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Category: WikiLeaks

  • JERAA urges US to drop spy charges – return Assange to Australia

    Pacific Media Watch

    The Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia (JERAA) has joined media freedom groups supporting Julian Assange, an Australian citizen whose unjust prosecution continues to undermine press freedoms and human rights.

    In light of recent developments and mounting concerns over Assange’s deteriorating health, JERAA said in a statement it had urged the United States to drop all charges against Assange and facilitate his immediate return to Australia.

    Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been the subject of relentless persecution by the US government for his efforts to expose war crimes and government misconduct.

    Assange received a Walkley Award in 2011 for outstanding contribution to journalism through Wikileaks, which included the release of the 2010 “collateral murder” video and the publication of classified US diplomatic cables, shedding light on atrocities committed by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    “It is concerning that Assange faces up to 175 years in jail if found guilty of espionage charges — a sentence that would effectively silence whistle-blowers and journalists worldwide,” JERAA said.

    The association said it believed that Assange’s indictment set a dangerous precedent and posed a grave threat to the fundamental principles of press freedom and freedom of expression.

    ‘Enough is enough’
    JERAA commended Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for his support in calling for Assange’s release and said it echoed his sentiment that “enough is enough.”

    PM Albanese’s recent vote in the federal Parliament for a motion demanding Assange’s return to Australia underscores the legitimacy of our demand. The motion, which received overwhelming support, leaves no room for ambiguity — it is time to bring Assange home.


    The WikiLeaks 2010 “collateral damage” video.         Video: Al Jazeera

    As the UK High Court prepares to rule on Assange’s appeal against extradition in a two-day hearing next week (February 20-21), and with Prime Minister Albanese’s continued efforts to advocate for Assange’s release, JERAA has urged the US to heed the calls for justice and drop all charges against Assange.

    It is imperative that Assange’s rights as an Australian citizen be respected, and that he be afforded the opportunity to return home.

    JERAA president Associate Professor Alexandra Wake said that while some members might not agree with all Assange has done in his life, it was clear that his work was central to our “understanding of press freedoms and human rights”.

    “JERAA upholds the principles of a free and independent press. It is time to end the trial of global media freedom,” she said.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • As ‘Day X’ approaches, do you really want to be on the wrong side of history?

    Next week, jailed journalist Julian Assange will have an appeal hearing in London. It could be the last attempt to stop him being sent to the US, where he faces 175 years in prison. So, people are already mobilising to show solidarity and support with him. And if you’re not – consider what side of history you’re going to be on.

    Assange’s final chance?

    As campaign group Free Assange wrote:

    The UK High Court has confirmed that a public hearing will take place on 20-21 February 2024. The two-day hearing may be the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States. If extradited, Assange faces a sentence of 175 years for exposing war crimes committed by the United States in the Afghan and Iraq wars.

    The Canary has extensively documented Assange’s case. He has been confined in the high-security Belmarsh Prison since he was arrested on a US extradition request on 11 April 2019. Since then, it has become clear that his charges, his incarceration, and the US state’s attempted extradition of him amount to not only a witch hunt and human rights violations, but an attempt to set a precedent regarding the freedom of journalists and publishers.

    Multiple twists and turns

    Assange’s case has had multiple twists and turns:

    • In 2017, US congressman Dana Rohrabacher met with the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to offer him a deal. Robinson was present at the meeting. Rohrabacher wanted Assange to provide evidence that Russia did not hack the Democratic National Committee emails. At the time, president Donald Trump was under investigation as part of the Mueller inquiry into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. Rohrabacher told Assange that if he agreed to provide the evidence, Trump would arrange a pardon or protection against extradition. But Assange was not prepared to name the source of the leak. An indictment followed.
    • UN special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer concluded in 2019 that Assange had been subjected to “torture”.
    • In May 2020 details of the notorious Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that Assange would likely be subject to if extradited to the US were published by the Canary. According to one report SAMs are “the darkest corner of the U.S. 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”.
    • In January 2021, a judge ruled that Assange’s extradition was disallowed on health grounds and the risk that he could take his own life.
    • Meanwhile, in October 2021 news emerged that the CIA planned to kidnap and kill Assange in London.
    • In December 2021 the US appealed the extradition decision, offering an ‘assurance’ that, according to Assange’s lawyer, US authorities would not “place him under SAMs unless they decide he later deserves it”. The magistrate then ruled that the extradition could go ahead after all, once the home secretary approves it.
    • In June 2022, then UK home secretary Priti Patel agreed that Assange could be extradited.
    • Further appeals from Assange’s legal team followed – and failed.
    • Of the 18 charges listed against Assange, one is simply about measures taken by any journalist to protect a source – in this instance Chelsea Manning. The other charges merely relate to receiving and publishing of information and so violate a journalist’s freedom of expression.

    Protest in solidarity with Assange

    Now, Assange is facing his last chance to stop the extradition. That’s why hundreds of people will be supporting him – protesting outside the Royal Courts of Justice during the hearing.

    On Tuesday 20 and Wednesday 21 February, people will gather from 8.30am. They will be witness to what Free Assange says is a:

    decisive stage in Mr Assange’s appeals [which] will determine one of two outcomes: whether Mr. Assange will have further opportunities to argue his case before the domestic (UK) courts, or whether he will have exhausted all appeals without a possibility for further appeal in the UK and thus enter the process of extradition. An application before the European Court of Human Rights remains a possibility.

    The campaign for freedom is supported by Amnesty International, the National Union of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and virtually every civil rights, press freedom, and journalists’ union in the world.

    As John Rees from the Free Assange campaign said:

    This is the most important press freedom case of the 21st century – we must ensure we don’t lose any hard-won freedoms.

    What side of history are you on?

    However, it is perhaps his wife Stella who summed the situation up best. She said:

    The last four and a half years have taken the most considerable toll on Julian and his family, including our two young sons.

    His mental health and physical state have deteriorated significantly.

    With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2019, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials were involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited. The persecution of this innocent journalist and publisher must end.

    You can find out more about the days of action here.

    This is not a case just about Assange. The freedom of every independent journalist and publisher who are brave enough to challenge corporate, capitalist, and colonial powers is at stake. To stay silent now is to mark your place on the wrong side of history.

    Feature image via Anarchmedia – Flickr

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The “Reality” around Us is Constructed by Liars: “Journalists are War Criminals”

    Albert Einstein argued,

    [P]rivate capital tends to become concentrated in few hands”, resulting in “an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organised political society.

    Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education).

    It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights. [May 1949 edition of socialist magazine Monthly Review]

    Thomas Jefferson wrote of Newspapers Lies:

    Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time;… General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn of the great facts, and the details are all false.1

    Chronologically,

    – vested interests journalism made the killing, capturing, transporting and slavery of Africans acceptable in colonial times and during the early United States of America.

    –   corrupted journalists drummed up hate against Indigenous peoples and the later desire for war and the pillage of Mexico.

    • Hearst newspapers’ journalists convinced enough Americas to war on Spain, Cuba and the Filipinos
    • journalists working for President Wilson’s established Committee on Public Information created a public desire for entering the First World War.

    –  journalists made U.S. corporations arming of Hitler’s poor Nazi Germany acceptable as a ‘bulwark’ against Communist Soviet Russia.2

    –  Julius Streicher, Nazi newspaper publisher was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials and was executed by hanging on October 16, 1946

    • cooperating journalists made a U.S. genocidal war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia appear necessary as was war in Korea before, and neo-colonial U.S. wars in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East thereafter.
    • Journalists reported non-existent popular demonstrations fired upon in Libya, which the UN had cited for its higher standard of living than 9 European countries. Journalists hail US/NATO bombing and terrorist army, slander Gaddafi – did not cover a near million Libyans wildly demonstrating in support of their wealthy and democratic Green Book Arab Socialist government.3

    –  All mainstream journalists ridiculed Gaddafi’s wonderful address to the UN General Assembly in which he, as no one had done before, described how the UN has sanctified US-NATO invasions and bombings in falsification of its charter from its very beginning, and labeled the UN Security Council correctly, a ‘council of terror.’

    • The CIA currently maintains a network of journalists around the world, who influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda, and provide direct access to a large amount of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.”4

    WAR BY MEDIA

    At London’s Trafalgar Square, on October 8, 2011 during the U.S. U.K. genocide in Iraq, Australian editor, publisher, activist and founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange spoke encouragingly about how “peace can be started by truth”:

    “. . . and that is something I want to talk about. What can we do with our values, what can we do at all in relation to this (Iraq) war? Because the reality is Margaret Thatcher had it right; there is no society any more. What there is is a transnational security elite that is busy carving up the world using your tax money.

    To combat that elite we must not petition; we must take it over.

    We must form our own networks of strength and mutual value which can challenge those strengths and self-interested values of the warmongers in this country and in others that have formed hand in hand an alliance to take money from the United States, from every NATO country, from Australia and launder it through Afghanistan, launder it through Iraq, lander it through Somalia , launder it through Yemen, launder it through Pakistan and wash that money in peoples blood.

    I don’t need to tell you the depravity of war, you are all too familiar with its images, with the refugees of war, with information that we have revealed showing the everyday squalor and barbarity of war.

    Information such as the individual deaths of over 130,000 people in Iraq. Individual deaths that were kept secret by the US military who denied that they ever counted the deaths of civilians.

    “Wars Can Be Undone!”

    Instead I want to tell you what I think is the way that wars come to be and that wars can be undone.

        “Wars Are a Result of Lies.”

    In democracies, or the pseudo-democracies that we are evolving into, wars are a result of lies. The Vietnam War and the push for US involvement was the result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident . . . a lie. The Iraq War famously is the result of lies. Wars in Somalia are a result of lies. The Second World War and the German invasion of Poland was the result of carefully constructed lies.

                “Average death count attributed to each journalist?”

    That is war by media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press, what is the average death count attributed to each journalist?

    When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries then who are the war criminals? 

                            “Journalists Are War Criminals!”

    It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. And while one might think that that should lead us to a state of despair, that the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars, is constructed by people who are close to those that they are meant to be policing, it should lead us also to an optimistic understanding because if wars can be started by lies, truth can be started, peace can be started by truth. So that is our task and it is your task, go and get the truth, get into the ballpark and get the ball and give it to us and we’ll spread it all over the world.” [War By Media: “Journalists Are War Criminals,” Julian Assange “The Reality That Is Constructed Around Us Is Constructed By Liars.” Celia Farber, The Truth Barrier, Oct. 10, 2023]

    Julian Assange spoke succinctly about those media journalists who read us selected, bent and twisted news to disinform, blind or trick the public to support, accept or ignore ongoing atrocity wars even when massive amount of lives are being taken.

    Gaza as a flagrant example:

    First, 

    a Description of  An Ongoing Unmitigated Glaringly Obvious Horrific Criminal Unbearably Cruel Genocide in Gaza and the October 7 Lethal Hamas Attack (Julian Assange said “truth can be started, peace can be started by truth.”)

    Is followed by

    The Reconstructed ‘Reality’ of Gaza Reconstructed by Western Media’ Wars Enabling Liars as ‘Acceptable,’ ‘Excusable,’ and/or a ‘Reasonable and ‘Proportionate’ ‘Necessary’ Defensive Reaction,’ and Not Seen as Genocide. Also a ‘Reconstructed October 7 ‘Reality’

    (“Wars Are a Result of Lies,”  and wars kept going by lies)

    First,

    A basic reality never mentioned in Western media is that Israel has been killing its own imprisoned Palestinians, imprisoned in its generations long, UN declared illegal, military occupation, while international law regarding military occupation has the occupying power responsible for the well being of its militarily occupied population. Also, Israel’s settling half a million Israelis in occupied Palestinian territory displacing the local population contravenes fundamental rules of international humanitarian law.

    Since October 7, In Israeli militarily occupied and blockaded Gaza, more than 27,000 Palestinians,5 mostly women and children, have already been killed by Israeli Air Force bombings with U.S. supplied warplanes and bombs. Over 66,000 have been wounded,[8] Thirty percent of the homes and buildings in the cities of Gaza have been destroyed completely or in part, and thousands are believed to be still buried in the ruble.  According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), of the thousands of maimed and crippled children, hundreds have suffered amputations of limbs, many without anaesthesia. Since October 7, Israeli attacks have killed 11,500 children in the Gaza Strip.6 Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them presumed dead.

    This grim toll means that one Palestinian child is killed every 15 minutes, or that about one child out of every 100 in Gaza has perished, leading the UN to say that the Gaza Strip is a “graveyard for children.”

    Half a million residents are starving with very little food and water and no electricity and most humanitarian aid blocked from being imported.[New York Times Jan. 31] Tens of thousands trying to escape the indiscriminate bombings have been forced into intensely crowded together refuge with little toilet facilities now rampant with disease. Report: Israel burns down hundreds of homes in Gaza:

    Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports it has obtained exclusive information saying that Israeli army commanders have been ordering their troops to destroy unoccupied Gaza homes. The commanders have been doing this without obtaining proper legal approval, the report says. “After the structure is set on fire along with everything inside it, it is allowed to burn out until it is rendered useless,” Haaretz wrote. The newspaper cited three Israeli army officials who have been “spearheading” Gaza operations, who confirmed that this is common practice.7 The UN Court of Justice is still hearing the great amount of evidence of Israeli committed genocide. US State Dept said “not seeing acts of genocide” in Gaza.8 Some Israeli leaders and rabbis have engaged in genocidal talk praised ethnic cleansing operations, one minister suggesting nuclear bombing of Gaza. Western media keeps quoting Isreal’s right to defend itself. All the above mentioned death, suffering and destruction is continually excused by Isreal to be necessary because Israel must kill Hamas to defend itself from future Hamas attack.9 Western media never questions why Israel could not just defend itself with it vast arsenal of U.S. supplied weapons instead of claiming It has had to kill 10,000 children among more than 27,000 Palestinians in order protect Israel from Hamas (an acronym of its official name), the Islamic Resistance Movement, an elected Palestinian Sunni Islamist political and military organisation governing the Gaza Strip of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

    The Oct. 7  Hamas Attack

    It has been widely reported that at the end of a Jewish holiday on October 7, hundreds of Hamas fighters, and other militants, broke through Gaza’s militarised border, crossed into Israel by land, air and sea and reportedly (with some amount of documentation), killed civilians in the streets, in their homes and at an outdoor rave party.

    Israel’s latest official estimated death toll of soldiers and civilians during the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion is 1,200.10

    UN Secretary General Guterres stated on October 25.

    It was important to acknowledge that the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing,” The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify those appalling attacks, and those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

    Hamas issued on Jan. 21, an 18-page document explaining its official explanation for why it launched its attack on Israel October 7, saying that it was aimed at stopping the expansion of West Bank settlements and bringing an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

    In its report titled “Our Narrative” Hamas, which is also the elected government of Gaza, said it wanted to “clarify” the background and dynamics of its surprise attack. The group said that avoiding harming civilians “is a religious and moral commitment” by fighters of Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades. “If there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces.” Hamas said in the report. “Many Israelis were killed by the Israeli army and police due to their confusion.” [19] Hamas’ describes its October 7th goal was to launch a commando-style assault on four military bases surrounding Gaza to kill or take hostage as many Israeli soldiers as possible, and a similar assault on local Israeli communities to seize civilian hostages in order to trade the hostages for Palestinian prisoners, thousands of whom are in Israeli jails, including women and children, often held without a military trial or even charges. To the Palestinian public, these prisoners are no less hostages than the Israelis held in Gaza.

    Western media journalists keep citing the hostages Palestinian Hamas is holding as one of the reasons for war. But the thousands of Palestinians are currently in Israeli prisons are never mentioned. And how many of them are children? First the figure mentioned was 7,000, a month later 9,000. (Since 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, it has arrested an estimated one million Palestinians, the United Nations reported last summer. One in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged under the 1,600 military orders that control every aspect of the lives of Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation. That incarceration rate doubles for Palestinian men — two in every five have been arrested.)

    Forces of five other militant groups, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, Al-Azsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Omar Al-Qasim Forces, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Mujahideen Brigades also invaded on Oct. 7, and three groups – PIJ, the Mujahideen Brigades and Al-Nasser Salah al-Deen Brigades – claim to have seized Israeli hostages, alongside Hamas, on that day.Hamas says its October 7 attacks in southern Israel were a “necessary step” against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. But the Islamist group admitted in its 16-page report justifying the attack that “some faults happened” due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza.” The Palestinian source said through the memorandum, Hamas was sending a message to the International Court of Justice in The Hague that Hamas should not be judged solely by the events of October 7 without examining Israel’s conduct in the West Bank and Gaza over the past decades.

    Hamas pointed to the historical origins of the conflict, saying “the battle of the Palestinian people against occupation and colonialism did not start on October 7, but started 105 years ago, including 30 years of British colonialism and 75 years of Zionist occupation.”

    The group said it wanted to “hold the Israeli occupation legally accountable” for the suffering it had inflicted on the Palestinian people. Hamas said the attack was “to confront all Israeli conspiracies against the Palestinian people.” The militant group urged “the immediate halt of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, the crimes and ethnic cleansing committed against the entire Gaza population.”

    The group blames Israeli helicopters for killing “many” of the 364 civilians massacred at the Nova music festival, saying that Hamas “had no prior knowledge of it.” The document alleges hypocrisy on the part of those who would accept civilian casualties as collateral damage in Gaza while condemning Hamas’s actions during its massacres on October 7.

    The document calls for an investigation by the International Criminal Court to look at “the broader context” of the October 7 attack as part of the “struggle against colonialism, as a “national liberation and resistance movement.” The document refers to several clauses in Hamas’s updated charter from 2017, alleging that the conflict is not with the Jews, but rather with Zionism. The section condemns “what the Jews were exposed to by Nazi Germany and praises Muslim nations for having provided Jews a “safe haven” for centuries.

    The document says that Hamas receives their legitimacy from the “Palestinian right to self-defence, liberation and self-determination,” claiming that according to “all norms, divine religions and international laws,” as well as the Geneva convention, parties are granted the right to resist when facing “the longest and brutalist colonial occupation,” as well as “massacres” and “oppression.”

    Calls on all countries around the world to back “Palestinian resistance” and support the Palestinians’ “struggle for liberation.” Calls on its allies to “support… the Palestinian resistance,” to charge Israel with crimes, to mobilise against “Israeli aggression” on Gaza, and to stop governments from providing further aid or arms to Israel.

    “Israel has destroyed our ability to create a Palestinian state by accelerating the settlement enterprise,” Hamas said, blaming the United Nations for failing to stop the process. “Were we supposed to continue waiting and relying on the helpless UN institutions?” the document asked. The organisation claimed that the Gaza had “been turned into the world’s largest open-air prison” and that the war “was necessary to end the blockade.

    And it said it rejected any international and Israeli efforts to decide Gaza’s post-war future. “We stress that the Palestinian people have the capacity to decide their future and to arrange their internal affairs,” the report said, adding that “no party in the world” had the right to decide on their behalf.

    Unknown to most western audiences, there has been a steady trickle of evidence from Israeli sources over the past two months implicating Israel’s own military in many of the killings attributed to Hamas. A police investigation shows Israeli Apache helicopters opened fire on attendees of the Nova music festival during the 7 October Hamas attack. [25] Israeli resent investigations have found that a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition. Since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles, Kalashnikov rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many if not most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots.

    At Kampala, Uganda, on Jan 17, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres addressing a summit of the Group of 77 (G-77) and China, with more than 130 countries– the largest grouping of the global South, representing 80 per cent of the planet’s population, denounced Israel for the “heartbreaking” deaths of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and called it unacceptable to resist statehood for the Palestinian people.[Reuters]

    (Julian Assange said “truth can be started, peace can be started by truth.”)

    Now

    The Reconstructed ‘Reality’ of Gaza Reconstructed by Western Media’ Wars Enabling Liars to portray the annihilation in Gaza as ‘Acceptable,’ ‘Excusable,’ and/or a ‘Reasonable and ‘Proportionate’ ‘Necessary’ Defensive Reaction,’ and Not Seen as Genocide. 

    (“,wars can be started by lies,” – then kept going by lies)

    Hamas “beheading 40 babies” – headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. U.S. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that “Israeli women were raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.”

    This is journalism that projects thinking the wholesale destruction  of Gaza to eliminate Hamas is morally justified.

    Hamas is pictured as bloodthirsty savages. Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.

    An Israeli first responder to the October 7 terror attack has claimed that Hamas terrorists roasted a baby in an oven in shocking video testimony. Asher Moskowitz, of the United Hatzalah first responder group, published a video of himself speaking to a camera, delivering his witness account.

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken even describing in graphic detail – and wholly falsely – a Hamas attack on an Israeli family: “The father’s eye gouged out in front of his kids. The mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed.Then their executioners sat down and had a meal.” Hamas beheaded 40 babies, baked another in an oven, carried out mass, systematic rapes, and cut a foetus from its mother’s womb.

    Efforts by the United Nations to investigate these claims being obstructed by Israel go unreported.

    Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about October 7. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.”

    In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,200 Israelis and abduction of over 200 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders. In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza.

    Worldwide reaching colonial media journalism will not report the truth that Israel admits Apache helicopters fired on their own civilians running from the Supernova music festival – even when Tel Aviv Ynet reports it to Israelis.11

    Western media readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place.

    “Israel has the right to defend itself!” Israel has the right to defend itself!” Each and every time Western media conglomerates consider it necessary to report the number of thousands killed in Gaza, media journalists repeat words to the effect that this is “a response to October 7 attack by Hamas — considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union.” Hamas is a terrorist group!

    Blacking 0ut from Unfavourable News Indicting U.S. led West

    This section regarding criminal journalism’s reconstructed “reality” of Gaza and Hamas is perforce quite short, brief because simply not reporting reality is the most major crime in Western entertainment/news conglomerate journalism in hiding 90% of reality. Never mentioning for example, the reality of the immense and deadly suffering of the Palestinians, which is the motive for the very existence of the Hamas militant group. Recently, many news hours have been begun simply covering other world and local events to the exclusion of any mention of the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza

    In Conclusion

    White supremacy colonisers always getting away with mass

    murder both in real time and for generations thereafter has been for some time the accomplishment of the war investor controlled CIA overseen journalists of giant entertainment/news conglomerates, which have been allowed to usurp the use of public owned broadcasting frequencies. This is a government collaboration with war investors, which can and must be challenged, at the same time as taking down the credibility of the war enabling journalists of criminal mainstream media.

    Fortunately, there is declining trust in mainstream news outlets, pushing people toward alternative online sources and social media for information.

    Do journalists feel the shame when they pass on deceptive info? Yes, of course some do on occasion, and there is always a segment of the citizenry of varying size that feels responsible for the crimes of its government.

    The more info the public has makes it more difficult to pursue policies of war on innocent populations, so the public is a threat that needs to be countered. So whenever an invasion is planned, a  huge public relations campaign goes into gear.12

    An Advisory Based on Julian Assange’s Counsel

    “So that is our task and it is your task, go and get the truth, get into the ballpark and get the ball and give it to us and we’ll spread it all over the world.”

    Countering the CIA-overseen giant entertainment/news/information conglomerates wars enabling deceptive journalism with truth can be more effective than attacking the wars ordering high government officials, both those elected and those appointed, who in reality must take orders form the ‘deep state’ Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex ‘deep pocket’ war investors.13

    Julian Assange has brought to our attention the pleasant-looking evening news anchor who captivates TV audiences with alternating joviality and gravitas, asking whether they should be seen as insidiously evil as they generate support for horrific suffering, death, maiming and destruction.

    Assange seems to have tasked us to awaken a critical number of decent but unwary citizens to the realisation that a trusted prime time personality of theirs is in fact a war criminal?

    ENDNOTES

    The post The “Reality” around Us is Constructed by Liars: “Journalists are War Criminals” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    In a 14 June 1807 letter to John Norvell. The Founders’ Constitution, Volume 5, Amendment I (Speech and Press), Document 29, The University of Chicago Press.
    2    Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Antony Cyril Sutton British-American writer, researcher, economist, and Stanford U. professor.
    3    There exists not one photo or video of a peaceful protest (CNN reported peaceful protests being fired upon by Libyan soldiers and police.) “There Was No Libyan Peaceful Protest, Just Murderous Gangs and Nic Robertson,” Information Clearing House, June 20, 2011 .  Long time Italian Prime Minister says Libyans love Gaddafi as Italians P. Nearly one million Libyans, out of a total population of six million, wildly demonstrated in favor of their nation’s government with a mile long green flag while listening to Gaddafi’s voice even as NATO warplanes were bombing nearby in Tripoli.
    4    “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A,” December 26, 1977, New York Times.
    5    Reports Gaza Ministry of Health and UN
    6    Aljazeera, Feb. 2.
    7    Report: “Israel burns down hundreds of homes in Gaza” Aljazeera, Feb. 1.
    8    US ‘not seeing acts of genocide’ in Gaza, State Dept says, Reuters, Jan. 3, 2024
    10    Israel-Hamas War Israel Lowers Oct. 7 Death Toll Estimate to 1,200, New York Times, Nov 10, 2023.
    11    Israeli Apache helicopters killed own soldiers, civilians on …New footage corroborates previous reports that say the Israeli military is responsible for many of the Israeli casualties.
    12    See “The War You Don’t See,” John Pilger Documentary, YouTube.
    13    The awful crimes against humanity ordered by President Eisenhower in Laos, Guatemala, Congo and other places indicate that the president was under the thumb of the Military Industrial Complex he warned of on the day he left office.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Unaccountable Hackers: The CIA, Vengeance, and Joshua Schulte

    The release of the Vault 7 files in the spring of 2017 in a series of 26 disclosures, detailing the hacking tools of the US Central Intelligence Agency, was one of the more impressive achievements of the WikiLeaks publishing organisation.  As WikiLeaks stated at the time, the hacking component of the agency’s operations had become so sizeable it began to dwarf the operations of the National Security Agency.  “The CIA had created, in effect, its ‘own NSA’ with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capabilities of a rival agency could be justified.”

    The publication ruffled feathers, enraged officials, and stirred the blood of those working in the intelligence community bothered by this “digital Pearl Harbor”.  The exercise involved the pilfering of 180 gigabytes of information and constituted, according to the agency, “the largest data loss in CIA history”.

    The CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force was charged with investigating the incident and submitted its findings to the director in October 2017.  Pompeo should have been grudgingly grateful – WikiLeaks had given the organisation a good excuse for cleaning the cobwebs and removing the creases.  The report, for instance, found that the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) had placed greater emphasis on the building of “cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems.  Day-to-day security practices had become woefully lax.”  The cyber weapons were also “not compartmented”, passwords at various administrator levels were shared “and historical data was available to users indefinitely.”  In what reads like a vote for the dull and the tedious, the report took issue with “a culture that evolved over years that too often prioritized creativity and collaboration at the expense of security.”

    The individual responsible for taking the loot to WikiLeaks was the fractious Joshua Schulte, who worked at the CCI as a software developer and had himself created a number of hacking tools.  On February 1, he was sentenced in the New York federal court to 40 years in prison.  His list of previous convictions was encyclopaedically colourful: espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and child pornography.

    At the sentencing hearing, Judge Jesse M. Furman, in that time honoured tradition of judicial vagueness, remarked that, “We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive.”  This was a silly claim, given that the leaks were, as Axios reported, “largely inconsequential, with most being instruction manuals for old hacking tools”.

    The prosecution was similarly imprecise (and disingenuous), as they tend to be when measuring the extent national security is supposedly impaired by information disclosures.  “He caused untold damage to our national security in his quest for revenge against the CIA for its response to Schulte’s security breaches while employed there,” stated the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams.  Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen further added that Schulte had “directly risked the lives of CIA personnel, persisting in his efforts even after his arrest.”

    In comments made to the court prior to the sentencing, Schulte touched on the wonderful penal conditions that mark the US penitentiary system.  He had, for instance, been denied hot water.  He had been extensively exposed to artificial light and constant noise.

    He also had – and here, British judges should take note regarding Assange’s own arguments against extradition to the US – been deceived by the prosecutors in a plea deal offer that would have seen him sentenced to 10 years in prison.  Instead, he got an additional three decades.  “This is not justice the government seeks,” Schulte accurately observed, “but vengeance.”

    Schulte proved an important figure in the roistering annals of WikiLeaks.  It was his disclosures that signalled the cold and vicious turn in US policy in targeting Assange.  The release of the Vault 7 files sent the then director, Mike Pompeo, into a rage.  The 2021 Yahoo! report, which famously noted various opinions within the intelligence community on what could be done about the Australian publisher, reports that change of approach.  According to one former Trump national security official, the director and CIA officials “were completely detached from reality because they were so detached about Vault 7.”

    Soon, Pompeo was publicly tarring WikiLeaks while privately pondering options to kidnap or assassinate Assange.  In April 2017, in a speech given to the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, the director hoisted the black flag.  “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence.”  Nonsensically, Pompeo imbues the publishing organisation with dictatorial and mesmeric qualities.  “It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information.”  (No, it did not.)  “And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.”  Given the concentration of unstable power at the heart of Washington, and its imperial pretences, Pompeo can hardly be surprised.

    The speech is worthy of close analysis.  It declares, inevitably, that the CIA is a noble organisation incapable of abuse, a saintly enterprise of patriots who should be treated as such.  It takes issue with those who give the game away.  And, more fundamentally, it refuses to have any truck with a publisher who aids that cause.

    Pompeo, for instance, dismissed Assange’s own justifications for publishing national security material as “sophistry”.  He could hardly be compared to Thomas Jefferson or “the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of legitimate news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post.”

    Dangerously, the strategy behind the bluster becomes clear, and would find itself gorily displayed in the indictment against Assange.  It picks and chooses between publishers as sacred and profane, the ennobled and the condemned.  It ignores the pointed fact that national security information is almost always pilfered and leaked, sometimes patriotically, sometimes selfishly.  Punish Assange, and you are opening the door to punishing any news outlet of any stripe operating anywhere.  And that, fundamentally, is the point.

    The post Unaccountable Hackers: The CIA, Vengeance, and Joshua Schulte first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Last Flurry: The US Congress and Australian Parliamentarians seek Assange’s Release

    On February 20, Julian Assange, the daredevil publisher of WikiLeaks, will be going into battle, yet again, with the British justice system – or what counts for it.  The UK High Court will hear arguments from his team that his extradition to the United States from Britain to face 18 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 would violate various precepts of justice.  The proceedings hope to reverse the curt, impoverished decision by the remarkably misnamed Justice Jonathan Swift of the same court on June 6, 2023.

    At this point, the number of claims the defence team can make are potentially many.  Economy, however, has been called for: the two judges hearing the case have asked for a substantially shortened argument, showing, yet again, that the quality of British mercy tends to be sourly short.  The grounds Assange can resort to are troublingly vast: CIA-sponsored surveillance, his contemplated assassination, his contemplated abduction, violation of attorney-client privilege, his poor health, the violation of free-speech, a naked, politicised attempt by an imperium to capture one of its greatest and most trenchant critics, and bad faith by the US government.

    Campaigners for the cause have been frenzied.  But as the solution to Assange’s plight is likely to be political, the burden falls on politicians to stomp and drum from within their various chambers to convince their executive counterparts.  In the US Congress, House Resolution 934, introduced on December 13 by Rep. Paul A. Gosar, an Arizona Republican, expresses “the sense of the House of Representatives that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States ought to drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.”

    The resolution sees a dramatic shift from the punishing, haute view taken by such figures as the late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was one of the first political figures to suggest that Assange be crucified on the unsteady timber of the Espionage Act for disclosing US cables and classified information in 2010.  The resolution acknowledges, for instance, that the disclosures by WikiLeaks “promoted public transparency through the exposure of the hiring of child prostitutes by Defense Department contractors, friendly fire incidents, human rights abuses, civilian killings, and United States use of psychological warfare.”  The list could be sordidly longer but let’s not quibble.

    Impressively, drafters of the resolution finally acknowledge that charging Assange under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for alleged conspiracy to help US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning access Defense Department computers was a fabled nonsense.  For one, it was “impossible” – Manning “already had access to the mentioned computer”.  Furthermore, “there was no proof Mr Assange had any contact with said intelligence analyst”.

    Ire is also directed at the espionage counts, with the resolution noting that “no other publisher has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act prior to these 17 charges.”  A successful prosecution of the publisher “would set a precedent allowing the United States to prosecute and imprison journalists for First Amendment protected activities, including the obtainment and publication of information, something that occurs on a regular basis”.

    Acknowledgment is duly made of the importance of press freedoms to promote transparency and protect the Republic, the support for Assange, “sincere and steadfast”, no less, shown by “numerous human rights, press freedom, and privacy rights advocates and organizations”, and the desire by “at least 70 Senators and Members of Parliament from Australia, a critical United States ally and Mr Assange’s native country” for his return.

    Members of Australia’s parliament, adding to the efforts last September to convince members of Congress that the prosecution be dropped, have also written to the UK Home Secretary, James Cleverly, requesting that he “undertake an urgent, thorough and independent assessment of the risks to Mr Assange’s health and welfare in the event that he is extradited to the United States.”

    The members of the Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group draw Cleverly’s attention to the recent UK Supreme Court case of AAA v Secretary of State for the Home Department which found “that courts in the United Kingdom cannot just rely on third party assurances by foreign governments but rather are required to make independent assessments of the risk of persecution to individuals before any order is made removing them from the UK.”

    It follows that the approach taken by Lord Justices Burnett and Holroyde in USA v Assange [2021] EWHC 3133 was, to put it politely, a touch too confident in accepting assurances given by the US government regarding Assange’s treatment, were he to be extradited.  “These assurances were not tested, nor was there any evidence of independent assessment as to the basis on which they could be given and relied upon.”

    The conveners of the group point to Assange’s detention in Belmarsh prison since April 2019, his “significant health issues, exacerbated to a dangerous degree by his prolonged incarceration, that are of very real concern to us as his elected representatives.”  They also point out the rather unusual consensus between the current Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and his opposition number, Peter Dutton, that the “case has gone on for too long.”  Continued legal proceedings, both in the UK, and then in the US were extradition to take place “would add yet more years to Mr Assange’s detention and further imperil his health.”

    In terms of posterity’s calling, there are surely fewer better things at this point for a US president nearing mental oblivion to do, or a Tory government peering at electoral termination to facilitate, than the release of Assange.  At the very least, it would show a grudging acknowledgment that the fourth estate, watchful of government’s egregious abuses, is no corpse, but a vital, thriving necessity.

    The post The Last Flurry: The US Congress and Australian Parliamentarians seek Assange’s Release first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • If Wikileaks is the enemy, then the true criminals are perpetrating a powerful feat of optics

    When Julian Assange was disgracefully arrested in 2019, he shouted, as he was dragged out of the Ecuadorean Embassy with his hands shackled to his feet, “RESIST.” His and Wikileaks‘ story is a good illustration of why resistance is so necessary, timely, and urgent.

    Assange and Wikileaks: an existential threat

    Approximately a decade before this 2019 arrest, Assange had become an acclaimed journalist and activist, having successfully pushed knowledge of US war crimes into the mass media and public consciousness. This was largely through his work as editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, the crypto-journalism organisation which managed and published the incriminating data.

    The following months and years were marked by escalating tensions between the US and Assange, with Wikileaks gaining more and more credibility and influence as a media organisation and information source.

    The viciousness of the counter-strategic effort by the US really gained pace after Wikileaks published a mountain of diplomatic cables, effectively shifting the geopolitical balance of power in a way which embarrassed and emasculated the US.

    Assange was from that point an existential threat to the US, to be eliminated by any means necessary.

    The dynamic after ‘cablegate’ was decidedly harsher and more oppressive. It saw the beginning of a ruthless pursuit of Assange with the intention to bring him into a custody which would serve as a smokescreen for extradition to the US.

    Both the UK and US found time, as well as vast resources better invested in schools, libraries, and hospitals, to corner Assange into a trap.

    Ecuador: complicit in the attack

    Having absconded from house arrest to seek asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy, a huge, expensive surveillance operation was set up in the vicinity to make it impossible for Assange to leave either the building, or the country.

    The period after he was granted sanctuary in the embassy was defined by a concerted attack on the part of the establishment, swamping the discourse around him with trivialities and red herrings intended to bury the most salient fact of the situation, his status as an asylum seeker, protected by international law.

    From January 2018 Assange was an Ecuadorean citizen, until unfortunately being stripped of this status and rendered stateless by way of machinations of an unsympathetic right-wing government in Ecuador, bribed with IMF and Goldman Sachs loans – blood money to trade him. This was made possible by a shady bilateral relationship between the US and Ecuador, which spelled the end for Assange’s asylum bid, completely trashing Ecuador’s hitherto impeccable example on human rights.

    Just one year after being granted citizenship in Ecuador, the hope for a liberated Assange was damned. In the build up to his arrest the Ecuadorean administration initiated a rapid erosion of his living conditions and quality of life, staffing the embassy with subservient diplomats working in the interests of the US.

    He was eventually ejected into the hands of the UK “justice” system, a corruptible power working at the behest of the US dictatorship.

    The 21st century empire

    The US national security regime, which grabbed power in the atmosphere of fear and panic after 9/11, exerts extraterritorial control over seemingly self-determining nations, in spite of their supposed judicial sovereignty.

    There is a clear issue with the proceedings of the longstanding, ongoing extradition case in the UK, insofar as the judge is operating as an adjudicator whilst having a conflict of interest, as her husband’s professional misconduct was reported on by Wikileaks.

    The bulwark imperial states, of which the UK and US are the poster boys, have long been committed to augmenting their partnership. Unfortunately they are not a force for good, despite their shallow rhetoric. They have coordinated in a way that decidedly undermines and renders obsolete basic constitutional principles, human rights norms, and fundamental civil liberties.

    This sickening agenda is one aspect of an agenda for world domination, based on US supremacy, a historical trend oft left undiscussed due to the negative perception of “conspiracy theories.” There are, however, peer reviewed studies and academic texts that study the political mechanics of what can be called a “new world order.”

    This development has been followed by a nascent, burgeoning political consciousness and sense of resistance amongst some citizens, harbouring bold aspirations to disestablish the institutions of empire.

    Resistance is a must when democracy is a fugitive

    Perceiving that neither political parties, nor elections, nor mainstream media serve the public interest, rather working together to rig the system and augment the status quo, these digital denizens share their dissent online and educate themselves through peer-to-peer dissemination of knowledge and information.

    Beginning its life as a vibrant democratic community based on a lively exchange of ideas, the internet has sadly transformed into an empire, dominated by shadowy Silicon Valley corporations who police the parameters of legitimate opinion and operate with an interface fusing it with government and military agencies.

    Unfortunately this is the socially acceptable model of internet publishing and all the worst tech companies have metastasized into a digital leviathan. An example of how they are rendered legitimate is how Facebook successfully launched the “publisher” defence in court, a legal refuge denied to Wikileaks.

    Facebook, with near total impunity, was complicit in its use as a tool for perception management during elections and plebiscites by agencies such as Cambridge Analytica, deleterious to democracy and tantamount to treason.

    Wikileaks on the other hand is a benevolent and politically impartial repository of information, with an unassailable reputation for 100% accuracy. It empowers citizens to transform society for the better by helping them to establish informed judgments and thus make them more likely to make rational decisions. If this is the enemy, the fifth column, and harbinger of terror and social decay, then there must be a powerful feat of optics being perpetrated by the true criminals in this saga.

    Democracy is a fugitive whose redemption is overdue, repressed precisely because of its power.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Megan Sherman

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Constitutional Violations: Julian Assange, Privacy and the CIA

    As a private citizen, the options for suing an intelligence agency are few and far between.  The US Central Intelligence Agency, as with other members of the secret club, pour scorn on such efforts.  To a degree, such a dismissive sentiment is understandable: Why sue an agency for its bread-and-butter task, which is surveillance?

    This matter has cropped up in the US courts in what has become an international affair, namely, the case of WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange.  While the US Department of Justice battles to sink its fangs into the Australian national for absurd espionage charges, various offshoots of his case have begun to grow.  The issue of CIA sponsored surveillance during his stint in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been of particular interest, since it violated both general principles of privacy and more specific ones regarding attorney-client privilege.  Of particular interest to US Constitution watchers was whether such actions violated the reasonable expectation of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment.

    Four US citizens took issue with such surveillance, which was executed by the Spanish security firm Undercover (UC) Global and its starry-eyed, impressionable director David Morales under instruction from the CIA.  Civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler and media lawyer Deborah Hrbek, and journalists John Goetz and Charles Glass, took the matter to the US District Court of the Southern District of New York in August last year.  They had four targets of litigation: the CIA itself, its former director, Michael R. Pompeo, Morales and his company, UC Global SL.

    All four alleged that the US Government had conducted surveillance on them and copied their information during visits to Assange in the embassy, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment.  In doing so, the plaintiffs argued they were entitled to money damages and injunctive relief.  The government moved to dismiss the complaint as amended.

    On December 19, District Judge John G. Koeltl delivered a judgment of much interest, granting, in part, the US government’s motion to dismiss but denying other parts of it.  Before turning to the relevant features of Koeltl’s reasons, various observations made in the case bear repeating.  The judge notes, for instance, Pompeo’s April 2017 speech, in which he “‘pledged that his office would embark upon a ‘long term’ campaign against WikiLeaks.’”  He is cognisant of the plaintiffs’ claims “Morales was recruited to conduct surveillance on Assange and his visitors on behalf of the CIA and that this recruitment occurred at a January 2017 private security industry convention at the Las Vegas Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

    From that meeting, it is claimed that “Morales created an operations unit, improved UC Global’s systems, and set up live streaming from the United States so that surveillance could be accessed instantly by the CIA.”  The data gathered from UC Global “was either personally delivered to Las Vegas; Washington, D.C.; and New York City by Morales (who travelled to these locations more than sixty times in the three years following the Las Vegas convention) or placed on a server that provided external access to the CIA”.

    Koeltl preferred to avoid deciding on the claims that Morales and UC Global were, in fact, “acting as agents of Pompeo and the CIA”.  Such matters were questions of fact “that cannot be decided on a motion to dismiss.”

    A vital issue in the case was whether the plaintiffs had standing to sue the CIA in the first place.  Citing the case of ACLU v Clapper, which involved a challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collection program, Koeltl accepted that they did.  In doing so, he rejected a similar argument made by the government in Clapper – that the injuries alleged were simply “too speculative and generalized” and that the information gathered via surveillance would necessarily even be used against them.  “In this case, the plaintiffs need not allege, as the Government argues, that the Government will imminently use their information collected at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.”   If the search of the conversations and electronic devices along with the seizure of the contents of the electronic devices “were unlawful, the plaintiffs have suffered a concrete and particularized injury fairly traceable to the challenged program and redressable by favorable ruling.”

    Less satisfactory for the plaintiffs was the finding they had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their conversations with the publisher given that “they knew Assange was surveilled even before the CIA’s alleged involvement.”  The judge thought it significant that they did “not allege that they would not have met Assange had they known their conversations would be surveilled.”  Additionally, it “would not be recognized as reasonable by society” to have expected conversations held with Assange at the embassy in London to be protected, given such societal acceptance of, for instance, video surveillance in government buildings.

    This reasoning is faulty, given that the visits by the four plaintiffs to the embassy did not take place with their knowledge of the operation being conducted by UC Global with CIA blessing.  In a general sense, anyone visiting the embassy could not help but suspect that Assange might be the object of surveillance, but to suggest something akin to a waiver of privacy rights on the part of attorneys and journalists aiding a persecuted publisher is an odd turn.

    The US Government also succeeded on the point that the plaintiffs had no reasonable expectation to privacy regarding their passports or their devices they voluntarily left at the Embassy reception desk.  In doing so, they “assumed the risk that the information may be conveyed to the Government.”  Those visiting embassies must, it would seem, be perennially on guard.

    That said, the plaintiffs convinced the judge that they had “sufficient allegations that the CIA and Pompeo, through Morales and UC Global, violated their reasonable expectation to privacy in the contents of their electronic devices.”  The government even went so far as to concede that point.

    Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, the biggest fish was let off the hook.  The plaintiffs had attempted to use the 1971 US Supreme Court case of Bivens to argue that the former CIA director be held accountable and liable for violating constitutional rights.  Koeltl thought the effort to extend the application of Bivens inappropriate in terms of the high standing nature of the defendant and the context.  “As a presidential appointee confirmed by Congress […] Defendant Pompeo is in a different category of defendant from a law enforcement agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.”  More’s the pity.

    Leaving aside some of the more questionable turns of reasoning in Koeltl’s judgment, public interest litigants and activists can take heart from the prospect that civil trials against the CIA for violations of the US Constitution are no longer unrealistic.  “We are thrilled,” declared Richard Roth, the plaintiffs’ attorney, “that the court rejected the CIA’s efforts to silence the plaintiffs, who merely seek to expose the CIA’s attempt to carry out Pompeo’s vendetta against WikiLeaks.”  The appeals process, however, is bound to be tested.

    The post Constitutional Violations: Julian Assange, Privacy and the CIA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Day X Marks the Calendar: Julian Assange’s “Final” Appeal

    Julian Assange’s wife, Stella, is rarely one to be cryptic. “Day X is here,” she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter.  For those who have followed her remarks, her speeches, and her activism, it was sharply clear what this meant.  “It may be the final chance for the UK to stop Julian’s extradition.  Gather outside the court at 8.30am on both days. It’s now or never.”

    Between February 20 and 21 next year, the High Court will hear what WikiLeaks claims may be “the final chance for Julian Assange to prevent his extradition to the United States.”  (This is qualified by the prospect of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.)  Were that to take place, the organisation’s founder faces 18 charges, 17 of which are stealthily cobbled from the aged and oppressive US Espionage Act of 1917.  Estimates of any subsequent sentence vary, the worst being 175 years.

    The WikiLeaks founder remains jailed at His Majesty’s pleasure at Belmarsh prison, only reserved for the most hardened of criminals.  It’s a true statement of both British and US justice that Assange has yet to face trial, incarcerated, without bail, for four-and-a-half years.  That trial, were it to ever be allowed to take place, would employ a scandalous legal theory that will spell doom to all those who dive and dabble in the world of publishing national security information.

    Fundamentally, and irrefutably, the case against Assange remains political in its muscularity, with a gangster’s legality papered over it.  As Stella herself makes clear, “With the myriad of evidence that has come to light since the original hearing in 2018, such as the violation of legal privilege and reports that senior US officials are involved in formulating assassination plots against my husband, there is no denying that a fair trial, let alone Julian’s safety on US soil, is an impossibility were he to be extradited.”

    In mid-2022, Assange’s legal team attempted a two-pronged attempt to overturn the decision of Home Office Secretary Priti Patel to approve Assange’s extradition while also broadening the appeal against grounds made in the original January 4, 2021 reasons of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser.

    The former, among other matters, took issue with the acceptance by the Home Office that the extradition was not for a political offence and therefore prohibited by Article 4 of the UK-US Extradition Treaty.  The defence team stressed the importance of due process, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta of 2015, and also took issue with Patel’s acceptance of “special arrangements” with the US government regarding the introduction of charges for the facts alleged which might carry the death penalty, criminal contempt proceedings, and such specialty arrangements that might protect Assange “against being dealt with for conduct outside the extradition request”.  History shows that such “special arrangements” can be easily, and arbitrarily abrogated.

    On June 30, 2022 came the appeal against Baraitser’s original reasons.  While Baraitser blocked the extradition to the US, she only did so on grounds of oppression occasioned by mental health grounds and the risk posed to Assange were he to find himself in the US prison system.  The US government got around this impediment by making breezy promises to the effect that Assange would not be subject to oppressive, suicide-inducing conditions, or face the death penalty.  A feeble, meaningless undertaking was also made suggesting that he might serve the balance of his term in Australia – subject to approval, naturally.

    What this left Assange’s legal team was a decision otherwise hostile to publishing, free speech and the activities that had been undertaken by WikiLeaks.  The appeal accordingly sought to address this, claiming, among other things, that Baraitser had erred in assuming that the extradition was not “unjust and oppressive by reason of the lapse of time”; that it would not be in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (inhuman and degrading treatment)”; that it did not breach Article 10 of ECHR, namely the right to freedom of expression; and that it did not breach Article 7 of the ECHR (novel and unforeseeable extension of the law).

    Other glaring defects in Baraitser’s judgment are also worth noting, namely her failure to acknowledge the misrepresentation of facts advanced by the US government and the “ulterior political motives” streaking the prosecution.  The onerous and much thicker second superseding indictment was also thrown at Assange at short notice before the extradition hearing of September 2020, suggesting that those grounds be excised “for reasons of procedural fairness.”

    An agonising wait of some twelve months followed, only to yield an outrageously brief decision on June 6 from High Court justice Jonathan Swift (satirists, reach for your pens and laptops). Swift, much favoured by the Defence and Home Secretaries when a practising barrister, told Counsel Magazine in a 2018 interview that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.  Why? “They take preparation and evidence-gathering seriously: a real commitment to getting things right.”  Good grief.

    In such a cosmically unattached world, Swift only took three pages to reject the appeal’s arguments in a fit of premature adjudication.  “An appeal under the Extradition Act 2003,” he wrote with icy finality, “is not an opportunity for general rehearsal of all matters canvassed at an extradition hearing.”  The appeal’s length – some 100 pages – was “extraordinary” and came “to no more than an attempt to re-run the extensive arguments made and rejected by the District Judge.”

    Thankfully, Swift’s finality proved stillborn.  Some doubts existed whether the High Court appellate bench would even grant the hearing.  They did, though requesting that Assange’s defence team trim the appeal to 20 pages.

    How much of this is procedural theatre and circus judge antics remains to be seen.  Anglo-American justice has done wonders in soiling itself in its treatment of Britain’s most notable political prisoner.  Keeping Assange in the UK in hideous conditions of confinement without bail serves the goals of Washington, albeit vicariously.  For Assange, time is the enemy, and each legal brief, appeal and hearing simply weighs the ledger further against his ailing existence.

    The post Day X Marks the Calendar: Julian Assange’s “Final” Appeal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Julian Assange: sabotage is solidarity where telling the truth is treason

    Julian Assange is a martyr for international peace and will surely be retrospectively vindicated in time. He is a rare example of a public figure actually deserving of laurels and admiration, despite the Washington verdict is that he is a public enemy who ought be expunged from the face of the earth, their concept of him a one dimensional card board cutout villain.

    Not above the law, but somehow beneath justice?

    It is the gravest miscarriage of justice that Assange dwells in the concrete coffin of Belmarsh prison; a harsh existence in an unyielding and repressive atmosphere that neglects the soul and oppresses even the keenest intellect. That voraciously bloodthirsty war criminals, who have made the Middle East a graveyard of innocents and bombed its civilisation out of existence, walk free – whilst also profiting from doubling down on their reputation – is beyond disgraceful.

    This state of affairs is at odds with the notion that the politics of our nations are ‘advanced’.

    At least for most of modern history, journalism has not constituted a crime. It has actually been a celebrated institution considered a fundamental check and balance upon power, as governments are perverted and grow corrupt. In a strategic move of pure arrogance and hubris designed to counterbalance and conspire against the revolutionary force Assange unleashed, the Wikileaks grand jury was created. It is attempting to establish a legal precedent making disseminating real, authentic facts illegal.

    The grand jury investigation is trying to forge a formal mechanism to grant unlimited prerogative to the state to silence dissent, a development that would be absolutely fatal to libertarian precepts of the US constitution. That is ultimately the basic purpose of the systematised prosecution of whistleblowers: a fragile super-power seeking inoculation against public dissatisfaction by destroying the architecture of democracy which enables the public to assert its own interests.

    The prosecution is aimed at suppressing information deemed not politically expedient or flattering to the ruling class, despite being in the public interest to be liberated from the secret, private domain which keeps it under wraps.

    The radicalism of cypherpunk activism

    Assange forms a vital – but nonetheless singular – manifestation of the renegade cypherpunk movement. He enjoys the company of a legion of ethical coders, some of whom – Aaron Schwartz comes to mind – have paid with their lives for their contributions to the democratisation of computer technology. This is perceived as an existential threat by the security state, whose entire edifice rests upon asymmetry of power over, and access to, nascent web-based technologies.

    Accurately described, Assange is a systems engineer who shifted his engineering abilities from computers to broken political systems. However, elites have a vested interest in keeping the system broken, because their schemes would never come to fruition in a free and fair society.

    Data activism of the kind galvanised by Assange undermines and destabilises information control systems weaponised against the people by thoroughly unconstitutional agencies, not party to the moderating influence of democratic oversight.

    Many people are not conscious of the tyranny which besets us as vassals of capitalist power. The corporate establishment has initiated vast research into consumer psychology throughout its rule and is well versed in how to create effective propaganda, a pioneering force in the use of corporate advertising and public relations to manipulate citizens.

    At the same time there is a steadily-developing mass consciousness within civic society, the majority of which seems to stem from the explosion of Wikileaks into the mainstream with its expose of US malfeasance.

    Humanitarianism as an engine of progress

    Even worse than being detained on the basis of fiction and charade, Assange is also being held indefinitely, in blatant contravention of humanitarian norms.

    Human rights norms are mutually agreed upon principles of state conduct supported by the majority of the world – and especially the UN constituency. Global governance institutions monitoring the implementation of these principles are openly, expressly united in opposition to the draconian persecution and illegal extraterritorial punishment of Assange – a political vendetta driven by spite, malice and pure hatred.

    One suggests to consult the work of Nils Melzer, UN rapporteur on torture, one of the most important and eloquent voices on the Assange saga, who deftly explains the reasons why the US pursuit of extradition is a paradigmatic example of human rights abuse.

    It’s oft said of ‘rogue states’ that their violation and indifference towards human rights is evidence of their corruption – and therefore their liability for regime change. So it begs to be said that this method of tyranny is also characteristic of how the US conducts itself. To paraphrase a quote by Assange himself, the purposeful violation of binding rules by the ruling class is the rubric by which it interprets itself as powerful.

    The so-called ‘rules-based order’

    Human rights norms form protocols and procedures supposedly underpinning a global ‘rules-based order’, emergent in the aftermath of WWII when the international community united in a conscientious mood and wholesome spirit of coordination. Obviously the Bretton-Woods system of this era and its manipulation of global finance infrastructure to suit the ruling class is a regressive, objectionable, and abhorrent development.

    Nonetheless the wider transformation of global civic society away from being characterised by belligerent, aggressive nationalism into a sphere focused on multilateral cooperation is arguably one of the most progressive and hopeful developments in recent history.

    The hope of rescuing Assange from the steely grasp of his torturers and ferry him to sanctuary is largely within the remit of the international community. Their persistent and firmly expressed opposition to the whims of tyrannical US power is a cause for positivity; a flare rising above a sea of dubious treachery demanding the attention of every lover of liberty.

    In a sombre and serious mood, the post-war world united to establish the humanitarian project, cognisant of the pressing need to create international legislative architecture preventing a repeat of the tragedies initiated by Hitler.

    Wikileaks as apostasy

    The US national security state at the root of Assange’s legal quagmire is a paradigmatic example of the blatant double standards in international relations, excusing behaviour by some states which in other states are condemned and made a pretext for forcible regime change. The doctrines underpinning US hegemony have a religious quality; anti-imperialists essentially apostates and heretic.

    An accurate understanding of the real balance of power demands a total inversion of perceived ‘reality’ spoon-fed to citizens in a grand strategy of perception management. The main goal of empire and the content it puts into public dialogue is to generate passive complicity in the forward march of the Military Industrial Complex, hurtling us towards massacres and civilisational collapse.

    The methods, tactics, and praxis of Wikileaks are a significant challenge to the realisation of their rotten schemes.

    The imperial network and its resistance

    US foreign policy, at the heart of global malaise, yields the staggering power of a network of allies – nations, secret services, and cartel media – which function as vital arteries under the skin of the imperial body politic, supplying its heart with force and vitality. This unholy alliance is at the apex of a global order at once hewn to the senseless unilateral barbarity of neoliberal hawks – whilst simultaneously invading less powerful nations for ruling in a similar fashion.

    The pursuit of Assange is the inevitable manifestation of a perverse pathology incepted deep within the Washington machine averse to true freedom. The true course of democracy demands the immediate liberation of Assange and the termination of violently imposed US rule infecting international politics.

    In a dystopian era defined by global surveillance totalitarianism, Assange and his virtues are a desperately needed symbol of liberty. In coming times the fate of civilisation will be determined – and it’s imperative we do not let the barbarians sit easy. It’s time to unleash an illustrious riot and storm the Belmarsh bastille.

    Featured image via Wikimedia

    By Megan Sherman

  • Australians Call to End Long Persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange

     

    Sydney Morning Herald: The time has come to end the sorry Julian Assange saga

    Sydney Morning Herald (5/12/23): “The time has come to end this sorry saga.”

    As WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange has nearly exhausted his appeals to British courts against a US extradition order, Australia has ramped up its advocacy on his behalf. Six Australian MPs held a press conference outside the US Department of Justice on September 20 to urge the Biden administration to halt its pursuit of Assange (Consortium News, 9/20/23).

    They came representing an impressive national consensus: Almost 80% of Australian citizens, and a cross-party coalition in Australia’s Parliament, support the campaign to free Assange (Sydney Morning Herald, 5/12/23). Opposition leader Peter Dutton joined Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in urging Assange’s release.

    The day before, an open letter to the Biden administration signed by 64 Australian parliamentarians appeared as a full-page ad in the Washington Post. It called the prosecution of Assange “a political decision” and warned that, if Assange is extradited, “there will be a sharp and sustained outcry” from Australians.

    Given what is at stake for freedom of the press in the Assange case, and the intensified pressure from Australia—a country being wooed to actively enlist in the US campaign against China by spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines and supersonic missiles (Sydney Morning Herald, 8/10/23)—we ought to expect coverage from the Washington Post, New York Times and major broadcast networks. But coverage of the press conference was virtually absent from US corporate media.

    Prosecuting publishing

    The US has been seeking to extradite Assange from Britain on charges relating to the leaking of hundreds of thousands of documents to international media in 2010 and 2011, many of which detailed US atrocities carried out in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and other human rights violations, such as the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay (Abby Martin, 3/10/23).

    In 2019, President Donald Trump’s administration brought Espionage Act charges against Assange for obtaining and publishing leaked documents, a dramatic new attack on press freedom (FAIR.org, 8/13/22). Assange could face 175 years in a supermax prison if convicted under the Espionage Act, “a relic of the First World War” meant for spies (American Constitution Society, 9/10/21), and not intended to criminalize leaks to or publications by the press. The Biden administration has rolled back much of the legal mechanism used by Trump to attack journalists, but President Joe Biden has reaffirmed the call to extradite Assange.

    NYT: Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy

    The New York Times (11/28/10) published articles based on WikiLeaks‘ revelations, but pays little attention to Julian Assange’s persecution.

    Assange also coordinated with international news outlets to publish other material known as Cablegate about the “inner-workings of bargaining, diplomacy and threat-making around the world” (Intercept, 8/14/23). Indeed, the New York Times (e.g., 11/28/10) published many articles based on the WikiLeaks documents, which had been sent to Assange by US army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

    US officials have repeatedly justified their case by charging that Assange put lives at risk; to date, no evidence has surfaced that any individuals were harmed by the leaks (BBC, 12/1/10; Chelsea Manning, Readme.txt, 2022). As the Columbia Journalism Review (12/23/20) admonished, don’t let the Justice Department’s

    misdirection around “blown informants” fool you—this case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity.

    In failing health after suffering a stroke, Assange has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in April 2019. He had sought asylum at the embassy in London in 2012 to avoid being sent to Sweden for questioning over sexual assault allegations, because Sweden would not provide assurances it would protect him from extradition to the US. Sweden dropped charges against Assange in November 2019 (BBC, 11/19/19), after he was in British custody.

    International condemnation

    Messenger: Brazil Calls for Release of WikiLeaks leader

    Brazilian President Lula da Silva (9/19/23): “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished [for] informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”

    The Australian diplomatic mission coincided with the convening of the UN General Assembly in New York City, where President Lula da Silva of Brazil condemned the prosecution of Assange, offering yet another opportunity for US corporate media to cover the strong international opposition to Assange’s treatment.

    A video (9/19/23) of Lula speaking at the opening of the UN General Assembly was widely circulated on social media. “Preserving press freedom is essential,” Lula declared. “A journalist like Julian Assange cannot be punished for informing society in a transparent and legitimate way.”

    Former British ambassador Craig Murray commented about Lula’s reception at the UN (Twitter, 9/17/23):

    It is really not normal for the hall at the UN General Assembly to break into this kind of spontaneous applause. The US has been losing the room internationally for a decade. The appalling treatment of Julian is a focus for that.

    US media absence

    Yet, with a few exceptions (Fox News, 9/20/23; The Hill, 9/21/23; Yahoo News, 9/21/23), none of this made the major US news outlets.

    Business Insider: Joe Biden has a decision to make about Julian Assange

    Business Insider (10/1/23): “The Assange issue is expected to be on the table during Albanese’s upcoming four-day visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden on October 25.”

    Over a week later, Business Insider (10/1/23) ran a long piece that featured an interview with Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s half-brother. It pointed out that Assange had become an obstacle to US plans to involve Australia in its aggression toward China, quoting the PM. But the piece also hashed through a number of long-debunked claims, including one that reminded readers that Mike Pompeo once called Assange “a fugitive Russian asset” (FAIR.org, 12/03/18; Sheerpost 2/25/23), and another that repeated US assertions that WikiLeaks releases would put the US at risk.

    The New York Times has been conspicuously absent from the coverage of Assange. Though the Times signed a joint open letter (11/28/22) with four other international newspapers that had worked with Assange and WikiLeaks, appealing to the DoJ to drop its charges, the paper has remained almost entirely silent on both Assange and the issues raised by his continued prosecution since then.

    As FAIR pointed out, during the Assange extradition hearing in London, the Times

    published only two bland news articles (9/7/20, 9/16/20)—one of them purely about the technical difficulties in the courtroom—along with a short rehosted AP video (9/7/20).

    There were no editorials on what the case meant for journalism. FAIR contributor Alan MacLeod noted that the Times seemed to distance itself from Assange and WikiLeaks, and its own reporting on the Cablegate scandal, coverage that boosted the papers’ international reputation.

    Other opportunities for coverage have been missed by the Times. For instance, Rep. Rashida Tlaib wrote a letter (4/11/23), signed by six other members of the Progressive Caucus, calling for the DoJ to drop the charges against Assange. Tlaib cited support from the ACLU, Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Defending Rights & Dissent and Human Rights Watch, and many others, stating that his prosecution “could effectively criminalize” many “common journalistic practices.” The letter was covered by The Nation (4/14/23), the Intercept (3/30/23), Fox News (4/1/23), The Hill (4/11/23) and Politico (4/11/23), but the Times and other major newspapers were conspicuously silent.

    When Assange lost his most recent appeal against extradition in June, a few outlets reported the news online (e.g., AP, 6/9/23; CNN, 6/9/23), but not a single US newspaper report could be found in the Nexis news database. (Newsweek‘s headline framed the news as a “headache for Biden”—6/8/23—rather than a blow for press freedom.)  The Times only vaguely referred to the news (Assange “keeps losing appeals”) two weeks later in a feature (6/18/23) on the late whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had criticized Biden’s decision not to drop the case against Assange.

    The world is watching 

    Common Dreams: 64​ Australian Parliamentarians Endorse Diplomatic Trip to Free Assange

    Australian Greens Sen. David Shoebridge (Common Dreams, 9/19/23) on Julian Assange: “The core crime he faces is the crime of being a journalist.” 

    A huge collective breath is being held as the world watches to see what will happen to Assange, the most famous publisher on the globe. Will he be returned to his country and his family by Christmas, as the Australian MPs have requested? Or will Britain and the US continue to slowly execute him?

    Assange’s case is expected to be discussed during Prime Minister Albanese’s current visit to the US, which includes a state dinner hosted by Biden on October 25. MP Monique Ryan, part of the pro-Assange delegation, told news outlets: “Our prime minister needs to see this as a test case for standing up to the US government. There are concerns among Australians about the AUKUS agreement, and whether we have any agency” (Business Insider, 10/1/23).

    As Common Dreams (9/19/23) quoted from the delegation’s letter:

    We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States’ Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange…. It is well and truly time for this matter to end, and for Julian Assange to return home.

     

     

     

    The post Australians Call to End Long Persecution of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Assange Freedom May Be Pivotal in Australian Support for US Cold War With China

    The stakes are high as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrives in Washington, D.C., today to meet with President Joe Biden. The U.S. government hopes to obtain Australia’s support for its cold war initiatives against China. Australia is one of the United States’ closest allies. Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. comprise “AUKUS,” a trilateral “security” alliance in the Indo-Pacific.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mission to Free Assange: Australian Parliamentarians in Washington

    It was a short stint, involving a six-member delegation of Australian parliamentarians lobbying members of the US Congress and various relevant officials on one issue: the release of Julian Assange.  If extradited to the US from the United Kingdom to face 18 charges, 17 framed with reference to the oppressive, extinguishing Espionage Act of 1917, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks risks a 175-year prison term.

    Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the independent member for Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, are to be viewed with respect, their pluckiness admired.  They came cresting on the wave of a letter published on page 9 of the Washington Post, expressing the views of over 60 Australian parliamentarians.  “As Australian Parliamentarians, we are resolutely of the view that the prosecution and incarceration of the Australian citizen Julian Assange must end.”

    This is a good if presumptuous start.  Australia remains the prized forward base of US ambitions in the Indo-Pacific, the spear pointed against China and any other rival who dares challenge its stubborn hegemony.  The AUKUS pact, featuring the futile, decorative nuclear submarines that will be rich scrapping for the Royal Australian Navy whenever they arrive, also makes that point all too clear.  For the US strategist, Australia is fiefdom, property, real estate, terrain, its citizenry best treated as docile subjects represented by even more docile governments.  Assange, and his publishing agenda, act as savage critiques of such assumptions.

    The following views in Washington DC have been expressed by the delegates in what might be described as a mission to educate.  From Senator Shoebridge, the continued detention of Assange proved to be “an ongoing irritant in the bilateral relationship” between Canberra and Washington. “If this matter is not resolved and Julian is not brought home, it will be damaging to the bilateral relationship”.

    Senator Whish-Wilson focused on the activities of Assange himself.  “The extradition of Julian Assange as a foreign journalist conducting activities on foreign soil is unprecedented.”  To create such a “dangerous precedent” laid “a very slippery slope for any democracy to go down.”

    Liberal Senator Alex Antic emphasised the spike in concern in the Australian population about wishing for Assange’s return to Australia (some nine out of 10 wishing for such an outcome). “We’ve seen 67 members of the Australian parliament share that message in a joint letter, which we’ve delivered across the spectrum”.  An impressed Antic remarked that this had “never happened before.  I think we’re seeing an incredible groundswell, and we want to see Julian at home as soon as possible.”

    On September 20, in front of the Department of Justice, Zappia told reporters that, “we’ve had several meetings and we’re not going to go into details of those meetings.  But I can say that they’ve all been useful meetings.”  Not much to go on, though the Labor MP went on to state that the delegation, as representatives of the Australian people had “put our case very clearly about the fact that Julian Assange pursuit and detention and charges should be dropped and should come to an end.”

    A point where the delegates feel that a rich quarry can be mined and trundled away for political consumption is the value of the US-Australian alliance.  As Ryan reasoned, “This side of the AUKUS partnership feels really strongly about this and so what we expect the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] to do is that he will carry the same message to President Biden when he comes to Washington.”

    The publisher’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, also suggests that the indictment is “a wedge in the Australia-US relationship, which is a very important relationship at the moment, particularly with everything that’s going on with the US and China and the sort of strategic pivot that is happening.” Assange, for his part, is bound to find this excruciatingly ironic, given his lengthy battles against the US imperium and the numbing servility of its client states.

    Various members of Congress have granted an audience to the six parliamentarians.  Enthusiasm was in abundance from two Kentucky Congressmen: Republican Senator Rand Paul and Republican House Representative Thomas Massie.  After meeting the Australian delegation, Massie declared that it was his “strong belief [Assange] should be free to return home.”

    Georgian Republican House member Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed her sense of honour at having met the delegates “to discuss the inhumane detention” of Assange “for the crime of committing journalism,” insisting that the charges be dropped and a pardon granted.  “America should be a beacon of free speech and shouldn’t be following in an authoritarian regime’s footsteps.”  Greene has shown herself to be a conspiracy devotee of the most pungent type, but there was little to fault her regarding these sentiments.

    Minnesota Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also met the parliamentarians, discussing, according to a press release from her office, “the Assange prosecution and its significance as an issue in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Australia, as well as the implications for freedom of the press both at home and abroad.”  She also reiterated her view, one expressed in an April 2023 letter to the Department of Justice co-signed with six other members of Congress, that the charges against Assange be dropped.

    These opinions, consistent and venerably solid, have rarely swayed the mad hatters at the Justice Department who continue to operate within the same church consensus regarding Assange as an aberration and threat to US security.  And they can rely, ultimately, on the calculus of attrition that assumes allies of Washington will eventually belt up, even if they grumble.  There will always be those who pretend to question, such as the passive, meek Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong.  “We have raised this many times,” Wong responded to a query while in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly.  “Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken and I both spoke about the fact that we had a discussion about the views that the United States has and the views that Australia has.”

    Not that this mattered a jot.  In July, Blinken stomped on Wong’s views in a disingenuous, libellous assessment about Assange, reminding his counterpart that the publisher had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.”  The libel duly followed, with the claim that Assange “risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention”.  That gross falsification of history went unaddressed by Wong.

    Thus far, Blinken has waived away the concerns of the Albanese government on Assange’s fate as passing irritants at a spring garden party.  However small their purchase, six Australian parliamentarians have chosen to press the issue further.  At the very least, they have gone to the centre of the imperium to add a bit of ballast to the effort.

  • Why the Media Aren’t Telling the Whole Story of Libya’s Floods

    The reality of the West’s trademark current foreign policy – marketed for the past two decades under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage.

    Many thousands are dead or missing in the port of Derna after two dams protecting the city burst this week as they were battered by Storm Daniel. Vast swaths of housing in the region, including in Benghazi, west of Derna, lie in ruins.

    The storm itself is seen as further proof of a mounting climate crisis, rapidly changing weather patterns across the globe and making disasters like Derna’s flooding more likely.

    But the extent of the calamity cannot simply be ascribed to climate change. Though the media coverage studiously obscures this point, Britain’s actions 12 years ago – when it trumpeted its humanitarian concern for Libya – are intimately tied to Derna’s current suffering.

    The failing dams and faltering relief efforts, observers correctly point out, are the result of a power vacuum in Libya. There is no central authority capable of governing the country.

    But there are reasons Libya is so ill-equipped to deal with a catastrophe. And the West is deeply implicated.

    Avoiding mention of those reasons, as Western coverage is doing, leaves audiences with a false and dangerous impression: that something lacking in Libyans, or maybe Arabs and Africans, makes them inherently incapable of properly running their own affairs.

    ‘Dysfunctional politics’

    Libya is indeed a mess, overrun by feuding militias, with two rival governments vying for power amid a general air of lawlessness. Even before this latest disaster, the country’s rival rulers struggled to cope with the day-to-day management of their citizens’ lives.

    Or as Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, observed of the crisis, it has been “compounded by Libya’s dysfunctional politics, a country so rich in natural resources and yet so desperately lacking the security and stability that its people crave.”

    Meanwhile, Quentin Sommerville, the corporation’s Middle East correspondent, opined that “there are many countries that could have handled flooding on this scale, but not one as troubled as Libya. It has had a long and painful decade: civil wars, local conflicts, and Derna itself was taken over by the Islamic State group – the city was bombed to remove them from there.”

    According to Sommerville, experts had previously warned that the dams were in poor shape, adding: “Amid Libya’s chaos, those warnings went unheeded.”

    “Dysfunction”, “chaos”, “troubled”, “unstable”, “fractured”. The BBC and the rest of Britain’s establishment media have been firing out these terms like bullets from a machine gun.

    Libya is what analysts like to term a failed state. But what the BBC and the rest of the Western media have carefully avoided mentioning is why.

    Regime change

    More than decade ago, Libya had a strong, competent, if highly repressive, central government under dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The country’s oil revenues were used to provide free public education and health care. As a result, Libya had one of the highest literacy rates and average per capita incomes in Africa.

    That all changed in 2011, when Nato sought to exploit the “Responsibility to Protect” principle, or R2P for short, to justify carrying out what amounted to an illegal regime-change operation off the back of an insurgency.

    The supposed “humanitarian intervention” in Libya was a more sophisticated version of the West’s similarly illegal, “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq, eight years earlier.

    Then, the US and Britain launched a war of aggression without United Nations authorisation, based on an entirely bogus story that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, possessed hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

    In Libya’s case, by contrast, Britain and France, backed by the United States, were more successful in winning a UN security resolution, with a narrow remit to protect civilian populations from the threat of attack and impose a no-fly zone.

    Armed with the resolution, the West manufactured a pretext to meddle directly in Libya. They claimed that Gaddafi was preparing a massacre of civilians in the rebel-stronghold of Benghazi. The lurid story even suggested that Gaddafi was arming troops with Viagra to encourage them to commit mass rape.

    As with Iraq’s WMD, the claims were entirely unsubstantiated, as a report by the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee concluded five years later, in 2016. Its investigation found: “The proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.”

    The report added: “Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.”

    Bombing campaigns

    That, however, was not a view prime minister David Cameron or the media shared with the public when British MPs voted to back a war on Libya in March 2011. Only 13 legislators dissented.

    Among them, notably, was Jeremy Corbyn, then a backbencher who four years later would be elected Labour opposition leader, triggering an extended smear campaign against him by the British establishment.

    When Nato launched its “humanitarian intervention”, the death toll from Libya’s fighting was estimated by the UN at no more than 2,000. Six months later, it was assessed at nearer 50,000, with civilians comprising a significant proportion of the casualties.

    Citing its R2P mission, Nato flagrantly exceeded the terms of the UN resolution, which specifically excluded “a foreign occupation force of any form”. Western troops, including British special forces, operated on the ground, coordinating the actions of rebel militias opposed to Gaddafi.

    Meanwhile, Nato planes ran bombing campaigns that often killed the very civilians Nato claimed it was there to protect.

    It was another illegal Western regime-overthrow operation – this one ending with the filming of Gaddafi being butchered on the street.

    Slave markets

    The self-congratulatory mood among Britain’s political and media class, burnishing the West’s “humanitarian” credentials, was evident across the media.

    An Observer editorial declared: “An honourable intervention. A hopeful future.” In the Daily Telegraph, David Owen, a former British foreign secretary, wrote: “We have proved in Libya that intervention can still work.”

    But had it worked?

    Two years ago, even the arch-neoconservative Atlantic Council, the ultimate Washington insider think-tank, admitted: “Libyans are poorer, in greater peril, and experience as much or more political repression in parts of the country compared to Gaddafi’s rule.”

    It added: “Libya remains divided politically and in a state of festering civil war. Frequent oil production halts while lack of oil fields maintenance has cost the country billions of dollars in lost revenues.”

    The idea that Nato was ever really concerned about the welfare of Libyans was given the lie the moment Gaddafi was slaughtered. The West immediately abandoned Libya to its ensuing civil war, what President Obama colourfully called a “shitshow”, and the media that had been so insistent on the humanitarian goals behind the “intervention” lost all interest in post-Gaddafi developments.

    Libya was soon overrun with warlords, becoming a country in which, as human rights groups warned, slave markets were once again flourishing.

    As the BBC’s Sommerville noted in passing, the vacuum left behind in places like Derna soon sucked in more violent and extremist groups like the head-choppers of Islamic State.

    Unreliable allies

    But parallel to the void of authority in Libya that has exposed its citizens to such suffering is the remarkable void at the heart of the West’s media coverage of the current flooding.

    No one wants to explain why Libya is so ill-prepared to deal with the disaster, why the country is so fractured and chaotic.

    Just as no one wants to explain why the West’s invasion of Iraq on “humanitarian” grounds, and the disbanding of its army and police forces, led to more than a million Iraqis dead and millions more homeless and displaced.

    Or why the West allied with its erstwhile opponents – the jihadists of Islamic State and al-Qaeda – against the Syrian government, again causing millions to be displaced and dividing the country.

    Syria was as unprepared as Libya now is to deal with a large earthquake that hit its northern regions, along with southern Turkey, last February.

    This pattern repeats because it serves a useful end for a West led from Washington that seeks complete global hegemony and control of resources, or what its policymakers call full-spectrum dominance.

    Humanitarianism is the cover story – to keep Western publics docile – as the US and Nato allies target leaders of oil-rich states in the Middle East and North Africa that are viewed as unreliable or unpredictable, such as Libya’s Gadaffi and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

    A wayward leader

    WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables in late 2010 reveals a picture of Washington’s mercurial relationship with Gaddafi – a trait paradoxically the US ambassador to Tripoli is recorded attributing to the Libyan leader.

    Publicly, US officials were keen to cosy up to Gaddafi, offering him close security coordination against the very rebel forces they would soon be assisting in their regime-overthrow operation.

    But other cables reveal deeper concerns at Gaddafi’s waywardness, including his ambitions to build a United States of Africa to control the continent’s resources and develop an independent foreign policy.

    Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. And who has control over them, and profits from them, is centrally important to Western states.

    The WikiLeaks cables recounted US, French, Spanish and Canadian oil firms being forced to renegotiate contracts on significantly less favourable terms, costing them many billions of dollars, while Russia and China were awarded new oil exploration options.

    Still more worrying for US officials was the precedent Gaddafi had been setting, creating a “new paradigm for Libya that is playing out worldwide in a growing number of oil producing countries”.

    That precedent has been decisively overturned since Gaddafi’s demise. As Declassified reported, after biding their time British oil giants BP and Shell returned to Libya’s oilfields last year.

    In 2018, Britain’s then ambassador to Libya, Frank Baker, wrote enthusiastically about how the UK was “helping to create a more permissible environment for trade and investment, and to uncover opportunities for British expertise to help Libya’s reconstruction”.

    That contrasts with Gaddafi’s earlier moves to cultivate closer military and economic ties with Russia and China, including granting access to the port of Benghazi for the Russian fleet. In one cable from 2008, he is noted to have “voiced his satisfaction that Russia’s increased strength can serve as a necessary counterbalance to US power”.

    Submit or pay

    It was these factors that tipped the balance in Washington against Gaddafi’s continuing rule and encouraged the US to seize the opportunity to oust him by backing rebel forces.

    The claim that Washington or Britain cared about the welfare of ordinary Libyans is disproved by a decade of indifference to their plight – culminating in the current suffering in Derna.

    The West’s approach to Libya, as with Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, has been to prefer that it be sunk into a quagmire of division and instability than allow a strong leader to act defiantly, demand control over resources and establish alliances with enemy states – creating a precedent other states might follow.

    Small states are left with a stark choice: submit or pay a heavy price.

    Gaddafi was butchered in the street, the bloody images shared around the world. The suffering of ordinary Libyans over the past decade, in contrast, has taken place out of view.

    Now with the disaster in Derna, their plight is in the spotlight. But with the help of Western media like the BBC, the reasons for their misery remain as murky as the flood waters.

    • First published at Middle East Eye

  • Educating the US Imperium: Australia’s Mission for Assange

    An odder political bunch you could not find, at least when it comes to pursuing a single goal.  Given that the goal is the release of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange makes it all the more striking.  Six Australian parliamentarians of various stripes will be heading to Washington ahead of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s October visit to test the ground of empire, maybe even plant a few seeds of doubt, about why the indictment against their countryman should be dropped.

    That indictment, an outrageous, piffling shambles of a document comprising 18 charges, 17 based on that nasty, brutish statute, the Espionage Act of 1917, risks earning Assange a prison sentence in the order of 175 years.  But in any instrumental sense, his incarceration remains ongoing, with the United Kingdom currently acting as prison warden and custodian.

    In the politics of his homeland, the icy polarisation that came with Assange’s initial publishing exploits (former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was convinced Cablegate was a crime) has shifted to something almost amounting to a consensus.  The cynic will say that votes are in the offing, if not at risk if nothing is done; the principled will argue that enlightenment has finally dawned.

    The Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, agree on almost nothing else but the fact that Assange has suffered enough.  In Parliament, the tireless work of the independent MP from Tasmania, Andrew Wilkie, has bloomed into the garrulous Bring Julian Assange Home Parliamentary Group.

    The Washington mission, which will arrive in the US on September 20, comprises former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, the scattergun former Nationals leader, Labor MP Tony Zappia, Greens Senators David Shoebridge and Peter Whish-Wilson, Liberal Senator Alex Antic and the competent independent member for Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan.

    What will be said will hardly be pleasing to the ears of the Washington establishment.  Senator Shoebridge, for instance, promises to make the case that Assange was merely telling the truth about US war crimes, hardly music for guardians from Freedom’s Land.  Sounding like an impassioned pastor, he will tell his unsuspecting flock “the truth about this prosecution”.

    Joyce, however, tried to pour some oil over troubled waters by insisting on ABC News that the delegates were not there “to pick a fight”.  He did not necessarily want to give the impression that his views aligned with WikiLeaks.  The principles, soundly, were that Assange had not committed any of the alleged offences as a US national, let alone in the United States itself.  The material Assange had published had not been appropriated by himself. He had received it from Chelsea Manning, a US military source, “who is now walking the streets as a free person”.

    To pursue the indictment to its logical conclusion would mean that Assange, or any journalist for that matter, could be extradited to the US from, say, Australia, for the activities in question.  This extraterritorial eccentricity set a “very, very bad precedent”, and it was a “duty” to defend his status as an Australian citizen.

    The Nationals MP also noted, rather saliently, that Beijing was currently interested in pursuing four Chinese nationals on Australian soil for a number of alleged offences that did not, necessarily, have a nexus to Chinese territory.  Should Australia now extradite them as a matter of course?  (The same observation has been made by an adviser to the Assange campaign, Greg Barns SC: “You’ve got China using the Assange case as a sort of moral equivalence argument.”)

    Broadly speaking, the delegation is hoping to draw attention to the nature of publishing itself and the risks posed to free speech and the journalistic craft by the indictment.  But there is another catch.  In Shoebridge’s words, the delegates will also remind US lawmakers “that one of their closest allies sees the treatment of Julian Assange as a key indicator on the health of the bilateral relationship.”

    Ryan expressed much the same view.  “Australia is an excellent friend of the US and it’s not unreasonable to request to ask the US to cease this extradition attempt on Mr Assange.”  The WikiLeaks founder was “a journalist; he should not be prosecuted for crimes against journalism.”

    While these efforts are laudable, they are also revealing.  The first is that the clout of the Albanese government in Washington, on this point, has been minimal.  Meekly, the government awaits the legal process in the UK to exhaust itself, possibly leading to a plea deal with all its attendant dangers to Assange.  (The recent floating of that idea, based on remarks made by US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy, was scotched by former British diplomat and Assange confidante Craig Murray in an interview with WBAI radio last week.)  Best, then, to leave it to a diverse set of politicians representative of the “Australian voice” to convey the message across the pond.

    Then there is the issue of whether the delegation’s urgings will have any purchase beyond being a performing flea act.  US State Department officials remain glacial in their dismissal of Canberra’s “enough is enough” concerns and defer matters to the US Department of Justice.  The unimpressive ambassador Kennedy has been the perfect barometer of this sentiment: host Australian MPs for lunch, keep up appearances, listen politely and ignore their views.  Such is the relationship between lord and vassal.

    In Washington, the perspective remains ossified, retributive and wrongheaded.  Assange is myth and monster, the hacker who pilfered state secrets and compromised US national security; the man who revealed confidential sources and endangered informants; a propagandist who harmed the sweet sombre warriors of freedom by encouraging a new army of whistleblowers and transparency advocates.

    Whatever the outcome from this trip, some stirring of hope is at least possible.  The recent political movement down under shows that Assange is increasingly being seen less in the narrow context of personality than high principle.  Forget whether you know the man, his habits, his inclinations.  Remember him as the principle, or even a set of principles: the publisher who, with audacity, exposed the crimes and misdeeds of power; that, in doing so, he is now being hounded and persecuted in a way that will chill global efforts to do something similar.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UK May Block Assange’s Attendance at Appeal to European Court of Human Rights

    Should he be deported from the U.K., Julian Assange, the Australian publisher of WikiLeaks, faces up to 175 years in a U.S. prison on charges related to his release of information that revealed U.S. war crimes and torture. His legal team has stated that they plan to appeal the extradition case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, arguing that the British litigation…

    Source

  • Assange Be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal

    At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses.  The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay.  Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty.  Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.

    In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured regularly in commentary, yet done the least, is Australia.  Assange may well be an Australian national, but this has generally counted for naught.  Successive governments have tended to cower before the bullying disposition of Washington’s power. With the signing of the AUKUS pact and the inexorable surrender of Canberra’s military and diplomatic functions to Washington, any exertion of independent counsel and fair advice will be treated with sneering qualification.

    The Albanese government has claimed, at various stages, to be pursuing the matter with its US counterparts with firm insistence.  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has even publicly expressed his frustration at the lack of progress in finding a “diplomatic solution” to Assange’s plight.  But such frustrations have been tempered by an acceptance that legal processes must first run their course.

    The substance of any such diplomatic solution remains vague.  But on August 14, the Sydney Morning Herald, citing US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy as its chief source, reported that a “resolution” to Assange’s plight might be in the offing.  “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador told the paper.  This could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, with the details sketched out by the US Department of Justice.  In making her remarks, Kennedy clarified that this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other department.  “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.”

    In May, Kennedy met members of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange Group to hear their concerns.  The previous month, 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, wrote an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, warning that the prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

    In a discussion with The Intercept, Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, had his own analysis of the latest developments. “The [Biden] administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [Albanese’s] first state visit to DC in October.”  In the event one wasn’t found, “we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

    That rebuff was particularly brutal, taking place on the occasion of the AUSMIN talks between the foreign and defence ministers of both Australia and the United States.  On that occasion, Foreign Minister Penny Wong remarked that Australia had made its position clear to their US counterparts “that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”

    In his response, Secretary of State Blinken claimed to “understand” such views and admitted that the matter had been raised with himself and various offices of the US.  With such polite formalities acknowledged, Blinken proceeded to tell “our friends” what, exactly, Washington wished to do.  Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.  The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

    Such an assessment, lazily assumed, repeatedly rebutted, and persistently disproved, went unchallenged by all the parties present, including the Australian ministers.  Nor did any members of the press deem it appropriate to challenge the account.  The unstated assumption here is that Assange is already guilty for absurd charges, a man condemned.

    At this stage, such deals are the stuff of manipulation and fantasy.  The espionage charges have been drafted to inflate, rather than diminish any sentence.  Suggestions that the DOJ will somehow go soft must be treated with abundant scepticism.  The pursuit of Assange is laced by sentiments of revenge, intended to both inflict harm upon the publisher while deterring those wishing to publish US national security information.  As the Australian international law academic Don Rothwell observes, the plea deal may well take into account the four years spent in UK captivity, but is unlikely to either feature a complete scrapping of the charges, or exempt Assange from travelling to the US to admit his guilt.  “It’s not possible to strike a plea deal outside the relevant jurisdiction except in the most exceptional circumstances.”

    Should any plea deal be successfully reached and implemented, thereby making Assange admit guilt, the terms of his return to Australia, assuming he survives any stint on US soil, will be onerous.  In effect, the US would merely be changing the prison warden while adjusting the terms of observation.  In place of British prison wardens will be Australian overseers unlikely to ever take kindly to the publication of national security information.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • AUSMIN and Assange: The Great Vassal Smackdown

    It was there for all to see.  Embarrassing, cloying, and bound make you cough up the remnants of your summit lunch, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III stopped by one of the vassal states to make sure that the meal and military service was orderly, the troops well behaved, and the weapons working as they should.  On the occasion of 2023 AUSMIN meetings, the questions asked were mild and generally unprovocative; answers were naturally tailored.

    Seeing that Australia is now rapidly moving into the US orbit of client status – its minerals will be designated a US domestic resource in due course – and given that its land, sea and air are to be more available than ever for the US armed forces, nuclear and conventional, nothing will interrupt this inexorable extinguishing of sovereignty.

    One vestige of Australian sovereignty might have evinced itself, notably in how Canberra might push for the release, or at the very least better terms, for the Australian national and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.  The publisher faces 18 counts, all but one of them pertaining to the Espionage Act of 1917, an archaic, wartime act with a dark record of punishing free speech and contrarians.  The Albanese government, eschewing “the hailer” approach in favour of “quiet diplomacy” and not offending Washington, has conspicuously failed to make any impression.

    In April, an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, featuring 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, argued that the Assange prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

    Despite such concerns bubbling away in Parliament, Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong was in no danger of upsetting their guests.  “[W]e have made clear our view that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”  But, as ever, “there are limits until Mr. Assange’s legal processes have concluded.”  The assumption, laid bare, is that Australia will only push for terms once the US secures its treasured quarry.

    Blinken parroted staged, withered lines, politely dismissing Wong’s statements while pouring acid on the Assange plea.  “I really do understand and certainly confirm what Penny said about the fact that this matter was raised with us, as it has been in the past, and I understand the sensitivities, I understand the concerns and view of Australians.”  He thought it “important”, as if it mattered “that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter.”

    Those friends were made to understand that matter in no uncertain terms. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country.  The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

    Such excremental, false reasoning was galling, and went unchallenged by the all too pliant Senator Wong and the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles.  This, despite the cool findings by Blinken’s own colleagues at the Pentagon that the WikiLeaks disclosures never posed a risk to any valued source in the service of the US imperium, and the fact that other outlets have also published these purportedly “named sources” without having their collars fingered by the US Department of Justice. The double standard is gold in Washington.

    The same babbling nonsense was evident during the extradition trial proceedings of Assange that were held at London’s Central Criminal Court in 2020.  There, the prosecution, representing a number of clumsy, clownish and impressively ignorant representatives from Freedom Land, proved unable to produce a single instance of actual compromise or harm to a single informant of the US imperium.  They also showed, with idiotic facility, an ignorance of the court martial that the US military had subjected Chelsea Manning to when she faced charges for revealing classified national security information to WikiLeaks.

    Wong, as part of her buttoned-up brief dictated by Washington’s suits, either did not know nor care to correct Blinken who, for all we know, is equally ignorant of his brief on the subject.  If the prosecutors in London in 2020 had no idea, why should the US secretary of state, let alone the Australian foreign minister?

    As a terrible omen for the Australians, four defence personnel seem to have perished in waters near Hamilton Island through an accident with their MRH-90 Taipan helicopter as part of the Talisman Sabre war games.  The US overlords were paternal and benevolent; their Australian counterparts were grateful for the interest.  Blinken soppily suggested how the sacrifice was appreciated.  “They have been on our minds throughout today; they remain very much on our minds right now.”  But the message was clear: Australia, you are now less a state than a protectorate, territory to exploit, a resource basket to appropriate.  Why not just make it official?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Free Press, Propaganda and Censorship

    In war, truth is the first casualty.

    — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)

    How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.

    It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.

    Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.

    But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

    It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts.  The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.

    Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.

    This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Assange Exposes the Empire’s True Face

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley).

    Julian Assange is a journalist who’s been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes, by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes.

    Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire’s true face.

    And in that sense it’s interesting that the empire made the decision to jail and silence Assange, since in doing so it exposed its own tyranny and criminality far more than WikiLeaks could have ever hoped to.

    *****

    Assange said, “It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers.” If you accept this as true, you must also accept that there are precisely zero good journalists anywhere in the western mass media, and that Assange is the greatest journalist who has ever lived.

    *****

    The moderate position on Ukraine is to hold both Russia and the US empire responsible for their respective roles in starting and continuing this war. That’s the middle ground. But this position is regarded as freakish fringe extremism in the western mainstream and you’ll be accused of literally conducting psyops for a foreign government if you voice it, because the western mainstream is just that freakishly extremist.

    The mainstream position in the west is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that Moscow is 100% responsible for this conflict in every way while the US is just an innocent little flower who just wants to protect freedom and democracy. When you actually spell out what the mainstream position on Ukraine is it sounds like a silly fairy tale for children, but that’s what all the most influential western pundits, politicians and government officials are actually saying. That’s how bat shit insane things are.

    The Overton window has been shifted so far in support of NATO warmongering that this middle-ground position is now regarded as fringe extremism, so they just debate things like whether or not cluster bombs should be used to fight this war that is obviously 10000% Russia’s fault. As is often the case this dynamic has already been well-described by the elderly scholar who we all love to share our opinions about:

    The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
    — Noam Chomsky

    *****

    https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1680051297754697728

    *****

    The claim that NATO is a “defensive” alliance that’s set up to promote peace is a lie that’s refuted by a swift glance at recorded history; in terms of evidence it’s crazier than saying there are alien aircraft in our skies. But you constantly hear respected pundits saying it.

    *****

    The US presidential race is that wonderful season American liberals set aside to remind socialists that they hate them far more than they hate the right and would cheerfully burn the whole country to the ground before they’d share one iota of power with them:

    https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1678593179019362305

    The only people who hate leftists more than rightists do are liberals, which is a bit funny because rightists think leftists and liberals are the same.

    *****

    It’s trippy how people pour such effort into disputing whether the planet is warming when the biosphere is showing us many, many other signs of looming collapse. They completely ignore the ocean dead zones, plummeting insect populations, loss of wildlife, trees, fertile soil etc.

    I mean, what specifically is the claim here? That there’s a big evil plot across the entire scientific field to lie about warming, but all the other signs of environmental collapse are legit? Or are those fake too? If so, why only focus on the one message that benefits fossil fuel companies?

    Obviously there are powerful people looking to exploit global warming to shore up wealth and power; that’s to be expected. It would be surprising if that wasn’t happening. None of that changes the need to drastically alter the way humanity operates on this planet right away.

    *****

    One reason it’s so hard to set up beneficial systems is because in negotiations manipulators always push for the absolute maximum amount of gain they can possibly grab while good people only push for a normal, human-sized amount of space for themselves. You see this constantly in union negotiations and politics alike: people come to the negotiation table with demands that are viewed as “reasonable” by those in power and then are negotiated back halfway from that point of “reason” as a “compromise”, while those with the power grab up everything they can get their mitts on and walk back only if forced to. This has a ratchet effect over the years which sees ordinary people losing more and more power to the ruling class.

    That’s not going to change until normal people stop letting the manipulators set the bar of what’s “reasonable” and start pushing out space for themselves with as much force and entitlement as bad people. People are going to have to stop coming to the negotiating table with their compromise, and instead show up with the demand to take back everything that was stolen from them — and more — with as much force as necessary.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Julian Assange Is “Dangerously Close” to Extradition for Revealing US War Crimes

    For nearly five years, publisher and journalist Julian Assange has fought extradition to the United States where he faces 175 years in prison for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes. Instead of protecting freedom of the press, to which he pledged allegiance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Joe Biden is continuing Donald Trump’s prosecution of Assange under the infamous…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Daniel Ellsberg is Lauded in Death by the Same Media that Lets Assange Rot in Jail

    Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam.

    The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.

    As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations that caused mass civilian casualties. Entire villages had been burned, while captured Vietnamese were tortured or executed. Deceptively, the US referred to these as “pacification programmes”.

    But most of those today loudly hailing Ellsberg as an “American hero” have been far more reluctant to champion the Ellsberg of our times: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

    For years, Assange has been rotting in a London high-security prison while the Biden administration seeks his extradition on charges that ludicrously equate his publication of the Afghan and Iraq war logs – a modern Pentagon Papers – with “espionage”.

    Like Ellsberg, Assange exposed the way western states had been systematically lying while they perpetrated war crimes. Like Ellsberg, he was fraudulently labelled a threat to national security and charged with espionage. Like Ellsberg, if found guilty, he faces more than 100 years in jail. Like Ellsberg, Assange has learned that the US Congress is unwilling to exercise its powers to curb governmental abuses.

    But unlike Ellsberg’s case, the courts have consistently sided with Assange’s persecutors, not with him for shining a light on state criminality. And, in a further contrast, the western media have stayed largely silent as the noose has tightened around Assange’s neck.

    The similarities in Assange’s and Ellsberg’s deeds – and the stark differences in outcomes – are hard to ignore. The very journalists and publications now extolling Ellsberg for his historic act of bravery have been enabling, if only through years of muteness, western capitals’ moves to demonise Assange for his contemporary act of heroism.

    Docile lapdogs

    The hypocrisy did not go unnoticed by Ellsberg. He was one of the noisiest defenders of Assange. So noisy, in fact, that most media outlets felt obliged in their obituaries to make reference to the fact, even if in passing.

    Ellsberg testified on Assange’s behalf at a London extradition hearing in 2020, observing that the pair’s actions were identical. That was not entirely right, however.

    Assange published classified documents passed to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, just as the New York Times published the secrets handed to them by Ellsberg. Given that media freedoms are protected by the US First Amendment, whereas whistleblowing by an official is not, Assange’s treatment is even more perverse and abusive than Ellsberg’s.

    In contrast to his case, Ellsberg added, the WikiLeaks founder could never receive a fair hearing in the US. His trial has already been assigned to a court in the eastern district of Virginia, home to the US intelligence agencies.

    Late last year, as Assange’s prospects of extradition to the US increased, Ellsberg admitted that he had been secretly given a backup copy of the leaked Afghan and Iraq war logs, in case WikiLeaks was prevented from making public the details of US and UK criminality.

    Ellsberg pointed out that his possession of the documents made him equally culpable with Assange under the justice department’s draconian “espionage” charges. During a BBC interview, he demanded that he be indicted too.

    If the praise being lavished on Ellsberg in death demonstrates anything, it is the degree to which the self-professed watchdogs of western state power have been tamed over subsequent decades into being the most docile of lapdogs.

    In the Assange case, the courts and establishment media have clearly acted as adjuncts of power, not checks on it. And for that reason, if no other, western states are gaining greater and greater control over their citizenry in an age when mass digital surveillance is easier than ever.

    Spied on day and night

    For those reluctant to confer on Assange the praise being heaped on Ellsberg, it is worth remembering how similarly each was viewed by US officials in their respective eras.

    Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, called Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America”.

    Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, declared Assange and WikiLeaks a “non-state, hostile intelligence service”. Pompeo’s CIA also secretly plotted ways to kidnap or assassinate Assange in London.

    Both Ellsberg and Assange were illegally surveilled by government agencies.

    In Ellsberg’s case, Nixon’s officials wiretapped his conversations and tried to dig up dirt by stealing files from his psychiatrist’s office. The same team carried out the Watergate break-in, famously exposed by the US media, that ultimately brought Nixon down.

    In Assange’s case, the CIA spied on him day and night after he was given political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, even violating his privileged conversations with his lawyers. Astonishingly, this law-breaking has barely been remarked on by the media, even though it should have been grounds alone for throwing out the extradition case against him.

    Nixon officials tried to rig Ellsberg’s trial by offering the judge in his hearings the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

    In Assange’s case, a series of judicial irregularities and apparent conflicts of interest have plagued the proceedings, again ignored by the establishment media.

    This month, High Court judge Jonathan Swift rejected what may amount to a last-ditch attempt by Assange’s legal team to halt his extradition. Swift’s previous career was as a government lawyer. Looking back on his time there, he noted that his “favourite clients were the security and intelligence agencies”.

    Above the law

    But if the modern White House is as hostile to transparency as its predecessors – and armed with more secret tools to surveil critics than ever before – the media and the courts are offering far less remedy than they did in Ellsberg’s time.

    Even the Obama administration understood the dangers of targeting Assange. His relationship to Manning was no different from the New York Times’ to Ellsberg. Each publicised state wrongdoing after classified documents were divulged to them by a disenchanted official.

    Prosecuting Assange was seen as setting a precedent that could ensnare any publisher or media outlet that made public state secrets, however egregious the crimes being exposed.

    For that reason, Obama went full guns blazing against whistleblowers, locking up more of them than all his predecessors combined. Whistleblowers were denied any right to claim a public-interest defence. State secrecy was sacrosanct, even when it was being abused to shield evidence of criminality from public view.

    Asked whether Obama would have pursued him through the courts, as Nixon did, Ellsberg answered: “I’m sure that President Obama would have sought a life sentence in my case.”

    It took a reckless Trump administration to go further, casting aside the long-standing legal distinction between an official who leaks classified documents in violation of their employment contract, and a publisher-journalist who exposes those documents in accordance with their duty to hold the powerful to account.

    Now Biden has chosen to follow Trump’s lead by continuing Assange’s show trial. The new presumption is that it is illegal for anyone – state official, media outlet, ordinary citizen – to disclose criminal activity by an all-powerful state.

    In Assange’s case, the White House is openly manoeuvring to win recognition for itself as officially above the law.

    Disappeared from view

    In the circumstances, one might have assumed that the courts and media would be rallying to uphold basic democratic rights, such as a free press, and impose accountability on state officials shown to have broken the law.

    In the 1970s, however imperfectly, the US media gradually unravelled the threads of the Watergate scandal till they exposed the unconstitutional behaviour of the Nixon administration. At the same time, the liberal press rallied behind Ellsberg, making common cause with him in a fight to hold the executive branch to account.

    Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, charged Ellsberg with espionage and accused the New York Times of the same. Claiming the paper had undermined national security, he threatened it with ruinous legal action. The Times ignored the threats and carried on publishing, forcing the justice department to obtain an injunction.

    The courts, meanwhile, took the side of both Ellsberg and the media in their legal battles. In 1973, the federal court in Los Angeles threw out the case against Ellsberg before it could be put to a jury, accusing the government of gross misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.

    Meanwhile, the Supreme Court prioritised freedom of the press, denying the government prior restraint. Ultimately, these cases and others forced Nixon from office in disgrace.

    The contrast with Assange’s treatment by the media and the courts could not be starker.

    The media, even “liberal” outlets he worked with on the Afghan and Iraq logs, including the New York Times and the Guardian, have struggled to show even the most rudimentary kind of solidarity, preferring instead to distance themselves from him. They have largely conspired in US and UK efforts to suggest Assange is not a “proper journalist” and therefore does not deserve First Amendment protections.

    These media outlets have effectively partnered with Washington in suggesting that their collaboration with Assange in no way implicates them in his supposed “crimes”.

    As a result, the media has barely bothered to cover his hearings or explain how the courts have twisted themselves into knots by ignoring the most glaring legal obstacles to his extradition: such as the specific exclusion in the UK’s 2007 Extradition Treaty with the US of extraditions for political cases.

    Unlike Ellsberg, who became a cause celebre, Assange has been disappeared from public view by the states he exposed and largely forgotten by the media that should be championing his cause.

    Shortening Odds

    Ellsberg emerged from his court victory over the Pentagon Papers to argue: “The demystification and de-sanctification of the president has begun. It’s like the defrocking of the Wizard of Oz.”

    In this assessment, time has proved him sadly wrong, as he came to recognise.

    In recent months, Ellsberg had become an increasingly voluble critic of US conduct in the Ukraine war. He drew parallels with the lies told by four administrations – those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson – to hide the extent of Washington’s involvement in Vietnam before the US went public with its ground war.

    Ellsberg warned that the US was waging a similarly undeclared war in Ukraine – a proxy one, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder – to  “weaken the Russians“.  As in Vietnam, the White House was gradually and secretly escalating US involvement.

    As also in Vietnam, western leaders were concealing the fact that the war had reached a stalemate, with the inevitable result that large numbers of Ukrainians and Russians were losing their lives in fruitless combat.

    He called former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s hidden, early role in stymying peace talks between Russia and Ukraine “a crime against humanity.”

    Referring to history repeating itself, he observed: “It’s an awakening that’s in many ways painful.”

    Most of all, Ellsberg feared that the West’s war machine – addicted to Cold War belligerence, obscured under the supposedly “defensive” umbrella of Nato – wanted once again to confront China.

    In 2021, as the Biden administration intensified its hostile posturing towards Beijing, Ellsberg revealed that back in 1958 Eisenhower’s officials had drawn up secret plans to attack China with nuclear weapons. That was during an earlier crisis over the Taiwan Strait.

    “At this point, I’m much more aware of… how little has changed in these critical aspects of the danger of nuclear war, and how limited the effectiveness has been to curtail what we’ve done,” he told an interviewer shortly before he died.

    What Ellsberg understood most keenly was the desperate need – if humanity was to survive – both for more whistleblowers to come forward to expose their states’ crimes, and for a tenacious, watchdog media to give their full backing.

    Watching the media abandon Assange to his persecutors, Ellsberg could draw only one possible conclusion: that humanity’s odds were shortening by the day.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Liberal and “Left” Silence on National Security Police State When Used against Trump and His Supporters

    The National Security police state now regards the Democratic Party as a more useful tool to criminalize opposition to US wars and maintain their control over the US government. We see this in the attack on the Uhuru Movement as being in the pay of Russia, in the imprisonment and torture of Julian Assange, in the jailing of numerous whistleblowers, in the censoring of hundreds of anti-war websites, claiming they spread Russian “disinformation.” Unfortunately, not a few who consider themselves on the left or liberals acquiesce to these attacks. Many actually repeat them.

    Many more self-described leftists and liberals are supportive and participate in national security state/Democratic Party attacks on Trump and his supporters. In doing so, first, they are oblivious to the fact that these repressive police state operations will be used against them in the future. We saw that when we okayed blocking access to Alex Jones’ website because of his abusive and cruel attacks on the Sandy Hook families and killings as a hoax. Once we tolerated that, the national security state used the same measures against hundreds of our own anti-war websites.

    Second, in supporting police state operations against Trump, leftists are caving into the Democratic Party and the national security state, some at a faster rate than others. Traditionally, liberals and leftists have always considered, either consciously or not, the Democrats as the “lesser evil.” They paint Republicans, particularly with the rise of Trump, as a fascist threat that must be stopped. In reality, the ruling class has no need for fascism in the present political climate of a quiescent and disorganized working class.

    The Man with the Horned Hat and “Obstruction of an Official Proceeding”

    We saw liberal and left supporters of civil liberties silent after the imprisonment of Jacob Chansley, the January 6 man with the horned hat. He was sentenced to 3 ½ years for “obstruction of an official proceeding,” even though the prosecutors admitted he was non-violent, that the videos of him in the Capitol showed he was respectful of the police, and was actually guided around by some of them.

    Jimmy Dore reported that police agencies had infiltrated the groups involved in January 6 long before it occurred, so they knew well enough what to expect. Dore also reported over 100 undercover police (FBI, Department of Justice and Homeland Security police, DC Metro Police, Secret Service, etc.) were part of the January 6 crowd both outside and inside the Capitol.

    For those of us who see the need for fundamental social change in this country, as most in the US now do, obstructing an official proceeding will sooner or later be obligatory – if many of us have not done so already. 

    Oath Keeper Stewart Rhodes and Seditious Conspiracy

    Liberal and left supporters of civil liberties were also silent after Stewart Rhodes, head of the police-infiltrated Oath Keepers, was sentenced to 18 years for “seditious conspiracy.” Key Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins, was tried but not found guilty of “seditious conspiracy.” She is, incidentally, is a transwoman — so much for the view that these right-wingers are “transphobic.”

    Seditious conspiracy is codified as:

    If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. 

    To “conspire” to use “force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” In contrast, Martin Luther King proclaimed, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

    “Seditious conspiracy” was used to imprison Puerto Rican nationalists opposed to the US occupation of their country. In 1936, Pedro Albizu Campos and other leaders of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were found guilty of the “crime.” Later, 17 members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party were charged after four of them carried out the 1954 shooting inside the Capitol, wounding five Congresspeople. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who declared, “By international law, a colonized people has the right to fight against colonialism by any means necessary, including the use of force,” was imprisoned for seditious conspiracy and other charges.

    On January 6, thousands of people went to the Capitol to protest, and hundreds went inside, some by violently attacking the police, some by breaking in, some let in by the police. The Oath Keepers were not some driving force behind the riot. It is silly to think a few hundred people, without guns, could seize control of the Capitol from armed police forces, let alone overturn an election. 

    Stewart Rhodes, leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers, didn’t engage in violence against the government, didn’t carry a weapon, didn’t go inside the Capitol, didn’t vandalize government property, and wasn’t commanding those outside or inside the Capitol. His crime was apparently talking about revolution in private chats and lamenting after the event that “we should have brought rifles.” How is that so different from the Black Panthers? The Oath Keepers didn’t bring guns to the Capitol, and they didn’t take part in an “insurrection” — everyone left the Capitol after just a few hours when asked to. Rhodes was basically convicted for mouthing off to his associates — a common occurrence among leftist revolutionaries. The government prosecution failed to prove they had a coordinated plan to seize the Capitol, let alone overthrow the government.

    In spite of this, the sentencing judge declared Rhodes conspired with others “to take up arms and foment revolution.” That is exactly the reason many leftists support some version of the Second Amendment. Rhodes had his sentence jacked up to 18 years with a “terrorism enhancement” charge, in part because the Oath Keepers had weapons elsewhere.

    The judge could assert, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the republic and to the very fabric of this democracy.” Rhodes’ lawyer legitimately stated his case was about the “weaponization of speech by the Department of Justice.” Exactly the same was true of Eugene Debs and later Socialist Workers Party leaders for their “seditious conspiracy” convictions for opposing US involvement in World War I and World War II.

    Sedition and conspiracy prosecutions, like those the Biden administration pursue, turn advocacy of ideas into a crime. This conviction of Rhodes, if not thrown out, you can expect to be used against a working class left wing in the coming years.

    Donald Trump and the Espionage Act

    Last summer President Biden branded so-called MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists” who “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Liberals and leftists use the same label to describe Trump supporters, who they claim are white supremacists and reactionaries.

    In January 2017, Democratic Senator Charles Schumer bluntly admitted who really controls Washington when he said President Trump was “being really dumb” by challenging the US police state apparatus. “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he foretold.

    The latest national security state operation is the Biden administration attempting to jail and exclude his chief rival in the upcoming presidential election, Trump, by charging him with treason. That is unprecedented in US history. There would be outrage and cries of a fascist government takeover if in 2020, sitting President Trump had charged his chief presidential rival, Joe Biden, with treason and aimed to imprison him for having classified and secret government documents in his garage and elsewhere. Trump could just as easily have done that, just as he could have charged Hillary and Obama with treason for the same reason.

    Previously the Espionage Act had been used against Eugene Debs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Daniel Ellsberg, and Julian Assange. Obama used the Espionage Act more than all previous presidents combined in order to shut down public knowledge of criminal US military policies abroad and at home. The Obama administration charged Jeffrey Sterling with espionage, a former CIA officer who publicized details of covert CIA spying on Iran; Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official who attempted to blow the whistle on NSA spying; Chelsea Manning, who provided information about US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan; John Kiriakou, who leaked information about the illegal torture of detainees; Edward Snowden, who showed the NSA was engaged in massive illegal surveillance against the world population; and Daniel Hale, who leaked documents about the Pentagon’s drone assassination program.

    The national security state and its puppet Biden are using this same Espionage Act to try to lock up Biden’s main opponent in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump is an anathema to them in part because he is against their proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, just as he was against their war on Iraq. Tucker Carlson made this point in a show now seen by 101 million.

    Tulsi Gabbard highlighted that this prosecution of President Biden’s rival is like “authoritarian regimes around the world [that] wield the power of the state to silence or eliminate opposition.” She called out the blatant double standard when it came to the same by Clinton, Biden, when CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress, when 51 senior intelligence officials deliberately lied and labeled Hunter Biden’s laptop Russian disinformation, when FBI officials spread the Russia-Trump collusion hoax.

    Carlson’s and Gabbard’s positions are ones that leftists and defenders of civil liberties should be taking. However, because of widespread anti-Trumpism in the liberal-left milieu, they don’t because they worry of losing their “left” credentials by standing up and condemning Democratic Party backed police state operations against right-wing groups, against Trump, against the attempt to deny people’s right to vote for Trump. We also saw this fear of standing for people’s rights and against the Democrat and police state operations with their support for the Russiagate hoax, with their condemnation of the Ottawa protestors, with unjustified sentences of those January 6 protestors who were non-violent. We even see it with the hesitation of many liberals and the left to defend Julian Assange and the Uhuru Movement, as they are considered “pro-Russian.”

    Given liberals and leftists paint the Republicans as a fascistic party, it follows they see — whether they admit it or not — the Democrats as the lesser evil. No matter that all Democrats in Congress vote to arm Ukraine fascists in the war on Russia, and only Republicans, a minority, oppose it. It is irrelevant to the Democrats how much you criticize them and what names you call them if in November you ok voting for them to stop the Republicans from winning. That makes you an election time supporter of the Democratic Party. That makes people like Bernie Sanders, even Cornel West and “left” groups, sheep dogs for the Democratic Party because in the end they say the Republicans are so dangerous we can’t let them win.

    This amounts to caving into the Democratic Party, the national security state, and inevitably to the ideology they push. One counterproductive result is that Trump becomes seen by much of the public as one real opposition to the national security state. He said after his indictment, the “deep state…they want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom…They are not coming after me, they are coming after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way….” He is standing in their way, he is seen as a threat to their controlling power, though he differs from his enemies only in the manner of maintaining US imperial world rule. But in the end, Trump is right: what the national security state does to him, they will later do to us.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Daniel Ellsberg: The Establishment’s Whistleblower

    In 1972 Stanley K. Sheinbaum, chairman of the Pentagon Papers Fund, wrote with a hot pertinence that remains striking (at this time Julian Assange is facing grave prospects of being extradited to the United States) that both Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo had “struck a blow for us all when they gave the Pentagon Papers to the press and to the Senate: against the war in Vietnam and against new adventures in Cambodia, Laos, or elsewhere”. And more besides, including striking against government secrecy in both domestic and foreign policy and directing a blow “for freedom of the press, freedom of the American people to be informed of what crimes their government might be committing in their name.”

    The Nixon administration was mustard keen to bang up Ellsberg for what would have been 115 years, and Russo for 35. The charges, absurd reading then as they are now, were for conspiracy, espionage, and larceny. Central to this particularly vicious effort on the part of President Richard Nixon and his inner circle was the release of the Pentagon Papers, a government document running into 7,000 pages that was much at odds with public statements made by respective presidential administrations on US involvement in the Indo-China War. Both men had been analysts and researchers at the RAND Corporation, with the former tasked with nuclear wargaming scenarios. Russo had aided Ellsberg in the mammoth task of copying the papers.

    The treatment dished out by the US national security state was very much the blueprint for what is taking place against the WikiLeaks founder. Initial indictment, followed by further grand jury hearings, followed by another round of indictments. As Sheinbaum remarked, the absurdity of the charges was self-evident. “Conspiracy against whom?” he asked. “The American people to whom the documents belonged in the first place? The press to whom the Pentagon Papers were given – not sold – so that they could better inform the people on how a succession of administrations had deceived them and wasted this country’s lives, resources, and honor?”

    The case, thankfully, collapsed. The presiding judge, William M. Byrne Jr., even before the jury’s verdict was in, dismissed the action in May 1973, citing serious government misconduct (the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been burgled by the infamous “White House Plumbers”), not to mention illegal wiretapping. As part of that most Nixonian of sagas, the judge also revealed that he had been offered the role of FBI director by John Ehrlichman, the President’s assistant for domestic affairs.

    Initially in agreement with policies in the Cold War rollback of communism, Ellsberg came to have trouble with the narrative of one’s country, right and wrong. In a sense, he became something of a model whistleblower: a figure initially besotted, a believer in the role of US power, only to then find evidence at odds with that belief.

    While working at RAND, he visited Haverford College in August 1969, where his attendance at a conference of the War Resisters’ International proved turning. He had initially found the participants, as he recfalls in his memoir Secrets, unduly simplistic, unnecessarily negative, dogmatic and extremist. It took a demonstration outside the trial of draft resister Bod Eaton to invest him with necessary confidence. “I had become free of the fear of being absurd, of looking foolish, for stepping out of line.”

    Then came a moving talk by peace activist Randy Kehler. The impression left by Kehler, far from being banally corny and naff, helped complete the Damascene conversion: the RAND employee would commit to the task of ending a war effort he had been complicit in advancing. His establishment skin would be sloughed.

    As Spencer Ackerman observes, the strength of Ellsberg’s whistleblowing was the locus of power; it came from a figure so highly placed in the national security apparatus he had the ear of presidential advisors. In the post-9/11 era, there has been no equivalent, no reputational shedding of skin. The leaks and disclosures have come from such individuals as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Daniel Hale, all vitally important, yet all several steps removed from the centre of power. “The people of Ellsberg’s equivalent rank and early-career promise more typically chose to serve the War on Terror, not resist it, going along with atrocities abroad and democratic destabilization at home.”

    Ellsberg’s tenacious advocacy for Assange, for whom he acted as witness in the extradition trial in September 2020, was fortifying. “My 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,” he outlined in his statement to the court. “I view the WikiLeaks publications of 2010 and 2011 to be of comparable importance.”

    He also warned about that most odious feature of the Espionage Act of 1917, upon which 17 of the 18 charges against Assange have been framed. Motivation, he recalled in his own 1973 trial, was dismissed by government lawyers as irrelevant: the offences imputed “strict liability”. As he told the Central Criminal Court in London, the Act effectively disallowed genuine whistleblowing to permit “you to say you were informing the polity. So I did not have a fair trial, no one since me had a fair trial on these charges and Julian Assange cannot remotely get a fair trial under those charges if he was tried.”

    As he revealed in December 2022, Ellsberg had been the WikiLeaks “backup” for releasing the documents that were eventually published in 2010. Assange, he told the BBC Hardtalk program, “could rely on me to get it [the information] out.”

    In any final reflections on what Ellsberg did, the conscientious duty of a figure to disclose evidence of government misconduct, to enlighten the citizenry more broadly as political agents rather than obedient subjects, shines. “From the point of view of a civilization and the survival of eight or nine billion people, when everything is at stake, can it be worth even a small chance of having a small effect?” he reflected in an interview with Politico. “The answer is: Of course.”

  • Judge refuses fresh evidence in Assange appeal, but there are at least two Get Out Of Jail cards

    On 8 June, high court judge Jonathan Swift announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US has failed. Swift’s rulings are here and here.

    The rulings came just days after it was revealed that new evidence had been withheld by police in Spain. That evidence appears to further demonstrate the political nature of the Assange prosecution.

    Meanwhile, Swift has given Assange’s lawyers until Tuesday 13 June to submit another appeal. However, he made it clear that any appeal should not include a submission of fresh evidence. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to explore this new evidence.

    The surveillance

    Spanish security firm UC Global conducted surveillance of Assange and his visitors inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London over several years:

    According to a former employee of the firm, “American friends” requested the surveillance. UC Global even arranged for the surveillance to be streamed to the US.

    Newly revealed evidence

    The new evidence was revealed during the ongoing investigation in a Madrid court of UC Global head David Morales. As a result, Assange accused Morales of violating his privacy. This fresh evidence consists of files marked on an external hard drive as “CIA,” “Embassy”, and “Videos”.

    WikiLeaks journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson published a screenshot of the files:

    The connection between Morales and US intelligence was first brought to the attention of the London court by Assange’s defence lawyer Gareth Peirce.

    How the new evidence was discovered

    Assange’s lawyers were active in exposing the missing UC Global surveillance files.

    Spanish news outlet El Pais explained:

    The discovery of these new clues about the CIA’s spying on the cyberactivist — who remains imprisoned in a London jail — is no accident. Assange’s lawyers found problems when downloading the records uploaded to the cloud.

    They managed to get Judge Santiago Pedraz — who is overseeing the case — to authorize a second copy of the material seized by the agents.

    Failure to disclose evidence

    Spanish police had failed to disclose the new evidence to the Madrid court. Its concealment is directly relevant to the Assange extradition proceedings.

    Regarding the non-disclosure of evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) clearly states:

    A failure by the prosecutor or the police to comply with their respective obligations… may result in a defence application to stay proceedings as an abuse of process, the exclusion of material evidence or a successful appeal.

    Two famous cases of non-disclosure in the UK resulted in the quashing of convictions and the accused set free.

    One saw the collapse of the Ratcliffe and Drax trials of environmental activists and their convictions quashed. Both trials showed the CPS withheld evidence that undercover officer Mark Kennedy was pivotal to the actions.

    In another case, four people known as the ‘Guildford Four’, accused of bombing a pub, had their convictions quashed too. That was after defence lawyers – including Peirce, who represents Assange – revealed that police had withheld evidence of their innocence.

    Surveillance breaches confidentiality

    CIA spy-craft could be regarded as par for the course.

    But that’s not necessarily true in this case. In September 2019 the Canary reported that the surveillance on the Ecuadorian Embassy involved monitoring of meetings between the Wikileaks founder and his lawyers. The lawyers included Melynda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, and Baltasar Garzón.

    Indeed, the Madrid court was told that Morales:

    had received explicit requests for information, which stated on several occasions that these requests came from the US, in the form of a list of targets which were communicated via email, telephone and verbally. The security personnel deployed in the embassy were instructed to pay special attention to these targets. Among them, special attention had to be given to Mr. Assange’s lawyers.

    Thus the newly revealed evidence could throw more light on these breaches of client-lawyer confidentiality. Such breaches would normally see a case voided.

    It’s not over yet

    Given Swift’s rulings, any appeal submitted on Tuesday will likely be about points of law.

    However, as his wife Stella Assange pointed out, there’s a possibility that Swift’s rulings could be bypassed:

    Assange’s ‘get out of jail’ cards?

    There are at least two more Get Out Of Jail options available to Assange’s legal team. For example, an earlier appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is yet to conclude. It’s possible the ECHR could issue an injunction to delay the extradition until it can examine the case further.

    Should that option fail, Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson has argued for a political solution. One suggestion is that the US and Australia agree on a deal that takes into account the time served by Assange in Belmarsh prison.

    Matters may be coming to a head.

    Featured image via YouTube – Zabby

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The UK was complicit in Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah’s torture. His lawyer says reparations should follow.

    Warning: this article contains links to graphic images and descriptions of torture.

    Earlier in May, the Canary reported on the publication of an academic paper regarding the art and diaries of Palestinian Abu Zubaydah. That paper included graphic descriptions of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) applied to Zubaydah.

    Zubaydah was classified by the US as a “High Value Detainee”. He was the first detainee US authorities subjected to EITs, effectively making him a “human guinea pig” for torture techniques. Before his rendition to Guantánamo Bay, the CIA held Zubaydah for 1,619 days at a number of “black sites”. These were located in Pakistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania, and Afghanistan.

    Allegations raised against Zubaydah were ultimately shown to be false.

    UK complicity in prisoner’s torture

    On 19 May, Zubaydah’s lawyer Helen Duffy stated:

    The UK has been found legally responsible for ‘complicity’ in our client’s torture and ongoing unlawful detention, and reparations should follow… This can include offers of relocation, recognition and apology, rehabilitation and compensation.

    Earlier, in November 2022, the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WAGAD) had declared that the:

    Governments of the United States, Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania, Afghanistan and the United Kingdom… are jointly responsible for the torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of Mr. Zubaydah.

    That followed a UK appeal court ruling. The Guardian summed this up as follows:

    UK intelligence services who allegedly asked the CIA to put questions to a detainee who was being tortured in “black sites” were subject to the law of England and Wales and not that of the countries in which he was being held.

    The ruling was significant, as it provided the opportunity for the detainee – Zubaydah – to accuse UK intelligence services of complicity in his torture.

    UK intelligence accused

    In 2018, the Canary published details about the UK personnel who had witnessed detainees’ mistreatment. Indeed, UK personnel supplied questions or intelligence for 232 cases.

    Also that year, a UK Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) report made it clear the Zubaydah case showed “direct awareness of extreme mistreatment – and probable torture”. Furthermore, UK intelligence was complicit in almost 600 cases of prisoner mistreatment following 9/11. And the UK also planned and financed 31 rendition ops.

    The previous year saw a European Parliament report that expressed:

    serious concern about the 170 stopovers made by CIA-operated aircraft at UK airports, which on many occasions came from or were bound for countries linked with extraordinary rendition circuits and the transfer of detainees

    The Rendition Project, however, listed a different figure, namely 391 alleged rendition flights via the UK or its overseas territories or crown dependencies. The CIA used these flights for the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners.

    The torture

    The CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation programme led to the detainment and torture of over 130 individuals. A database produced jointly by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Rendition Project gave the number as 124.

    Torture is contrary to international law, including the UN Convention against Torture and the Nuremberg Code.

    Yet the Rendition Project noted that CIA records revealed how:

    39 prisoners were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” whilst in CIA detention. EITs were a set of eleven specific techniques approved by the Department of Justice for use by the CIA: the attention grasp; walling; facial hold; facial slap; cramped confinement; wall standing; stress positions; sleep deprivation; waterboard; use of diapers; and use of insects.

    An August 2002 memo to John Rizzo, Acting General Counsel of the CIA, described in detail the torture techniques, including waterboarding, used on Zubaydah.

    Orwellian nightmare

    Details of the CIA rendition programme, the torture, and the conditions prisoners were subjected to at Guantánamo Bay were first published by WikiLeaks.

    In 2021, award-winning film maker Alex Gibney released a documentary about Zubaydah. On arbitrary detention, Gibney referencing George Orwell’s famous description of torture said:

    It’s not the boot on the face forever, but it’s that sense of eternally not knowing what is going to happen to you or why. That is soul-crushing and has got to be psychologically destabilizing in some really potent way where you just don’t know.

    As to the current situation at Guantánamo, the Guardian reported that:

    There are 30 inmates left at the Guantánamo camp, of which only one has been convicted of a crime; 10 are involved in military tribunal proceedings, although in most cases, the trials have not even started; 16 have been recommended for a transfer to another country, pending security guarantees

    Reparations

    Regarding possible legal action against the UK, there is at least one precedent. Guantánamo detainees Bisher al-Rawi, Richard Belmar, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, Omar Deghayes, and Binyam Mohamed sued the UK government, including MI5 and MI6.

    In November 2010 the UK agreed on a confidential settlement that included a payout of millions of pounds to those detainees. The settlement meant that UK authorities could avoid the release of confidential intelligence documents in court.

    Following the WGAD declaration, the UK government should immediately arrange reparations or agree on a settlement for Zubaydah, too. It’s the very least they can do after being complicit in Zubaydah’s torture for years.

    Featured image via HBO – YouTube

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • US Lawmakers Implore DOJ to Drop ‘Unprecedented’ Charges Against Julian Assange

    On the fourth anniversary of Julian Assange’s arrest, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib led six other progressive lawmakers in calling on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to “uphold the First Amendment’s protections for the freedom of the press by dropping the criminal charges” against the Australian WikiLeaks founder and withdrawing the extradition request of the U.K. government.

    Assange has been jailed at Belmarsh Prison in London since U.K. authorities forcibly removed him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2019. The 51-year-old publisher continues to fight his extradition to the United States, which the U.K. government approved last year.

    Tlaib (D-Mich.) along with Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) on Tuesday joined media outlets, world leaders, and civil liberties, human rights, and press freedom groups that have decried U.S. efforts to prosecute Assange under the Espionage Act.

    Such organizations “have been emphatic that the charges against Mr. Assange pose a grave and unprecedented threat to everyday, constitutionally protected journalistic activity, and that a conviction would represent a landmark setback for the First Amendment,” the Democrats wrote to Garland. “This global outcry against the U.S. government’s prosecution of Mr. Assange has highlighted conflicts between… America’s stated values of press freedom and its pursuit of Mr. Assange.”

    “We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution.”

    The lawmakers argued that prosecuting the publisher “for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America’s credibility as a defender of these values, undermining the United States’ moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities.”

    “Assange faces 17 charges under the Espionage Act and one charge for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion,” they noted. “The Espionage Act charges stem from Mr. Assange’s role in publishing information about the U.S. State Department, Guantánamo Bay, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of this information was published by mainstream newspapers, such as The New York Times and Washington Post, who often worked with Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks directly in doing so. Based on the legal logic of this indictment, any of those newspapers could be prosecuted for engaging in these reporting activities.”

    However, “the prosecution of Mr. Assange marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” the letter highlights. “The prosecution of Mr. Assange, if successful, not only sets a legal precedent whereby journalists or publishers can be prosecuted, but a political one as well.”

    “As attorney general, you have rightly championed freedom of the press and the rule of law in the United States and around the world,” the document added, pointing to the U.S. Department of Justice’s recently revised media regulations. “We are grateful for these pro-press freedom revisions, and feel strongly that dropping the Justice Department’s indictment against Mr. Assange and halting all efforts to extradite him to the U.S. is in line with these new policies.”

    “Every day that the prosecution of Julian Assange continues is another day that our own government needlessly undermines our own moral authority abroad and rolls back the freedom of the press under the First Amendment at home,” the letter concludes. “We urge you to immediately drop these Trump-era charges against Mr. Assange and halt this dangerous prosecution.”

    The Democrats’ appeal to Garland coincided with similar demands from parliamentarians across the political spectrum in Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, and was welcomed by groups that have long demanded Assange’s freedom.

    “As Julian Assange marks four years in Belmarsh prison and faces possible imminent extradition to the United States, it’s more crucial for members of Congress to speak up now than ever before,” said Rebecca Vincent, director of operations and campaigns at Reporters Sans Frontières, or Reporters Without Borders (RSF). “No one should face prosecution or the possibility of the rest of their lives in prison for publishing information in the public interest.”

    “As long as the case against Assange continues, it will be a thorn in the side of the U.S. government, and undermines U.S. efforts to defend media freedom globally,” Vincent added. “We welcome Rep. Tlaib’s leadership on this issue and encourage widespread support for her call on the Justice Department to drop the charges against Assange. It’s time for the U.S. to lead by example by bringing this 12-year-old case to a close and allowing for his release without further delay.”

    Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, similarly applauded the Michigan Democrat for her “courageous defense of the First Amendment.”

    “Defending the Bill of Rights is the responsibility of every branch of government,” said Gibbons, “and we are proud to stand with those members of Congress who are joining with nearly every press freedom group and newspapers such as The New York Times, in calling on the Department of Justice to end its prosecution of Julian Assange.”

    Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Seth Stern also commended Tlaib’s “efforts to finally put an end to the unconstitutional prosecution of Julian Assange,” stressing that “whatever one might think about Assange personally, there is no principled distinction between the conduct he is charged with and the kind of investigative journalism that has helped shape U.S. history.”

    “As long as the government claims the power to prosecute newsgathering, all journalists can do is hope prosecutors exercise restraint and don’t come after them for doing their jobs. Journalists will surely tread more cautiously as a result,” he warned. “No one who values the First Amendment should be comfortable with that, which is why every major press rights and civil liberties organization opposes Assange’s prosecution.”

  • CIA’s War on WikiLeaks Is a Scandal Worthy of Congressional Investigation

    In 2010, Chelsea Manning shocked the world with leaked documents that exposed abuses and crimes committed by the United States military in Iraq. These revelations also made the publisher of those documents, Julian Assange, and his organization, WikiLeaks, household names. Kevin Gosztola was one of the few reporters to cover the U.S. military court-martial against Manning. Gosztola was at Fort…

    Source

  • Inglorious inertia: Anthony Albanese, Stephen Smith and Julian Assange

    As with all matters regarding United States policy, Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a non-committal position — “quiet diplomacy”. Binoy Kampmark reports.

  • Turning tides: The US Congress and Julian Assange

    Democratic Congressperson Rashida Tlaib has urged fellow Congress members to sign a letter to US Attorney-General Merrick Garland urging him to drop the charges against Julian Assange, reports Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • How Chelsea Manning’s Court-Martial Laid the Groundwork for Julian Assange’s Prosecution

    Adapted from Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange

    Private First Class Chelsea Manning received the harshest punishment any United States military officer or federal government employee has ever received for leaking classified information to the press. Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over her court-martial, sentenced Manning to thirty-five years at Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.

    She was found guilty of six charges under the Espionage Act, five stealing charges, one charge involving the “wanton publication” of “intelligence,” multiple charges of “failure to obey an order or regulation,” and one charge under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Notably, Manning was acquitted of an “aiding the enemy” offense that carried a potential sentence of life in prison.

    Manning was never charged with any conspiracy offenses, and, unlike the charges against Assange, military prosecutors did not accuse her of attempting to crack a password hash. Even with logs from alleged chats between Manning and Assange, there was scant evidence that Assange or any WikiLeaks staff attempted to enlist her to leak. Prosecutors only expressed disgust that she had independently chosen to become a source and shared more than 700,000 documents.

    When Manning’s trial occurred in 2013, WikiLeaks was not yet designated a “hostile intelligence agency” by the CIA. However, by 2019, there was no longer division in the government over whether to treat WikiLeaks as a journalistic entity or not. The indictment plainly claimed, “To obtain information to release on the WikiLeaks website, Assange recruited sources and predicated the success of WikiLeaks in part upon the recruitment of sources” in order to “illegally circumvent legal safeguards on information.”

    Prosecutors at the Justice Department (DOJ) would like the public to believe that Assange posted a “Most Wanted Leaks” list to the WikiLeaks website in 2009 to solicit leaks from “insiders” like Manning, and Manning used it to determine which documents to provide to WikiLeaks.3

    Yet, this conspiracy theory, which forms the basis of criminal allegations against Assange, was promoted by military prosecutors during Manning’s trial, and it was discredited by Manning’s own statement to the court and David Coombs, her defense attorney.

    Despite Manning’s statement, DOJ prosecutors concocted their own conspiracy theory to further their political case. Central to this theory is the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

    On May 14, 2009, WikiLeaks requested nominations from human rights groups, lawyers, historians, journalists, and activists for documents as well as databases from around the world that the media organization would work to expose.

    The list, according to prosecutors, was “organized by country and stated that documents or materials nominated to the list must ‘be likely to have political, diplomatic, ethical, or historical impact on release.’” WikiLeaks suggested the information should be “plausibly obtainable to a well-motivated insider or outsider.”

    With little to no evidence, military prosecutors called the list Manning’s “guiding light,” a characterization Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs directly challenged during his closing argument.

    “It was WikiLeaks saying, look, tell us, humanitarians, activists, NGOs, fellow reporters, what do you want to know in your country? What in your country is being hidden from the public that you believe the public should know? Give us a list,” Coombs said.

    “We are going to compile that list, and we are going to work to obtain that list. What does this sound like? Any journalistic organization that has like a hotline or anything else says, call us. You got a story. Call us. We’ll investigate.”

    There were seventy-eight items on the list. As Coombs noted, military prosecutors were only able to “remotely” tie Manning to “four of the things on the list.” She could have used Intelink, which is a US intelligence network of top secret, secret, and unclassified databases, to search for specific items on the list. She did not.

    DOJ prosecutors emphasized in their indictment that the list requested “bulk databases,” including Intellipedia, a classified Wikipedia for US intelligence analysts. Yet Manning never released this database to WikiLeaks, nor did she release the complete CIA Open Source Center database or PACER database containing US federal court records, which were listed as “important bulk databases.”

    Chat logs show Manning brought up the CIA Open Source Center on March 8, 2010, and a user, whom the government claims was Assange, replied, “That’s something we want to mine entirely.” But Manning never engaged in any attempts to download and transfer this database to WikiLeaks.

    Manning released four sets that could be labeled “bulk databases.” She released the Afghanistan and Iraq War Logs, the US State embassy cables in the Net-Centric Diplomacy database, and the database containing detainee assessments from Joint Task Force Guantánamo. None of those documents were on the “Most Wanted Leaks” list.

    DOJ prosecutors contended Manning’s searches on November 28, 2009, for “retention+of+interrogation+videos” and “detainee+abuse” matched up with the “Most Wanted Leaks” list. However, at the time, WikiLeaks was interested in obtaining copies of any of the ninety-two CIA torture tapes that were destroyed as well as “detainee abuse photos withheld by the Obama administration.” It is far more plausible that Manning searched for abuse photos or torture videos.

    Contrary to Manning’s version of events, DOJ prosecutors insisted that Assange convinced Manning to find the detainee assessment briefs and release them. FBI special agent Megan Brown, of the “counterespionage squad” at the Washington Field Office in the District of Columbia, wrote, “Manning asked Assange, ‘how valuable are JTF GTMO detention memos containing summaries, background info, capture info, etc?’ Assange replied, ‘Time period?’ Manning answered, ‘2007–2008.’”

    Assange allegedly responded, “Quite valuable to the lawyers of these guys who are trying to get them out, where those memos suggest their innocence/bad procedure,” and added, “also valuable to merge into the general history. Politically, Gitmo is mostly over though.”

    Yet in the messages Brown referenced, Assange never specifically asked Manning to provide the reports to WikiLeaks. He did not say whether WikiLeaks would publish the documents. He certainly did not solicit Manning to leak the detainee assessments. All Assange allegedly did was state his opinion that the documents were in the public interest.

    Prosecutors attempted to link Manning’s disclosure of rules of engagement for US military forces in Iraq to the supposed “Most Wanted Leaks” list because it included “Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. Army Rules of Engagement 2007–2009.” They suggested Manning provided the files to WikiLeaks on March 22, 2010, after Assange allegedly wrote on March 8, “Curious eyes never run dry.”

    Manning said she uploaded the rules of engagement with the “Collateral Murder” video on February 21, weeks before the alleged exchange with Assange.

    One lesser-known Espionage Act charge against Manning involved the alleged disclosure of video showing the Garani massacre by US military forces in the Farah province of Afghanistan. An air strike killed at least eighty-six Afghan civilians on May 4, 2009. She was acquitted, a fact that poses a problem for the DOJ’s theory.

    According to evidence presented during the trial, Jason Katz, an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory from February 2009 to March 2010, tried to help WikiLeaks and downloaded an encrypted file with the air strike video onto his work computer on December 15. Katz was unable to use a password-cracking tool to open the file.

    WikiLeaks indicated on Twitter on January 8, “We need supercomputer time.” The media organization apparently had an encrypted file of the attack, but they were never able to decrypt the file.

    Military prosecutors attempted to connect Manning to Katz. They claimed during their case that Manning’s earliest violations began on November 1, and Manning had provided the video to Katz to decrypt with a supercomputer. Although Manning searched and downloaded “Farah” files, the video Katz had did not match any of Manning’s files.

    “Let’s go along with the government and its logic. Pfc. Manning hits the ground in Iraq in mid-November,” Coombs argued. “For whatever reason, [her] motive, I’m now going to use the 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ List as my guiding light. And I’m going to give something to WikiLeaks. I’m going to do it because I’m now a traitor. I’m now an activist.

    “So what is the first thing I’m going to choose? What is the very first thing I’m going to give to WikiLeaks and say look, WikiLeaks, I’m for you? Well, I’m going to give you an encrypted video I can’t see. You can’t see. Guess what? We don’t have a password for it. By the way, you never asked for it. That’s not on your 2009 ‘Most Wanted [Leaks]’ list.”

    Coombs suggested, “This is kind of like someone showing up to a wedding and giving you something that’s not on the list that you registered for. What do you think Pfc. Manning is doing at this point? According to the government, [she] is like, hey, you know what, I can go to the seventy-eight things that you want, but I don’t want to give you that stuff.”

    Military prosecutors seem to have failed to persuade the military judge that Manning used the “Most Wanted Leaks” list as her guide. Lind’s “special findings” show she accepted evidence that Manning viewed a tweet from WikiLeaks on May 7, 2010, which requested a list of as many military email addresses as possible. This led Manning to compile a list of over 74,000 addresses for WikiLeaks. Except Lind did not find that WikiLeaks had solicited Manning to leak any of the more than 700,000 documents that were published.

    When the first indictment against Assange was disclosed by the Justice Department on April 11, 2019, the response from some attorneys and advocates was mixed. It was widely viewed as “narrowly tailored” to avoid “broader legal and policy implications.”

    The DOJ did not accuse Assange of hacking into a US military computer. He was accused of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” when he allegedly “agreed” to assist Manning in “cracking a password hash” to help her browse information databases anonymously.

    DOJ prosecutors were already presented with evidence related to these allegations during Manning’s trial. Patrick Eller, a command digital forensic examiner responsible for a team of more than eighty examiners at US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters, reviewed court-martial records for Assange’s defense. He testified during the evidentiary hearing in the extradition case in September 2020.

    Eller found testimony from the US military’s own forensic expert that contradicted presumptions at the core of the computer crime charge. Password hashes are generally used to help authenticate users and passwords on a computer. Manning never provided the two files necessary to “reconstruct the decryption key” for the password hash. According to Eller, at the time it was not “possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”

    James Lewis QC, a prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, asked Eller if he agreed that Manning and Assange “thought they could crack a password and agreed to attempt to crack a password.” Eller told Lewis a hash was provided and that the account user that the US government associated with Assange said they had “rainbow tables for it.” (Using “rainbow tables” is one decryption method for cracking the hash by guessing different password values.) However, Manning never shared where she obtained the hash.

    “The government’s own expert witness in the court-martial stated that was not enough for them to actually [crack the password],” Eller added. A user must also have a system file to complete an attempt at password-cracking. During the Manning trial, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that the “hash value” was included in the chat, but it was not the “full hash value.”

    Major Thomas Hurley, who was on Manning’s defense team, asked if Manning would have needed more of the hash value to crack the password. Shaver replied, “I mentioned the system file, you would need that part as well.” (This was one of the two files Eller said were necessary for decryption.)

    “So the hash value included in the chat wouldn’t be enough to actually gain any passwords or user information?” Hurley asked.

    Shaver replied, “Correct.”

    Eller’s statement submitted to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London was even more explicit.

    Upon reading the indictment, it became clear that the technical explanation of the password hashing allegations is deficient in a number of ways which cast doubt upon the assertion that the purpose of the Jabber chat was for Manning to be able to download documents anonymously.

    Jabber is the software Manning used to chat with the account allegedly associated with Assange.

    Manning had already downloaded the Reykjavík cable, Guantánamo Files, Iraq War Logs, and Afghanistan War Logs before the alleged exchange on password-cracking occurred. “Routinely in the course of work,” according to Eller, she downloaded military incident reports to have “offline backups” in the event of “connectivity issues” with the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network that hosted the information.

    “The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password-cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” he said. However, Eller acknowledged, “Manning had authorized access to these documents.” Eller showed that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, constantly tried to crack administrative passwords to install programs that were not authorized for their computers.

    Jason Milliman, a computer engineer contracted to manage laptops at the base, testified during Manning’s court-martial that “soldiers cracked his password in order to install a program and then deleted his administrator account.”

    As Eller asserted, Manning never would have tried to use a password hash to exfiltrate files for submission to WikiLeaks because she already had a way to anonymously access the files: a Linux CD that allowed her to bypass Windows security features.

    Sgt. David Sadtler, a soldier in Manning’s battalion, testified that Manning proposed starting “some sort of hash cracking business.” The idea had already been done in the “open source world.” So “reimplementing it” made sense to Sadtler.

    Eller concluded, “While she was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat, she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”

    During the court-martial, military prosecutors underscored the fact that Manning exchanged messages with a user identified as “Nathaniel Frank,” a name the government believed was associated with Assange.

    Assange attorney Mark Summers QC asked Eller multiple times if he found evidence that linked Assange to this account. “No, I did not,” Eller replied.

    Summers asked if Eller was aware of the person who sat at the other end of whatever computer terminal “Nathaniel Frank” used. “Of course not. I could not have that personal knowledge,” Eller added.

    Major Ashden Fein, a military prosecutor, said during the closing argument, “[Manning] was a determined soldier with a knowledge, ability, and desire to harm the United States in its war effort. And, Your Honor, [she] was not a whistleblower. [She] was a traitor—a traitor who understood the value of compromised information in the hands of the enemy and took deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it.”

    The attacks on Manning’s character were nasty. In addition to questioning her loyalty to the United States, military prosecutors pejoratively labeled Manning an “anarchist” and a “hacker.” But missing from the prosecutors’ narrative of her acts was any explicit claim that she collaborated with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or that she engaged in a password-cracking conspiracy.

    As Captain Joe Morrow, one of the military prosecutors, declared during her sentencing: “Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for [her] crimes. Pfc. Manning is solely responsible for the impact.”

    Manning was not an insider or spy who worked for WikiLeaks to steal US government documents. She had whistleblower motives that inspired her to take action. That is an inconvenient truth for prosecutors, who are compelled to deny her agency to bolster their arguments.

    In fact, submitting documents to WikiLeaks was not Manning’s first choice. As she recounted in her 2022 memoir, README.txt, “While I shared WikiLeaks’ stated commitment to transparency, I thought that for my purposes, it was too limited a platform. Most people back then had never heard of it. I worried that information on the site wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

    Manning used landlines, mostly at Starbucks, to reach out to “traditional publications.” She contacted the Washington Post in January 2010. During her court-martial she testified that a reporter she spoke to at the Post had not taken her seriously. Next, she called the New York Times. No one responded to the message she left for the Times’ public editor. She considered going to Politico, but weather conditions hampered plans to travel to its offices in Arlington, Virginia.

    WikiLeaks, as she put it in her memoir, was “the publication of last resort.”

    The post How Chelsea Manning’s Court-Martial Laid the Groundwork for Julian Assange’s Prosecution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.