Don’t think that it can’t happen here

It has. The George H. W. Bush administration denied the mass civilian casualties in the invasion of Panama, falsely accused Noriega’s Dignity Battalions of starting the firestorm in El Chorrillo, and killed Spanish photojournalist Juantxu Rodríguez while he was walking down the street near the ATLAPA convention center.

When the editor of The Panama News, at the time an associate editor with the Ann Arbor newsmonthly Agenda, who came to Panama to report and visit a few days after the December 20, 1989 US attack on Panama, returned to his undergraduate alma mater, Eastern Michigan University, and spoke about the mass civilian casualties and the secret mass burials, a black ROTC sergeant called it a pack of lies, denied the mass graves and called the editor “a Zonie who sympathizes with the Hoochies.” Neither the Pentagon nor the university ever disavowed the racism.

(In its own way that was a perfect illustration of the opinion of Malcolm X, that racism is a malady that can afflict any person of any race anywhere, which in the USA of his time was a small problem among black people but a big problem among white people.)

At his sentencing in a US courtroom in Saipan — the venue carefully chosen in Washington to avoid press coverage — the judge tacitly admitted the years-long campaign of lies against Assange, noting that nobody was personally killed or injured because of what Assange published. The possibilities of reparations for the defamation campaign appear to be remote. However, individuals and institutions that participated in it go on with forever-stained reputations. 

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