The persecution of Wilfred Burchett and Julian Assange
Julian Assange's "crime" was, in 2010, to expose military abuses committed by the USA .
Assange is not a USA citizen - he's Australian. Yet his own national government is apparently abandoning him to the cruel vindictive revenge of a foreign government - the USA.
But hey - this is nothing new! While the world remembers the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it conveniently forgets that other Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who,in 1945 revealed the horrors of that bombing.
In the 1930s, Burchett took many personal risks to help rescue Jews from Hitler’s Germany.
In August 1945, in defiance of the US army’s ban on journalists, he made his way to the devastated Japanese city of Hiroshima . He was the first journalist to expose the truth about the devastating after-effects of the atom bomb.The US military had wanted to keep radioactive contamination an official secret, concealing the death and suffering it caused for hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
US officials accused Burchett of being under the sway of Japanese propaganda.[Burchett lost his press accreditation and he was ordered to leave Japan. His camera, containing photos of Hiroshima, was confiscated while he was documenting persistent illness at a Tokyo hospital. The film was sent to Washington and classified secret .
For daring to out these and later, many other important truths, Burchett was marked by Western intelligence services.
Burchett dedicated the rest of his life to exposing the lies told by Western governments.
Australian conservatives branded him a traitor and communist. the Australian Robert Menzies government illegally refused to replace his passport. He was barred from re-entering Australia, despite his citizenship. His children were also denied Australian passports. The Australian national security department, which became ASIO in 1949, opened a file on the whole Burchett family in the 1940s.
the Australian government investigated the possibility of charging Burchett with treason. ASIO agents were despatched to Japan and Korea to collect evidence, but their investigations uncovered little. Burchett was subjected to government-backed smear campaigns and barred from Australia.
In 1969, Australian authorities refused Burchett entry to attend his father’s funeral. Only in 1972 — after 17 years of exile — was Burchett finally given an Australian passport by the incoming Whitlam government.
I guess that Australia will never again be allowed by the USA to have a government like that of Gough Whltlam. Liberal or Labor, the Australian government is determined to toe the USA line - which is to persecute any journalist who tells the truth about USA war atrocities.