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Category: WikiLeaks

  • Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate

    There has been a fascinating, near unanimous condemnation among the cognoscenti about the seemingly careless addition of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic to the chat chain of Signal by US National Security Advisor Michael Waltz. Condemnation of the error spans the spectrum from clownish to dangerous. There has been virtually nothing on the importance of such leaks of national security information and the importance they serve in informing the public about what those in power are really up to.

    Rather than appreciate the fact that there was a journalist there to receive information on military operations that might raise a host of concerns (legitimate targeting and the laws of war come to mind), there was a chill of terror coursing through the commentariat and Congress that military secrets and strategy had been compromised. Goldberg himself initially disbelieved it. “I didn’t think it could be real.” He also professed that some messages would not be made public given the risks they posed, conceding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s communications to the group “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

    This seemingly principled stance ignores the bread-and-butter importance of investigative reporting and activist publishing, which so often relies on classified material received via accident or design. Normally, the one receiving the message is condemned. In this case, Golberg objected to being the recipient, claiming moral high ground in reporting the security lapse. Certain messages of the “Houthi PC small group channel” were only published by The Atlantic to throw cold water on stubborn claims by the White House that classified details had not been shared.

    The supposed diligence on Goldberg’s part to fuss about the cavalier attitude to national security shown by the Trump administration reveals the feeble compromise the Fourth Estate has reached with the national security state. Could it be that WikiLeaks was, like the ghost of Banquo, at this Signal’s feast? Last year’s conviction of the organisation’s founding publisher, Julian Assange, on one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC), might have exerted some force over Goldberg’s considerations. Having been added to the communication chain in error, the defence material could well have imperilled him, with First Amendment considerations on that subject untested.

    As for what the messages revealed, along with the importance of their disclosure, things become clear. Waltz reveals that the killing of a Houthi official necessitated the destruction of a civilian building. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” Vance replies: “Excellent.”

    As Turse reminds us in The Intercept, this conforms to the practices all too frequently used when bombing the Houthis in Yemen. The United States offered extensive support to the Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Shia group, one that precipitated one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises. That particular aerial campaign rarely heeded specific targeting, laying waste to vital infrastructure and health facilities. Anthropologist Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, also noted in remarks to The Intercept that fifty-three people have perished in the latest US airstrikes, among them five children. “These are just the latest deaths in a long track record of US killing in Yemen, and the research shows that US airstrikes in many countries have a history of killing and traumatizing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

    The appearance of Hillary Clinton in the debate on Signalgate confirmed the importance of such leaks, and why they are treated with pathological loathing. “We’re all shocked – shocked!” she screeched in The New York Times. “What’s worse is that top Trump administration officials put our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.” As a person with a hatred of open publishing outlets such as WikiLeaks (her own careless side to security was exposed by the organisation’s publication of emails sent from a private server while she was Secretary of State), the mania is almost understandable.

    Other countries, notably members of the Five Eyes alliance system, are also voicing concern that their valuable secrets are at risk if shared with the Trump administration. Again, the focus there is less on the accountability of officials than the cast iron virtues of secrecy. “When mistakes happen, and sensitive intelligence leaks, lessons must be learned to prevent that from recurring,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stated gravely in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It’s a serious, serious issue, and all lessons must be taken.”

    Former chief of Canada’s intelligence agency, Richard Fadden, was even more explicit: “Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?”

    Signalgate jolted the national security state. Rather than being treated as a valuable revelation about the latest US bombing strategy in Yemen, the obsession has been on keeping a lid on such matters. For the sake of accountability and the public interest, let us hope that the lid on this administration’s activities remains insecure.

    The post Secrecy and Virtue Signalling: Another View of Signalgate first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • FBI Redactions On Seth Rich Index Leave No Answers

    The attorney in the freedom of information case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation seeking the contents from the computers of a murdered staffer of the Democratic National Committee has criticized the number of redactions in the index that the bureau turned over to the court late Monday night.

    “Lots of things in the Seth Rich indexes don’t pass the smell test,” wrote Ty Clevenger, the attorney for Brian Huddleson, a Texas businessman, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request in September 2017 seeking to learn whether Rich was the source of WikiLeaks’ 2016 publication of DNC emails that impacted that year’s U.S. presidential election.

    The post FBI Redactions On Seth Rich Index Leave No Answers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • FBI Due To Release List Of Seth Rich Files Monday

    With U.S.-Russia tensions as dangerously high as they’ve been since the worst days of the Cold War, there is potential new evidence that Russia was not behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, although Congress and the U.S. mainstream media accept the unproven allegation of Russia’s guilt as indisputable fact.

    The possible new evidence comes in the form of a leaked audiotape of veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in which Hersh is heard to say that not Russia, but a DNC insider, was the source of the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in late July 2016.

    The post FBI Due To Release List Of Seth Rich Files Monday appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Finally Free, Assange Receives a Measure of Justice From the Council of Europe

    The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Europe’s foremost human rights body, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution on October 2 formally declaring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a political prisoner. The Council of Europe, which represents 64 nations, expressed deep concern at the harsh treatment suffered by Assange, which has had a “chilling effect” on journalists and…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Handmaiden to the Establishment

    When established, well fed and fattened, a credible professional tires from the pursuit. One can get complacent, flatulently confident, self-assured. From that summit, the inner lecturer emerges, along with a disease: false expertise.

    The Australian journalist Peter Greste has faithfully replicated the pattern. At one point in his life, he was lean, hungry and determined to get the story. He seemed to avoid the perils of mahogany ridge, where many alcohol-soaked hacks scribble copy sensational or otherwise. There were stints as a freelancer covering the civil wars in Yugoslavia, elections in post-apartheid South Africa. On joining the BBC in 1995, Afghanistan, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa fell within his investigative orbit. To his list of employers could also be added Reuters, CNN and Al Jazeera English.

    During his tenure with Al Jazeera, for a time one of the funkiest outfits on the media scene, Greste was arrested along with two colleagues in Egypt accused of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. He spent 400 days in jail before deportation. Prison in Egypt gave him cover, armour and padding for journalistic publicity. It also gave him the smugness of a failed martyr.

    Greste then did what many hacks do: become an academic. It is telling about the ailing nature of universities that professorial chairs are being doled out with ease to members of the Fourth Estate, a measure that does little to encourage the fierce independence one hopes from either. Such are the temptations of establishment living: you become the very thing you should be suspicious of.

    With little wonder, Greste soon began exhibiting the symptoms of establishment fever, lecturing the world as UNESCO Chair of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland on what he thought journalism ought to be. Hubris struck. Like so many of his craft, he exuded envy at WikiLeaks and its gold reserves of classified information. He derided its founder, Julian Assange, for not being a journalist. This was stunningly petty, schoolyard scrapping in the wake of the publisher’s forced exit from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2019. It ignored that most obvious point: journalism, especially when it documents power and its abuses, thrives or dies on leaks and often illegal disclosures.

    It is for this reason that Assange was convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917, intended as a warning to all who dare publish and discuss national security documents of the United States.

    In June this year, while celebrating Assange’s release (“a man who has suffered enormously for exposing the truth of abuses of power”) evidence of that ongoing fixation remained. Lazily avoiding the redaction efforts that WikiLeaks had used prior to Cablegate, Greste still felt that WikiLeaks had not met that standard of journalism that “comes with it the responsibility to process and present information in line with a set of ethical and professional standards.” It had released “raw, unredacted and unprocessed information online,” thereby posing “enormous risks for people in the field, including sources.”

    It was precisely this very same view that formed the US prosecution case against Assange. Greste might have at least acknowledged that not one single study examining the effects of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, a point also made in the plea-deal itself, found instances where any source or informant for the US was compromised.

    Greste now wishes, with dictatorial sensibility, to further impress his views on journalism through Journalism Australia, a body he hopes will set “professional” standards for the craft and, problematically, define press freedom in Australia. Journalism Australia Limited was formerly placed on the Australian corporate register in July, listing Greste, lobbyist Peter Wilkinson and executive director of The Ethics Centre, Simon Longstaff, as directors.

    Members would be afforded the standing of journalists on paying a registration fee and being assessed. They would also, in theory, be offered the protections under a Media Reform Act (MFA) being proposed by the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, where Greste holds the position of Executive Director.

    A closer look at the MFA shows its deferential nature to state authorities. As the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom explains, “The law should not be protecting a particular class of self-appointed individual, but rather the role that journalism plays in our democracy.” So much for independent journalists and those of the Assange-hue, a point well spotted by Mary Kostakidis, no mean journalist herself and not one keen on being straitjacketed by yet another proposed code.

    Rather disturbingly, the MFA is intended to aid “law enforcement agencies and the courts identify who is producing journalism”. How will this be done? By showing accreditation – the seal of approval, as it were – from Journalism Australia. In fact, Greste and his crew will go so far as to give the approved journalist a “badge” for authenticity on any published work. How utterly noble of them.

    Such a body becomes, in effect, a handmaiden to state power, separating acceptable wheat from rebellious chaff. Even Greste had to admit that two classes of journalist would emerge under this proposal, “in the sense that we’ve got a definition for what we call a member journalist and non-member journalists, but I certainly feel comfortable with the idea of providing upward pressure on people to make sure their work falls on the right side of that line.”

    This is a shoddy business that should cause chronic discomfort, and demonstrates, yet again, the moribund nature of the Fourth Estate. Instead of detaching itself from establishment power, Greste and bodies such as the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom merely wish to clarify the attachment.

    The post Handmaiden to the Establishment 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.

  • Unrealisable Justice: Julian Assange in Strasbourg

    It was good to hear that voice again. A voice of provoking interest that pitter patters, feline across a parquet, followed by the usual devastating conclusion. Julian Assange’s last public address was made in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. There, he was a guest vulnerable to the capricious wishes of changing governments. At Belmarsh Prison in London, he was rendered silent, his views conveyed through visitors, legal emissaries and his family.

    The hearing in Strasbourg on October 1, organised by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), arose from concerns raised in a report by Iceland’s Thórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, in which she expressed the view that Assange’s case was “a classic example of ‘shooting the messenger’.” She found it “appalling that Mr Assange’s prosecution was portrayed as if it was supposed to bring justice to some unnamed victims the existence of whom has never been proven, whereas perpetrators of torture or arbitrary detention enjoy absolute impunity.”

    His prosecution, Ævarsdóttir went onto explain, had been designed to obscure and deflect the revelations found in WikiLeaks’ disclosures, among them abundant evidence of war crimes committed by US and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, instances of torture and arbitrary detention in the infamous Guantánamo Bay camp facility, illegal rendition programs implicating member states of the Council of Europe and unlawful mass surveillance, among others.

    A draft resolution was accordingly formulated, expressing, among other things, alarm at Assange’s treatment and disproportionate punishment “for engaging in activities that journalists perform on a daily basis” which made him, effectively, a political prisoner; the importance of holding state security and intelligence services accountable; the need to “urgently reform the 1917 Espionage Act” to include conditional maliciousness to cause harm to the security of the US or aid a foreign power and exclude its application to publishers, journalists and whistleblowers.

    Assange’s full testimony began with reflection and foreboding: the stripping away of his self in incarceration, the search, as yet, for words to convey that experience, and the fate of various prisoners who died through hanging, murder and medical neglect. While filled with gratitude by the efforts made by PACE and the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, not to mention innumerable parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, even the Pope, none of their interventions “should have been necessary.” But they proved invaluable, as “the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.”

    The legal system facing Assange was described as encouraging an “unrealisable justice”. Choosing freedom instead of purgatorial process, he could not seek it, the plea deal with the US government effectively barring his filing of a case at the European Court of Human Rights or a freedom of information request. “I am not free today because the system worked,” he insisted. “I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”

    When founded, WikiLeaks was intended to enlighten people about the workings of the world. “Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.” Power can be held to account by those informed, justice sought where there is none. The organisation did not just expose assassinations, torture, rendition and mass surveillance, but “the policies, the agreements and the structures behind them.”

    Since leaving Belmarsh prison, Assange rued the abstracting of truth. It seemed “less discernible”. Much ground had been “lost” in the interim; truth had been battered, “undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished. I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship.”

    Much of the critique offered by Assange focused on the source of power behind any legal actions. Laws, in themselves, “are just pieces of paper and they can be reinterpreted for political expedience”. The ruling class dictates them and reinterprets or changes them depending on circumstances.

    In his case, the security state “was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation of the US constitution,” thereby denuding the expansive, “black and white” effect of the First Amendment. Mike Pompeo, when director of the Central Intelligence Agency, simply lent on Attorney General William Barr, himself a former CIA officer, to seek the publisher’s extradition and re-arrest of Chelsea Manning. Along the way, Pompeo directed the agency to draw up plans of abduction and assassination while targeting Assange’s European colleagues and his family.

    The US Department of Justice, Assange could only reflect, cared little for moderating tonic of legalities – that was something to be postponed to a later date. “In the meantime, the deterrent effect that it seeks, the retributive actions that it seeks, have had their effect.” A “dangerous new global legal position” had been established as a result: “Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights.”

    PACE had, before it, an opportunity to set norms, that “the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all”. “The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.”

    A spectator, reader or listener might leave such an address deflated. But it is fitting that a man subjected to the labyrinthine, life-draining nature of several legal systems should be the one to exhort to a commitment: that all do their part to keep the light bright, “that the pursuit of truth will live on, and the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.”

    The post Unrealisable Justice: Julian Assange in Strasbourg first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “I Pled Guilty to Journalism”: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Speaks Publicly After Prison Release


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Julian Assange says he ‘chose freedom over unrealisable justice’

    WikiLeaks founder says he pleaded ‘guilty to journalism’ in deal for his release and calls for protection of press freedom

    Julian Assange has said he chose freedom “over unrealisable justice” as he described his plea deal with US authorities and urged European lawmakers to act to protect freedom of expression in a climate with “more impunity, more secrecy [and] more retaliation for telling the truth”.

    In his first public statement since the plea deal in June ended his nearly 14 years of prison, embassy confinement and house arrest in the UK, the WikiLeaks founder argued that legal protections for whistleblowers and journalists “only existed on paper” or “were not effective in any remotely reasonable time”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Julian Assange just revealed exactly WHAT he said in his plea bargain

    Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday 1 October he was released after years of incarceration only because he pleaded guilty to doing “journalism”, warning freedom of expression was now at a “dark crossroads”.

    Assange: ‘I was guilty of doing journalism’

    Assange was addressing the Council of Europe rights body at its Strasbourg headquarters in his first public comments since his release. He said:

    I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pleaded guilty to journalism.

    The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) had issued a report expressing alarm at Assange’s treatment, saying it had a “chilling effect on human rights”.

    Assange spent most of the last 14 years either holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London to avoid arrest, or locked up at Belmarsh Prison. He was released under a plea bargain in June, after serving a sentence for publishing hundreds of thousands of confidential US government documents.

    The trove included searingly frank US State Department descriptions of foreign leaders, accounts of extrajudicial killings and intelligence gathering against allies.

    Assange returned to Australia and since then had not publicly commented on his legal woes or his years behind bars.

    Facing a potential 175-year sentence, “I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice… Justice for me is now precluded,” Assange said, referring to the conditions of his plea bargain.

    14 years, lost

    Speaking calmly and flanked by his wife Stella, who fought for his release, he added:

    Journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society. The fundamental issue is simple. Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs,” said Assange.

    The Wikileaks chief said that he could have lost years more of his life had he tried to fight his case all the way:

    Perhaps, ultimately, if it had gotten to the Supreme Court of the United States and I was still alive… I might have won. But in the meantime I had lost 14 years under house arrest, embassy, siege, and maximum security prison.

    “Ground has been lost” during his incarceration, he said, regretting that he now sees “more impunity, more secrecy and more retaliation for telling the truth:

    Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads… Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure the light of freedom never dims and the pursuit of truth will live on and the voices of many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

    Assange was still visibly affected by his experiences, tiring towards the end of the session even as he thanked “all the people who have fought for my liberation”.

    Assange ‘still needs time to recover’

    Stella Assange told reporters after the committee hearing that:

    It was truly exceptional that he came here today… He needs time to be able to recover. He’s only been free for a few weeks and we’re really just in the process of starting from zero, or from less than zero.

    Asked what the next moves for Wikileaks might be, the site’s editor-in-chief Kristin Hrafnsson told reporters Assange was:

    committed as ever to the basic principles that he’s always abided by – transparency, justice, quality journalism.

    Featured image via PACE TV – YouTube

    Additional reporting via Agence France-Presse

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Assange Is Free, But the Fight to Protect Press Freedom Is Far From Over

    WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has finally put an end to his 14-year-long judicial persecution by the United States and the United Kingdom, thanks to the prowess of his legal team and the tenacity of his family members, but also thanks to an assist from the British High Court and the support of millions of activists around the world. Fifty-thousand people, for example…

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  • Julian Assange: reflections on politics, publishing, and power

    In 2011, on a bright, cold day in May, whilst enduring house arrest on a resplendent Norfolk estate that nonetheless constituted a jail of sorts, Julian Assange reflected on the seismic uprising of a global counterculture that his incredible activism galvanised.

    His righteous renegade crusade for freedom of information and democratic enfranchisement by giving citizens data necessary for meaningful informed choice is one of the most important contributions to revolutionary politics since Marx, and is of a tradition encompassing names too numerous to list, but including the likes of Orwell, Ellsberg, Schwartz, and Lauri Love.

    WikiLeaks was an immensely successful intervention that dealt a fist to imperial geopolitics by generating huge publicity for government and corporate corruption. This was a major influence in stoking a geopolitical environment in which students, workers and conscientious citizens united, an uprising which scared a thousand kings by reviving the ideals of the 1871 Paris commune within the context of the Information Age.

    Against this raw new zeitgeist, and against the backdrop of uprisings in US proxy states engendered by Wikileaks’ exposure of endemic corruption in Cablegate, Assange answered, under duress, to Google Kingpin Eric Schmidt and his motorcade.

    Julian Assange: demystifying the idea of civil society

    Of all the erudite evaluations Julian Assange made later in a long meditation of the event, the most striking – for he has no formal training in the theory of politics – is his deft demystification of the hagiography of fabled “civic society,” debunking the central pillar of the dominant pluralist school of democratic theory by illuminating how agendas are being set and enacted by shadow networks beyond ceremonial government, in think tanks, transnational lobbies, and military committees.

    Were we to sideline media conjecture for a moment and reflect on the ideas being published everybody has something to learn from those words with their wisdom any jail, any subpoena cannot erase with the bludgeon of its authority.

    It is wisdom worthy of the megaphone, the articulations of a supremely perceptive and voracious intellect in unity with a compassionate heart.

    Moreover, as a form of acknowledgement of the critical influence of radicals the world around on the febrile atmosphere of protest which snaked from the Arabic speaking nations to the poor underworld of London, he hails, in the introduction to the published transcript of the debate with Schmidt, a fresh generation of activists, empowered by brave, socially conscientious use of ITC. He explained how ethical use of the internet resource could expose the corruption of ossified officialdom.

    The at once hopeful and tragic gestures like those of self immolating peaceniks such as in Tunisia, whose names should be spelled across the stars, proclaimed an era of permanent struggle, a species of rebellion in which fearless activism can accelerate the collapse of the system of domination today.

    Plainly explained, that system is manifest in the political and governance institutions that exert vast control over the substance and detail of our societies and lives.

    A diligently developed philosophy

    Julian Assange’s diligently developed philosophy, theory, and praxis of individual and social emancipation – evident not only in his published texts but his activism and interviews – has come to be a highly regarded and influential source of guidance for opposition movements in a new age of authoritarianism and dissidence.

    The unifying idea of this school of thought is that the goal of every serious citizen is to enlist a progressive arsenal of technological knowledge and critical doubt of establishment claims to scatter the seeds of a non-repressive society, based on fundamentally free existential relations, inhibited from emerging by contemporary society and intensified by the establishment’s rapid recent monopolisation of ITC.

    Julian imagines that common cause in communal cryptography collectives, a sort of global agenda to nationalise information so as to manifest a utopian world.

    To this end, Julian invests serious time as a cryptographer, publisher, and activist bringing his influence to bear on power, for peaceful revolution.

    On Julian’s view nascent collectives and protest movements bring utopia closer to fruition because they mobilise against the centralised infrastructure that has encoded the dominance of all manifestations of oppression, perpetuated by the institutions of civilisation, namely money and war and organised religion.

    His meditations on the backlash against informational imperialism, the craven misery beget under its aegis, the geopolitical doom it engineers, made in the zenith of the Wikileaks controversy, reveal his thoughts on liberation in their broader cultural and historical context.

    The 2010s and Assange: a seismic era

    It was a time of transition, a seismic era: imperialism was increasingly assailed by protest and revolt organised diligently by those no longer invested in the rigged game of society. They worked together towards laying the foundations of a qualitatively different and unique society, one which transvaluated – transformed the values of – the corrupt civic order they lived in.

    The counterculture, and the tide of protest movements which succeeded it, were passionately abloom with a protest against imperialism, a movement to: transcend its conditions of alienation which cuts to the roots of its existence, which argued vehemently against its henchmen in the third world, and despised, mocked its culture, its morality of nihilism and wastefulness.

    By this point it had become clear to protestors that the growth and success of the imperial state was an expression of a project at the centre of which is the experience, transformation and organisation of life and people as the mere subjects of domination.

    Civilisation entrenched tyranny, subjugation, exploitation and alienation of the masses and nature. But Julian Assange, like the counterculture, was incandescent for bubbling with optimism about change. There was a world to win.

    The culmination of Julian’s letters, loves, and learning experiences represent an attempt to realise the revolutionary potential of radical philosophical experimentation that mark him as truly a man of the counterculture.

    Global peace and enlightenment

    Whilst the historical trend had been towards the continuation of war and aggression as a policy of the dominant powers on the world stage, Julian Assange nevertheless remains committed to the project of global peace and peaceful enlightenment, in which he sees the potential to manifest a rational and moral utopia banished of social ills and wants such as war, pollution and greed.

    He believes in this project presumably because the conquest of the war machine over the natural instincts of love and peace – symbolised most negatively by the atomic bomb – and the exponential development of the productive forces of the war machine in the advanced industrial states signified to him that the utopian designation for revolutionary ideas had ceased to be an operative truth, because the means really existed to rationally and creatively plan society in such a way as to create solidarity, abundance, happiness, and peace.

    If that social vision is to be dismissed as utopian, then realism can be called into disrepute. That is to say ideology had concealed the reality of domination and alienation inherent in imperialism. Julian’s message implicitly implored people to think about the terrifying truth of the world we currently live in by imagining one that was better.

    The lively life of Assange places him as the crux of an opposition of youth and intellectuals and persecuted minorities against a corrupt authoritarian statist autocracy which engages in military warfare against its own citizens, insofar as it coldly perceived how powerfully they could subvert the continuum of repression perpetuated by the hegemonic and hawkish military-industrial complex.

    Julian Assange: still a danger to the status quo

    What makes Julian Assange and his disciples so dangerous to the status quo was the way they acted beyond the continuum of repression, conscientious about liberating themselves from its demanding repressive imperatives, those of a society which they could see was constrained by a carefully managed ideological conformism.

    His anger at social injustice and organised repression developed to focus on the ways in which war-makers and the political classes were tightening control of their societies not only through the rule of the iron fist, but also through new technologies like the web, the new religion, which integrated the working classes into regulated modes of thought and behaviour.

    Moreover, the doom cloud of the new Cold War looms large in our minds, the battle being, like in the mind of the sixties militants, as two systems equal in degrees of totalitarianism, transcending the Cold War demonology which cast communism as the oppressor against the liberal democratic state.

    We see that, save for the nascent counterculture movement, liberal democracies are static societies in which there was a dearth of opposition to the status quo, in which people were integrated in to regulated systems of thought and behaviour.

    Julian aims to surprise and stimulate, and his existence helps give inspiration and joy to the parties and groupings that constituted the international solidarity movement, making stone hearts beat and bleed and people united.

    In the spirit of a genuinely radical critique of society Julian bequeaths a vision rare in its passion, a swan song of the liberation era which distinguishes the new age vision and ideas of the anti authoritarian left. It pays well to flash our eyes on Julian’s letters, for their insight in to the terrifying truth of a culture that alienates the essence of our humanity.

    Featured image via Wikileaks

    By Megan Sherman

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Assange, CIA Surveillance and Spain’s Audencia Nacional

    The sordid story on the CIA-backed operation against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange during his time cramped in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy continues to froth and thicken. US officials have persisted in their reticent attitude, refusing to cooperate with Spain’s national high court, the Audiencia Nacional, regarding its investigation into the Agency’s espionage operations against the publisher, spearheaded by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global.

    Since 2019, requests for assistance regarding the matter, including querying public statements by former CIA director Mike Pompeo and former head of counterintelligence, William Evanina, along with information mustered by the relevant Senate Intelligence Committee, have been made to US authorities by judges José de la Mata and Santiago Pedraz. These have been treated with a glacial silence.

    On December 12, 2023, the General Subdirectorate of International Legal Cooperation furnished the US authorities “an express announcement” whether such judicial assistance would be denied.

    Spain’s liaison magistrate in the US, María de las Heras García, duly revealed that the tardiness to engage had been occasioned by ongoing legal proceedings being conducted before the US District Court of the Southern District of New York.  As Courtney E. Lee, trial attorney at the US Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs explained, supplying Spain’s national high court with such information would “interfere” with “ongoing US litigation”.  Hardly a satisfactory response, given requests made prior to the putative litigation.

    The litigation in question involved a legal suit filed in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York by civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler, media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass.

    In their August 2022 action, the complainants alleged that they had been the subject of surveillance during visits to Assange during his embassy tenure, conduct said to be in breach of the Fourth Amendment.  The plaintiffs accordingly argued that this entitled them to money damages and injunctive relief from former CIA director Mike Pompeo, the director of the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global David Morales, and UC Global itself.

    On December 19, 2023 District Judge John G. Koeltl granted, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss while denying other portions of it.  The judge accepted the record of hostility shown by Pompeo to WikiLeaks openly expressed by his April 2017 speech and acknowledged that “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

    The litigants found themselves on solid ground with Koeltl in the finding that they had standing to sue the intelligence organisation. “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.”   The plaintiffs would “have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling” if the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices were found to be unlawful.

    The plaintiffs also convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.”  But they failed to convince Koeltl that they had a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with Assange, given the rather odd reasoning that they were aware the publisher was already being “surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.”  Nor could such an expectation arise given the acceptance of video surveillance of government buildings.  Problematically, the judge also held that those surrendering devices and passports at an Embassy reception desk “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”

    Sadly, Pompeo was spared the legal lash and could not be held personally accountable for violating the constitutional rights of US citizens.  “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”

    In February this year, US Attorney Damian Williams and Assistant US Attorney Jean-David Barnea clarified the Agency’s line of response in a submission to Judge Koeltl.  “Any factual inquiry into these allegations – whether they are true or not – would implicate classified information, as it would require the CIA to reveal what intelligence-gathering activities it did or did not engage in, among other things.”  As the agency could not “publicly reveal the very facts over which it is seeking authorization to assert the State Secrets Privilege, it is not able to respond to the relevant allegations in the complaint or to respond to any discovery requests pertaining to those allegations.”

    Richard Roth, an attorney representing the four litigants, found this reasoning bemusing in remarks made to The Dissenter.  “From our vantage point, we cannot imagine how there is any privilege at all that relates to proprietary information of American citizens who visited the Ecuadorian embassy.”

    In April, CIA director William J. Burns sought to further draw the veil in submitting a “classified declaration” defining “the scope of the information” concerning the case, claiming it satisfactorily explained “the harm that reasonably could be expected to result from the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.”  For those in such lines of work, alleged harm has no quantum or sense of proportion.

    Again, Roth was unimpressed, issuing a reminder that this case had nothing to do with “terroristic threats to destroy America that were uncovered through technology or a program that must never be disclosed or else the threat will succeed.”  The case, importantly, concerned the CIA’s search and seizure of cell phone and laptop devices in the possession of “respected American lawyers and journalists, who committed no crime, and who have now stood up against the loss of liberties and the government’s intrusion into their private lives by copying the contents of their cell phones and laptops.”

    As long as the Agency stifles and drags out proceedings on the grounds of this misused privilege, the Justice Department is bound to remain inert in the face of the Spanish investigation.

    The post Assange, CIA Surveillance and Spain’s Audencia Nacional first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It was the Media, Led by the Guardian, that Kept Julian Assange behind Bars

    It is only right that we all take a moment to celebrate the victory of Julian Assange’s release from 14 years of detention, in varying forms, to be united, finally, with his wife and children – two boys who have been denied the chance to ever properly know their father.

    His last five years were spent in Belmarsh high-security prison as the United States sought to extradite him to face a 175-year jail sentence for publishing details of its state crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

    For seven years before that he was confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Quito awarded him political asylum to evade the clutches of a law-breaking US empire determined to make an example of him.

    His seizure by UK police from the embassy on Washington’s behalf in 2019, after a more US-aligned government came to power in Ecuador, proved how clearly misguided, or malicious, had been those who accused him of “evading justice”.

    Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world.

    No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

    Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

    That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him and kidnap him off the streets of London.

    Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers.

    That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

    Media no watchdog

    Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to.

    Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation.

    For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

    The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars.

    The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

    Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies.

    Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were finally withdrawn. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week.

    In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on.

    Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities.

    The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger.

    That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has even cursorily studied the background to the case knows.

    More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange.

    And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.

    Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right.

    That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship.

    Character assassination

    But it is not just these glaring reporting failures that kept Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the entire media acted in concert in his character assassination, making it not only acceptable but respectable to hate him.

    It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

    It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

    What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

    Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

    The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.

    Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower to stop him being locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism.

    The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

    For the record, so we do not forget, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

    Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes:

    BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

    Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

    Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling.

    Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge”, while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

    The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians.

    This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling every approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website.

    This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

    It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before.

    Too little too late

    The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

    That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

    But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination.

    A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?”

    The post It was the Media, Led by the Guardian, that Kept Julian Assange behind Bars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why the US Declared War on Wikileaks: The Origin Story


    This content originally appeared on VICE News and was authored by VICE News.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Pacific Journalism Review turns 30 – and challenges media over Gaza

    Pacific Journalism Review

    Pacific Journalism Review has challenged journalists to take a courageous and humanitarian stand over Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in its latest edition with several articles about the state of news media credibility and the shocking death toll of Palestinian reporters.

    It has also taken a stand in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange who was set free in a US federal court in Saipan and returned to Australia the day before copies of the journal arrived back from the printers.

    The journal went online last week and it celebrated three decades of publishing at the 2024 Pacific International Media Conference hosted by The University of the South Pacific in Fiji in partnership with the Pacific islands News Association (PINA) and the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN).

    In the editorial provocatively entitled “Will journalism survive?”, founding editor Dr David Robie wrote: “Gaza has become not just a metaphor for a terrible state of dystopia in parts of the world, it has also become an existential test for journalists — do we stand up for peace and justice and the right of a people to survive under the threat of ethnic cleansing and against genocide, or do we do nothing and remain silent in the face of genocide being carried out with impunity in front of our very eyes?

    “The answer is simple surely.”

    Launching the 30th anniversary edition, adjunct USP professor Vijay Naidu paid tribute to the long-term “commitment of PJR to justice and human rights” and noted USP’s contribution through hosting the journal for five years and also continued support from conference convenor associate professor Shailendra Singh.

    Papua New Guinea’s Communication Minister Timothy Masiu also launched at the PJR event a new book, Waves of Change: Media, Peace, and Development in the Pacific, edited by Professor Biman Prasad (who is also Deputy Prime Minister of Fiji), Dr Singh and Dr Amit Sarwal.

    The PJR editors, Dr Philip Cass and Dr Robie, said the profession of journalism had since the covid pandemic been under grave threat and the journal outlined challenges facing the Pacific region.

    The cover of the 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review
    The cover of the 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review. Image: PJR

    Among contributing writers, Jonathan Cook, examines the consequences of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) legal cases over Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Assange’s last-ditch appeal to prevent the United States extraditing him so that he could be locked away for the rest of his life.

    Both cases pose globe-spanning threats to basic freedoms, writes Cook.

    New Zealand writer Jeremy Rose offers a “Kiwi journalist’s response” to Israel’s war on journalism, noting that while global reports have tended to focus on the “horrendous and rapid” climb of civilian casualties to more than 38,000 — especially women and children — Gaza has also claimed the “worst death rate of journalists” in any war.

    The journalist death toll has topped 158.

    Independent journalist Mick Hall offers a compelling research indictment of the role of Western legacy media institutions, arguing that they too are in the metaphorical dock along with Israel in South Africa’s genocide case in the ICC.

    PJR designer Del Abcede with Rosa Moiwend
    PJR designer Del Abcede with Rosa Moiwend at the PJR celebrations. Image: David Robie/APMN

    He also cites evidence of the wider credibility implications for mainstream media in the Oceania region.

    Among other articles in this edition of PJR, a team led by RMIT’s Dr Alexandra Wake, president of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (Jeraa), has critiqued the use of fact check systems, arguing these are vital tool boxes for journalists.

    The edition also includes articles about the Kanaky New Caledonia decolonisation crisis reportage, three USP Frontline case study reports on political journalism, the social media ecology of an influencer group in Fiji, and a photo essay by Del Abcede on Palestinian protests and media in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.

    Book reviews include the Reuters Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2024, Journalists and Confidential Sources, The Palestine Laboratory and Return to Volcano Town.

    The PJR began publication at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1994.

    • The full 30th anniversary edition of Pacific Journalism Review

    Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pacific Journalism Review with a birthday cake
    Celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pacific Journalism Review with a birthday cake . . . Professor Vijay Naidu (from left), Fiji Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, founding PJR editor Dr David Robie, PNG Communications Minister Timothy Masiu, conference convenor and PJR editorial board member Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, and current PJR editor Dr Philip Cass. Image: Joe Yaya/Islands Business

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Assange’s Return to Australia: The Resentment of the Hacks

    Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame is now back in the country of his birth, having endured conditions of captivity ranging from cramped digs in London’s Ecuadorian embassy to the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh Prison.  His return to Australia after striking a plea deal with the US Department of Justice sees him in a state with some of the most onerous secrecy provisions of any in the Western world.

    As of January 2023, according to the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Commonwealth had 11 general secrecy offences in Part 5.6 of the Criminal Code, 542 specific secrecy offences across 178 Commonwealth laws and 296 non-disclosure duties spanning 107 Commonwealth laws criminalising unauthorised disclosure of information by current and former employees of the Commonwealth.

    In November 2023, the Albanese Government agreed to 11 recommendations advanced by the final report of the review of secrecy provisions.  While aspiring to thin back the excessive overgrowth of secrecy, old habits die hard.  Suggested protections regarding press freedom and individuals providing information to Royal Commissions will hardly instil confidence.

    With that background, it is unsurprising that Assange’s return, while delighting his family, supporters and free press advocates, has stirred the seething resentment of the national security establishment, Fourth Estate crawlers, and any number of journalistic sellouts.  Damn it all, such attitudes seem to say: he transformed journalism, stole away our self-censorship, exposed readers to the original classified text, and let the public decide for itself how to react to disclosures revealing the abuse of power.   Minimal editorialising; maximum textual interpretation through the eyes of the universal citizenry, a terrifying prospect for those in government.

    Given that the Australian press establishment is distastefully comfortable with politicians – the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for instance, has a central reporting bureau in Canberra’s Parliament House – Assange’s return has brought much agitation.  The Canberra press corps earn their crust in a perversely symbiotic, and often uncritical relationship, with the political establishment that furnishes them with rationed morsels of information.  The last thing they want is an active Assange scuppering such a neat understanding, a radical transparency warrior keenly upsetting conventions of hypocrisy long respected.

    Let’s wade through the venom.  Press gallery scribbler Phillip Coorey of the Australian Financial Review proved provincially ignorant, his mind ill-temperedly confused about WikiLeaks.  “I have never been able to make up my mind about Assange.”  Given that his profession benefits from leaks, whistleblowing and the exposure of abuses, one wonders what he is doing in it.  Assange has, after all, been convicted under the US Espionage Act of 1917 for engaging in that very activity, a matter that should give Coorey pause for outrage.

    For the veteran journalist, another parallel was more appropriate, something rather distant from any notions of public interest journalism that had effectively been criminalised by the US Republic.  “The release of Julian Assange has closer parallels to that of David Hicks 17 years ago, who like Assange, was deemed to have broken American law while not in that country, and which eventually involved a US president cutting a favour for an Australian prime minister.”

    The case of Hicks remains a ghastly reminder of Australian diplomatic and legal cowardice.  Coorey is only right to assume that both cases feature tormented flights of fancy by the US imperium keen on breaking a few skulls in their quest to make the world safe for Washington. The military commissions, of which Hicks was a victim, were created during the madly named Global War on Terror pursuant to presidential military order.  Intended to try non-US citizens suspected of terrorism held at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, they were farcical exercises of executive power, a fact pointed out by the US Supreme Court in 2006.  It took Congressional authorisation via the Military Commissions Act in 2009 to spare them.

    Coorey’s colleague and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Peter Hartcher, was similarly uninterested in what Assange exposed, babbling about the publisher’s return as the moment “Assangeism came into plain view”.  He had no stomach for “the cult” which seemed to have infected Canberra’s cold weather.  He also wondered whether Assange could constructively “use his global celebrity status to campaign for public interest journalism and human rights”.  To do so – and here, teacher’s pet of the political establishment, beater of the war drum for the United States – Assange would have to “fundamentally” alter “his ways to advance the cause”.

    All this was a prelude for Hartcher to take the hatchet to the journalistic exploits of a man more decorated with journalism awards that many in the Canberra gallery combined.  The claim that he is “a journalist is hotly contested by actual journalists.”  Despite the US government conceding that the disclosures by WikiLeaks had not resulted in harm to US sources, “there were many other victims of Assange’s project.”  The returned publisher was only in Australia “on probation”, a signal reminder that the media establishment will be attempting to badger him into treacherous conformity.

    Even this language was too mild for another Australian hack, Michael Ware, who had previously worked for Time Magazine and CNN.  With pathological inventiveness,  he thought Assange “a traitor in the sense that, during a time of war, when we had American, British and Australian troops in the field, under fire, Julian Assange published troves of unredacted documents”.  Never mind truth to power; in Ware’s world, veracity is subordinate to it, even in an illegal war. What he calls “methods” and “methodology” cannot be exposed.

    Such gutter journalism has its necessary cognate in gutter politics.  All regard information was threatening unless appropriately handled, its more potent effects for change stilled.  Leader of the opposition in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, found it “completely unnecessary and totally inappropriate for Julian Assange to be greeted like some homecoming hero by the Australian Prime Minister.” Chorusing with hacks Coorey, Hartcher and Ware, Birmingham bleated about the publication by Assange of half a million documents “without having read them, curated them, checked to see if there was anything that could be damaging or risking the lives of others there.”  Keep the distortions flying, Senator.

    Dennis Richardson, former domestic intelligence chief and revolving door specialist (public servant becomes private profiteer with ease in Canberra), similarly found it inexplicable that the PM contacted Assange with a note of congratulation, or even showed any public interest in his release from a system that was killing him.  “I can think of no other reason why a prime minister would ring Assange on his return to Australia except for purposes relating to politics,” moaned Richardson to the Guardian Australia.

    For Richardson, Assange had been legitimately convicted, even if it was achieved via that most notorious of mechanisms, the plea deal.  The inconvenient aside that Assange had been spied upon by CIA sponsored operatives, considered a possible object of abduction, rendition or assassination never clouds his uncluttered mind.

    Sharp eyes will be trained on Assange in Australia, however long he wishes to stay.  He is in the bosom of the Five Eyes Alliance, permanently threatened by the prospect of recall and renewed interest by Washington.  And there are dozens of journalists, indifferent to the dangers the entire effort against the publisher augurs for their own craft, wishing that to be the case.

    The post Assange’s Return to Australia: The Resentment of the Hacks first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Liberal media perspectives on geopolitics are delusional. WikiLeaks was punished for exposing this fact.

    Noam Chomsky perfectly summarised the liberal media thusly:

    The media are a corporate monopoly.

    These are days of vast conspiracy against humanity by the invisible empire, in which tight control over channels of media dissemination plays a central role in – erroneously – defining political reality, with the result of stunting public perception.

    Where once journalism was a byproduct of politics and a realm of genuine public enlightenment, intellectualism and exploration of social issues, today political developments are largely a byproduct of media orchestration. Most major political events, particularly wars, are deliberately manipulated into existence by the masters of the media class who use their power marshal support for their schemes.

    Information communication technology and the Internet have emboldened both the best and worst aspects of humanity.

    Our naive embrace of what are effectively commercialised military technologies has opened the door to malicious surveillance and covert social control, particularly in the case of social media enterprises, which are sources of human connection in theory, but function as pervasive corporate spyware in practice.

    Enter Assange and Wikileaks

    Julian Assange, who invented whist website WikiLeaks to circumvent censorship and spread accurate information, predicted the collapse of liberal civilisation into an Orwellian global surveillance superstate long ago. Describing this dynamic he said:

    Big Brother is home. He is installed in the item you just dragged home from the Apple store.

    He elaborated:

    The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilisation.

    The goal of the Silicon Valley corporations monopolising the web and the national security entities they collude with is to create an invisible interface, machine that absorbs Internet surfers into a matrix that modifies perception and behaviour. They have incepted an apparatus that bolsters egregiously harmful political agendas that citizens would otherwise reject and resist.

    This is nothing less than techno-feudalism, perhaps even technocratic fascism, a political destiny for the world we were once conscious about averting, preferring eventually to surrender to the anodyne to political consciousness supplied, purposefully, by the assorted paraphernalia of commercialised surveillance.

    Smart technologies and social media are prime examples. In the grasp of this matrix undesirable, destructive political agendas seem desirable and normal.

    Dissidence openly defying this system and the popular propagandist fictions sustaining it is subject to systemic ostracism, embarrassing public ridicule, and thorough demonisation. Because propaganda is the weapon that allows empires ability to engineer comprehensive passivity, apathy and acquiescence amongst citizens, those who successfully diagnose the blatant falsity of its messages and fail to submit become targets of smear campaigns.

    A real and present political opposition

    Genuine political opposition to the establishment is a scarce phenomena today but has never been more needed. The countervailing force to the US quest for world domination launched by WikiLeaks was a real and present political opposition of this kind.

    It’s a revolutionary organisation in several ways, perhaps most significantly from the perspective of history, as an information age permutation of the Gutenberg press.

    In the same way the Church maintained a monopoly on acceptable belief in the dark ages, the post-democratic neoliberal world is confined by blind faith in doctrinaire ideas and economic fundamentalism.

    Just as the Gutenberg press emancipated medieval Europe from the shackles of officialdom, so too did WikiLeaks shatter the ruling illusions of the contemporary geopolitical establishment.

    In the annals of history, Assange and his colleagues will loom large besides other celebrated figures of political virtue, the likes of which contain Orwell, Marx, Ellsberg, but many, many others, too numerous to name, who lived as catalysts for progress and justice.

    Their remarkable achievement is to have helped restore public consciousness and bring it out of a seemingly omnipotent state of collective amnesia, deliberately cultivated by establishment actors who benefit from the public being kept ignorant. It is no less than a restitution of the sovereignty of the mind, a defence of the life of the mind, the ultimate antidote to fascism.

    Discrediting the truthtellers

    There is a longstanding, ongoing – but increasingly transparent and fragile – attempt to discredit WikiLeaks and sully the shine of its achievements.

    The Obama administration, particularly Hillary Clinton, was tremendously keen about this sordid endeavour, the exact same Hillary Clinton who vocally fantasised about droning Assange and who, unlike him, will be remembered negatively, for having been a driving force in military intervention that stripped Arab countries of independence, such as the war in Libya, a major Clinton project.

    The destruction of native political authorities in Middle Eastern countries, though they be riddled with many of their own imperfections and flaws, has not been a force for freedom.

    The lie behind this, that these wars were in support of citizens yearning for freedom, is nakedly exposed by WikiLeaks data, hence the ferocity of the establishment uprising against Assange, who threatened their power as de facto world emperors.

    John Pilger, a veteran anti-imperialist journalist who was widely acclaimed, and a key comrade and colleague of Assange said that WikiLeaks made plain:

    The truth about a war on terror that was always a war of terror.

    The fundamental fault line running beneath the seismic WikiLeaks phenomenon is the tension between media and journalism it makes apparent. The missions of media and genuine journalism are not simply unlike, they are fundamentally contradictory.

    Wikileaks will go down in the annals of history

    Media is a public relations asset utilised by elites that masquerades as a free, fair system that accommodates diverse opinion. Journalism in the truest and fullest sense of the word is any publishing activity that transcends or sits outside of this machine.

    To return to Chomsky, he offered this perceptive insight on media perception management:

    The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum….

    Never has such thirst for social control been apparent. WikiLeaks is the noble exception to this regime and deserves to be recognised as such irrespective of one’s personal opinion about Assange as a personality.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Megan Sherman

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Assange: a huge win for journalistic freedom – but a huge loss for survivors

    Content warning: this article discusses rape and sexual assault in detail. Reader discretion is advised. 

    On Tuesday 25 June, we learned UK authorities had released Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison on the condition that he pleads guilty to US espionage charges. This is great news for journalistic freedom. However, many people seem to have forgotten that two women accused Assange of rape, sexual assault, and other offences.  

    It seems in the reporting of Assange’s release, the majority of the mainstream media have conveniently forgotten about the allegations against him:

    One woman accused Assange of rape, and another of sexual assault. He also faced investigations for unlawful coercion and molestation. Obviously, Assange protested his innocence. After losing a high court appeal against his extradition in from the UK to Sweden in 2012, he requested political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

    As always with X, people were quick to point out that eventually, the Swedish prosecution dropped the allegations – so he must be innocent.

    However, it is worth noting that at least in the UK, a mere 1.3% of rape cases recorded by the police actually result in them charging a suspect. When you include the number of rapes that go unreported, which is thought to be around 63%, this figure drops substantially more.

    In 2015, some of the allegations against Assange were dropped due to the statute of limitations. However, the rape allegation still stood.

    According to Amnesty International, in Sweden:

    The statute of limitations is 15 years for gross (aggravated) rape and 10 years for rape and “less serious” rape, calculated from the date the crime was committed.

    In 2017, Swedish prosecutors dropped the rape case. They claimed it was impossible to proceed while Assange was hiding in the Ecuadorean embassy. They reopened the case in 2019 and shortly after, dropped it again:

    At the time, the Swedish Prosecution Authority said:

    The reason for this decision is that the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.

    I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.

    Believe women

    Something that much of social media fails to grasp is that two things can be true at the same time.

    Assange exposed brutal war crimes and corruption. His release is a huge win for journalistic freedom. However, when did we stop believing women? All the progress we have made as a society since the #MeToo movement seems to be forgotten as soon as a man who did something good gets accused.

    The allegations do not change the win for journalistic freedom. Similarly, his achievements don’t negate the accusations against him.

    Stereotypes keep us stuck

    This stereotype that abusers are 24/7 ‘bad people’ can prevent people from recognising real life abusive situations. It makes people believe that men who do good things cannot possibly be abusive. 

    People tend to have a very specific image in mind when they think of abusive men. They’re often angry, old, and slightly overweight. This image leads people to believe that abusers are easily visible – you can spot them a mile off. It creates a false sense of safety.

    In reality, abusive men inhabit all walks of life, often have money, and are highly successful. Usually, they are also kind and thoughtful. It is these traits that allow them to get away with their behaviour – because no one questions the nice guy.

    Abusive men know how to manipulate power, and as Jessica Valenti wrote in 2018:

    Knee-jerk sympathy for men accused of wrongdoing isn’t new
    People find it hard to believe when their favourite TV star or celebrity is accused of sexual violence. The version of them that we see in the media is portrayed purposefully – powerful people want to feel familiar to us, so that we put our trust in them. That is how they get away with being abusive – because the image they have painted of themselves would never do the things they are being accused of.
    In reality, that is not them at all.

    The prevailing argument for Assange

    Writer Caitlyn Johnstone has argued that the allegations were politically motivated – and it is of course important to understand the power dynamics at work. In particular, she has set out how the US used these allegations to try extradite Assange. She argues:

    This was never resolved because this was never about rape or justice. It was about extraditing Assange to the United States for his publications.

    She continues:

    Don’t try to justify what Assange is accused of having done, just point out that there’s no actual evidence that he is guilty and that very powerful people have clearly been pulling some strings behind the scenes of this narrative.

    However, these facts aren’t mutually exclusive. The US could have weaponised the allegations to get hold of Assange. At the same time, it doesn’t mean they’re not true.

    This whole ‘he says, she says’ argument is where we have been getting stuck for decades.

    While Johnstone points out that there is no actual evidence that he is guilty, it is worth pointing out that there is also no actual evidence that he is a) innocent and b) was set up by the US government, as she claims in her article.

    Yes, I think it is correct to question why there was such a huge response from Interpol and the UK authorities compared to every other sexual violence accusation, as Naomi Wolf points out. However, that isn’t evidence of a set up as people are claiming.

    A 2016 article by Celia Farber argues that:

    Was it rape? Was it somewhere in the “grey zone”?

    Now, lets get one thing clear. There is no ‘grey zone’ when it comes to rape, sex, and consent. There is consensual sex, and there is rape. I do not go and hit someone over the head with a surfboard and call it surfing. Consent has to be clear, ongoing, and can be withdrawn at any time.

    Consent is not complicated

    One of the accusations against Assange was that he initiated ‘sex’ whilst the victim was half asleep, and without a condom. Previously, the woman had consented to sex with Assange on the condition a condom was used. Let’s make another thing clear – someone cannot consent to sex if they are unconscious, asleep, or in any way do not have the capacity to make informed decisions. The Guardian reported in 2010 that:

    She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. “According to her statement, she said: ‘You better not have HIV’ and he answered: ‘Of course not,’ ” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.”

    I will say it again. A woman who is asleep cannot consent to sex. Not that hard to get your head around, is it? As if that wasn’t bad enough, she had also made it very clear she didn’t consent to sex without a condom. That alone, is also rape. Clearly, some people do not understand the definitions of rape and consent.

    Another allegation also specified that Assange tampered with a condom after making it clear he didn’t want to use one. Again, the victim consented to sex on the condition a condom was used. She did not consent to unprotected sex. Therefore, the act of tampering with the condom so it becomes ineffective, changes it from sex, to rape. In the UK at least, this specific crime is called ‘stealthing‘ and someone who carries it out can be prosecuted for rape.

    There is no ‘normal’

    Johnstone’s article also states:

    SW freaked out when she learned the police wanted to charge Assange with rape for the half-asleep incident, and refused to sign any legal documents saying that he had raped her.

    No one has even stopped to consider that maybe, the police naming the incident as rape was the first time the woman had considered the severity of what had happened to her. Often, victims are so immersed in denial that they are not able to process what has happened to them, or acknowledge that the experience was in fact rape. Trauma impacts everyone differently and there is no ‘right’ way to respond when something like that happens to you.

    Johnstone also commented on the timing of the allegations:

    This all occurred just months after Assange enraged the US war machine with the release of the Collateral Murder video, and he was already known to have had US feds hunting for him.

    While there are valid questions around this, she fails to recognise one key thing about sexual assault allegations. There was a reason why so many women came forward during the #MeToo movement.

    Partly, this was because when the media threw these powerful men into the spotlight, they too were empowered to come forwards. In Assange’s case – the media attention meant that these women might have felt the world would finally listen to them.

    Glorification of Assange

    The mainstream media ignoring allegations against Assange is one thing – but putting him on a pedestal is a whole other matter. Unintentionally, its true that Assange has become somewhat of a symbol of press freedom. However, the media need to be able to separate the man from the cause. Glorifying Assange as the embodiment of press freedom is unnecessary and actually, in this case it is highly inappropriate.

    The message this sends is that as a saviour of journalistic freedom Assange is above the law when it comes to violence against women.

    Our freedom of press feels a little bit safer. But lets not forget about the women who have made allegations against him. When other powerful men are accused of similar crimes we don’t sit here and gush over them. The default should not be questioning women’s accusations. That is how powerful men get away with being abusive for far too long. 

    Feature image via WWLTV – YouTube

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable

    The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession.  Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise.  For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.

    The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.

    Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line.  One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.

    Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy.  “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018.  Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?”  For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day.  “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew.  Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”

    These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets.  In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith.  Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.

    The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power.  When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate.  WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.

    Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it.  Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.

    The tendency is pestilential.  While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.  “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.”  An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”

    While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”

    There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks.  There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.

    Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face.  “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell.  He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”

    In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher.  By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained.  Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award.  Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners.  In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.

    The post Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How a rainbow coalition of Australian politicians came together to push for Julian Assange’s freedom | Greg Barns

    After bleak beginnings, our campaign united a formidable group of parliamentarians from across the political spectrum

    In late 2012 I had a call from John Shipton, Julian Assange’s father. I had done some advocacy on the Assange case for the Australian Lawyers Alliance. John wanted to know if I would run Julian’s bid to be elected to the Senate in the 2013 federal election. From that time on I have worked with John, Julian’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, the lawyer Steve Kenny and others to help bring an end to the US pursuit of Assange for publishing material which clearly implicated that nation in war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our work morphed into an Australian Assange campaign.

    The Australian political environment has changed enormously since I began campaigning for Assange 11 years ago. Then, the Labor government of Julia Gillard not only showed no sympathy for Assange but ordered an investigation into whether he had broken any Australian laws in publishing the material. It was an absurd proposition and one that was quickly dismissed by commonwealth law officers. There seemed to be little interest on the part of the Coalition parties, and many in the Australian media saw Assange as a dangerous impostor.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Assange Is Free, But US Spite Will Chill Reporting for Years

     

    CBS: WikiLeaks' Julian Assange returns to Australia a free man after pleading guilty to publishing U.S. secrets

    WikiLeaks director Julian Assange pleaded guilty “to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information” (CBS, 6/25/24).

    In some ways, the nightmare for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is coming to an end. After taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he was arrested in 2019 by Britain, who have since been trying to extradite him to the United States on charges that by publishing official secrets he violated the Espionage Act (FAIR.org, 12/13/20; BBC, 6/25/24). Once he enters a guilty plea, he will be sentenced to time served and walk away a free man (CBS, 6/25/24).

    Assange’s case has attracted the attention of critics of US foreign policy, and those who value free speech and a free press. His family has rightly contended that his treatment in prison was atrocious (France24, 11/1/19; Independent, 2/20/24). A group of doctors said he was a victim of “torture” tactics (Lancet, 6/25/20). In 2017, Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that the “CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation” and that CIA and Trump administration insiders “even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.”

    His supporters noted that the charges against him came after he harmed the US imperial project, particularly by leaking a video showing US troops killing Reuters journalists in Iraq (New York Times, 4/5/10). Under his watch, WikiLeaks also leaked a trove of diplomatic cables that the New York Times (11/28/10) described as an “unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.”

    Press freedom and human rights groups like the International Federation of Journalists and Amnesty International had long called for his release. Several major news outlets from the US and Europe—the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País—signed a letter calling for his release (New York Times, 11/28/22). They said his “indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

    Hostility toward press freedom

    Guardian: Julian Assange’s wife speaks of elation over plea deal

    Assange will owe the Australian government half a million US dollars for his flight home from imprisonment (Guardian, 6/25/24).

    Assange’s loved ones and supporters are certainly glad to see him come home (Guardian, 6/25/24). But let’s be perfectly clear-eyed: The entire ordeal and his plea deal are proof of a hostile climate toward a free press in the United States and the wider world, and its chilling effect on investigative journalism could substantially worsen.

    Assange’s deal has echoes of the end of the West Memphis Three case, where three Arkansas men were wrongfully convicted as teenagers of a heinous triple homicide in 1993 (Innocence Project, 8/19/11). The three re-entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. They won their freedom, but their names were still attached to a terrible crime, and the state of Arkansas was able to close the case, ensuring the real killer or killers would never be held accountable. It was an imperfect resolution, but no one could blame the victims of a gross injustice for taking the freedom grudgingly offered.

    Something similar is happening with Assange. It compounds the persecution already inflicted on him to force him to declare that exposing US government misdeeds was itself a high crime.

    “On a human level, we’re thrilled that he’s out of prison, including the time in the embassy,” said Chuck Zlatkin, a founding member of NYC Free Assange, a group that has held regular protests calling for his release. “We’re thrilled for him personally.”

    But the deal shows how eager the US government is to both save face and remain a threatening force against investigative reporters.

    ‘Criminalization of routine journalistic conduct’

    Freedom of the Press Foundation: Justice Dept. and Julian Assange reach plea deal in case that threatens press freedom

    Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24): “Under the legal theory used in the indictment, any journalist could be convicted of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining national defense information from a source, communicating with a source to encourage them to provide national defense information, or publishing national defense information.”

    As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24), said in a statement:

    It’s good news that the DoJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.

    The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case, but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.

    And that is all happening while threats against leakers and journalists remain. Edward Snowden, the source in the Guardian’s investigation (6/11/13) into National Security Agency surveillance, still resides in Russia in order to evade arrest. I recently wrote about the excessive sentencing of the man who leaked tax documents to ProPublica and the New York Times showing how lopsided the tax system is in favor of the rich (FAIR.org, 2/2/24). NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking documents to the Intercept on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US election (Vanity Fair, 10/12/23).

    Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who brought Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance to light, said that Assange’s conviction could silence reporters doing investigative reporting on the US government (New York Times, 12/21/20). Chelsea Manning, Assange’s source for these investigations, spent only seven years in prison out of the 35 years of her sentence thanks to presidential clemency, but that is still a harrowing experience (NPR, 5/17/17).

    ‘Not transparency’ but ‘sabotage’

    NY Post: Julian Assange is not a hero — but a self-righteous lowlife lucky to be set free

    The New York Post (6/25/24) predicted that Assange’s release would be cheered by “anarchists and America-haters.”

    Worse, some in the so-called free press have rallied behind the government. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/11/19) cheered the legal crusade against Assange, arguing that the leaks harmed national security. “Assange has never been a hero of transparency or democratic accountability,” the Murdoch-owned broadsheet proclaimed.

    The neoconservative journal Commentary (4/12/19) dismissed the free press defenders of Assange, saying of Wikileaks’ investigations into US power: “This was not transparency. It was sabotage.”

    And the British Economist (4/17/19) said, in support of Assange’s extradition to the US:

    WikiLeaks did some good in its early years, exposing political corruption, financial malfeasance and military wrongdoing. But the decision to publish over 250,000 diplomatic cables in 2010 was malicious. The vast majority of messages revealed no illegality or misdeeds. Mr. Assange’s reckless publication of the unredacted versions of those cables the following year harmed America’s interests by putting its diplomatic sources at risk of reprisals, persecution or worse.

    Unsurprisingly, Murdoch outlets gave the plea deal a thumbs down. “Don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted ‘publisher,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) warned.

    The New York Post editorial board (6/25/24) disparaged Assange’s motives, saying he “wasn’t interested in justice or exposing true abuse; he simply relished obtaining and releasing any secret government or political material, particularly if US-based.” Alleging that the documents he published were sensitive, the paper argued in favor of government secrecy: “Uncle Sam needs to keep some critical secrets, especially when lives are on the line.”

    In reality, US intelligence and military officials have never been able to trace any deaths to WikiLeaks‘ revelations (BBC, 12/1/10; Guardian, 7/31/13; NPR, 4/12/19)—and certainly have never identified any damage anywhere nearly as serious as the very real harms it exposed. (NPR did quote a former State Department lawyer who complained that WikiLeaks‘ exposes “can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts.”)  Alas, some publications side with state power even if journalistic freedom is at stake (FAIR.org, 4/18/19).

    ‘Punished for telling the truth’

    CNN: Trump and his allies are threatening retribution against the press. Their menacing words should not be ignored

    The vindictive plea bargain the Biden administration forced on Assange might provide Donald Trump in a potential second term with tools he could use to put establishment journalists in prison (CNN, 12/7/23).

    Assange’s case is over, but he walks away a battered man as a result of the legal struggle. And that serves as a warning to other journalists who rely on brave people in high levels of power to disclose injustices. Stern is right: Another Trump administration would be horrendous for journalists. But the current situation with the Democratic administration is already chilling.

    “All he was being punished for was telling the truth about war crimes committed by this country,” Zlatkin told FAIR.

    And without a real change in how the Espionage Act is used against journalists, the ability to tell the truth to the rest of the world is at risk.

    “We’re still not in a situation where we as a general population are getting the truth of what’s being done in our name,” Zlatkin said. “So the struggle continues.”

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Julian Assange is free – but press freedom questions

    All main media and many NGOs spent considerable attention on the release from prison of Julian Assange [see also: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/129BFFBD-4F20-45B0-B029-78668832D473 – he won 3 human rights awards].  

    But many, such as the NGO ARTICLE 19, have a warning: However, this is not a slam-dunk win for press freedom. The US should have never brought these charges. The single remaining criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents puts investigative journalism at severe risk in the United States and beyond. Journalists that cover national security, the armed forces and defence do this day in and day out as part of providing transparency and accountability to hold abuses of power in check.

    ‘We are all at risk if the government can hold an archaic law, the Espionage Act, over the heads of journalists to silence them.’  The charge under the Espionage Act undermines the principles of media freedom, accountability, and independent journalism that Assange, his legal team, and campaigners had championed throughout his case, which began in 2012. The fact that his release from Belmarsh prison is a result of plea deal is a clear reminder of how important it is to redouble our efforts defending media freedom and pushing for accountability. 

    See more on this: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/julian-assange/

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxee24pvl94o

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/25/julian-assange-wikileaks-press-freedom-biden-administration

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Assange’s release also exposes Starmer – born and raised to be a US/UK establishment-pleasing flunkey

    This archaic method of British democracy — soon to be disowned by the Tories in opposition when they realise proportional representation will award them enough MPs to fill at least one minibus — has left the right-wing Daily Mail telling their crayon-wielding ‘readers’ the best way to keep the Labour Party’s widely-predicted massive parliamentary “Starmer supermajority” in-check: tactical voting, Tory/Reform-style, in the general election.

    I’m not entirely sure why Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, is particularly concerned by the prospect of a Labour government under the leadership of Mail columnist Keir Starmer, who describes watching a nuclear submarine being built as a “humbling experience”, and any possibility of a wealth tax was ruled out by chancellor-in-waiting, Rachel Reeves some time ago now.

    Birds of a feather flock together.

    But then maybe Rothermere — whose great-grandad posed for a selfie with Adolf Hitler — remembered Keir Starmer’s long-abandoned ten pledges and thought it was best not to take a chance on Starmer keeping his word.

    Entirely understandable.

    Anyone but Labour

    The best way you can ensure Keir Starmer’s “supermajority” isn’t quite-so-super is by following this very simple guide.

    1. Attend your polling station on 4 July, not forgetting your identification. The elite love a bit of disenfranchisement.
    2. Look at the list of candidates on offer and do not vote for the Labour, Conservative or Reform candidates.
    3. Vote for someone like an independent left-wing socialist, and if this isn’t possible, vote Green.

    The Labour Party is starting to go big on insisting you must vote for Labour if you want to see the back of the Tories.

    This is absolute bullshit. Labour will win the 2024 general election with a comfortable majority without your vote.

    The reason the Labour machine doesn’t want you voting for an independent or Green candidate is nothing to do with seeing Starmer over the finishing line and everything to do with ensuring left-wing candidates cannot build a modest support base to attack Labour from in five years time.

    Starmer doesn’t need your vote

    Labour doesn’t need your vote. Labour doesn’t deserve your vote. Keir Starmer is a pillar of the establishment. I repeat: Labour does not need or deserve your vote.

    Being fractionally less dishonest than the deplorable and discredited Conservative government really isn’t a massive selling point to the politically homeless.

    Starmer’s assault on true Labour Party values and the contempt for the people that stand by those values has been utterly galling. The Labour Party has become an amoral and vindictive sham under the leadership of the toolmaker’s son.

    Joseph Stalin purged the Soviet Union of all his opponents in order to rule the country through despotism. Keir Starmer purged the Labour Party of all of its socialists in order to rule the country through despotism, from the traditional conservative right.

    To his credit, Mr Stalin didn’t refuse to axe the two-child benefit cap that is set to impact an extra quarter-of-a-million children in 2025.

    Assange: a case in point

    On a separate but absolutely related point, I must say I was absolutely delighted to hear of the long-overdue release of the Wikileaks founder and journalist, Julian Assange.

    Assange has been a defining case for the left, and it is worth remembering that even when Starmer — a slavishly loyal asset of the British security state — was pleading for left-wing votes during the Labour leadership contest in 2020, he took the most conservative position imaginable and aligned himself with the fascist Donald Trump.

    Starmer’s steadfast loyalty to the British and American establishment has never been in question. This isn’t a conspiracy theory that’s been scribbled down on the back of a fag pack.

    Keir Starmer served as a member of the highly-secretive Trilateral Commission some time between March 2017 and October 2018. He departed at some point between April 2021 and June 2022.

    Matt Kennard of Declassified UK revealed that while Starmer was publicly playing hero to the People’s Vote Ltd cause he was also moonlighting with the Trilateral Commission, serving alongside two former heads of the CIA.

    Another Kennard exposé revealed when serving as the Director of Public Prosecutions between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was in Washington three times while in charge of Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden.

    This cost the public purse £21,603.

    The Crown Prosecution Service — England and Wales’ public prosecutor — has now deleted all of their records relating to Keir Starmer’s trips to the United States.

    Kennard goes on to say:

    During Starmer’s time in post, the CPS was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder.

    A complicity of silence on Starmer and Assange

    I do hope a British journalist has the common sense to nail Starmer over his part in the scandalous treatment of Julian Assange, but I won’t hold my breath, and I equally hope an overwhelming majority of British ‘journalism’ hangs its disgraced head in shame for its complicit silence throughout this grave miscarriage of justice.

    Kennard has been quite brilliant in his quest to hold truth to power. He has gnawed away at Starmer like a dog with a fresh bone.

    Shortly after Starmer lied his way into the top job, Kennard sent the new Labour leader an astonishing letter asking him about his links to the British and American national security establishments.

    The letter, which contained five pertinent questions for Starmer unsurprisingly went unanswered, so Kennard published it as an open letter.

    The questions were:

    1. Why he met the head of MI5 for informal social drinks in April 2013, the year after he decided not to prosecute MI5 for its role in torture?
    2. When and why did he join the Trilateral Commission and what does his membership of this intelligence-linked network entail?
    3. What did he discuss with then US Attorney General Eric Holder when he met him on 9 November 2011 in Washington DC, at a time Sir Keir was handling the Julian Assange case as the public prosecutor?
    4. What role did he play in the Crown Prosecution Service’s irregular handling of the Julian Assange case during his period as DPP?
    5. Why did he develop such a close relationship with the Times newspaper while he was the DPP and does this relationship still exist?

    Labour: no justice, and definitely no peace

    These questions, first asked four years ago, seem particularly relevant following Julian’s release. But shifty Starmer, born and raised to be an establishment-pleasing flunkey, knows how to stay silent on the greatest issues of our times.

    Just ask the children of Gaza.

    Keir Starmer quite clearly isn’t going to put justice at the heart of how he governs, he is a Tory after all. But when Starmer boldly claims “country before party”, which country is he referring to?

    If Starmer meant us, in little Blighty, he would be providing a vision of how he would house the homeless, feed the hungry, offer dignity to disabled people and save our NHS from the corporate clutches of American privateer vultures instead of foolishly employing Tory policies to deal with one Tory-made crisis after another.

    There isn’t a force on this earth that’s going to make me change my mind about the American/Israeli asset, Starmer.

    Starmer lies as freely and brazenly as Boris Johnson ever did.

    While we have seen the British electorate aren’t particularly bothered if their Prime Minister speaks fluent bullshit — providing he has a bit of charisma, scruffs up his hair, and says a few preposterously long words every now and then — Starmer has the charisma of a rusty scaffolding pole, a tub of Brylcreem in his briefcase, and repeats three-worded soundbites that mean absolutely nothing to anyone.

    Vote Labour, get despotism, and get the British and American establishment’s security state at its very worse, working against the interests of justice around the world.

    Featured image via Rachael Swindon

    By Rachael Swindon

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies

    One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus.  That is, if you believe in final chapters.  Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative.  His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice.  Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

    Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

    As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

    Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

    The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

    Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

    As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family.  He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

    There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

    One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

    From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

    Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

    From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

    To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

    The post The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Julian Assange Is Released from Prison: What Does it Mean?

    Lifesize bronze sculpture featuring (L-R) former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former US soldier Chelsea Manning convicted of violations of the Espionage Act, on May 1, 2015 at Alexanderplatz square in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Tobias Schwarz) © AFP

    The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will at long last taste freedom again. He should never have been imprisoned. Nevertheless, the release is conditional on his accepting to plead guilty to espionage in the United States — in the far-flung US territory of Saipan. There he is to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served. However, it is much longer that 62 months. Since Sweden ordered an arrest of Assange over rape allegations in 2010, Assange has found himself under some form of incarceration until his current release.

    There are some important takeaways from this gross dereliction of justice.

    One: The rape allegations, that continue to appear in lazy media, were false, and this was attested to by the two women in the case. The allegations were a political construction between Sweden acting on behalf of the US. The United Kingdom abetted the US’s scheming against Assange. No western nations stepped forward to criticize the treatment. Graciously, president  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered asylum for Assange in Mexico.

    Why was Assange being targetted? Because WikiLeaks has released scads of classified US military documents on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  diplomatic cables, and the devastating video Collateral Murder. When US citizen Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” for publication, he was charged with theft on top of espionage, but government chicanery caused it to end up in a mistrial. Whereas president Richard Nixon failed miserably against Ellsberg, Donald Trump and Joe Biden persevered and kept Assange under some form of lock-and-key.

    Two: Assange is not guilty. He is guilty of journalism, which is not a crime. He did not commit treason against the US. He is an Australian citizen and not a US citizen. He did not commit espionage. Assange is not a spy and neither was he a thief. He is a publisher, and when WikiLeaks published the leaks, Assange was doing what the New York Times did when they published the “Pentagon Papers.”

    Nonetheless, Assange is human. He has parents, a wife, and kids. Assange realizes that he was up against the state machinery of the US, UK, Sweden, and the collusion of Ecuador under president Lenin Moreno. Crucial was the unwillingness of pre-Albanese Australian administrations to fight for one of its citizens.

    If the Deep State in the US can have its own president assassinated without consequences, then it can easily have a single person put in some form of incarceration for as long as it intends.

    After years and years of incarceration — especially in the notorious Belmarsh prison, his health diminishing, missing his family — that Assange would have accepted the release terms of a rogue empire is completely understandable.

    Three: Justice is all too often not just. Justice delayed is justice denied goes the legal maxim. Unfortunately, Assange is not an isolated example. Edward Snowden cannot return stateside. Seeing what has happened to Assange reinforces that the US government will mete out injustice to him.

    Four: Monopoly media continues to evince that it is an organ of government and corporations. Why so? First, because they are instruments of power. Second, they found themselves all too often scooped by WikiLeaks on major stories.

    Five: The bad: this is a blow to freedom of speech and the right of the public to know what their government is doing.

    Six: More bad: it is too easy to demonize a hero, to torture a hero, and to do this even though there is a significant (although arguably not numerous enough) global movement in support of a hero.

    Seven: Even more bad: people must keep in mind the other heroes out there who brought corruption, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity to the public consciousness and as a consequence face persecution, imprisonment, assassination, and whatever sordid punishments the machinery of rogue states can cook up. People like Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, George Galloway, conscientious objectors, truth tellers, resistance fighters, among others.

    Eight: Assange is a hero. Heroes tend to be too loosely defined. Scoring a boatload of goals does not one a hero make, neither does crooning a hit song make one a hero, nor does attaining ultra wealth. Heroes are embued with a highly developed sense of morality and transcend themselves by working for the greater good of humanity and the world.

    Nine: It is a Pyrrhic victory for Empire. Yes, Assange was brought to the point of having to confess guilt, but who knows what Assange and WikiLeaks will do for exposing crimes of state from here on.

    Ten: Whatever Assange decides to do in the future, his decision is earned. He has already done so much for the people who want transparency and who want their governments held to account.

    The post Julian Assange Is Released from Prison: What Does it Mean? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • WikiLeaks founder Assange hearing ‘significant’ for Pacific island Saipan

    By Lydia Lewis, RNZ Pacific journalist

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s court hearing in Saipan is set to make “this dot in the middle of the Pacific” the centre of the world for one day, says a CNMI journalist.

    The Northern Marianas — a group of islands in the Micronesian portion of the Pacific with a population of about 50,000 — is gearing up for a landmark legal case.

    In 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.

    Assange is expected to plead guilty to a US espionage charge in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands today at 9am local time.

    Saipantribune.com journalist and RNZ Pacific’s Saipan correspondent Mark Rabago will be in court, and said it was a significant moment for Saipan.

    “Not everybody knows Saipan, much less can spell it right. So it’s one of the few times in a decade that CNMI or Saipan is put in the map,” he said.

    He said there was heavy interest from the world’s media and journalists from Japan were expected to fly in overnight.

    ‘Little dot in the middle’
    “It’s significant that our little island, this dot in the middle of the Pacific, is the centre of the world,” Rabago said.

    Assange was flying in from the United Kingdom via Thailand on a private jet, Rabago said.

    He said it was not known exactly why the case was being heard in Saipan, but there was some speculation.

    “He doesn’t want to step foot in the continental US and also Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, is the closest to Australia, aside from Guam,” Rabago said.

    Reuters was reporting Assange was expected to return home to Australia after the hearing.

    Rabago added that Assange probably was not able to get a court date in Guam, and there was a court date open on Saipan.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    Julian Assange . . . timeline to freedom?
    Julian Assange . . . timeline to freedom? Image: NZ Herald screenshot/APR/Pacific Media Watch

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Is Set to Be Freed Following Plea Deal

    Julian Assange, a journalist who faced 175 years in prison for publishing evidence of U.S. war crimes, has agreed to a plea deal with the U.S. government, ending years of imprisonment in the United Kingdom where he awaited extradition and allowing him to live in freedom. The WikiLeaks founder was charged under the Espionage Act under the Trump administration, which alleged that he had illegally…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • People are rightly celebrating Julian Assange’s freedom – but it came at a price

    UK authorities, at the behest of the US, have released Julian Assange from Belmarsh prison. But that freedom comes at a price. To secure his release, the US forced Australian Assange to plead guilty to US espionage charges for receiving and publishing information in the public interest from a whistleblower – Chelsea Manning.

    Still, people are rightly celebrating the icon’s freedom.

    Assange: free, but at a price

    Assange has faced 14 years of political persecution and detainment. According to the UN, Assange was under arbitrary detention from 2010 while he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Then from 2019, he spent five years in Belmarsh where he was still “arbitrarily detained in the UK on politically-motivated charges”, in the words of Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnès Callamard.

    Assange’s wife Stella thanked the activists who campaigned for his release:

    People also noted the war crimes Assange exposed such as US conduct in the illegal Iraq war:

    Others pointed out the role the corporate media played in manufacturing consent for his persecution:


    This includes the Guardian publishing a fake hit job in 2018 that claimed Donald Trump’s campaign manager had visited Assange. This was part of a longstanding smear campaign including over 40 articles attacking the WikiLeaks founder. That came after the Guardian initially published and celebrated his journalism.

    Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, meanwhile, called Assange’s persecution “grotesque”:

    Labour candidate Zarah Sultana described his work as a “public service”:

    While it came at a price, Assange’s freedom is a beacon of hope for many.

    Featured image via Stella Assange – X

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Journalist Antony Loewenstein on Assange’s Release, WikiLeaks & Israeli Drones Killing Gaza Reporters

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    We discuss the plea deal and release of Julian Assange with Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein, and the reaction in Assange’s home country of Australia to his release and WikiLeaks’s legacy, which he says helped open the door to whistleblowers and leakers in the era of digital journalism. Loewenstein, the author of The Palestine Laboratory, also discusses the state of press freedom in Israel’s war on Gaza. The Israeli military doesn’t view Palestinian journalists as journalists, he argues. Instead, it views them as “akin to terrorists” to justify its targeting of them, an issue that Loewenstein argues should be of more concern to Western media outlets.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Julian Assange Is Free: WikiLeaks Founder’s Brother Gabriel Shipton on End of Decadelong Legal Saga

    Seg gabriel assange

    WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been freed from Belmarsh Prison in London, where he has been incarcerated for the past five years, after accepting a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors. After a decade-plus of legal challenges, Assange will plead guilty to a single felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security material for publishing classified documents detailing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan on WikiLeaks. The Australian publisher is expected to be sentenced to time served and allowed to return home, where he reportedly will seek a pardon. Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton describes learning of his release as “an amazing moment.” He speaks to Democracy Now! about Assange’s case and what led up to the latest developments, as well as what he expects will happen next.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.