Who will be among those who remember the moral imperative to speak truth to power, and nominate Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize?
In memory of Carl von Ossietzky, an investigative journalist and editor of Die Weltbühne who died in hospital in Gestapo custody after being held in various prisons and concentration camps. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. The award was controversial because von Ossietzky had been imprisoned for revealing the illegal steps the German government had been taking to rearm militarily.
There are those who believe that no matter what a country may do, it is the duty of its citizens to obey their laws without objection. And there are those who hold the primacy of natural law and private conscience and moral duty to resist evil even when it has been declared by a temporal authority to be legal.
Intelligence agencies hate Assange because he dared to expose their dirty secrets. Collateral Murder and CableGate made him a marked man.
Idle speculation on my part: is extradition to the United States a forgone conclusion, or might WikiLeaks be able to blackmail the Brits with as-of-yet embarrassing secrets?
