Assange supporters Candles4Assange have put together an incredibly helpful list of actions planned for Julian Assange on April 11th around the world, to mark 2 years of his unjust imprisonment. The full Twitter thread is here but we’ve also listed each event by city below.
The post April 11: Global Day Of Action For Julian Assange appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
For the past fortnight the Home Run for Julian tour has been weaving its way through regional and suburban Victoria and NSW, towards the nation’s capital.
And along its route, it’s met with supporters to spread the word that Australians want Wikileaks founder Julian Assange returned home.
After over a decade of drawn out detention in the UK, Assange is now incarcerated in London’s Belmarsh prison, pending an appeal of the British court decision not to extradite him to the United States to face multiple espionage charges over his publishing.
The Home Run for Julian speak out tour has been led by Assange’s father John Shipton, along with 3CR journalist and peace campaigner Jacob Grech, the Peace Bus’ Graeme Dunstan and Melbourne for Wikileaks’ Raine Sinclair.
The post Assange’s Father John Shipton On The Home Run Tour For Julian appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Ten years ago, President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. referred to Founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Wikileaks Julian Assange as a “high-tech terrorist.” Saying this, Biden located himself within one of the more potent, but entirely unsound anti-Assange narratives. This mythical line of thinking, originally motivated by notions that Assange was a facilitator of terrorism against the United States, remains prevalent to this day. It motivates either implicitly or explicitly so many governments’ libelous, defamatory, and violent pursuits of Assange.
In February 2010, Wikileaks began releasing a voluminous trove of classified documents too many members of the American establishment suspiciously over-emphasized contained the identities of informants overseas.
The post Debunking The Myth Of Assange As A Terrorist appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Julian Assange’s lawyers are considering bringing a cross appeal to the High Court in London disputing parts of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s Jan. 4 judgment not to extradite Assange to the United States, according to a report by journalist Tareq Haddad.
Baraitser refused the U.S. request on narrow grounds, saying Assange’s extradition would put his life and health at risk. But Baraitser sided with the U.S. on every other point of law and fact, making it clear that in the absence of the life and health issues she would have granted the U.S. request.
That opens the way for the U.S. government to seek the extradition of other persons, including journalists, who do the same things as Assange did, but who cannot rely on the same life and health issues.
The post Letter: On The Matter Of Assange’s Lawyers Considering A Cross Appeal appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
It’s been reported that the US authorities will appeal the recent UK ruling that Julian Assange should not be extradited to the US. However, in the meantime, the case against WikiLeaks founder Assange has met resistance. A former Conservative cabinet minister has made a statement to parliament regarding the UK Extradition Act which could undermine the prosecution’s appeal.
David Davis MP told parliament:
Although we cannot, of course, discuss the substance of the Assange judgment here today, the House must note the worrying development more generally in our extradition arrangements – extradition for political offences. This stems from an erroneous interpretation of Parliament’s intention in 2003. This must now be clarified.
Article 4 of the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty provides that extradition will not be granted for political offences. In the U.K., the treaty was implemented in the Extradition Act 2003. It has been claimed that, because the Act does not specifically refer to political offences, Parliament explicitly took the decision to remove the bar when passing the Act in 2003. That is not the case – Parliament had no such intention. Had it intended such a massive deviation from our centuries-long tradition of providing asylum, it would have been explicit.
Indeed, in a 9 December 2002 Commons debate, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the home department Bob Ainsworth MP stated that the then Extradition bill would:
ensure that no one can be extradited where the request is politically motivated, where the double jeopardy rule applies or where the fugitive’s medical condition—an issue raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Harry Cohen)—would make it unjust.
Ainsworth went on to say that under the terms of the bill, “extradition will not be allowed of people being prosecuted or punished for crimes that are accounted for by their race, religion, nationality or political opinions”.
Also, at the extradition hearing, Edward Fitzgerald QC for the defence referred to a submission, which quoted from the 2003 US-UK extradition treaty (ratified in 2007) – namely:
extradition shall not be granted if the offence for which extradition is requested is a political offence
The Canary also reported in a June 2019 article that:
It should also be noted that none of the other media outlets that partnered with WikiLeaks has been charged. And so it could be argued that the charges raised against Assange amount to selective prosecution. That could equate to political prosecution, which is grounds under UK extradition arrangements for US requests to be denied. US lawyer Jacques Semmelman, who specialises in extradition cases, agrees. He argues that the charges raised against Assange are political, saying:
“It is a classic political offense. I have a difficult time seeing a British court departing so significantly from legal tradition and saying in this case they will make an exception. The political offense exception as it has existed for probably 150 years has consistently maintained that for espionage charges, they are not extraditable. That’s just a classic principle of international extradition law.”
District judge Vanessa Baraitser had ruled that Assange should not be extradited because once in the US Assange would be likely to attempt to take his own life:
I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the ‘single minded determination’ of his autism spectrum disorder.
Referring to the January ruling, Assange’s partner Stella Moris commented:
We wanted a U.K. court to properly quash the extradition and refute the other grounds too. We wanted a finding that the extradition is an attempt to criminalise journalism, not just in the U.S. but in the U.K. and the rest of the world as well; and that the decision to indict Julian was a political act, a violation of the treaty, a violation of his human rights and an abuse of process.
Julian’s extradition team is considering all these issues, and whether they can be cross-appealed.
In her ruling Baraitser concluded: “The defence has not established that Mr. Assange has been the target of a politically motivated prosecution”. In other words, her interpretation of ‘politically’ was not about Assange and his motivations but the US prosecution. That can easily be challenged, as observed in a May 2019 article in The Canary.
For example, CIA chief Mike Pompeo described WikiLeaks as a “hostile intelligence service”. There have also been numerous threats (including death threats) against Assange from the US, including by senior politicians:
And there’s this:
But there’s yet another ‘political’ dimension.
Last year 154 lawyers sent a letter to prime minister Boris Johnson, the lord chancellor and secretary of state for justice Robert Buckland QC, the secretary of state for foreign affairs Dominic Raab, and home secretary Priti Patel, pointing out that:
Charges 1-17 [raised against Assange] are brought under the Espionage Act 1917, which, in name alone, reveals the political and antiquated nature of the charges.
The letter added:
The UK-US Extradition Treaty, which provides the very basis of the extradition request, specifically prohibits extradition for political offences in Art. 4(1).
And that:
there is broad international consensus that political offences should not be the basis of extradition.[ix] This is reflected in Art. 3 of the 1957 European Convention on Extradition, Art. 3 ECHR, Art. 3(a) of the UN Model Treaty on Extradition, the Interpol Constitution and every bilateral treaty ratified by the US for over a century.
On 8 February, 24 rights organisations – including Amnesty International USA and Human Rights Watch – appealed to the US acting attorney-general to end the prosecution of Assange, saying:
It is unfortunately the case that press freedom is under threat globally. Now more than ever, it is Pentagon Papers case memorably called a “cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press”—in the United States and abroad. With this end in mind, we respectfully urge you to forgo the appeal of Judge Baraitser’s ruling, and to dismiss the indictment of Mr. Assange.
By Tom Coburg
This post was originally published on The Canary.
With changes of presidential administrations, radical departures in policy are always exaggerated. Continuity remains, for the most part, a standard feature. It is precisely that continuity being challenged by groups fearful of the continuing prosecution of Julian Assange.
The effort by the US Justice Department to extradite Assange from the UK on eighteen charges based on the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act met a stumbling block in the courts on January 4 this year. The decision by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser proved exceedingly unsympathetic to the press and to Assange in general, but found his “the mental condition … such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”
Undeterred, the Justice Department promised to appeal (the February 12 deadline looms), while President Donald Trump showed little interest in dropping the case or using his pardoning powers. With the Biden administration still finding its feet, advocacy groups have gathered to press for the dropping of the case against the founder of WikiLeaks. On February 9, the Freedom of the Press Foundation sent a letter to President Joe Biden making the case. Signatories included Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.
“While our organizations have different perspectives on Mr Assange and his organization,” states the letter, “we share the view that the government’s indictment of him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.” The letter distils the implications of the continued prosecution to model simplicity. The indictment is a threat to press freedom given that it covers the sort of conduct “journalists engage in routinely – and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.” Journalism entails speaking with sources, seeking clarification or further documentation and receiving and publishing documents “the government considers secret.”
Biden is weakly kitted out in the garb of a press defender, having positioned himself against Trump’s designation of the fourth estate as “the Enemy of the People”. In May last year, he promised that a Biden White House would ensure that there was “no bullying of the media from the press room podium or by tweet.” But for a good stretch of the presidential campaign, Biden tended to ignore the press, part of a general strategy to avoid his famed bumbling. For three months he did not hold a single news conference, even in virtual format.
Biden was also Vice President in an administration that preached mightily about the values of the press while regularly resorting to the Espionage Act in prosecuting journalistic sources and whistleblowers. Parker Higgins of the Freedom of the Press Foundation even argues that the Obama administration created a model Trump would grasp with glee, one characterised by the Espionage Act, efforts to “eviscerate reporter’s privilege,” the use of surveillance and the “abuse of the classification system”.
The new president does not count himself among Assange’s fans. In the aftermath of the publication of US State Department cables by WikiLeaks in 2010, Biden went so far as to call the publisher a “high-tech terrorist”, a position almost intemperate relative to other White House officials. The point is worth reiterating, given the Obama administration’s general reluctance to prosecute either Assange or WikiLeaks given the proximity of their activities to journalism. In 2013, Obama’s officials fell back on precedent, sparing WikiLeaks, and by virtue of that other press outlets, from legal action.
In that unfortunate interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, an irony that eluded him at the time, the then Vice President revealed that the Justice Department was “taking a look” at possible charges. If conspiracy could be proven behind obtaining “these classified documents with a member of the US military that is fundamentally different than if someone drops on your lap … if you are a press person, here is classified material.”
Biden also threw cold water on any claims that the publications had been anything like the Pentagon Papers released during the Nixon administration. Assange had “done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.” There was also a complaint that meeting world leaders had become more onerous. “For example, in my meetings … there is a desire to meet with me alone, rather than have staff in the room. It makes things more cumbersome – so it has done damage.”
Such reasoning has been essentially duplicated in the current indictment, despite a paucity of evidence as to what actual harm the disclosures are said to have caused. Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the release of the Pentagon Papers, told the court in Assange’s extradition trial that US authorities had “not been able to identify a single person at risk of death, incarceration or physical harm.”
Given Biden’s previous form on the subject, it is hardly surprising that his administration is promising to continue the prosecution. On February 9, Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi revealed that there would be no change of tack in pursuing Assange. “We continue to seek his extradition.” The new is looking awfully like the old on this point.
The post Continuing Prosecutions: Assange and the Biden Administration first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With changes of presidential administrations, radical departures in policy are always exaggerated. Continuity remains, for the most part, a standard feature. It is precisely that continuity being challenged by groups fearful of the continuing prosecution of Julian Assange.
The effort by the US Justice Department to extradite Assange from the UK on eighteen charges based on the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act met a stumbling block in the courts on January 4 this year. The decision by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser proved exceedingly unsympathetic to the press and to Assange in general, but found his “the mental condition … such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”
Undeterred, the Justice Department promised to appeal (the February 12 deadline looms), while President Donald Trump showed little interest in dropping the case or using his pardoning powers. With the Biden administration still finding its feet, advocacy groups have gathered to press for the dropping of the case against the founder of WikiLeaks. On February 9, the Freedom of the Press Foundation sent a letter to President Joe Biden making the case. Signatories included Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders.
“While our organizations have different perspectives on Mr Assange and his organization,” states the letter, “we share the view that the government’s indictment of him poses a grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.” The letter distils the implications of the continued prosecution to model simplicity. The indictment is a threat to press freedom given that it covers the sort of conduct “journalists engage in routinely – and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do.” Journalism entails speaking with sources, seeking clarification or further documentation and receiving and publishing documents “the government considers secret.”
Biden is weakly kitted out in the garb of a press defender, having positioned himself against Trump’s designation of the fourth estate as “the Enemy of the People”. In May last year, he promised that a Biden White House would ensure that there was “no bullying of the media from the press room podium or by tweet.” But for a good stretch of the presidential campaign, Biden tended to ignore the press, part of a general strategy to avoid his famed bumbling. For three months he did not hold a single news conference, even in virtual format.
Biden was also Vice President in an administration that preached mightily about the values of the press while regularly resorting to the Espionage Act in prosecuting journalistic sources and whistleblowers. Parker Higgins of the Freedom of the Press Foundation even argues that the Obama administration created a model Trump would grasp with glee, one characterised by the Espionage Act, efforts to “eviscerate reporter’s privilege,” the use of surveillance and the “abuse of the classification system”.
The new president does not count himself among Assange’s fans. In the aftermath of the publication of US State Department cables by WikiLeaks in 2010, Biden went so far as to call the publisher a “high-tech terrorist”, a position almost intemperate relative to other White House officials. The point is worth reiterating, given the Obama administration’s general reluctance to prosecute either Assange or WikiLeaks given the proximity of their activities to journalism. In 2013, Obama’s officials fell back on precedent, sparing WikiLeaks, and by virtue of that other press outlets, from legal action.
In that unfortunate interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, an irony that eluded him at the time, the then Vice President revealed that the Justice Department was “taking a look” at possible charges. If conspiracy could be proven behind obtaining “these classified documents with a member of the US military that is fundamentally different than if someone drops on your lap … if you are a press person, here is classified material.”
Biden also threw cold water on any claims that the publications had been anything like the Pentagon Papers released during the Nixon administration. Assange had “done things that have damaged and put in jeopardy the lives and occupations of people in other parts of the world.” There was also a complaint that meeting world leaders had become more onerous. “For example, in my meetings … there is a desire to meet with me alone, rather than have staff in the room. It makes things more cumbersome – so it has done damage.”
Such reasoning has been essentially duplicated in the current indictment, despite a paucity of evidence as to what actual harm the disclosures are said to have caused. Daniel Ellsberg, the man behind the release of the Pentagon Papers, told the court in Assange’s extradition trial that US authorities had “not been able to identify a single person at risk of death, incarceration or physical harm.”
Given Biden’s previous form on the subject, it is hardly surprising that his administration is promising to continue the prosecution. On February 9, Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi revealed that there would be no change of tack in pursuing Assange. “We continue to seek his extradition.” The new is looking awfully like the old on this point.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) under former President Donald Trump had aggressively pursued the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — and it appears, now that President Joe Biden has taken office, that policy won’t be changing anytime soon.
The DOJ announced on Wednesday that it would seek to appeal a recent court ruling in the United Kingdom last month that blocked an extradition request from the Trump administration. The DOJ under Trump had alleged that Assange had violated federal crimes in publishing documents obtained by Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010.
Those documents were published online when former President Barack Obama was still in office, and when Biden was serving as vice president. At the time, the Obama administration had thoroughly investigated and considered placing charges against Assange but ultimately decided not to pursue any, citing his First Amendment protections. Under Trump, however, Assange was charged with violating the Espionage Act.
The Biden administration’s decision to continue seeking to extradite Assange has been criticized by a number of civil liberties organizations, who joined together this week in an open letter calling for the president to drop the appeal on the basis that Assange had a right to publish the material obtained by Manning. That letter was organized by The Freedom of the Press Foundation, and included other signers, such as Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders.
“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely — and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do,” the letter stated. “News organizations frequently and necessarily publish classified information in order to inform the public of matters of profound public significance.”
The documents Assange published (obtained by Manning) were indeed damning, shining a light on a number of the U.S. military’s controversial actions and atrocities — such as the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, which showed an Army helicopter and members of the U.S. military targeting and firing upon unarmed citizens in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists.
A U.K. judge blocked an extradition request from the DOJ early last month. While that ruling was hailed by journalists and civil liberties groups, it was also criticized in part because it did not block extradition on the basis of Assange’s political rights, but rather because of the WikiLeaks founder’s mental health status, and the belief that he could be harmed further by being placed in the U.S. prison system for an indefinite period of time.
The U.S. indicated after the ruling that it would pursue an appeal of the decision. Stella Morris, Assange’s fiancée, blasted their decision to do so.
“We are extremely concerned that the U.S. government has decided to appeal this decision and continues to want to punish Julian and make him disappear into the deepest darkest hole of the U.S. prison system for the rest of his life,” Morris said at the time.
Marjorie Cohn, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, was also critical of the decision, and of the DOJ’s continued pursuance of Assange.
“This is the first time a journalist has been indicted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information,” Cohn noted in an op-ed for Truthout last month. “Journalists are allowed to publish material illegally obtained by a third person if it is a matter of public concern. The U.S. government has never prosecuted a journalist or newspaper for publishing classified information.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The following was originally published as part of The Dissenter Newsletter.
The Justice Department under President Joe Biden plans to continue the case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that was launched under President Donald Trump.
“We continue to seek his extradition,” Justice Department spokesperson Marc Raimondi told Reuters, days before February 12, the deadline for the United States government to submit its “grounds for appeal.”
The statement represents a departure from President Barack Obama’s administration, which declined to prosecute Assange. Justice Department officials were reportedly concerned about the threat it would pose to press freedom.
On January 4, British district judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the U.S. government’s extradition request and concluded Assange’s mental condition was “such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”
She accepted that Assange would likely be imprisoned at a supermax prison in the U.S. under special administrative measures (SAMs) and would find a way to commit suicide.
“I am satisfied that, in these harsh conditions, Mr. Assange’s mental health would deteriorate causing him to commit suicide with the ‘single minded determination’ of his autism spectrum disorder.”
However, the Biden Justice Department plans to contest the judge’s conclusion that Assange should not be extradited because he would likely commit suicide.
Just one day ago, a coalition of civil liberties, press freedom, and human rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Center for Constitutional Rights, Committee to Protect Journalists, Fight for the Future, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Human Rights Watch, PEN America, Project on Government Oversight, and Reporters Without Borders, signed on to a letter demanding that the Biden Justice Department drop the charges against Assange.
“The indictment of Mr. Assange threatens press freedom because much of the conduct described in the indictment is conduct that journalists engage in routinely—and that they must engage in in order to do the work the public needs them to do,” the letter [PDF] to acting attorney general Monty Wilkinson declared. “Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret.”
“In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalize these common journalistic practices.”
The coalition noted former Justice Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, a Biden supporter, told the Washington Post in 2013, “The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists.”
While Attorney General Eric Holder empaneled a grand jury to investigate WikiLeaks in 2010, by the summer of 2013, Holder was reluctant to indict Assange and charges were never brought by the Obama administration.
Assange was charged in April 2019 with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion that contains elements of an Espionage Act offense. He is detained at the Belmarsh high-security prison in London and has been denied bail multiple times.
“The Trump administration positioned itself as an antagonist to the institution of a free and unfettered press in numerous ways,” according to the coalition.
In February 2017—Trump’s first month in office, WikiLeaks published “CIA espionage orders” that called attention to how major political parties in France were “targeted for infiltration” in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election.
About a month later, WikiLeaks brought further scrutiny to the CIA when they published the “Vault 7” material, which they described as the “largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.”
Mike Pompeo, who was the CIA director, responded to the publication on April 13, 2017. He labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” and argued Assange had “no First Amendment freedoms” because “he is not a U.S. citizen,” an assertion with no basis in law.
“We’ve had administrations before that have been squeamish about going after these folks under some concept of this right to publish,” Pompeo added.
Assange, who was living under asylum in the Ecuador embassy, was targeted in a U.S.-backed espionage operation conducted by a private security company called U.C. Global, which currently faces a criminal case in Spain.
Pompeo and Attorney General Bill Barr had no problem with employing questionable and potentially illegal tactics that would ultimately result in the arrest of Assange, and now, officials are demonstrating the end of Trump’s presidency doesn’t mean they will go back to being “squeamish” toward cases that threaten the right to publish.
During Biden’s first foreign policy speech on February 4, he proclaimed, “We believe a free press isn’t an adversary; rather, it’s essential. A free press is essential to the health of a democracy.”
However, in Trump’s last year in office, he signed a counterintelligence strategy document [PDF] that lumped in “leaktivists” and “public disclosure organizations,” like WikiLeaks, with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and terrorist groups, which U.S. security agencies view as “significant threats.”
That strategy document, which covers 2020-2022, sharply conflicts with Biden’s assertion that the U.S. government believes the free press is not an adversary. Indeed, it shows U.S. security agencies believe they should monitor, neutralize, and even target dissident media organizations that may employ practices pioneered by WikiLeaks.
While the tone of the new administration may sound more polite toward elite journalists, by refusing to abandon this dangerous political case, the Biden Justice Department is effectively signaling his administration is not all that serious about press freedom and what officials have to say are empty platitudes that should not pacify people aware of what is at stake if Assange is brought to the U.S. and put on trial.
The post Assange Prosecution, Launched By Trump Justice Department, Will Continue Under Biden appeared first on Shadowproof.
This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
For this edition of “Dissenter Weekly,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola highlights multiple whistleblower stories related to federal government corruption and corporate malfeasance during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Later, Kevin provides an update on the return of Boeing 737 MAX aircrafts to the skies and why one known whistleblower is still warning of potential tragedies.
The show concludes with coverage of Josh Schulte, the ex-CIA engineer who is in harsh confinement at MCC New York awaiting a second trial on Espionage Act charges. The U.S. government will not back down and insists he is the source of “Vault 7” documents that were published by WikiLeaks, although they failed to convince a jury of this during Schulte’s trial in March.
Fund For Pandemic Emergencies Raided By Federal Officials, Whistleblower Revealed
Court Orders Agriculture Company To Increase COVID-19 Safety Measures After Whistleblower Complaint
Biden’s Executive Order To Supposedly Improve Worker Safety During Pandemic Is Relatively Toothless
Whistleblower Warns Of ‘Potential Defects’ That Remain In Boeing 737 Max Aircrafts
US Justice Department Tries To Stifle Alleged WikiLeaks Source’s Challenge To Cruel Confinement
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The post Dissenter Weekly: Migrant Farmworker Prevails After Whistleblower Complaint Over Lack Of COVID-19 Safety appeared first on Shadowproof.
This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
*The following was originally published as part of The Dissenter newsletter.
The United States Justice Department is attempting to foil former CIA engineer Joshua Schulte’s challenge to his harsh confinement conditions at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Jacob argued in a letter [PDF] to a federal judge, “The court lacks jurisdiction to resolve this petition in the context of this criminal case.”
Prosecutors maintain MCC Warden Marti Licon-Vitale should be the target of any habeas petition, or complaint, but Licon-Vitale cannot be named as a defendant.
Effectively, if accepted by the court, this means Schulte would have to pursue a civil lawsuit against prison administrators while at the same time preparing for the Justice Department to try him on Espionage Act charges that a jury deadlocked on last March. He already has public defenders and definitely could not afford to hire an attorney to argue his constitutional rights are being violated.
Schulte was accused of leaking the “Vault 7” files to WikiLeaks and charged with 13 offenses, including four counts of violating the Espionage Act in June 2018.
The files Schulte allegedly released brought scrutiny to the CIA’s hacking arsenal, which targeted smartphones and computers. A program called “Weeping Angel” that allowed the CIA to attack Samsung F8000 TVs and convert them into spying devices was exposed. They also showed how the CIA targeted Microsoft Windows, as well as Signal and WhatsApp users, with malware.
Lawyer Sabrina Shroff, according to Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press, opened Schulte’s trial by maintaining the CIA did not want these documents published and the CIA had no idea how they were leaked. They also do not know when, why, or who leaked the documents.
Shroff further suggested the CIA felt pressure to blame someone, and Schulte was an easy target. “All they know is WikiLeaks published the information on March 7, 2017.”
In October 2018, Attorney General William Barr imposed special administrative measures (SAMs) on Schulte. The complaint [PDF] alleges the prison has imposed additional “arbitrary punishment” that was not authorized.
“MCC’s treatment of pretrial detainees is truly abhorrent, unconscionable, cruel and unusual punishment,” the complaint declares. “SAMs inmates are locked in concrete boxes the size of parking spaces with purposefully obstructed views of outside. The cages are filthy and infested with rodents, rodent droppings, cockroaches, and mold.”
“There is no heating or air conditioning in the cages. There is no functioning plumbing. The lights burn brightly 24 hours per day, and the inmates are denied outside recreation, normal commissary, normal visitation, access to books and legal material, medical care, and dental care.”
The complaint adds, “All attorney-client privilege is also void to SAMs inmates as the prison confiscates, opens, and reads all legal mail. Inmates are forbidden from transferring legal material to and from their attorneys.”
Schulte is allegedly denied proper heating and air conditioning, and the cells in 10 South, the SAMs unit, lack insulation. This means he wears “four sets of clothing, five sets of socks, a sweatshirt and sweatpants, two blankets, three sets of socks on his hands, and still freezes when the temperature in his cell plummets below freezing and water literally freezes in his cell.”
The warden and MCC staff, the complaint argues, are “aware and indifferent to this barbaric torture.”
Schulte has not been outside in over two years because there is no outside recreation available to SAMs detainees. He cannot even see the world outside his cell because windows are blacked out.
“Despite Mr. Schulte’s congenital heart issues and ongoing cardiologist appointments, he has not seen a doctor since his trial in February 2020. Additionally, Mr. Schulte has not once seen a dentist at MCC.”
“When [10 South] inmates are moved, they must be shackled from head-to-toe like Hannibal,” the complaint states. Schulte is “handcuffed, belly-chained, and foot-cuffed,” even though he has never been accused of violence or committing disciplinary infractions.
The FBI intercepts Schulte’s mail in order to prevent the “alleged dissemination of classified information.” Yet, it is impossible for Schulte to “transmit classified information by receiving mail, especially court mail.”
Schulte’s lawyers contend, “The mail interception is arbitrarily imposed in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This court should modify SAMs and issue an order preventing the FBI from intercepting or reading any incoming mail to Mr. Schulte.”
All of the alleged violations of his constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment are practically impossible for Schulte to challenge through the “administrative remedy” process supposedly available to prisoners.
First, MCC did not reply “in a timely manner” so Schulte appealed to a regional office. That regional office claimed he failed to “file at the institutional level,” even though he was cleared to appeal because the MCC had not responded to his grievance within 20 days. This regional office also disqualified his complaint because it was not written in ballpoint pen. (Schulte is banned from using pens.)
Schulte appealed to the Central Office, which is next in the bureaucratic hierarchy. He received “similar denials.”
On top of that, the prison apparently has an “informal resolution process” that prisoners like Schulte are required to go through before they can formally complain. Schulte has 17 outstanding forms submitted through this process. He is not to be given a form that allows him to pursue an administrative remedy unless the prison replies to these forms.
The warden limits prisoners’ ability to formally file requests, and as a result, Schulte’s lawyers insist this is in violation of the Prison Litigation Reform Act.
Prisoners in 10 South are “often forced to urinate and defecate in plastic bags. During visitation, inmates are moved to a 6×6 ft. cage. Instead of taking the inmate back to his cage after visitation, as would be logical, [Solitary Housing Unit] lieutenants take the visitors back first.”
It can be anywhere from five to seven hours before the lieutenants return, which means prisoners must go to the bathroom in a plastic bag they were given.
Systematic abuse and mistreatment of SAMs prisoners played a decisive role in District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s decision to deny the U.S. government’s extradition request against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He would likely be placed under the kind of restrictions Schulte has faced if the U.S. prevailed and brought him to the country for a trial on Espionage Act charges.
Even more troubling, Schulte already went to trial once. A jury did not convict, yet because the Justice Department is responsible for his SAMs designation—and they have not given up on their leak prosecution—the cruelty has not abated.
“It is barbaric and inhumane to lock human beings into boxes for years and years,” the complaint concludes. “It is a punishment worse than death, and there is no wonder that MCC inmates would rather kill themselves than continue to live in absolute oppression.”
“No matter what crime an individual is alleged to have committed, the United States Constitution grants all a presumption of innocence. Indeed, no American wants to be treated like a caged animal if accused of a crime—dependent, deserted, dehumanized, demoralized, and detained.”
The post US Justice Department Tries To Stifle Alleged WikiLeaks Source’s Challenge To Cruel Confinement appeared first on Shadowproof.
This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
Back in 2017, before WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange was silenced by Twitter, he used the platform to highlight an immutable truth:
‘The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security not national security.’
Power hates being exposed. It hates having its inner machinations, its selfish priorities and ugly operations opened up to public scrutiny.
The omission of inconvenient facts, and the silencing of inadmissible viewpoints, are core features of the so-called ‘mainstream’ news media. Thus, it should be obvious by now why we always put ‘mainstream’ in quotation marks. Because, as increasing numbers of the public surely now recognise, the major news media are not impartial, or fair, or balanced. Nor do they truly represent and reflect the concerns and priorities of the vast majority of the population. Instead, the major newspapers and broadcasters represent, defend and project the interests of powerful state and corporate elites. The state-corporate media will not, and cannot, undertake consistent and reliable public scrutiny of these elites. That would make no sense since the mass media is the propaganda operation of state-corporate power.
Since we began Media Lens twenty years ago in 2001, we have amassed over 5,000 pages of media alerts detailing numerous examples of dangerous, power-friendly omissions, distortions and imbalances in UK state-corporate media. Rather than go for easy and obvious targets like the Sun, Express and Mail, we have focused on those media outlets the public is supposed to regard as the most fair, balanced, probing and challenging of governments and Big Business. ‘Thus far and no further’, as Noam Chomsky has described the most open or most liberal end of the narrow spectrum of establishment media.
BBC News deserves particular scrutiny, not least because it regularly declares itself ‘the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster’. That is not much of an accolade given that public trust in the media is crumbling; particularly in a country which has some of the worst ‘news’ media anywhere on the planet. The UK has an overwhelmingly right-wing and establishment press dominated by rich owners, and edited by compliant editors with the required ideologically-aligned views. As for the Guardian, which has always been a ‘liberal’ gatekeeper on behalf of power, investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis reported in 2019 that the paper has been:
‘successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the “security state”, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.’
Moreover, other than a recent belated and mealy-mouthed defence, for many years the Guardian essentially abandoned and abused Julian Assange, along with the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, after exploiting him and WikiLeaks.
Couple all that with the fact that BBC News regularly follows the skewed, power-serving agenda set by UK press coverage, and it is no surprise that overall British public trust in the media is so low. As we noted last year, the extensive annual Eurobarometer survey across 33 countries revealed that the UK public’s trust in the press is rock bottom. Indeed, 2020 was the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK had come last.
BBC Silence Over Israel As An Apartheid State
One of the most egregious recent omissions by BBC News was last week’s groundbreaking report by leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem naming Israel as ‘an apartheid state’ and ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy’:
‘In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.’
Apartheid in the Palestinian Territories has long been recognised. For example, in 2004, a prominent South African professor of international law, John Dugard, then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that there is ‘an apartheid regime’ in the territories ‘worse than the one that existed in South Africa.’
Noam Chomsky concurred:
‘In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by “apartheid” you mean South African-style apartheid.
‘What is happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There is a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce…
‘The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.’
All this was damning enough. But the publication of the new B’Tselem report was the first time that Israeli human rights and legal experts had publicly stated that apartheid exists not just in the Occupied Territories, but throughout the whole region that Israel claims for itself.
As the Israel-based British journalist Jonathan Cook observed:
‘By calling Israel an apartheid state and a “regime of Jewish supremacy”, B’Tselem has given the lie to the Israel lobby’s claim – bolstered by a new definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – that it is antisemitic to suggest Israel is a “racist endeavour”.
‘B’Tselem, a veteran Israeli Jewish organisation with deep expertise in human rights and international law, has now explicitly declared that Israel is a racist state. Israel’s apologists will now face the much harder task of showing that B’Tselem is antisemitic, along with the Palestinian solidarity activists who cite its work.’
As far as we are aware, there was no mention of the report on any of the flagship BBC News at 6 or 10 television programmes. Nor was there anything to be found on the BBC News website. Presumably, the BBC deemed it unworthy of the public’s attention. We challenged BBC foreign editor Andrew Roy, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and BBC digital news editor Stuart Millar for a response. Not one of them replied. It is perhaps significant that Millar moved to the BBC from the Guardian where, as deputy editor of Guardian US, he had scoffed at Julian Assange:
‘I like to think that #Assange chose the Ecuadorean embassy because it’s so convenient for Harrods’
This is the archetypal sneering ‘mainstream’ journalist’s view of anyone who seriously exposes the truth and challenges power.
As for B’Tselem’s landmark report detailing the reality of the Israeli state as an apartheid regime, it is possible that there were sporadic brief mentions in some outlying parts of the BBC. Longtime readers will recall that the BBC infamously buried revelations by Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector, that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed of any weapons of mass destruction, at 3am on the BBC World Service.
In response to the B’Tselem report, John Pilger pointed out via Twitter:
‘Israel is top of the league for vaccinating its own people [against coronavirus]. The accolades say Israel is the “example”. False. Israel is denying the vaccine to Palestinians whose land and lives it controls. WHO has pleaded with Israel: to no avail. Apartheid in action.’
Glossing Over Brutal Imperialism
Here in the UK, the Tory government’s criminally incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic has led to an appalling death toll – now the highest death rate of any country in the world – while ministers robotically repeat the mantra of ‘following the science’, with one U-turn after another. Meanwhile, many people are suffering tremendous hardship, losing their jobs or struggling to earn a living, or even unable to feed their children adequately.
As Phil Miller, a staff writer for the excellent investigative journalism website Declassified UK, noted:
‘The UK now has over 100,000 covid deaths. That’s a result of government failure on a grand scale. The lack of calls for Johnson and ministers to resign is extraordinary’
It is extraordinary. But, tragically, it is a natural consequence of how the state-corporate media represents and defends elite power, of which it is a key component. Any real dissent is smeared, swept to the margins or simply blanked. With the power of corporate media manifest in the demolition of Jeremy Corbyn’s prospects of becoming Prime Minister in 2019, it is entirely predictable that there is now no substantive political opposition to a destructive, elite-serving Tory government.
Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s lame Blairite successor, is a stalwart establishment figure who, at best, would only ever paper over a few cracks in the edifice of neoliberal economics. This is the corporate- and finance-driven system that is crushing the vast majority of the world’s population, destroying the natural environment and species at an alarming rate, and driving us all towards the precipice of climate breakdown. As we have noted before, and as we will see again below, no world leader anywhere is doing anything remotely sufficient to address this disaster.
Starmer has actually called for the Labour party to emulate incoming US President Joe Biden’s ‘broad coalition’ to ‘see progressive values triumph over the forces of division and despair’. The stone-cold reality that Biden, set to be inaugurated today (20 January), represents huge financial interests and corporate power, and has an appalling record in supporting US imperialism and wars, appears to have escaped Starmer’s attention. But then, Starmer is also seemingly oblivious to the UK’s own imperial past and blood-soaked complicity in war crimes. How else could a Labour leader write:
‘We are at our best when the world knows we have the courage of our convictions and a clear moral purpose.’
Wiping away the blood of countless US/UK atrocities across the globe, he continued:
‘For the United States of America and for Britain, this is the time to return to the world stage. This is the time for us to lead.’
To gloss over Britain’s brutal past and present – to ignore the grievous crimes committed against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to name a few – is an insult to the UK’s many victims. For a supposed ‘progressive’ to do so is surely absurd. It can only result from being blind to the propaganda system so cogently explained by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ (Vintage, 1988). In this system, we are immersed in a brainwashing environment of mass media in which even the more ‘reputable’ news outlets such as Associated Press regurgitate doctrinal statements such as:
‘For decades, the U.S. has been an advocate for democracy abroad, using diplomatic pressure and even direct military intervention in the name of spreading the principles of a pluralistic system with a free and fair vote for political leaders. These tactics have generated both allies and enemies, and this year’s presidential vote perhaps more than any other is testing the strength of the values it promotes around the world.’
A safe pair of hands like Sir Keir would never recognise, far less, criticise such assertions for the dangerous, ideological and ahistorical nonsense that they are. Instead, Starmer is locked into an elite-friendly mindset apparent whenever he proclaims his establishment credentials, as here via Twitter:
‘This is also an important moment for the world. It is a chance to reassert America’s place as a force for good on the world stage. A nation that will work with Britain and other allies to defeat this pandemic and fight climate change.’
The reply from Media Lens reader Ryan Moon was apt:
‘When, specifically, has the US (& UK) been a “force for good in the world”? Supporting Suharto & Pinochet maybe? In Yemen & Libya? In the Chagos Islands? Nicaragua might have a few choice words about that description, too. Grow a spine.’
Biologist and science writer Richard Dawkins, like so many other prominent members of the liberal commentariat, once again revealed his deep ignorance of history and world affairs:
‘With few exceptions like Putin & Farage, the entire world welcomes President Biden and Vice-President Harris. After four years of lies, venal hypocrisy and vicious hostility to decency and humane values, America has taken a major step towards making America great again.’
Historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, responded:
‘The thing is, @RichardDawkins, while you’re right to welcome the demise of the contemptible Trump, as I do, the “lies, venal hypocrisy and vicious hostility to decency and humane values” are just routine features of every US presidency, especially in foreign policy.’
Meanwhile, it was no surprise to see a senior Guardian journalist unleashing purple prose in praise of Biden. David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, declared that ‘with empathy and humility, Biden sets out to make America sane again’. The ideological rhetoric continued to gush out across Guardian column inches:
‘After the mental and moral exhaustion of the past four years, Biden made America sane again in 15 minutes. It was an exorcism of sorts, from American carnage to American renewal.’
Readers with long memories will recall similar Guardian effusions of liberal ordure when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 to ‘rebrand America’ and serve as the eloquent ‘cool’ figurehead of US corporate and imperial might. That is the Guardian worldview in a nutshell.
The harsh truth is that the corporate media, including BBC News and the Guardian, has a stranglehold on any prospect for changing society. The transfer of US power from Trump to Biden provided the briefest permissible glimpse of mild scepticism being broadcast from corporate newsrooms. This was most notable with Trump vociferously contesting the US presidential elections results, claiming election fraud on a grand scale. The repeated buzz phrase from journalists reporting Trump’s claims was ‘without offering evidence’. Thus, BBC news presenter Mishal Husain told the nation’s television audience on 8 November last year:
‘President Trump has been out on the golf course and made further claims of election fraud without offering evidence.’
The point was emphasised in a news piece by BBC North America correspondent Nick Bryant:
‘the president took to the golf course this morning continuing to make unsubstantiated claims that the election was rigged.’
This narrative was repeated across the ‘mainstream’ media.
But those important caveats – ‘without further evidence’ and ‘unsubstantiated claims’ – are routinely missing when propaganda declarations are, or were, made by the US/UK about Iraq’s mythical ‘WMD’; or when the public is told that the West’s ‘security’ and military forces need to counter the ‘threat’ from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or whoever the latest ‘enemy’ happens to be; or that ‘we’ need to keep Saudi Arabia as an ‘ally’; that Israel only ever ‘retaliates’ in the face of Palestinian ‘provocation’, that the US is a neutral ‘peace broker’ in the Middle East; or that the US/UK defend freedom and human rights around the world. On and on flow the propaganda assertions, without serious challenge from a compliant media. Suddenly, when it really matters, the media’s supposed enthusiasm for ‘fact checking’ dries up.
Julian Assange And Guardian Hypocrisy
We have seen the ugly truth in the brutal, inhumane treatment of Julian Assange, arguably the most important Western dissident, journalist and publisher in recent years, by western ‘democracies’, the major news media, and a cruel system of court ‘justice’ operating in London. During a recent online conversation, acclaimed film director Ken Loach nailed the despicable role of the Guardian, in particular, in persecuting and undermining Assange:
‘It’s one of those cases that clarifies the role of the media […] there’s a collusion of silence. There doesn’t need to be an active conspiracy; they all understand the steps of the dance. “We’re going to keep quiet about this”. The Guardian did publish some [WikiLeaks] material, but then turned on Julian. And typical with the liberal press, there’s a degree of hypocrisy. They want to have a foot in both camps. They want to be both seen as part of the responsible establishment; they also want to speak truth to power. But they’re compromised on both fronts. And their attacks on Julian Assange were critical in undermining his presence as a journalist, and being seen as a journalist. And the scurrilous attacks on him, for year after year; [and their] failure to really campaign against the torture for ten years.’
He added:
‘There could not be a clearer case of shoot the messenger, and let the scoundrel go free. I mean, here you have people – Bush, Blair, propagandists like Alastair Campbell – wheeled out on the BBC, like Newsnight. They have season tickets to the current affairs programmes that tell us what to think. They are responsible for – what – up to a million deaths, four, five, million people made homeless, destruction of Iraq; the most atrocious war crimes, in an illegal war – an illegal war, so every activity is illegal on account of that, war crimes – they should be indicted. The man who told us about those crimes is condemned to rot, at the very least, and is in danger of never seeing the light of day again, or of being executed, and we know some politicians in the States have called for precisely that. There could not be a more outrageous, a more egregious example of the messenger being crucified and the scoundrels, the villains, the criminals getting away with this.’
As musician Brian Eno said during the discussion:
‘Julian is a threat [to power] because he exposes an illusion that we are generally being told to support. And that illusion is that we live in a democracy. So, the fundamental concept of democracy is that people make decisions about their future, and about the state they live in. And the fundamental assumption of democracy is that people have the information on which to make those decisions. So, clearly, for democracy to work we have to have good information, otherwise we’ll make bad decisions.’
‘The Gravity Of The Situation Requires Fundamental Changes To Global Capitalism’
The most compelling evidence that there is no functioning democracy in capitalist societies is all around us: global environmental collapse and climate breakdown.
A new scientific report this month warns that the planet is facing a ‘ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals’ that threaten human survival. The study, published in ‘Frontiers in Conservation Science’ by a group of 17 experts, observes that:
‘The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.’
Somewhat couched in academic language, the urgency and starkness of the warning are nevertheless clear:
‘The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition, reigning in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women.’
They added:
‘the mainstream [sic] is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.’
Meanwhile, the climate crisis has been worsening, with 2020 declared by scientists as the joint hottest year ever recorded, despite the pandemic lockdowns. There were record Arctic wildfires and Atlantic tropical storms.
The European Commission’s Matthias Petschke said:
‘The extraordinary climate events of 2020 […] show us that we have no time to lose. We must come together as a global community, to ensure a just transition to a net zero future. It will be difficult, but the cost of inaction is too great…’
In the wake of the US presidential election last November, the BBC’s John Simpson had tweeted:
‘According to the New York Times, exit polls showed that 84% of people who voted for Trump thought that global warming wasn’t an important issue.’
But, of course, if political leaders everywhere believed that climate breakdown is an important issue – the overriding issue facing humanity – they would be tackling it with the urgency that it requires now.
As climate campaigner Greta Thunberg pointed out last week:
‘In 2010 our leaders signed “ambitious goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems”. By 2021 they’d failed on every single one. Each day they choose not to act. Instead they sign more “ambitious” non-binding future goals while passing policy locking in destructive business as usual.’
This was her acerbic summary of political discussions at the One Planet Summit in Paris on 11 January:
LIVE from #OnePlanetSummit in Paris:
Bla bla nature
Bla bla important
Bla bla ambitious
Bla bla green investments
Bla bla great opportunity
Bla bla green growth
Bla bla net zero
Bla bla step up our game
Bla bla hope
Bla bla bla…*
*locking in decades of further destruction
We have arrived at this terminal stage of capitalism because we are being held in a death-grip by a system of economics and exploitation that is coated with a veneer of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and other convenient ideological myths. The corporate media has sold the public those myths, perpetuating and deepening the various interlocking crises that threaten to wipe out homo sapiens, along with countless other species.
We can still escape the worst if we face up to reality. As Gail Bradbrook and Jem Bendell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and founder of Deep Adaptation respectively, explain:
‘Our power comes from acting without escape from our pain.’
They continue:
‘Paying attention fully to what is around us and in front of us, even though it hurts, is to be fully alive. […] Once we accept that anxiety and grief will be constant companions in this struggle, we can stay fully present to what is happening and respond accordingly. It means we do not grasp desperately at the latest idea of what might fix the climate and ecological emergency. Instead, we can help each other stay fully present to the difficult mess, so that we can try to reduce harm, save what we can and plant some seeds for what might come next.’
A good start would be to reject the corporate media.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Australia’s Foreign Minister, Marise Payne, said little in the statement from her department, which was a good thing, as it might have been dangerously useful. The finding of a UK court on whether Julian Assange would be extradited to the United States was made “on the grounds of his mental health and consequent suicide risk.” She does not care to mention the actual details of the case, the fact that the decision by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, while blocking the extradition, was nastily focused against journalism.
Payne insists on objective distance from the proceedings. “Australia is not a party to the case and will continue to respect the ongoing legal process, including the U justice system’s consideration of applications for release, or any appeals.” Superficial regard for due process is thereby preserved and acknowledged.
What follows from the statement is a cover excusing the feeble efforts by Australian governments over the years of all stripes to assist Assange in his monumental battle against the US imperium and the proxy torments inflicted by Britain and Sweden. “We have made 19 offers of consular assistance to Mr Assange since 2019 that have gone unanswered. We will continue to offer consular support.”
Such a statement sticks to the steady line that Australian officials have always been there, always ready and eager to assist a citizen beleaguered, persecuted and haunted by the agencies and instruments of an ally. But the position is sacredly supine: do not rock the alliance with either the US or the UK; do not disturb the good offices of Washington or raise hackles in Downing Street.
In the past, Australia, with a few dubious exceptions, has shown scant regard to shielding citizens in a monumental pickle, especially those accused of grave crimes of a political nature. The Howard government’s lamentable response to David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, both accused of terrorism offences by the US in the misnamed global war on terror, has been documented. Hicks found himself facing that most dubious of legal experiments with cheery Australian approval: US military commissions established by the administration of George W. Bush.
When the US Supreme Court struck down the legality of the commissions in Hamdan v Rumsfeld (2006) for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949, then Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer remained unmoved. “Prior to that the military commission process had been upheld by other courts including the US court of appeals, so it had been, until it went to the Supreme Court, a process that was upheld by American civil courts.”
Hardly the sharpest legal analysis ever offered, and one leaving Australian officials flatfooted in their treatment of an Australian citizen. “Our advice has been, as had the American Government’s advice had been, that it was lawful,” explained a less than contrite Prime Minister John Howard. “Now, the court has said no, well, we accept that – you get advice and you act on it.”
The case with Assange is no less dire. When President Barack Obama’s Vice President and soon to be US President Joe Biden was asked about the release of US State Department cables by WikiLeaks in 2010, the response was unequivocal: Assange was a species of “hi-tech terrorist”. Republican Rep. Peter King of New York insisted that he be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 (corks must have popped at the release of the Department of Justice indictment doing just that) and WikiLeaks designated a terrorist organisation. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton merrily floated the idea of using a drone against Assange that same year, though claimed not to recall doing so in 2016. “It would have been a joke, if it had been said, but I don’t recall that.”
Rather than defend an Australian national against the positively homicidal and kidnapping disposition of US politicians and agencies, Canberra has been generally reticent, hiding behind the fiction of due process. In some cases, Australian officials have gone so far as to level their own accusations against the Australian national, hinting that Assange might deserve trial and incarceration. Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard stumbled into a trap of her own making in asserting in 2012 that it was an “illegal act” to leak documents to WikiLeaks. “It would not happen, information would not be on WikiLeaks, if there had not been an illegal act undertaken.”
Unfortunately for Gillard, she had not reckoned with the corrective assessment of opposition legal affairs spokesman George Brandis. Gillard, he said reproachfully, had been “clumsy” in her use of language. “As far as I can see he (Mr Assange) hasn’t broken any Australian law.” Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop similarly pointed out that Gillard was unable to identify “any Australian law that Mr Assange has broken. Nor has she apologised for pre-judging him in that way and making that prejudicial statement.”
In 2012, when he was Australian Foreign Minister, Bob Carr also waffled in accusation, casting a spear at Assange for releasing “secrets… for the sake of being released without inherent justification.” In doing so, he threw in his lot with those who considered the release by WikiLeaks to be nothing like the Pentagon Papers, that jewel of exposure released by US Defence Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg. The WikiLeaks exposures were “not like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers which revealed huge American deception, huge deception by the American government of the American public.”
This was horrendously off the mark, not least given the assessment by Ellsberg himself since 2010 and at Assange’s extradition trial. In December 2010, Ellsberg released a co-signed statement remarking that, “Every attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.” In giving his testimony as a defence witness for Assange in September 2020, he further argued that his “own actions in relation to the Pentagon Papers and the consequences of their publication have been acknowledged to have performed such a radical change of understanding. I view the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance.”
Carr was also irritated by those nuisance accusations that Assange had not received sufficient consular assistance. In his diary entry of June 2, 2012, he notes being, “Fed up with complaints from [Assange’s] family suggesting he hasn’t been supported by Australia and the opposition spokesperson saying the same thing”. Disingenuous to a fault, Carr made the adventurous suggestion at a press conference that the WikiLeaks publisher “has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian. Strictly speaking, I don’t know whether this is the case.”
Carr has since undergone the sort of transformation that the Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel found inherent in politics. The very nature of the practice – one can hardly call it a discipline – produces a divorce between truth and the human being. When it is convenient, these might meet, human might and solidarity marshalled behind verity. Carr, for a time, found it inconvenient to consider the truth of Assange’s situation. Now, he has become Assange’s late-to-the party standard-bearer and defender. His extradition to the US, argues the converted Carr, “would set an ugly precedent.”
In the aftermath of the court decision, Carr suggested on Twitter that Australia was “entitled to tell Trump in his last days that Assange is one of us and his extradition is wrong. He exposed US war crimes exactly like our own in Afghanistan which we are prosecuting.” He also had words for Payne: raise the matter of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in forceful and proud fashion to defend an Australian case. “Or does your view of the [US-Australian] alliance mean you never do that?” Havel would have rolled his eyes.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
I wouldn’t have thought that any mass media reporters would have the temerity to continue the public smear campaign against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after it became clear to everyone that he was the subject of a brutal Trump administration prosecution aimed at criminalizing inconvenient journalism. But if there was going to be anyone to take up that flag, it would be the odious James Ball.
Ball, who as activist Suzie Dawson documented in 2016 has been working within the plutocratic media to destroy Assange’s reputation for years, has just published yet another disgusting smear piece titled “Julian Assange is no hero. I should know — I lived with him and his awful gang”, this time with Murdoch’s Sunday Times. Claiming that Assange is “Reckless and immoral in deed and word”, Ball spins the tortured journalist as a monster who must remain marginalized and never be trusted by sources again.
This would be the same James Ball who, as Financial Eyes recently observed, “admits to having taken money from the Integrity Initiative, a government and NATO funded propaganda unit designed to shape opinion in a direction hostile towards Russia and favourable towards increased militarism.”
It’s no secret that money talks but, in today’s anti-Assange hit piece, @jamesrbuk keeps very quiet about exactly what attracts him to the billionaire US oligarch Mr Rupert Murdoch. https://t.co/tRjsCr9zAd
— Financial Eyes (@financialeyes) January 10, 2021
This would also be the same James Ball who, a year before Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in which he’d taken political asylum fearing US extradition, authored a Guardian article titled “The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride” and subtitled “The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US, charges in Sweden have been dropped – and for the embassy, he’s lost his value as an icon”.
“There is no public criminal case against Assange or WikiLeaks in the US,” Ball argues in his January 2018 article, claiming there is “no real reason to believe anything has changed with Assange’s situation in the US.”
Well something had indeed changed in the US. Assange was being spied on by US intelligence with Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson acting as a liaison between the CIA and a private intelligence corporation, and in December 2017 the Trump administration had ordered Assange’s arrest and begun orchestrating an international plot to enact it after the CIA Director branded WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
If I had written an article in a major publication claiming there was “no real reason” to believe Assange would face extradition proceedings if he left the Ecuadorian embassy, and then that claim had proved horrifyingly wrong, I personally would have done what any normal person would do and shut the entire fuck up about Julian Assange for the rest of my life.
Not James Ball though. There’s a certain type of personality that guarantees it will always fail upward because it possesses a remarkable combination of power-worshipping obsequiousness, a total lack of shame, and a complete lack of scruples. It’s the same type of personality that still gets lucrative punditry work after pushing for the Iraq invasion. James Ball has no more business opining about Julian Assange than John Bolton has about the merits of interventionist foreign policy, yet both remain visible and vocal. Because they are the same kind of creature.
I’m pretty good with words, but I’ve never succeeded in finding any which adequately articulate the absolute depravity of the mass media smearmeisters who’ve spent years getting paid to churn out deceitful hit pieces about Assange while he’s silenced and unable to defend himself. There’s simply no one lower. There’s shit, there’s the shit that would come out of shit if shit could shit, and then there’s people like James Ball.
I’ve worked a lot to debunk this smear campaign, and it’s sucked because I know for a fact that Assange could have done an infinitely better job of it than I can if he still had internet access. He knows all the facts about his work inside and out, and could have knocked out the smears as they came.
But that was the whole idea. That’s why they silenced him, long before they dragged him out of the embassy. The empire needed the public to consent to his persecution, and he was running interference on their consent manufacturing campaign. And now they kick him while he’s down, continuing to stomp his reputation into the ground even as he’s being unjustly locked in Belmarsh after a judge already blocked his extradition.
The torture and brutalization of Julian Assange has only been made possible by the fact that the public consents to it, and the public only consents to it because of a concerted mass media smear campaign that took place between late 2016 and his arrest in April 2019. People like James Ball are directly responsible for the empire’s ability to make an example of what happens to a journalist who exposes US war crimes, and they must never be forgiven for it.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
There was a fascinating online panel discussion on Wednesday night on the Julian Assange case that I recommend everyone watch. The video is at the bottom of the page.
But from all the outstanding contributions, I want to highlight a very important point made by Yanis Varoufakis that has significance for understanding current events well beyond the Assange case.
Varoufakis is an academic who was savaged by the western political and media establishments when he served as Greece’s finance minister. Back in 2015 a popular leftwing Greek government was trying to oppose the imposition of severe loan conditions on Greece by European and international financial institutions that risked tipping the Greek economy into deeper bankruptcy and seemed chiefly intended to upend its socialist programme. The government Varoufakis served was effectively crushed into obedience through a campaign of economic intimidation by these institutions.
Varoufakis describes here the way that leftwing dissidents who challenge or disrupt western establishment narratives – whether it be himself, Assange or Jeremy Corbyn – end up not only being subjected to character assassination, as was always the case, but nowadays find themselves being manipulated into colluding in their own character assassination.
Here is a short transcript of Varoufakis’ much fuller comments – about 48 minutes in – highlighting his point about co-option:
The establishment, the Deep State, call it whatever you want, the oligarchy, they’ve become much, much better at it [character assassination] than they used to be. Because back in the 1960s and 1970s, you know, they would accuse you of being a Communist. They would accuse me of being a Marxist. Well, I am a Marxist. I’m really not going to suffer that much if you accuse me of being a left-winger. I am a left-winger!
Now what they do is something far worse. They accuse you of something that really hurts you. Calling somebody like us a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, a rapist. This is what really hurts because if anybody calls me a rapist today, right, even if it’s complete baloney, I feel as a feminist I have the need to give the woman, implied or involved somehow this accusation, the opportunity to speak against me. Because that is what we left-wingers do.
Varoufakis’ point is that when Assange was accused of being a rapist, as he was before the US made clear the real case against him – by trying to extradite him from the UK for exposing its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan – he could not defend himself without alienating a significant constituency of his natural supporters, those on the left who identify as feminists. Which is exactly what happened.
Similarly, as Varoufakis notes from earlier conversations he had with Assange, the Wikileaks founder was in no position to properly defend himself against accusations that he colluded with Russia and Donald Trump to help Trump win the 2016 US presidential election against Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
At the time, Assange’s supporters were able to point out that the leaked emails were true and that they were in the public interest because they showed deep corruption in the Democratic party establishment. But those arguments were drowned out by a narrative confected by the US media and security establishments that Wikileaks’ publication of the emails was political interference because the emails had supposedly been hacked by Russia to sway the election result.
Because Assange was absolutely committed to the principle of non-disclosure of sources, he refused to defend himself in public by confirming that the emails had been leaked to him by a Democratic party insider, not the “Russians”. His silence allowed his vilification to go largely unchallenged. Having already been stripped of support from much of the feminist left, particularly in Europe, Assange now lost the support of a sizeable chunk of the left in the US too.
My latest: Even if Julian Assange’s death is not the goal, the US and UK have recklessly ensured that possibility grows ever more likely – and will continue to do so until they swiftly bring his incarceration and torture to an end https://t.co/DM4fM4PAJH
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 7, 2021
In these cases, the one who stands accused has to defend themselves with one hand tied behind their back. They cannot hit back without further antagonising a substantial section of their supporters, deepening divisions within the left’s ranks. The victim of this kind of character assassination is caught in the equivalent of reputational quicksand. The more they fight, the deeper they sink.
Which is, of course, exactly what happened to the UK’s former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn when he was accused of being a racist. If he or his supporters tried to challenge the claim that the party had become antisemitic overnight under his leadership – even if only by citing statistics that showed the party hadn’t – they were immediately denounced for supposed “antisemitism denial”, posited as the modern equivalent of Holocaust denial.
Notice Ken Loach, who was also on the panel, nodding in agreement as Varoufakis speaks. Because Loach, the noted left-wing, anti-racist film-maker who came to Corbyn’s defence against the confected media campaign smearing him as an antisemite, soon found himself similarly accused.
Jonathan Freedland, a senior columnist at the liberal Guardian, was among those using precisely the tactic described by Varoufakis. He tried to discredit Loach by accusing him of denying Jews the right to define their own experience of antisemitism.
Freedland sought to manipulate Loach’s anti-racist credentials against him. Either agree with us that Corbyn is an antisemite, and that most of his supporters are too, or you are a hypocrite, disowning your own anti-racist principles – and solely in the case of antisemitism. And that, QED, would prove you too are motivated by antisemitism.
Loach found himself with a terrible binary choice: either he must collude with Freedland and the corporate media in smearing Corbyn, a long-standing friend, or else he would be forced to collude in his own smearing as an antisemite.
It’s a deeply ugly, deeply illiberal, deeply manipulative, deeply dishonest tactic. But it is also brilliantly effective. Which is why nowadays rightists and centrists use it at every opportunity. The left, given its principles, rarely resorts to this kind of deceit. Which means it can only bring a peashooter to a gun fight.
My latest: George Monbiot, supposedly the Guardian’s ‘conscience of the left’, offered his followers two feeble excuses for failing to raise his voice in support of Julian Assange against the US extradition bid. But this time his excuses simply won’t wash https://t.co/ACc0vdN0fF
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 6, 2020
This is the left’s dilemma. It’s why we struggle to win the argument in a corporate media environment that not only denies us a hearing but also promotes the voices of those like Freedland trying to destroy us from the centre and those supposedly on the left like George Monbiot and Owen Jones who are too often destroying us from within.
As Varoufakis also says, the left needs urgently to go on the offensive.
We need to find ways to turn the tables on the war criminals who have been gaslighting us in demanding that Assange, who exposed their crimes, is the one who needs to be locked up.
We need to make clear that it is those who are so ready to smear anti-racists as antisemites – as Corbyn’s successor, Sir Keir Starmer, has done to swaths of Labour party members – who are the real racists.
And we need to unmask as war hawks those who accuse the anti-war left of serving as apologists for dictators when we try to stop western states conducting more illegal, resource-grab wars with such devastating results for local populations.
We must get much more sophisticated in our thinking and our strategies. There is no time to lose.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A London court has ruled against those seeking Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the US. Assange is charged with 17 counts of espionage as well as hacking.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Pacific Media Watch newsdesk
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is relieved by the January 4 ruling of UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser to block the United States’ attempt to extradite WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
However, it is extremely disappointed by the court’s failure to reject the substance of the case, leaving the door open to further prosecutions on similar grounds, RSF says in a statement today.
Although Judge Baraitser decided against extradition, the grounds for her decision were strictly based on Assange’s serious mental health issues and the conditions he would face in detention in the US.
On the substantive points in the case – in which the US government has pursued Assange on 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – the judge’s decision was heavily in favour of the prosecution’s arguments, and dismissive of the defence.
“We are immensely relieved that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the US. At the same time, we are extremely disappointed that the court failed to take a stand for press freedom and journalistic protections, and we disagree with the judge’s assessment that the case was not politically motivated and was not centred on journalism and free speech,” said RSF’ Director of International Campaigns, Rebecca Vincent.
“This decision leaves the door open for further similar prosecutions and will have a chilling effect on national security reporting around the world if the root issues are not addressed.”
The US government has indicated that it intends to appeal against the extradition decision.
Detained on remand
Assange remains detained on remand in high-security Belmarsh prison, pending the judge’s consideration of his bail application on January 6.
RSF has called again for his immediate release, and will continue to monitor proceedings.
Despite extensive difficulties securing access – including refusal by the judge to accredit NGO observers and threats of arrest by police on the scene – RSF monitored the January 4 hearing at London’s Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey).
It has been the only NGO to monitor the full extradition proceedings against Assange.
The UK and US are respectively ranked 35th and 45th out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2020 World Press Freedom Index.
Asia Pacific Report’s Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF in Paris.
Julian Assange … still detained on remand at high-security Belmarsh prison. Image: RSF
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Analysis: ruling appears to extend the scope of British Official Secrets Act on classified information
Julian Assange may have won the first round of his extradition battle against the US but lawyers and the National Union of Journalists have warned his victory had little to do with the protection of journalism and free speech.
A study of the ruling from the district judge Vanessa Baraitser – which said the WikiLeaks founder should not be extradited on mental health grounds – appears to extend the scope of the British Official Secrets Act, which governs the leaking and handling of classified government information.
Related: Julian Assange extradition ruling: what happens now?
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Making political sense of the world can be tricky unless one understands the role of the state in capitalist societies. The state is not primarily there to represent voters or uphold democratic rights and values; it is a vehicle for facilitating and legitimating the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.
In a recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.
My latest: The increasingly desperate task of capitalism's perception managers is to dissociate our economic system from the emerging environmental crisis – to break our understanding of the causal link between the two https://t.co/S4Aby314FX
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 25, 2020
Our own societies must deal with the externalised costs of industries ranging from tobacco and alcohol to chemicals and vehicles. Societies abroad must deal with the costs of the bombs dropped by our “defence” industries. And future generations will have to deal with the lethal costs incurred by corporations that for decades have been allowed to pump out their waste products into every corner of the globe.
Divine right to rule
In the past, the job of the corporate media was to shield those externalities from public view. More recently, as the costs have become impossible to ignore, especially with the climate crisis looming, the media’s role has changed. Its central task now is to obscure corporate responsibility for these externalities. That is hardly surprising. After all, the corporate media’s profits depend on externalising costs too, as well as hiding the externalised costs of their parent companies, their billionaire owners and their advertisers.
Once, monarchs rewarded the clerical class for persuading, through the doctrine of divine right, their subjects to passively submit to exploitation. Today, “mainstream” media are there to persuade us that capitalism, the profit motive, the accumulation of ever greater wealth by elites, and externalities destroying the planet are the natural order of things, that this is the best economic system imaginable.
Most of us are now so propagandised by the media that we can barely imagine a functioning world without capitalism. Our minds are primed to imagine, in the absence of capitalism, an immediate lurch back to Soviet-style bread queues or an evolutionary reversal to cave-dwelling. Those thoughts paralyse us, making us unable to contemplate what might be wrong or inherently unsustainable about how we live right now, or to imagine the suicidal future we are hurtling towards.
Lifeblood of empire
There is a reason that, as we rush lemming-like towards the cliff-edge, urged on by a capitalism that cannot operate at the level of sustainability or even of sanity, the push towards intensified war grows. Wars are the life blood of the corporate empire headquartered in the United States.
My latest: The new documentary on Greta Thunberg – I Am Greta – isn’t about climate change. It’s about something even more important: the elusiveness of sanity in an insane world https://t.co/uU2G6i821I
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 17, 2020
US imperialism is no different from earlier imperialisms in its aims or methods. But in late-stage capitalism, wealth and power are hugely concentrated. Technologies have reached a pinnacle of advancement. Disinformation and propaganda are sophisticated to an unprecedented degree. Surveillance is intrusive and aggressive, if well concealed. Capitalism’s destructive potential is unlimited. But even so, war’s appeal is not diminished.
As ever, wars allow for the capture and control of resources. Fossil fuels promise future growth, even if of the short-term, unsustainable kind.
Wars require the state to invest its money in the horrendously expensive and destructive products of the “defence” industries, from fighter planes to bombs, justifying the transfer of yet more public resources into private hands.
The lobbies associated with these “defence” industries have every incentive to push for aggressive foreign (and domestic) policies to justify more investment, greater expansion of “defensive” capabilities, and the use of weapons on the battlefield so that they need replenishing.
Whether public or covert, wars provide an opportunity to remake poorly defended, resistant societies – such as Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – in ways that allow for resources to be seized, markets to be expanded and the reach of the corporate elite to be extended.
War is the ultimate growth industry, limited only by our ability to be persuaded of new enemies and new threats.
Fog of war
For the political class, the benefits of war are not simply economic. In a time of environmental collapse, war offers a temporary “Get out of jail” card. During wars, the public is encouraged to assent to new, ever greater sacrifices that allow public wealth to be transferred to the elite. War is the corporate world’s ultimate Ponzi scheme.
The “fog of war” does not just describe the difficulty of knowing what is happening in the immediate heat of battle. It is also the fear, generated by claims of an existential threat, that sets aside normal thinking, normal caution, normal scepticism. It is the invoking of a phantasmagorical enemy towards which public resentments can be directed, shielding from view the real culprits – the corporations and their political cronies at home.
The “fog of war” engineers the disruption of established systems of control and protocol to cope with the national emergency, shrouding and rationalising the accumulation by corporations of more wealth and power and the further capture of organs of the state. It is the licence provided for “exceptional” changes to the rules that quickly become normalised. It is the disinformation that passes for national responsibility and patriotism.
Permanent austerity
All of which explains why Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, has just pledged an extra £16.5 billion in “defence” spending at a time when the UK is struggling to control a pandemic and when, faced by disease, Brexit and a new round of winter floods, the British economy is facing “systemic crisis”, according to a new Cabinet Office report. Figures released this week show the biggest economic contraction in the UK in three centuries.
If the British public is to stomach yet more cuts, to surrender to permanent austerity as the economy tanks, Johnson, ever the populist, knows he needs a good cover story. And that will involve further embellishment of existing, fearmongering narratives about Russia, Iran and China.
To make those narratives plausible, Johnson has to act as if the threats are real, which means massive spending on “defence”. Such expenditure, wholly counter-productive when the current challenge is sustainability, will line the pockets of the very corporations that help Johnson and his pals stay in power, not least by cheerleading him via their media arms.
New salesman needed
The cynical way this works was underscored in a classified 2010 CIA memorandum, known as “Red Cell”, leaked to Wikileaks, as the journalist Glenn Greenwald reminded us this week. The CIA memo addressed the fear in Washington that European publics were demonstrating little appetite for the US-led “war on terror” that followed 9/11. That, in turn, risked limiting the ability of European allies to support the US as it exercised its divine right to wage war.
The memo notes that European support for US wars after 9/11 had chiefly relied on “public apathy” – the fact that Europeans were kept largely ignorant by their own media of what those wars entailed. But with a rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the concern was that this might change. There was an urgent need to further manipulate public opinion more decisively in favour of war.
The US intelligence agency decided its wars needed a facelift. George W Bush, with his Texan, cowboy swagger, had proved a poor salesman. So the CIA turned to identity politics and faux “humanitarianism”, which they believed would play better with European publics.
Part of the solution was to accentuate the suffering of Afghan women to justify war. But the other part was to use President Barack Obama as the face of a new, “caring” approach to war. He had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – even though he had done nothing for peace, and would go on to expand US wars – very possibly as part of this same effort to reinvent the “war on terror”. Polls showed support for existing wars increased markedly among Europeans when they were reminded that Obama backed these wars.
As Greenwald observes:
Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the US and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric US wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.
Obama-style facelift
Once the state is understood as a vehicle for entrenching elite power – and war its most trusted tool for concentrating power – the world becomes far more intelligible. Western economies never stopped being colonial economies, but they were given an Obama-style facelift. War and plunder – even when they masquerade as “defence” or peace – are still the core western mission.
That is why Britons, believing days of empire are long behind them, may have been shocked to learn this week that the UK still operates 145 military bases in 42 countries around the globe, meaning it runs the second largest network of such bases after the US.
Such information is not made available in the UK “mainstream” media, of course. It has to be provided by an “alternative” investigative site, Declassified UK. In that way the vast majority of the British public are left clueless about how their taxes are being used at a time when they are told further belt-tightening is essential.
REVEALED — The UK military’s overseas base network involves 145 sites in 42 countries.
The results of a months-long investigation by @pmillerinfo https://t.co/oaffNnJlZc
— Declassified UK (@declassifiedUK) November 24, 2020
The UK’s network of bases, many of them in the Middle East, close to the world’s largest oil reserves, are what the much-vaunted “special relationship” with the US amounts to. Those bases are the reason the UK – whoever is prime minister – is never going to say “no” to a demand that Britain join Washington in waging war, as it did in attacking Iraq in 2003, or in aiding attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen. The UK is not only a satellite of the US empire, it is a lynchpin of the western imperial war economy.
Ideological alchemy
Once that point is appreciated, the need for external enemies – for our own Eurasias and Eastasias – becomes clearer.
Some of those enemies, the minor ones, come and go, as demand dictates. Iraq dominated western attention for two decades. Now it has served its purpose, its killing fields and “terrorist” recruiting grounds have reverted to a mere footnote in the daily news. Likewise, the Libyan bogeyman Muammar Gaddafi was constantly paraded across news pages until he was bayonetted to death. Now the horror story that is today’s chaotic Libya, a corridor for arms-running and people-trafficking, can be safely ignored. For a decade, the entirely unexceptional Arab dictator Bashar Assad, of Syria, has been elevated to the status of a new Hitler, and he will continue to serve in that role for as long as it suits the needs of the western war economy.
Notably, Israel, another lynchpin of the US empire and one that serves as a kind of offshored weapons testing laboratory for the military-industrial complex, has played a vital role in rationalising these wars. Just as saving Afghan women from Middle Eastern patriarchy makes killing Afghans – men, women and children – more palatable to Europeans, so destroying Arab states can be presented as a humanitarian gesture if at the same time it crushes Israel’s enemies, and by extension, through a strange, implied ideological alchemy, the enemies of all Jews.
Quite how opportunistic – and divorced from reality – the western discourse about Israel and the Middle East has become is obvious the moment the relentless concerns about Syria’s Assad are weighed against the casual indifference towards the head-chopping rulers of Saudi Arabia, who for decades have been financing terror groups across the Middle East, including the jihadists in Syria.
During that time, Israel has covertly allied with oil-rich Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, because all of them are safely ensconced within the US war machine. Now, with the Palestinians completely sidelined diplomatically, and with all international solidarity with Palestinians browbeaten into silence by antisemitism smears, Israel and the Saudis are gradually going public with their alliance, like a pair of shy lovers. That included the convenient leak this week of a secret meeting between Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
My latest: Pompeo’s declaration that criticism of Israel and the peaceful movement urging a boycott of its settlements are ‘antisemitic’ marks the logical endpoint of a foreign policy consensus rapidly taking shape in the US and Europe https://t.co/0fLC8TKnzm
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) November 24, 2020
The west also needs bigger, more menacing and more permanent enemies than Iraq or Syria. Helpfully one kind – nebulous “terrorism” – is the inevitable reaction to western war-making. The more brown people we kill, the more brown people we can justify killing because they carry out, or support, “terrorism” against us. Their hatred for our bombs is an irrationality, a primitivism we must keep stamping out with more bombs.
But concrete, identifiable enemies are needed too. Russia, Iran and China give superficial credence to the war machine’s presentation of itself as a “defence” industry. The UK’s bases around the globe and Boris Johnson’s £16 billion rise in spending on the UK’s war industries only make sense if Britain is under a constant, existential threat. Not just someone with a suspicious backpack on the London Tube, but a sophisticated, fiendish enemy that threatens to invade our lands, to steal resources to which we claim exclusive rights, to destroy our way of life through its masterful manipulation of the internet.
Crushed or tamed
Anyone of significance who questions these narratives that rationalise and perpetuate war is the enemy too. Current political and legal dramas in the US and UK reflect the perceived threat such actors pose to the war machine. They must either be crushed or tamed into subservience.
Trump was initially just such a figure that needed breaking in. The CIA and other intelligence agencies assisted in the organised opposition to Trump – helping to fuel the evidence-free Russiagate “scandal” – not because he was an awful human being or had authoritarian tendencies, but for two more specific reasons.
First, Trump’s political impulses, expressed in the early stages of his presidential campaign, were to withdraw from the very wars the US empire depends on. Despite open disdain for him from most of the media, he was criticised more often for failing to prosecute wars enthusiastically enough rather than for being too hawkish. And second, even as his isolationist impulses were largely subdued after the 2016 election by the permanent bureaucracy and his own officials, Trump proved to be an even more disastrous salesman for war than George W Bush. Trump made war look and sound exactly as it is, rather than packaging it as “intervention” intended to help women and people of colour.
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But Trump’s amateurish isolationism paled in comparison to two far bigger threats to the war machine that emerged over the past decade. One was the danger – in our newly interconnected, digital world – of information leaks that risked stripping away the mask of US democracy, of the “shining city on the hill”, to reveal the tawdry reality underneath.
Julian Assange and his Wikileaks project proved just such a danger. The most memorable leak – at least as far as the general public was concerned – occurred in 2010, with publication of a classified video, titled Collateral Murder, showing a US air crew joking and celebrating as they murdered civilians far below in the streets of Baghdad. It gave a small taste of why western “humanitarianism” might prove so unpopular with those to whom we were busy supposedly bringing “democracy”.
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The threat posed by Assange’s new transparency project was recognised instantly by US officials.
Exhibiting a carefully honed naivety, the political and media establishments have sought to uncouple the fact that Assange has spent most of the last decade in various forms of detention, and is currently locked up in a London high-security prison awaiting extradition to the US, from his success in exposing the war machine. Nonetheless, to ensure his incarceration till death in one of its super-max jails, the US empire has had to conflate the accepted definitions of “journalism” and “espionage”, and radically overhaul traditional understandings of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment.
My latest: Julian Assange was on the front line of a war to remake journalism as a true check on the runaway power of government. Journalists had a chance to ally with him. Instead they served him up as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters https://t.co/oF2nPOix49
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 2, 2020
Dress rehearsal for a coup
An equally grave threat to the war machine was posed by the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of Britain’s Labour party. Corbyn presented as exceptional a problem as Assange.
Before Corbyn, Labour had never seriously challenged the UK’s dominant military-industrial complex, even if its support for war back in the 1960s and 1970s was often tempered by its then-social democratic politics. It was in this period, at the height of the Cold War, that Labour prime minister Harold Wilson was suspected by British elites of failing to share their anti-Communist and anti-Soviet paranoia, and was therefore viewed as a potential threat to their entrenched privileges.
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As a BBC documentary from 2006 notes, Wilson faced the very real prospect of enforced “regime change”, coordinated by the military, the intelligence services and members of the royal family. It culminated in a show of force by the military as they briefly took over Heathrow airport without warning or coordination with Wilson’s government. Marcia Williams, his secretary, called it a “dress rehearsal” for a coup. Wilson resigned unexpectedly soon afterwards, apparently as the pressure started to take its toll.
‘Mutiny’ by the army
Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learnt the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the “defence” establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as the US war machine’s attack dog. Defying that allotted role would be political suicide.
By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.
He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged specifically to challenge the premises of the “war on terror”. He explicitly demanded an end to Israel’s role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party – and claims he was undermining “national security” – Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the “defence” establishment for the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine programme, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn’s socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK’s 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programmes.
In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, Corbyn’s own MPs – still loyal to Blairism – sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.
Weeks after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the general warned that the army would take “direct action” using “whatever means possible, fair or foul” to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be “mutiny”, he said. “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it.”
My latest: Corbyn's election to lead the Labour party didn't overturn the rigged political system or end the corporate chokehold on power. His victory was an accident, and the system has been fighting back with all its might to correct the error ever since https://t.co/2u0Vyo0qLU
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 3, 2019
Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organisations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to “run the gauntlet” as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling.
In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added: “You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses.”
Smears and Brexit
After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn threat was decisively neutralised in the follow-up election two years later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of antisemitism slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe.
Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a surge of antisemitism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the smears – amplified in the media – quickly gained a life of their own. The allegations often bled into broader – and more transparently weaponised – suggestions that Corbyn’s socialist platform and criticisms of capitalism were also antisemitic. (See here, here and here.) But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn on to the national stage.
By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centred that debate on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war machine.
Which is one reason that Johnson’s cash-strapped Britain is now promising an extra £16bn on “defence”. The Tory government’s priorities are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and its ability to continue using war – as well as the unique circumstances of the pandemic – to channel billions from public coffers into the pockets of the establishment.
A Biden makeover
After four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately needs a makeover. The once-confident, youthful Wikileaks is now less able to peek behind the curtain and listen in to the power establishment’s plans for a new administration under Joe Biden.
We can be sure nonetheless that its priorities are no different from those set out in the CIA memo of 2010. Biden’s cabinet, the media has been excitedly trumpeting, is the most “diverse” ever, with women especially prominent in the incoming foreign policy establishment.
There has been a huge investment by Pentagon officials and Congressional war hawks in pushing for Michèle Flournoy to be appointed as the first female defence secretary. Flournoy, like Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Tony Blinken, has played a central role in prosecuting every US war dating back to the Bill Clinton administration.
The other main contender for the spot is Jeh Johnson, who would become the first black defence secretary. As Biden dithers, his advisers’ assessment will focus on who will be best positioned to sell yet more war to a war-weary public.
The role of the imperial project is to use violence as a tool to capture and funnel ever greater wealth – whether it be resources seized in foreign lands or the communal wealth of domestic western populations – into the pockets of the power establishment, and to exercise that power covertly enough, or at a great enough distance, that no meaningful resistance is provoked.
A strong dose of identity politics may buy a little more time. But the war economy is as unsustainable as everything else our societies are currently founded on. Sooner or later the war machine is going to run out of fuel.
The post The Planet Cannot Begin to Heal Until We Rip the Mask off the West’s War Machine first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
by Jacob Ecclestone and Bernie Corbett
There is a scandal and a crisis in British journalism. For the past three weeks or so a crucial extradition hearing has been taking place in the Central Criminal Court in London. You won’t know about it if you rely for your news on the established newspapers, the BBC or ITV or Channel 4. They have the resources to report it but they are not doing so. You still wouldn’t know if you followed any of the many online news operations, which don’t have the resources to cover a major trial.
The case revolves around Julian Assange, of Wikileaks, and the government of the United States of America, which wishes to extradite this pioneering journalist and revealer of the truth and put him into a horrible prison until he dies.
Apparently there are about ten journalists regularly attending the court and taking notes, but as far as we know only one of them is publishing serious accounts of the ridiculous and disgraceful procedures. The vast majority of the public are unaware the proceedings are even taking place, let alone the distortion of justice that is happening in plain sight.
This is a case about free speech, exposure of wicked secrets, and the ability of journalists to operate in society. Yet journalists themselves are turning their backs on it. It almost seems as if they hope Assange will be taken away, removed from public view, and they will be left to plough their establishment furrow without being troubled by an outlier who showed us that some things are not as they appear.
Journalists should be covering the proceedings day by day, exposing the lengths and depths to which American and British politicians, lawyers and journalists are colluding.
The only journalist who is doing this is Craig Murray, formerly the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, whose blog probably has a small readership, and who himself is in jeopardy of prison because of his fearless exposure of establishment corruption and lying.
The Assange “trial” is comparable to that of Dreyfus, with our “free” press betraying both the word itself and their readers and viewers. The more that people round the world are able to read what is going on, the greater the pressure on our government. Our judiciary is being corrupted and our judicial system poisoned at the behest of Trump and as a result we are sliding towards fascism. Please do all you can to give “the oxygen of publicity” to this grotesque persecution of Assange.
We are both retired. Jacob was a journalist and union leader on the pre-Murdoch Times for 20 years and then the deputy general secretary of the National Union of Journalists from 1980 to 1997. Bernie was a senior journalist on the Birmingham Post, Guardian and Independent, then editor of the NUJ newspaper Journalist, then an organiser, negotiator and case worker for the NUJ, then general secretary of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain from 2000 to 2016.
We might be old but we can still smell injustice and we are incredulous that the present generation of journalists is ignoring this critical travesty.
The post The silence around Assange appeared first on Media Reform Coalition.
This post was originally published on Media Reform Coalition.
More than 100 doctors and psychologists from 18 different nations have renewed calls for the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from Belmarsh Prison in the UK. Chris Graham reports.
In a letter first published today in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, the 117 doctors and psychologists express concern over “medical neglect” and Assange’s fitness for his legal proceedings.
The Lancet letter affirms the alarm raised by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, and several specialists in the field, that Assange is in a dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture.
Assange will front a London court next week, February 24, having endured almost eight in “arbitrary detention”, according to the United Nations.
A copy of the letter has been sent to Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Marise Payne, following an earlier letter by ‘Doctors 4 Assange’ in December last year. It calls on Payne to bring Assange home to Australia for urgent medical care.
A copy has also been sent to the UK Government, who the doctors’ accuse of violating Assange’s human right to health. In a covering note to Marise Payne the doctors urged the Minister to “act decisively now” to remove Assange from Belmarsh prison, before it is too late.
“Should Mr Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will have effectively been tortured to death,” the letter warns. “Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors’ watch.
“The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds. We condemn the torture of Assange. We condemn the denial of his fundamental right to appropriate healthcare. We condemn the violations of his right to doctor-patient confidentiality.
“Politics cannot be allowed to interfere with the right to health and the practice of medicine. In the experience of UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, the scale of state interference is without precedent.
“Since doctors first began assessing Mr Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2015, expert medical opinion and doctors’ urgent recommendations have been consistently ignored.
“This politicisation of foundational medical principles is of grave concern to us, as it carries implications beyond the case of Julian Assange.
“Abuse by politically motivated medical neglect sets a dangerous precedent, ultimately undermining our profession’s impartiality, commitment to health for all, and obligation to do no harm.
“Our appeals are simple: we are calling upon governments to end the torture of Mr Assange and ensure his access to the best available healthcare, before it is too late.
Our request to others is this: please join us.”
The letter links to a website, Doctors 4 Assange where readers can get more information.
Timeline of a detention
Assange has now been held in arbitrary detention for almost eight years, after being granted asylum in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy in June 2012. In May last year, that asylum was withdrawn after Assange published a series of leaks that levelled corruption allegations against key figures in a new Ecuadorian Government. He was arrested by British Police inside the embassy and sentenced to 50 months jail in Britain for breaching earlier bail conditions, imposed while Sweden was seeking his extradition on allegations relating to two women.
Sweden has abandoned those cases, however immediately after his arrest the US sought his extradition over the 2010 leak of military files to Wikileaks by former defence analyst, Chelsea Manning.
Assange has been held in the UK without charge while he awaits the outcome of those extradition proceedings.
Ms Manning is also being held in jail after refusing to testify before a US grand jury against Assange, arguing she had already provided her testimony at a lengthy military hearing.
In addition to her incarceration, which remains until the term of the grand jury expires in late 2020, while-ever Manning refuses to testify she is also being fined $1,000 per day.
The post On The Eve Of Julian Assange’s Extradition Hearing, Doctors Renew Calls For His Freedom appeared first on New Matilda.
This post was originally published on New Matilda.
The roll call of those who have not only failed Julian Assange but actively worked to silence him is a long one, and a very ‘Australian’ one. John Pilger explains.
On Saturday, there will be a march from Australia House in London to Parliament Square, the centre of British democracy. People will carry pictures of the Australian publisher and journalist Julian Assange who, on February 24, faces a court that will decide whether or not he is to be extradited to the United States and a living death.
I know Australia House well. As an Australian myself, I used to go there in my early days in London to read the newspapers from home. Opened by King George V over a century ago, its vastness of marble and stone, chandeliers and solemn portraits, imported from Australia when Australian soldiers were dying in the slaughter of the First World War, have ensured its landmark as an imperial pile of monumental servility.
As one of the oldest ‘diplomatic missions’ in the United Kingdom, this relic of empire provides a pleasurable sinecure for Antipodean politicians: a ‘mate’ rewarded or a troublemaker exiled.
Known as High Commissioner, the equivalent of an ambassador, the current beneficiary is George Brandis, who as Attorney General tried to water down Australia’s Race Discrimination Act and approved raids on whistleblowers who had revealed the truth about Australia’s illegal spying on East Timor during negotiations for the carve-up of that impoverished country’s oil and gas.
This led to the prosecution of Bernard Collaery and ‘Witness K’, on bogus charges. Like Julian Assange, they are to be silenced in a Kafkaesque trial and put away.
Australia House is the ideal starting point for Saturday’s march.
“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1898, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”
We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Having devastated our Indigenous people in an invasion and a war of attrition that continues to this day, we have spilt blood for our imperial masters in China, Africa, Russia, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. No imperial adventure against those with whom we have no quarrel has escaped our dedication.
Deception has been a feature. When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a training team, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External Affairs wrote secretly that “although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam”, the order came from Washington.
Two versions. The lie for us, the truth for them. As many as four million people died in the Vietnam war.
When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the Australian Ambassador, Richard Woolcott, secretly urged the government in Canberra to “act in a way which would be designed to minimise the public impact in Australia and show private understanding to Indonesia”. In other words, to lie. He alluded to the beckoning spoils of oil and gas in the Timor Sea which, boasted Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, were worth “zillions”.
In the genocide that followed, at least 200,000 East Timorese died. Australia recognised, almost alone, the legitimacy of the occupation.
When Prime Minister John Howard sent Australian special forces to invade Iraq with America and Britain in 2003, he – like George W. Bush and Tony Blair – lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. More than a million people died in Iraq.
WikiLeaks was not the first to call out the pattern of criminal lying in democracies that remain every bit as rapacious as in Lord Curzon’s day. The achievement of the remarkable publishing organisation founded by Julian Assange has been to provide the proof.
Truth to power
WikiLeaks has informed us how illegal wars are fabricated, how governments are overthrown and violence is used in our name, how we are spied upon through our phones and screens. The true lies of presidents, ambassadors, political candidates, generals, proxies, political fraudsters have been exposed. One by one, these would-be emperors have realised they have no clothes.
It has been an unprecedented public service; above all, it is authentic journalism, whose value can be judged by the degree of apoplexy of the corrupt and their apologists.
For example, in 2016, WikiLeaks published the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, which revealed a direct connection between Clinton, the foundation she shares with her husband and the funding of organised jihadism in the Middle East – terrorism.
One email disclosed that Islamic State (ISIS) was bankrolled by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, from which Clinton accepted huge “donations”. Moreover, as US Secretary of State, she approved the world’s biggest ever arms sale to her Saudi benefactors, worth more than $80 billion. Thanks to her, US arms sales to the world – for use in stricken countries like Yemen – doubled.
Revealed by WikiLeaks and published in The New York Times, the Podesta emails triggered a vituperative campaign against editor-in-chief Julian Assange, bereft of evidence. He was an “agent of Russia working to elect Trump”; the nonsensical “Russiagate” followed. That WikiLeaks had also published more than 800,000 frequently damning documents from Russia was ignored.
On an Australian Broadcasting Corporation programme, Four Corners, in 2017, Clinton was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson, who began: “No one could fail to be moved by the pain on your face at [the moment of Donald Trump’s inauguration]… Do you remember how visceral it was for you?”
Having established Clinton’s visceral suffering, the fawning Ferguson described “Russia’s role” and the “damage done personally to you” by Julian Assange.
Clinton replied, “He [Assange] is very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence. And he has done their bidding.”
Ferguson said to Clinton, “Lots of people, including in Australia, think that Assange is a martyr of free speech and freedom of information. How would you describe him?”
Again, Clinton was allowed to defame Assange – a “nihilist” in the service of “dictators” – while Ferguson assured her interviewee she was “the icon of your generation”.
There was no mention of a leaked document, revealed by WikiLeaks, called Libya Tick Tock, prepared for Hillary Clinton, which described her as the central figure driving the destruction of the Libyan state in 2011. This resulted in 40,000 deaths, the arrival of ISIS in North Africa and the European refugee and migrant crisis.
For me, this episode of Clinton’s interview – and there are many others – vividly illustrates the division between false and true journalism. On February 24, when Julian Assange steps into Woolwich Crown Court, true journalism will be the only crime on trial.
Why Assange?
I am sometimes asked why I have championed Assange. For one thing, I like and I admire him. He is a friend with astonishing courage; and he has a finely honed, wicked sense of humour. He is the diametric opposite of the character invented then assassinated by his enemies.
As a reporter in places of upheaval all over the world, I have learned to compare the evidence I have witnessed with the words and actions of those with power. In this way, it is possible to get a sense of how our world is controlled and divided and manipulated, how language and debate are distorted to produce the propaganda of false consciousness.
When we speak about dictatorships, we call this brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It is a truth we rarely apply to our own societies, regardless of the trail of blood that leads back to us, and which never dries.
WikiLeaks has exposed this. That is why Assange is in a maximum security prison in London facing concocted political charges in America, and why he has shamed so many of those paid to keep the record straight.
Watch these journalists now look for cover as it dawns on them that the American fascists who have come for Assange may come for them, not least those on the Guardian who collaborated with WikiLeaks and won prizes and secured lucrative book and Hollywood deals based on his work, before turning on him.
In 2011, David Leigh, the Guardian’s ‘investigations editor’, told journalism students at City University in London that Assange was “quite deranged”. When a puzzled student asked why, Leigh replied, “Because he doesn’t understand the parameters of conventional journalism.”
But it’s precisely because he did understand that the “parameters” of the media often shielded vested and political interests and had nothing to do with transparency that the idea of WikiLeaks was so appealing to many people, especially the young, rightly cynical about the so-called “mainstream”.
Leigh mocked the very idea that, once extradited, Assange would end up “wearing an orange jumpsuit”. These were things, he said, “that he and his lawyer are saying in order to feed his paranoia”.
The current US charges against Assange centre on the Afghan Logs and Iraq Logs, which the Guardian published and Leigh worked on, and on the Collateral Murder video showing an American helicopter crew gunning down civilians and celebrating the crime. For this journalism, Assange faces 17 charges of “espionage” which carry prison sentences totalling 175 years.
Whether or not his prison uniform will be an “orange jumpsuit”, US court files seen by Assange’s lawyers reveal that, once extradited, Assange will be subject to Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMS. A 2017 report by Yale University Law School and the Center for Constitutional Rights described SAMS as “the darkest corner of the US federal prison system” combining “the brutality and isolation of maximum security units with additional restrictions that deny individuals almost any connection to the human world… The net effect is to shield this form of torture from any real public scrutiny.”
That Assange has been right all along, and getting him to Sweden was a fraud to cover an American plan to “render” him, is finally becoming clear to many who swallowed the incessant scuttlebutt of character assassination.
“I speak fluent Swedish and was able to read all the original documents,” Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, said recently, “I could hardly believe my eyes. According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never taken place at all. And not only that: the woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm Police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages.”
Meanwhile in London…
Keir Starmer is currently running for election as leader of the Labour Party in Britain. Between 2008 and 2013, he was Director of Public Prosecutions and responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service. According to Freedom of Information searches by the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, Sweden tried to drop the Assange case in 2011, but a CPS official in London told the Swedish prosecutor not to treat it as “just another extradition”.
In 2012, she received an email from the CPS: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!” Other CPS emails were either deleted or redacted. Why? Keir Starmer needs to say why.
At the forefront of Saturday’s march will be John Shipton, Julian’s father, whose indefatigable support for his son is the antithesis of the collusion and cruelty of the governments of Australia, our homeland.
The roll call of shame begins with Julia Gillard, the Australian Labor prime minister who, in 2010, wanted to criminalise WikiLeaks, arrest Assange and cancel his passport – until the Australian Federal Police pointed out that no law allowed this and that Assange had committed no crime.
While falsely claiming to give him consular assistance in London, it was the Gillard government’s shocking abandonment of its citizen that led to Ecuador granting political asylum to Assange in its London embassy.
In a subsequent speech before the US Congress, Gillard, a favourite of the US embassy in Canberra, broke records for sycophancy (according to the website Honest History) as she declared, over and again, the fidelity of America’s “mates Down Under”.
Today, while Assange waits in his cell, Gillard travels the world, promoting herself as a feminist concerned about “human rights”, often in tandem with that other right-on feminist Hillary Clinton.
The truth is that Australia could have rescued Julian Assange and can still rescue him.
In 2010, I arranged to meet a prominent Liberal (Conservative) Member of Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull. As a young barrister in the 1980s, Turnbull had successfully fought the British Government’s attempts to prevent the publication of the book Spycatcher, whose author Peter Wright, a spy, had exposed Britain’s “deep state”.
We talked about his famous victory for free speech and publishing and I described the miscarriage of justice awaiting Assange – the fraud of his arrest in Sweden and its connection with an American indictment that tore up the US Constitution and the rule of international law.
Turnbull appeared to show genuine interest and an aide took extensive notes. I asked him to deliver a letter to the Australian government from Gareth Peirce, the renowned British human rights lawyer who represents Assange.
In the letter, Peirce wrote, “Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions… it is very hard to attempt to preserve for [Julian Assange] any presumption of innocence. Mr Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.”
Turnbull promised to deliver the letter, follow it through and let me know. I subsequently wrote to him several times, waited and heard nothing.
In 2018, John Shipton wrote a deeply moving letter to the then prime minister of Australia asking him to exercise the diplomatic power at his government’s disposal and bring Julian home. He wrote that he feared that if Julian was not rescued, there would be a tragedy and his son would die in prison. He received no reply. The prime minister was Malcolm Turnbull.
Last year, when the current prime minister, Scott Morrison, a former public relations man, was asked about Assange, he replied in his customary way, “He should face the music!”
When Saturday’s march reaches the Houses of Parliament, said to be “the Mother of Parliaments”, Morrison and Gillard and Turnbull and all those who have betrayed Julian Assange should be called out; history and decency will not forget them or those who remain silent now.
And if there is any sense of justice left in the land of Magna Carta, the travesty that is the case against this heroic Australian must be thrown out. Or beware, all of us.
• The march on Saturday, 22 February begins at Australia House in Aldwych, London WC2B 4LA, at 12.30pm: assemble at 11.30am.
The post Julian Assange Must Be Freed, Not Betrayed: John Pilger appeared first on New Matilda.
This post was originally published on New Matilda.
