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Category: Whistleblowing

  • The Conviction and Sentencing of Witness K

    After tormenting the man for years, it became clear that the Australian authorities were willing to, for want of a better word, compromise.  The more accurate word would be compromising.  Instead of banishing former spy turned bean spiller Witness K to a cell and throwing away the key, there was preference for a softer, more hypocritical mode of punishment. He would be spared jail time, showing that the national security state can, when it wishes to sit in judgment, show some mercy.

    For those familiar with the case, there was nothing merciful in the finding.  A punishment had been levelled for exposing an unlawful operation against a friendly and fledgling state.  In 2004, Australia’s then foreign minister Alexander Downer authorised the bugging of the cabinet offices of Timor-Leste by officers of the Australian Secret Intelligence Services (ASIS).

    The surveillance of Timor-Leste’s negotiators was an act of economic espionage and fraud, intended to give the Australians the upper hand in discussions between the countries over their maritime boundary.  At stake were the oil and gas-rich deposits in the Timor Sea.  Unaware of the surveillance operation, the East Timorese went ahead to sign a treaty which distinctly favoured Australia: a 50-50 division of the Greater Sunrise fields.

    Eventually, the truth outed.  The operation was revealed.  Former US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, who was the chief negotiator on behalf of the Timor-Leste government, was stunned by Canberra’s commercial rapacity.  “The whole experience of the negotiation from 2000 on and through this whole episode was to see a country that – yes, in many ways focuses on the public good – but where corporate greed was a big part of it, because the Howard and Downer government, they were shills for the corporations.”

    This is where Witness K’s role becomes important.  As the former head of technical operations at the agency, he felt sour by the prioritising of resources against Timor-Leste over other security matters. When he became aware of Downer’s consultancy with the multinational Woodside, who stood to benefit from a general divvying up of the Greater Sunrise fields, the red mist descended.

    Exercised by the matter, Witness K made an internal compliant to the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) about the bugging.  Showing how such internal complaint mechanisms only serve to expose the complainant to retribution, Witness K’s saw his employment terminated.  With the consent of the IGIS, Witness K secured the services of an ASIS-approved lawyer and former ACT attorney-general, Bernard Collaery.  Collaery did some digging and came to the conclusion that the espionage operation was not only unlawful but probably a conspiracy to defraud the government of Timor-Leste under section 334 of the Criminal Code.

    Timor-Leste, aggrieved by the bugging incident, went to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague intent on overturning the sham arrangement they had reached with Canberra.  In 2013, aided by Collaery’s efforts, an invitation was extended to Witness K to give evidence.  Disclosures regarding the surveillance operation were made in two affidavits.  Alarmed, Australia’s attorney-general George Brandis sprang into action.  Witness K’s passport was cancelled. The domestic intelligence service, ASIO, raided the homes of both men.

    Brandis flirted with prosecuting both Witness K and Collaery.  But it was only in May 2018, a mere two months after Canberra’s conclusion of a renegotiated treaty with Timor-Leste, that the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions formally brought charges under section 39 of the Intelligence Services Act 2001, which criminalises the communication of any information or matter acquired or prepared by or on behalf of ASIS in connection with its functions or relates to its performance.

    Law academic Spencer Zifcak, in writing about the matter with some horror, saw an “Alice in Wonderland quality about all this” (Kafka would have been more appropriate): the defendants in a criminal case were the very men who “acted in the national interest by disclosing alleged unlawful activity by Australia’s intelligence service”.  The prosecutors were the very individuals who initiated the covert operation.

    In 2019, Witness K suggested that he would plead guilty. On June 17, concealed behind a wall of black panels, he formally entered a guilty plea in the ACT Magistrates Court.  The next day, magistrate Glenn Theakston concluded that the former ASIS agent would not face the bars of a prison and would be subject to a 12-month good behaviour bond.  Adding his bit to the Alice in Wonderland farce, Theakston claimed that, “It cannot and should not be up to … former staff members to unilaterally depart from those security obligations” though he admitted that this “was not a breach that was going to go hidden for some time.”  That said, it was “express” and “deliberate”.  It compromised the agency’s effectiveness, safety and security and jeopardised Australia’s relationships and reputations.

    While stern and rigid on the letter of the law – the proscriptions regarding ASIS were “strict and absolute” – the magistrate did note that Witness K had been motivated by considerations of justice, not those of personal gain.  The former agent’s disclosures were part of an effort to participate in a “rules-based order of international relations”.  (The bitter ironist will detect how this jars with Canberra’s incessant babble of about such an order even as it tries to upend it.)

    Richard Maidment QC, representing the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, swatted Witness K’s efforts to secure a non-conviction order.  His conviction would serve a lesson of deterrence.  Whether it was “appropriate for him to breach the obligations, which had been brought to his attention many times, does not afford him mitigation.”

    The criminals behind the Timor-Leste operation remain at large. The wrong man was convicted. Senator for South Australia Rex Patrick released a sombre statement claiming to be “ashamed to be an Australian.”  Collaery, for his part, has refused to plead guilty.  His fate, largely being determined behind closed doors, is likely to be a harsher one.

    The post The Conviction and Sentencing of Witness K first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Time for a New Toolbox

    Though his story has been widely disseminated by now, before Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong he sent a box of classified documents by snail mail from Hawaii (marked mysteriously “from B. Manning”) to a writer in New York, which made its way, unopened, from person to person until it reached journalists Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald, who went on to meet with Snowden and tell his story of global panoptic surveillance affecting just about everybody online.

    The story, Snowden’s ToolBox: Trust in the Age of Surveillance, by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, is, as the authors emphasize, a story of trust in an age of paranoia and suspicion. They’re keen to tell us, tag-team style, how the world has changed since the events of 9/11, with the militarization of the Internet, and the rise of surveillance capitalism, leading to a pervasive sense that privacy is no longer viable. We’ve succumbed to the sad notion that if we have ‘nothing to hide’ then we needn’t worry about Big Brother watching over us.

    Many readers will be familiar with Jessica Bruder’s work through the adaptation of her travel memoir, Nomadland, which recently won the Oscar for best film, and for which she worked with the director Chloé Zhao to create a screenplay. Her road travels, living the life of a nomad for months, and talking Studs Terkel-like to American wanderers, travelling from job to job as a lifestyle, jibes quite nicely with co-author Dale Maharidge’s background. Maharidge won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for And Their Children After Them, his follow-on to the James Agee study of Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. They’re People people, and so are the cadre of journalists and independent filmmakers they hook up with in telling this side story.

    The first half of the book retells the now-familiar story of how and why Edward Snowden stole highly classified documents from NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and handed them over to Poitras and Greenwald, who went on to make a film, Citizenfour, and detail his revelations in the Guardian. The co-authors quote Snowden judiciously; in an interview shortly after he outs himself on TV, Snowden tells us that the surveillance state he’s seen represents “an existential threat to democracy…I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

    Bruder explains that Snowden had wanted to have his revelations run in the New York Times, the nation’s preeminent paper of record, but was seriously bummed out when they quashed an October 2004 article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that exposed Stellar Wind, the government’s illegal dragnet of American electronic communications. The Bush administration had denied such activity.

    Bruder writes, “Approaching the New York Times…was out of the question. Snowden didn’t have confidence that the newspaper would have the guts to break the story… The scoop was scheduled to run right before the 2004 elections, but Executive Editor Bill Keller deferred to Bush administration officials, who claimed the revelations would damage national security.” When the story finally broke, more than a year later, it caused a political furor and popular outcry.

    A more intriguing section in Snowden’s Toolbox comes when Bruder talks about how Poitras and Greenwald got together after the Snowden revelations began running in the Guardian and were invited by Ebay billionaire Pierre Omidyar to start up a new publication — The Intercept. It was meant to be a solid alternative to the corporatized MSM and a trustworthy reporting platform for whistleblowers. The publication garnered and poached some of the best journalistic talent from NYT and WaPo and elsewhere and seemed, at first, like the Travelling Wilburys of journalism.

    But there was trouble from the start. The Terms of Service (TOS) made it clear that readers could be expected to have their presence at the site logged and their comments scanned by Google Adsense and Amazon’s algorithms. Such surveillance was troublesome, if for no other reason than that the Intercept’s readership were probably the types the State would want to gather details about.

    It recalled the deal that Greenwald had signed with Amazon to promote his Pulitzer Prize-winning post-Snowden account of the surveillance state, No Place to Hide. Viewers of the site were offered an opportunity to receive Greenwald’s book for free, if they applied and were successfully approved for an Amazon credit card. The application details would be processed by Chase, who Greenwald had once excoriated for their corrupt practices. But more importantly, by accepting the deal from Amazon, Greenwald was effectively promoting the forwarding of private information to a corporation that would collect and store that data – from exactly the kind of readers the State would be eager to parse.

    We learn that Laura Poitras, co-founder of The Intercept, was turned down when she wanted to continue working with the Snowden trove of documents, which First Look Media, owner of The Intercept, told her “the company would own all rights to any publication that resulted from our writing about the Snowden archive.” And that, she continues, “Notes we took at the archive would be confiscated for review — and possible redaction — by the Intercept.” And she added: “I laughed. The experience felt like something out of Kafka. And it gave me a sense of déjà vu, echoing how the NSA and the FBI had shut down our request to see our files.” The Intercept has since stopped writing altogether about the Snowden archive.

    It gets worse when the reader learns that Laura Poitras was stiffed by The Intercept in her compensation package. Bruder writes, “Laura had been facing challenges of her own at the company, including the startling realization that her compensation was far below that of her male colleagues Greenwald and (Jeremy) Scahill.” Unbeknownst to her, Scahill and Greenwald had renegotiated their contracts, and the resulting pay disparity was “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

    Toward the end of the book, Bruder and Maharidge, the leit motif is repeated. Trust — at the interpersonal level, work environment and social contract with the State — is key. They write, “Trust is the basis of all cooperative action in a free society. It’s the feeling of fellowship that allows people to take risks and grow. It’s also the underpinning of democracy. And it’s fragile, easy to undermine.”

    Succinct, true, and well put.

    All in all, Snowden’s Toolbox is a good read, with humor, intelligence, and a welcome sense of journalistic collegiality. An Appendix offers a “toolbox” of stuff journalists and readers can do to maintain their privacy and the documents of their whistleblowing sources.

    The post Time for a New Toolbox first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Julian Assange: Covid Risks and Campaigns for Pardon

    Before the January 4 ruling of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in the extradition case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher will continue to endure the ordeal of cold prison facilities while being menaced by a COVID-19 outbreak.  From November 18, Assange, along with inmates in House Block 1 at Belmarsh prison in south-east London, were placed in lockdown conditions.  The measure was imposed after three COVID-19 cases were discovered.

    The response was even more draconian than usual.  Exercise was halted; showers prohibited.  Meals were to be provided directly to the prisoner’s cell.  Prison officials described the approach as a safety precaution.  “We’ve introduced further safety measures following a number of positive cases,” stated a Prison Service spokesperson.

    Assange’s time at Belmarsh is emblematic of a broadly grotesque approach which has been legitimised by the national security establishment.  The pandemic has presented another opportunity to knock him off, if only by less obvious means.  The refusal of Judge Baraitser to grant him bail, enabling him to prepare his case in conditions of guarded, if relative safety, typifies this approach.  “Every day that passes is a serious risk to Julian,” explains his partner, Stella Moris.  “Belmarsh is an extremely dangerous environment where murders and suicides are commonplace.”

    Belmarsh already presented itself as a risk to one’s mental bearings prior to the heralding of the novel coronavirus.  But galloping COVID-19 infections through Britain’s penal system have added another, potentially lethal consideration.  On November 24, Moris revealed that some 54 people in Assange’s house block had been infected with COVID-19.  These included inmates and prison staff.  “If my son dies from COVID-19,” concluded a distressed Christine Assange, “it will be murder.”

    The increasing number of COVID-19 cases in Belmarsh has angered the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer.  On December 7, ten years from the day of Assange’s first arrest, he spoke of concerns that 65 out of approximately 160 inmates had tested positive.  “The British authorities initially detained Mr. Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence.” He was currently being “detained for exclusively preventive purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years.”

    The picture for the rapporteur is unmistakable, ominous and unspeakable.  The prolonged suffering of the Australian national, who already nurses pre-existing health conditions, amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.  Imprisoning Assange was needlessly brutal.  “Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”  Melzer suggested immediate decongestion measures for “all inmates whose imprisonment is not absolutely necessary” especially those, “such as Mr Assange, who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition.”

    Free speech advocates are also stoking the fire of interest ahead of Baraitser’s judgment.  In Salon, Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, penned a heartfelt piece wondering what had happened to the fourth estate.  “Where is the honest reporting that we all so desperately need, and upon which the very survival of democracy depends?”  Never one to beat about the bush, Waters suggested that it was “languishing in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.”  To extradite Assange would “set the dangerous precedent that journalists can be prosecuted merely for working with inside sources, or for publishing information the government deems harmful.”  The better alternative: to dismiss the charges against Assange “and cancel the extradition proceedings in the kangaroo court in London.”

    In the meantime, a vigorous campaign is being advanced from the barricades of Twitter to encourage President Donald Trump to pardon Assange.  Moris stole the lead with her appeal on Thanksgiving.  Pictures of sons Max and Gabriel were posted to tingle the commander-in-chief’s tear ducts.  “I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas.”

    Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has added her name to the Free Assange campaign, directing her pointed wishes to the White House.  “Since you’re giving pardons to people,” she declared, “please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality in the deep state.”

    Pamela Anderson’s approach was somewhat different and, it should be said, raunchily attuned to her audience.  She made no qualms donning a bikini in trying to get the president’s attention.  “Bring Julian Assange Home Australia,” went her carried sign, tweeted with a message to Trump to pardon him.  Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept, proved more conventional, niggling Trump about matters of posterity.  “By far the most important blow Trump could strike against the abuse of power by CIA, FBI & the Deep State – as well as to impose transparency on them to prevent future abuses – is a pardon of @Snowden & Julian Assange, punished by those corrupt factions for exposing their abuses.”  Alan Rusbridger, formerly editor of The Guardian, agrees.

    While often coupled with Assange in the pardoning stakes, Edward Snowden has been clear about his wish to see the publisher freed.  “Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange.  You alone can save his life.”  As well meant as this is, Trump’s treasury of pardons is bound to be stocked by other options, not least for himself.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2020 at 8:06pm and is filed under Belmarsh Prison, CIA, COVID-19, Deep State, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Exploitation, FBI, Health/Medical, Incarceration, Julian Assange, Lockdown, Media, NSA, Political Prisoners, Solidarity, Solitary confinement, Surveillance, United Kingdom, United States, US Prison System, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The David McBride Case: Whistleblowing, Afghanistan and Australian War Crimes

    Much complaint can be had of the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report. It exempts political actors of responsibility for alleged atrocities and war crimes. It suggests that those in the highest echelons of the Australian Defence Forces are ignorant in incompetent innocence.  It spares the desk warriors and flays the field operatives. Heavily redacted, this document suggests that no serious cleansing of the Augean stables is going to take place any time soon.

    One recommendation in the report does stand out for its logical decency. “Perhaps the single most effective indication that there is a commitment to cultural reform is the demonstration that those who have been instrumental in the exposure of misconduct, or are known to have acted with propriety and probity, are regarded as role models.”

    Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing who the people being recommended for promotion or pardon are, their names furiously blacked out in the public version of the report.  But hints can be gathered from the explicit reference to the role played by whistleblowers. “Too often, not only in the military, have the careers of whistleblowers been adversely affected.”

    One such whistleblower is Major David McBride, who once cut his teeth as a military lawyer and participated in two deployments to Afghanistan.  Between 2014 and 2016, McBride passed on information to the ABC on alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan by Australian soldiers.  It began with the gathering of files from computers located in the joint-operations headquarters near Bungendore, east of the nation’s capital.  A report documenting alleged atrocities by special forces in Afghanistan came into being, though it bulked to cover the mishandling of sex abuse allegations within the military, and the treatment of women in the armed forces.  Avenues of internal disclosure were used, and exhausted.  McBride even sought to tempt the Australian Federal Police.  No one bit.

    In 2017, the material gathered by McBride became the trove of documents and revelations called The Afghan Files.  They were disturbing, enlightening, and did much to expose the whole sordid business of committing special forces to such theatres of war as Afghanistan.  But McBride’s view on the information was more panoramic and less specifically focused on the minutiae of brutality.  Australia’s special forces, he suggested in what can only be regarded as an eternal theme, were scapegoats for desk bound commanders and bureaucrats.  While soldiers killed and bled in the field, the pen pushers back in Canberra thrived.  “It’s a real sickness we need to work on,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in June 2019.  “Everyone has an opinion poll.  No one wants to make a decision.”

    In that sense, McBride remains conventional, keen on proper process, and far from a garlanded peacenik.  He stares at officialdom, finds them wanting: they want to send soldiers to war, but in doing so, hobble them.  “If you are worried about Afghan deaths, why not pull us out? If you want us to fight the war, you have to be able to let us do it.”

    For his deeds, McBride faces five charges centred on theft of Commonwealth property, breaching the Defence Act and disclosing information without due authorisation.  In a preliminary hearing in 2019, he pleaded not guilty to all charges.

    His case has put a few Australian parliamentarians in a sour mood, though not those of the major parties, who remain characteristically cowed and cowardly on such subjects.  The well-meaning and often sound independent MP Andrew Wilkie is entirely clear about what should happen to McBride.  “The federal government must stop going after whistleblowers who risk everything to reveal what happens in dark corners.”  To that end, the government “must drop all charges against Mr McBride.”

    Senator Rex Patrick, another independent, has also urged the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to drop the charges.  McBride “is a hero” and in the absence of the CDPP failing to drop the case, “the Attorney-General should order the discontinuance of the prosecution under the powers afforded him by section 71(1) of the Judiciary Act.”

    Nick Xenophon, law partner of the firm representing McBride and himself a former federal parliamentarian, is also a standard bearer for whistleblowers.  In an open letter to the chief of the Australian Defence Forces, General Angus Campbell, he argued that it was only “whistleblowers like McBride and a handful of others who made the Brereton report possible by refusing to be intimidated into silence.  In my view, they have redeemed the reputation of our nation.  They do not deserve jail cells.”

    The answer supplied by General Campbell was nothing if not predictable.  When called upon to have a view on the subject of McBride’s liability, he retreated to the bunker of dispassionate propriety.  “I can’t speak to issues at play in a current court process,” he explained to the press last month.  “I am not in a position to do so.  I understand your concern and I appreciate that many here will speak to that issue, but I am not able to talk to it.”

    A petition started by Afghan Australian lawyer Arezo Safi, is bustling away to its intended target of 50,000.  (To date 38,552 have signed it.)  “As an Afghan-Australian and a lawyer, I am deeply upset by the persecution of David McBride, the brave whistleblower who exposed Australian Defence Force’s war crimes in Afghanistan.”  Democracy, she claims, is at stake without the exploits of McBride and his like.

    Support is also forthcoming from the Afghan Community Support Organisation of New South Wales.  In commending the efforts and findings of the investigation, its president Nadir Azami wanted the government to “go all the way and finish this goodwill and drop charges against Mr McBride”.  Doing so would show “good intention” in supporting future whistleblowers.

    Safi is dedicated in her advocacy for McBride, certain that he is “being celebrated for his bravery by the general public.”  But the approach to whistleblowers in Australia is at best fickle.  The system of protections are perniciously poor for those exposing national security information.  The best McBride can hope for at this point are sensible decisions made by the CDPP based on the public interest, a concept regularly used against, rather than for, the whistleblower.

    Should the matter ultimately wind its way to the Attorney-General Christian Porter, advocates for McBride will have every reason to be perturbed.  Porter is a dreary authoritarian who relishes the prosecutor’s garb.  He has already given a clue to fellow parliamentarians on what members of the public can expect.  Intervening in the McBride case “would be utterly extraordinary and would necessarily, by its very nature, represent political intervention in a process which has conventionally been independent.”

    This article was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2020 at 10:50am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, Major David McBride, War Crimes, Whistleblowing.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Where is Canadian Media on the Assange File?

    After 10 years of restricted freedom, political exile and incarceration, Julian Assange finally came face-to-face with his accusers at the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London. For three weeks in September, a team of English lawyers argued on behalf of their client, the U.S. Department of Justice, that the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder and publisher should be handed over to a U.S. national security court to face 17 counts under the 1917 Espionage Act.

    If convicted by the District Court of Eastern Virginia, where the indictments originated, Assange will spend the rest of his life in an American supermax facility for having published evidence of United States war crimes, torture and a host of other government wrongdoing.

    “The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms,” blogged former Guardian reporter and Martha Gellhorn prize winner Jonathan Cook on the eve of Assange’s extradition hearings.

    “Right now, every journalist in the world ought to be up in arms, protesting at the abuses Assange is suffering, and has suffered, and the fate he will endure if extradition is approved.”

    If you go by years of Canadian reporting on Assange and WikiLeaks, Canadian journalists don’t share Cook’s sentiment. When asked in the summer if advocacy group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression has plans to advocate for Assange’s freedom, CJFE president Philip Tunley responded, “I am not seeing any consensus at CJFE to weigh in on behalf of Mr. Assange, though some clearly still support him and wish him well.”

    The premise that it takes an informed citizenry to run a true democracy is being seriously subverted by the Canadian fourth estate itself. By distracting attention away from the press freedom principles of Assange’s extradition case and obsessing over his character, Canadian mainstream press have undermined the public’s right to know while ignoring the significance of WikiLeaks releases themselves. That needs to change.

    As a Canadian freelancer, enduring 10 years of biased and inaccurate reporting in the Canadian press about Assange has been a source of dismay and frustration. Petitioning and complaining to senior editors and broadcast gatekeepers was clearly naïve given the paucity of responses.

    One response that did come back signposted a troubling predicament in Canadian Assange and WikiLeaks coverage.

    CBC had posted a Thomson Reuters story in August about a U.S. Senate Committee report that claimed WikiLeaks worked with Russian Intelligence to release the Democratic National Committee  emails in 2016.

    When I suggested in my complaint that the report provides no evidence for this classic claim against WikiLeaks and that repeating official unsubstantiated narratives does not make them true, CBC director of journalistic standards Paul Hambleton emailed back:

    “I fully understand that you may hold a different view than that of the Senate committee.

    It is not the CBC’s obligation to determine what is ‘truth’ (a truly dangerous notion for any broadcaster), but only to present differing views fairly and accurately affording Canadians the opportunity and the information they need to make up their own minds about the nature or quality of the views expressed.”

    I argued back: “The predicament here is that journalism is not principally about ‘the nature or quality of views.’ Journalism is foremost about presenting facts, checked and verified.”

    What’s seriously worrying in the Assange and WikiLeaks coverage I complained about to CBC and other news outlets is that for the public, the repetition of established narratives — including unsubstantiated claims and assertions —eventually becomes a substitute for fact or truth.

    I haven’t heard back from Mr. Hambleton.

    When I wasn’t writing complaint emails to news outlets, I was busy pitching Assange stories and opinion pieces of my own. Except for two queries, most were politely (but outright) rejected, citing issues with space and timing.

    Canadaland published one submission that called out Canadian Assange coverage for ignoring the United States’  attempt to criminalize whistleblower journalism.

    The National Observer posted my opinion letter after negotiating with the editor who asserted one of the classic positions held by many in the legacy press. “Assange is a programmer and a hacker, but never worked as a journalist. You’re framing the issue as a journalism freedom issue. For me this is still a problem in your framing.”

    The problem with my “framing” was resolved when I pointed out that Assange and WikiLeaks won a string of journalism awards over the years including the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism awarded annually to a journalist “whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or ‘official drivel’, as Martha Gellhorn called it.”

    We find ourselves in a time when unauthorized ideas are no longer guaranteed to make it into the mainstream, even when those ideas have been fact-checked and proven to be true.

    The crisis in Canadian journalism isn’t underfunding and it isn’t the concentration of media ownership. The plight of Canadian journalism, if reportage on Assange is the yardstick, are the signposts that fearless independent reporting that holds governments and institutions to account has all but vanished from the mainstream, which is where most Canadians get their news.

    In 2010, WikiLeaks released 750,000 pages of the Manning leaks, “the largest leak of classified documents in U.S history” declared the Pentagon  – State Department cables, Guantanamo secrets, Afghan war diaries and Iraq war logs which included collateral murder, the helicopter gunsight video that shows unprovoked slayings of civilians by U.S. troops in the streets of Baghdad.

    Australian journalist John Pilger said Assange and WikiLeaks were in the crosshairs of United States authorities years before the publicity around the war logs releases made WikiLeaks a household name.

    “The aim was to silence and criminalize WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech,” Pilger told a crowd of Assange supporters in front of the Old Bailey.

    Pilger described in detail the campaign to discredit Assange led by the Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch of the U.S. Defense Department after a 2007 WikiLeaks post of a U.S. Army manual of standard operating procedures for soldiers overseeing al-Qaida suspects held in Guantanamo military prison.

    Pilger refers to the extradition hearings as “the final act to bury Julian Assange. It’s not due process, it’s due revenge.”

    According to independent observers, the structural inequalities of the extradition proceedings alone, as overseen by Westminster District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, provide plenty of cause to have the U.S. extradition request dismissed outright.

    During his incarceration at maximum security Belmarsh facility, Assange had only restricted access to his legal team and was only permitted to hold on to case files for a limited time. In court Assange sat in the back of the room behind a glass partition and wasn’t permitted confidential communications with his lawyers.

    Two protected defence witnesses, former employees of Spanish security firm UC Global, confirmed that they recorded conversations in the Ecuadorian embassy between Assange and his lawyers and gave the information to U.S. intelligence officials.

    Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, also a witness for the defence, had his case thrown out for less, after president Richard Nixon operatives broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal mental health information that might discredit him.

    Former UK diplomat and independent journalist Craig Murray, who reported in his daily blog from Courtroom 10 at the Central Criminal Court of England, wrote in his Day 6 report from the hearings: “What came over most strongly was the desire of both judge and prosecution to railroad through the extradition with as little of the case against it getting a public airing as possible.”

    None of the abuses of process were reported by establishment reporters. The only Canadian report from inside the courtroom, by the Globe and Mail, validated Murray’s observations and helped ensure judge and prosecution had their way.

    Globe and Mail Europe correspondent Paul Waldie concludes in his Sept. 16 report about Daniel Ellsberg’s testimony, “At one point he (Assange) started heckling Judge Vanessa Baraitser who threatened to kick him out.”

    However, according to Court News UK reporter Charlie Jones, what actually happened was that when U.S. prosecutors objected to the live testimony of German-Lebanese citizen Khaled El-Masri  — a survivor of CIA kidnapping, torture, and rendition —, Assange stood up and “heckled” from behind the glass partition at the back of the courtroom, saying “Madame, I will not accept you censoring a torture victim’s statement to this court.”

    Waldie made no mention of defence witness El-Masri’s testimony, which confirmed what WikiLeaks’ publication of U.S. diplomatic cables had revealed in 2010, that significant U.S. pressure was brought on German authorities not to arrest and prosecute CIA actors.

    Waldie also didn’t bring up that lawyers for the U.S. prosecution argued vehemently to keep all references to U.S. torture and wrong doing out of the proceeding’s transcripts.

    Noam Chomsky was one of the defence witnesses whose full testimony Baraitser and the prosecution didn’t want to hear. His live testimony was replaced by a four-minute summary read into the court records.

    An excerpt from Chomsky’s written submission: “In my view, Julian Assange, in courageously upholding political beliefs that most of us profess to share, has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know what their elected representatives are doing. His actions in turn have led him to be pursued in a cruel and intolerable manner.”

    Canadian coverage of Assange’s extradition consists almost entirely of the same Thomson-Reuters and Associated Press dispatches posted on various Canadian news sites. If you held them up against independent accounts, you’d think indie journos and wire service reporters attended different events.

    Fidel Narváez, the Ecuadorian diplomat who granted Julian Assange political asylum, was one of only a handful of observers permitted into the courtroom. Narváez reports that on the first day, Baraitser cut access to the video stream in Courtroom 9 that had been previously authorized for nearly 40 human rights organizations and international observers, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and PEN International.

    “If the case in London were decided solely on justice, as it should in a state based on law, this battle would have been won by Assange,” writes Narváez in one of his daily dispatches.

    Narváez and other independent observers suggest that what was adjudicated was not whether Assange should be extradited for violating the Espionage Act, but rather the criminality of the American state itself.

    The chilling claim put forward by U.S. prosecutors that the United States has jurisdiction over any journalist, any publication, anywhere in the world to prosecute under the Espionage Act for publishing classified U.S. information hasn’t gone unnoticed by the Canadian Association of Journalists.

    “I can assure you that I, as president, as well as the CAJ’s advocacy committee, are keeping a very close eye on the Assange case,” said Brent Jolly. “The CAJ still believes the United States should immediately drop its attempts to extradite Mr. Assange.”

    “Encouraging sources to leak information that is in the public interest to the media is a basic practice of journalism which must be defended. Journalists and whistleblowers have a role to play in protecting citizens in a democracy,” Jolly’s predecessor, Karyn Pugliese, told me after Assange was arrested and imprisoned at Belmarsh in 2019.

    The CAJ’s position has yet to translate into accurate and unbiased reporting on the Assange-WikiLeaks file by Canadian journalists and news organizations. However, coverage of domestic occurrences of the ‘Assange effect’ — attempts to criminalize journalism, such as Justin Brake’s and Karl Dockstader’s arrest for covering Indigenous land disputes —  have been diligently reported.

    “There is a vague but widely held notion among the Canadian press that Assange’s troubles are not terribly important and not particularly newsworthy,” Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown told me in October after the hearings.  “To actually engage with the facts invariably means accepting that Julian Assange is being persecuted for telling the public things about the American government that they did not want known, and that means accepting that Julian Assange’s cause is every journalist’s cause.”

    The hearings wrapped up three weeks of witness testimonies in September. Assange’s lawyers submitted their closing arguments to the court on Nov. 6 arguing that the request for Assange’s extradition is the result of U.S. President Donald Trump’s political agenda.

    “It is politically motivated, it is an abuse of the process of this court, and it is a clear violation of the Anglo-U.S. treaty that governs this extradition.”

    Prosecutors will submit their closing arguments on Nov. 20. Baraitser is expected to hand down her judgement on Jan. 4.

    The post Where is Canadian Media on the Assange File? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.