Mexican President Says Statue of Liberty Should Be Dismantled if Assange is Convicted
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican president, said in an interview on Monday that the Statue of Liberty should be dismantled if Julian Assange is convicted for his role in one of the biggest leaks in U.S. history.
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López Obrador, who has offered Assange asylum several times in the past, said at a press conference that any conviction would diminish what the Stature of Liberty signifies.
“A few days ago I released a New York Times report talking about the super cop, Genaro García Luna, and it is the New York Times, and the Financial Times does the same, and The Wall Street Journal, and we are all talking of this Assange thing, isn’t it worthwhile for the New York Times to deal with the matter, El País and to convene a meeting of the most important press in the world to exhort, request, call, so that a pardon be granted to Assange?
“If they don’t do it, they will be tarnished and we will have to start the campaign that if they take him to the US, and sentence him to the maximum sentence and die in prison, they will have to dismantle the Statue of Liberty that the French delivered and that is in New York because it is no longer a symbol of freedom,” he said, according to The Mexico Daily Post.
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Assange has made a final appeal to prevent his extradition to the U.S. where he faces 18 federal counts tied to his decision to publish classified diplomatic cables and reports from the U.S. military tied to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
"Julian Assange is the best journalist of our time in the world and he has been treated very unfairly, worse than a criminal,” López Obrador said. “This is a shame for the world."
Jonathan P. Baird wrote in the Concord Monitor that he believes the “hatred and anger stirred up has confused the public’s view about what is at stake in Assange’s legal case.”
“The government is turning investigative journalism into a criminal act. Assange, through Wikileaks, published classified documents in 2010. He didn’t leak them, Chelsea Manning did that,” he wrote.
“The job of a journalist is to question governments and to put out information that governments hate having disclosed,” he wrote. “We don’t need journalists who act as courtiers to power. History shows that survival of democracy necessitates journalists like Assange who are willing to expose the powerful. Without such journalists, the public is much more likely to be led into more imperialist misadventures like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.”