Instant death in consulate, 6 years of isolation in embassy link disparate enemies of free press

On October 2, 2018, Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Turkey and was brutally murdered by Saudi government agents. In 2012, Australian journalist Julian Assange walked into Ecuador's London embassy, beginning a six yer odyssey under life threatening solitary confinement that continues to today, to avoid a likely lifetime prison sentence, even execution, in the American legal system. Both have suffered extra legal government punishment for practicing what most in the media take for granted: the right to publish truth about government wrongdoing. Khashoggi is dead and Assange, cut off from medical care, access to legal assistance, indeed all contact with the outside word, incurs what former Ecuador president Rafael Correa, whose government granted the journalist political asylum, describes as “torture.”

Killing or extra legally imprisoning unfriendly journalists for years enables governments bent on perpetual war that ruins the lives of millions while squandering trillions, must be resisted by every journalist, indeed every citizen. The actions of the Saudis, the Brits and the Americans attacking a free press are all of a piece...and are the antithesis of peace.