After 10 years of restricted freedom, political exile and incarceration, Julian Assange finally came face-to-face with his accusers at the Old Bailey Criminal Court in London. For three weeks in September, a team of English lawyers argued on behalf of their client, the U.S. Department of Justice, that the beleaguered WikiLeaks founder and publisher should be handed over to a U.S. national security court to face 17 counts under the 1917 Espionage Act.<\/p>\n
If convicted by the District Court of Eastern Virginia, where the indictments originated, Assange will spend the rest of his life in an American supermax facility for having published evidence of\u00a0United States war crimes, torture and a host of other government wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms,\u201d blogged <\/a>former Guardian reporter and Martha Gellhorn prize winner Jonathan Cook on the eve of Assange\u2019s extradition hearings.<\/p>\n \u201cRight now, every journalist in the world ought to be up in arms, protesting at the abuses Assange is suffering, and has suffered, and the fate he will endure if extradition is approved.\u201d<\/p>\n If you go by years of Canadian reporting on Assange and WikiLeaks, Canadian journalists don\u2019t share Cook\u2019s sentiment. When asked in the summer if advocacy group Canadian Journalists for Free Expression has plans to advocate for Assange\u2019s freedom, CJFE president Philip Tunley responded, \u201cI am not seeing any consensus at CJFE to weigh in on behalf of Mr. Assange, though some clearly still support him and wish him well.\u201d<\/p>\n The premise that it takes an informed citizenry to run a true democracy is being seriously subverted by the Canadian fourth estate itself. By distracting attention away from the press freedom principles of Assange\u2019s extradition case and obsessing over his character, Canadian mainstream press have undermined the public\u2019s right to know while ignoring the significance of WikiLeaks releases themselves. That needs to change.<\/p>\n As a Canadian freelancer, enduring 10 years of biased and inaccurate reporting in the Canadian press about Assange has been a source of dismay and frustration. Petitioning and complaining to senior editors and broadcast gatekeepers was clearly na\u00efve given the paucity of responses.<\/p>\n One response that did come back signposted a troubling predicament in Canadian Assange and WikiLeaks coverage.<\/p>\n CBC had posted a Thomson Reuters story in August about a U.S. Senate Committee report that claimed WikiLeaks worked with Russian Intelligence to release the Democratic National Committee\u00a0 emails in 2016.<\/p>\n When I suggested in my complaint that the report provides no evidence for this classic claim against WikiLeaks and that repeating official unsubstantiated narratives does not make them true, CBC director of journalistic standards Paul Hambleton emailed back:<\/p>\n \u201cI fully understand that you may hold a different view than that of the Senate committee.<\/p>\n It is not the CBC\u2019s obligation to determine what is \u2018truth\u2019 (a truly dangerous notion for any broadcaster), but only to present differing views fairly and accurately affording Canadians the opportunity and the information they need to make up their own minds about the nature or quality of the views expressed.\u201d<\/p>\n I argued back: \u201cThe predicament here is that journalism is not principally about \u2018the nature or quality of views.\u2019 Journalism is foremost about presenting facts, checked and verified.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s seriously worrying in the Assange and WikiLeaks coverage I complained about to CBC and other news outlets is that for the public, the repetition of established narratives \u2014 including unsubstantiated claims and assertions \u2014eventually becomes a substitute for fact or truth.<\/p>\n I haven\u2019t heard back from Mr. Hambleton.<\/p>\n When I wasn\u2019t writing complaint emails to news outlets, I was busy pitching Assange stories and opinion pieces of my own. Except for two queries, most were politely (but outright) rejected, citing issues with space and timing.<\/p>\n Canadaland<\/em> published one submission<\/a> that called out Canadian Assange coverage for ignoring the United States\u2019\u00a0 attempt to criminalize whistleblower journalism.<\/p>\n The National Observer<\/em> posted my opinion letter<\/a> after negotiating with the editor who asserted one of the classic positions held by many in the legacy press. \u201cAssange is a programmer and a hacker, but never worked as a journalist. You\u2019re framing the issue as a journalism\u00a0freedom issue. For me this is still a problem in your framing.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem with my \u201cframing\u201d was resolved when I pointed out that Assange and WikiLeaks won a string of journalism awards over the years including the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism awarded annually to a journalist \u201cwhose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or \u2018official drivel\u2019, as Martha Gellhorn called it.\u201d<\/p>\n We find ourselves in a time when unauthorized ideas are no longer guaranteed to make it into the mainstream, even when those ideas have been fact-checked and proven to be true.<\/p>\n The crisis in Canadian journalism isn\u2019t underfunding and it isn\u2019t the concentration of media ownership. The plight of Canadian journalism, if reportage on Assange is the yardstick, are the signposts that fearless independent reporting that holds governments and institutions to account has all but vanished from the mainstream, which is where most Canadians get their news.<\/p>\n In 2010, WikiLeaks released 750,000 pages of the Manning leaks, \u201cthe largest leak of classified documents in U.S history\u201d declared the Pentagon\u00a0 \u2013 State Department cables, Guantanamo secrets, Afghan war diaries and Iraq war logs which included collateral murder, the helicopter gunsight video that shows unprovoked slayings of civilians by U.S. troops in the streets of Baghdad.<\/p>\n Australian journalist John Pilger said Assange and WikiLeaks were in the crosshairs of United States authorities years before the publicity around the war logs releases made WikiLeaks a household name.<\/p>\n \u201cThe aim was to silence and criminalize WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech,\u201d Pilger told a crowd of Assange supporters in front of the Old Bailey.<\/p>\n Pilger described in detail the campaign to discredit Assange led by the Cyber Counter-Intelligence Assessments Branch of the U.S. Defense Department<\/a> after a 2007 WikiLeaks post of a U.S. Army manual of standard operating procedures for soldiers overseeing al-Qaida suspects held in Guantanamo military prison.<\/p>\n Pilger refers to the extradition hearings as \u201cthe final act to bury Julian Assange. It\u2019s not due process, it\u2019s due revenge.\u201d<\/p>\n According to independent observers, the structural inequalities of the extradition proceedings alone, as overseen by Westminster District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, provide plenty of cause to have the U.S. extradition request dismissed outright.<\/p>\n During his incarceration at maximum security Belmarsh facility, Assange had only restricted access to his legal team and was only permitted to hold on to case files for a limited time. In court Assange sat in the back of the room behind a glass partition and wasn\u2019t permitted confidential communications with his lawyers.<\/p>\n Two protected defence witnesses, former employees of Spanish security firm UC Global, confirmed that they recorded conversations in the Ecuadorian embassy between Assange and his lawyers and gave the information to U.S. intelligence officials.<\/p>\n Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, also a witness for the defence, had his case thrown out for less, after president Richard Nixon operatives broke into Ellsberg\u2019s psychiatrist\u2019s office to steal mental health information that might discredit him.<\/p>\n Former UK diplomat and independent journalist Craig Murray, who reported in his daily blog from Courtroom 10 at the Central Criminal Court of England,\u00a0wrote in his Day 6 report from the hearings: \u201cWhat came over most strongly was the desire of both judge and prosecution to railroad through the extradition with as little of the case against it getting a public airing as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n None of the abuses of process were reported by establishment reporters. The only Canadian report from inside the courtroom, by the Globe and Mail<\/em>, validated Murray\u2019s observations and helped ensure judge and prosecution had their way.<\/p>\n Globe and Mail<\/em> Europe correspondent Paul Waldie concludes in his Sept. 16 report about Daniel Ellsberg\u2019s testimony, \u201cAt one point he (Assange) started heckling Judge Vanessa Baraitser who threatened to kick him out.\u201d<\/p>\n However, according to Court News<\/em> UK reporter Charlie Jones, what actually happened was that when U.S. prosecutors objected to the live testimony of German-Lebanese citizen Khaled El-Masri\u00a0 \u2014 a survivor of CIA kidnapping, torture, and rendition \u2014, Assange stood up and \u201checkled\u201d from behind the glass partition at the back of the courtroom, saying \u201cMadame, I will not accept you censoring a torture victim\u2019s statement to this court.\u201d<\/p>\n Waldie made no mention of defence witness El-Masri\u2019s testimony, which confirmed what WikiLeaks\u2019 publication of U.S. diplomatic cables had revealed in 2010, that significant U.S. pressure was brought on German authorities not to arrest and prosecute CIA actors.<\/p>\n Waldie also didn\u2019t bring up that lawyers for the U.S. prosecution argued vehemently to keep all references to U.S. torture and wrong doing out of the proceeding\u2019s transcripts.<\/p>\n Noam Chomsky was one of the defence witnesses whose full testimony Baraitser and the prosecution didn\u2019t want to hear. His live testimony was replaced by a four-minute summary read into the court records.<\/p>\n An excerpt from Chomsky\u2019s written submission: \u201cIn my view, Julian Assange, in courageously upholding political beliefs that most of us profess to share, has performed an enormous service to all the people in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy and who therefore demand the right to know what their elected representatives are doing. His actions in turn have led him to be pursued in a cruel and intolerable manner.\u201d<\/p>\n Canadian coverage of Assange\u2019s extradition consists almost entirely of the same Thomson-Reuters and Associated Press dispatches posted on various Canadian news sites. If you held them up against independent accounts, you\u2019d think indie journos and wire service reporters attended different events.<\/p>\n Fidel Narv\u00e1ez, the Ecuadorian diplomat who granted Julian Assange political asylum, was one of only a handful of observers permitted into the courtroom. Narv\u00e1ez reports that on the first day, Baraitser cut access to the video stream in Courtroom 9 that had been previously authorized for nearly 40 human rights organizations and international observers, including Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and PEN International.<\/p>\n \u201cIf the case in London were decided solely on justice, as it should in a state based on law, this battle would have been won by Assange,\u201d writes Narv\u00e1ez in one of his daily dispatches.<\/p>\n Narv\u00e1ez and other independent observers suggest that what was adjudicated was not whether Assange should be extradited for violating the Espionage Act, but rather the criminality of the American state itself.<\/p>\n The chilling claim put forward by U.S. prosecutors that the United States has jurisdiction over any journalist, any publication, anywhere in the world to prosecute under the Espionage Act for publishing classified U.S. information hasn\u2019t gone unnoticed by the Canadian Association of Journalists.<\/p>\n \u201cI can assure you that I, as president, as well as the CAJ\u2019s advocacy committee, are keeping a very close eye on the Assange case,\u201d said Brent Jolly. \u201cThe CAJ still believes the United States should immediately drop its attempts to extradite Mr. Assange.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEncouraging sources to leak information that is in the public interest to the media is a basic practice of journalism which must be defended. Journalists and whistleblowers have a role to play in protecting citizens in a democracy,\u201d Jolly\u2019s predecessor, Karyn Pugliese, told me after Assange was arrested and imprisoned at Belmarsh in 2019.<\/p>\n The CAJ\u2019s position has yet to translate into accurate and unbiased reporting on the Assange-WikiLeaks file by Canadian journalists and news organizations. However, coverage of domestic occurrences of the \u2018Assange effect\u2019 \u2014 attempts to criminalize journalism, such as Justin Brake\u2019s and Karl Dockstader\u2019s arrest for covering Indigenous land disputes \u2014\u00a0 have been diligently reported.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a vague but widely held notion among the Canadian press that Assange\u2019s troubles are not terribly important and not particularly newsworthy,\u201d Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown told me in October after the hearings.\u00a0 \u201cTo actually engage with the facts invariably means accepting that Julian Assange is being persecuted for telling the public things about the American government that they did not want known, and that means accepting that Julian Assange\u2019s cause is every journalist\u2019s cause.\u201d<\/p>\n The hearings wrapped up three weeks of witness testimonies in September. Assange\u2019s lawyers submitted their closing arguments to the court on Nov. 6 arguing that the request for Assange\u2019s extradition is the result of U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s political agenda.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is politically motivated, it is an abuse of the process of this court, and it is a clear violation of the Anglo-U.S. treaty that governs this extradition.\u201d<\/p>\n Prosecutors will submit their closing arguments on Nov. 20. Baraitser is expected to hand down her judgement on Jan. 4.<\/p>\n The post Where is Canadian Media on the Assange File?<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n