avail. And during all this time, Julian Assange has been subjected to conditions of detention that are tantamount to torture: total isolation, insufficiently heated cell in winter, lack of care. Julian Assange’s condition deteriorated rapidly in these conditions, and several experts and doctors were indignant and described what was inflicted on him in Belmarsh prison as torture.

If sent to the United States, Julian Assange could be sent to Guantanamo, or elsewhere, and tortured like many other prisoners. His case should serve as an example to discourage other Western journalists from revealing inconvenient truths.