“They must feel that they are weak. How could this very establishment in the United Kingdom, which has been in power for hundreds of years, feel threatened? It’s quite sophisticated after all. It has many different components: the intelligence services, the banks, the landed gentry, the oligarchs from Russia, the commercial media, …the BBC which is the big propaganda organism that helps keep the country cohesive… How could they feel threatened by a wild colonial boy from Australia who arrived from overseas?”

A few pages later:

“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the ‘international community’. We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants.”

Insights like that make a man dangerous. It puts him at odds with Empire, which is used to having its way. So it’s no surprise that the man who wrote or spoke those words is now the prisoner of an endless legal checkmate carried out in the airless chambers of the English courts. Sent to prison for breaching bail, he began a 50-week sentence in April 2019. It is now December 2021 and the English courts, in a royal stitch-up, have accepted American assurances about his future treatment. This too will be contested, leaving the man, in frail health, a little longer in jail.

Every week there are new revelations, such as the plot concocted by the CIA to assassinate him, which came to light in October. To add to the brutal irony the British court’s ruling was handed down within days of events celebrating Democracy, Human Rights, the Nobel Prize and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. Julian Assange is the man in question. He isn’t a journalist toiling away at one of the legacy fronts like the Times or the Guardian but someone who invented his own role in life. Julian Assange made news until he became the news, ducking into the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid extradition to the U.S.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists issued their annual December report on journalists imprisoned around the world. It’s sitting here next to Julian’s book. The report lists some 290 journalists behind bars, and while many of the usual suspect countries are near the top, the U.S. and Great Britain are excluded. You do a double take; obviously this is an error of some sort. Assange is the prize catch, the man they are making a lesson of, so that the rest of the world gets the message. If he isn’t a journalist, then who the hell is? The CPJ has mistaken credentials for impact, so they respond to criticism with weaselly definitions of journalist. The beat goes on.

There are other problems with the Committee’s report. It is seriously outmoded. How so? The definition of a journalist is rapidly evolving. Attacks on freedom of information and expression matter not only to journalists but to everyone in the field: public interest watchdogs, NGOs, advocacy groups – even lawyers. The American contribution to the imprisoned over the last year includes Reality Winner, Daniel Hale, Natalie Edwards, all having served time or in the clink now. We know their names even if mainstream media rarely mentions their stories.

If you’re an Environmental Activist these days, you’re on the world’s most dangerous beat. An activist testifies, reveals, argues: they’re attempting to expand the historical record. They do the work traditional news organizations no longer do. The MSM prefer narratives they can repeat ad nauseam. Everything else makes a lightning fast trip down the memory hole.

And so, like Daniel Hale, the former NSA analyst who revealed the savagery of America’s Afghan drone program, still in jail – no peep about him from Sleepy Joe Biden, who warned us that democracy is dying before grabbing the jail keys for Julian Assange on World Human Rights Day – there are many others who aren’t journalists, some of whom haven’t been arrested but loom large in the picture. You could start with Ed Snowden, in exile in Russia for nearly a decade. Steven Donziger, the lawyer who won a huge judgment against Shell in Ecuador, was just released to a second round of house arrest. Others, like Berta Cáceres murdered in Honduras, never had the luxury of escaping or being safe at home.

Most of this happened before the Pegasus revelations this summer. That too changed everything: now we know that anyone, anywhere, you, too, dear reader, can be spied on down to the short hairs of your private life once a government or private entity is willing to pay for it. Despite Google’s lawsuit against the Israeli-government subsidized NSO Group and Snowden’s call for the U.N. to ban Pegasus, the technique is sure to proliferate. A November report found that every government in Europe except one was employing Pegasus, and in that exception, France, the security agencies were caught napping and promised it wouldn’t happen again.

For those brave enough to be actors on this stage, the ground beneath their feet has shifted dramatically. A journalist at Forbidden Stories in Paris told me recently, “For twenty years we watched the security of our communications closely and kept up, always one step ahead. Now everything is precarious.” Forbidden Stories not only broke the Pegasus story, they revealed the truth behind Daphne Caruana Galizia’s death in Malta. Meet with a journo from FS and they’ll sometimes turn on a faucet so running water disguises our voices; you get the feeling journalists in the field are becoming like Mafia soldiers of old, communicating with hand gestures in shady corners. Pegasus turned us all into journalists, rapporteurs of what’s really going on.

Where does that leave our wild colonial boy? Charges against him have fallen apart, one after another. His lawyers chisel away at the legal fortress, attempting to free the prisoner kept illegally in notorious Belmarsh. Court proceedings are not in their interest.

“A trial… will certainly bring up two kinds of problems, the war crimes he revealed, the … enormous numbers of civilians killed which had not been reported, a major program of torture by our Iraqi allies which continued into the Obama Administration… These are not things they want discussed in open-ended trial.” That’s Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers in a recent interview. The Deep Insecurity State is making an example of Assange so journalists, researchers, whistleblowers around the world can’t help but notice, while newspaper journalists and television presenters act as if it will never happen to them.

In His Own Words is a short, sober book built around paragraph-length entrees. It is of course about Wikileaks, “the biggest dog in the room,” as Assange calls it but really more about where we are right now and what sort of future we can dare to imagine. Assange, it may surprise you, is an optimist at heart.

“I posed the question of what the most positive trajectory for the future would look like. Self-knowledge, diversity, and networks of self-determination. A highly educated global population…stimulating vibrant new cultures and the maximal diversification of individual thought, increased regional self-determination, and the self-determination of interest groups that are able to network quickly and exchange value rapidly over geographic boundaries.” Orwell’s shadow looms over happy prognostications like that.

Getting Assange out will be a real test of our resistance, our ability to act together in this fractured time. There is good news: Craig Murray – writer, blogger, ex-British ambassador, another man you may never have heard of – was released from jail in Edinburgh, Scotland on November 30th, having served four months for the newly invented crime of “jigsaw identification.” He’s out and if one can get free, so can another. Crossing party lines in November while citing Wikileaks’ revelations of American espionage on French politicians, the National Assembly here in Paris overwhelmingly voted to give him political asylum. Symbolic but important and it means it can be done.

JULIAN ASSANGE IN HIS OWN WORDS, Compiled and edited by Karen Sharpe, O/R Books 2021.

©James Graham 2021

James Graham is a Paris-based writer whose stories have appeared in Counterpunch, the Baffler, The Guardian and elsewhere. His new English-language novel is le Plouc de Paris. Continental Riffs on Substack is his port in the storm. He can reached at [email protected]

Considering that the slow motion execution of Julian Assange, who’s currently languishing in London’s Category A Belmarsh Prison, is taking place at the behest of a British legal system whose adherents boast is a pillar of Western civilisation, Benjamin’s observation is well made.
Because be in no doubt, the founder and former editor of Wikileaks, the publishing organisation which since established in 2006 has removed the cloak of democracy from the face of an empire whose high crimes and war crimes would make Genghis Khan blush, has been placed on a metaphorical cross at in the name of nothing more ennobling than vengeance and retribution.

The chilling warning that Assange could die in the prison unless he receives urgent medical treatment — a warning published in the Guardian in the form of an open letter signed by more than 60 doctors — should make every person of conscience and consciousness tremble with rage. Compounding his brutal treatment is the knowledge that he is not being forced to suffer in the name of British justice, but instead in the name of British subservience to Washington.

In this regard the British state is acting like a rogue state, evincing no respect for international law or human rights, much less basic human decency.

Don’t just take my word for it either. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, after visiting Assange at Belmarsh recently, voiced strong concerns over the conditions of his detention, arguing that ‘The blatant and sustained arbitrariness shown by both the judiciary and the Government in this case suggests an alarming departure from the UK’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law. This is setting a worrying example, which is further reinforced by the Government’s recent refusal to conduct the long-awaited judicial inquiry into British involvement in the CIA torture and rendition programme.’

Added to the revelation that while confined in the Ecuadorian Embassy between 2012 and 2019, where he’d sought political asylum fearing extradition to the US, Julian Assange was secretly being spied on by a Spanish defence and private security company at the behest of US intelligence — the revelation that the husband of the judge presiding over his extradition to the US until recently, Lady Emma Arbuthnot, has financial links to the UK military establishment, ‘including institutions and individuals exposed by Wikileaks’ — and you have a case that is so sordidly corrupt that it is no hyperbole to assert, as precisely the aforementioned Nils Melzer did in an article back in June, that ‘this is not only about protecting Assange, but about preventing a precedent likely to seal the fate of Western democracy.’

Julian Assange, in his role as editor of Wikileaks, has been the canary down the coal mine of this very ‘Western democracy’, exposing the rank hypocrisy, lies, exceptionalism, and barbarity that are embedded in its foundations. For so doing he’s now being forced to endure the kind of punishment that even Kafka couldn’t conjure up.

Expanding on this literary theme, it was American novelist Thomas Wolfe who in his essay ‘God’s Lonely Man’ argued that loneliness is the universal yet unspoken fate of all in society. He wrote: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

The concept of the isolation and loneliness of the individual in society is one that has been explored continuously. In literature Albert Camus’ seminal work The Stranger, also titled The Outsider (1942), describes the alienation of the novel’s protagonist, Meursault, before, during and after he kills a man in self defence. In first person narrative, the reader is introduced to Meursault being notified of his mother’s death. He attends the wake but refuses to view the body when offered the chance. Later he attends the funeral, but does so absent of any of the conventional emotions associated with bereavement. When standing trial for killing the man in self defence, he likewise betrays no emotion, as if passively accepting his fate.

Meursault’s crime in the eyes of society isn’t so much that he killed a man, but that he demonstrated no emotion or remorse either in the aftermath or before when attending to his mother’s death. This lack of emotion bespeaks a refusal to conform, an abnormality, thus marking him out as a threat to the system and its moral verities.

Taken in context then, Julian Assange has provided the world with a glimpse of an empire in decline. More, he has provided it with a warning of the grim consequences if, like Camus’s Meursault, it remains passive in the face of the crimes and violations of human rights it commits on a daily basis in a desperate and cynical attempt to maintain its fading hegemony.
It is why at this moment, languishing in Belmarsh Category A Prison in London, the founder of Wikileaks is indeed God’s Lonely Man.

Thus, it is the duty of all who believe in truth and justice to end his loneliness and with one voice demand his release. For if Julian Assange is allowed to perish in prison not only will we be indicted in the court of history, like him we may well find ourselves indicted in the court of those who speak the language of democracy while practising the law of the jungle.

Source: Counterpunch

His fight against extradition has just begun. He is fighting for his life, but also he is fighting for all of us.

Nozomi Hayase, PhD, is a writer who covers issues of freedom of speech, transparency and decentralized movements.  Find her on twitter @nozomimagine

Source: Counterpunch

The only issue is whether he will be extradited to the US and sent to prison for decades for publishing true facts about US crimes around the world.

If the US government succeeds in doing this, it will strike a devastating blow to the fundamental elements of democracy throughout the world—the freedom of the press and the related ability of citizens to know what their governments is doing.

I say “throughout the world” because It’s important to understand that the US government in this case is asserting its prosecutorial authority over someone who is not an American and whose journalistic activity took place outside the United States. The United States is demonstrating its ability to get a foreign government to arrest and extradite journalists who are neither Americans nor citizens of its own country and send them off to the United States to face charges under American law. It’s not only a brazen attempt to quash press freedoms; it’s a further extension of the United States’ arrogant assertion of extra-territorial—indeed, universal—jurisdiction of its laws.

As Jonathan Cook says, those who accept this have “signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.”

Whether anybody says it out loud or thinks it explicitly, and no matter how slight it might be right now, the sight of Julian Assange being dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in handcuffs is already working in the minds of journalists throughout the world, engendering some pause or consideration about what’s worth the risk to report on. It cannot not be so. The consummation of his extradition and prosecution, the sight of him disappearing into the American prison system, will radically change that calculus of risk for every journalist in the world. The minute after sentence is pronounced, every journalist and citizen will open their eyes in a world where a lot of important things they could expect to reveal and see a minute ago will now stay hidden. And they will know it. At that moment, all the bullshit irrelevancies and avoidance mechanisms will instantly dissipate, and it will be clear to everyone what the only issue always was. Too late.

It’s incumbent on everyone who claims to value free speech and freedom of the press to do everything in their power to prevent the United States government from getting away with this. That requires focusing one’s own discourse and one’s interlocutors’ and audience’s attention on the core issue.

Unfortunately, for seven years, pundits throughout the political spectrum have been assiduously avoiding exactly that, and have instead been blowing smoke, insisting on diverting attention from the core issue of the USG’s attack on journalism via its attempt to imprison Assange. They have denied it was really happening and characterized it as an artifact of Assange’s paranoia, and/or they insisted that something else was the real issue, the thing we should really be focussed on and concerned about.

One would think that the actual fact of an indictment and extradition demand from the United States would put an end to that diversionary discourse, but unfortunately that smoke is still blowing, from all the same lips.

And most of that smoke is wafting out of the garbage fire fueled by one accelerant: “Assange is an asshole.”

At this point, there are two types of discourse about Julian Assange.

There’s A: “Assange may be an asshole, but that’s irrelevant. The USG is not going to drag him here, prosecute him, and put him in prison for a very long time for being an asshole. The USG is doing that to punish him for revealing embarrassing truths about its crimes, and to intimidate every other journalist who might think about doing that again. That’s the only relevant issue here, and we are obliged to focus our energies on it and on preventing that from happening.”

Then there’s B (a position roundly skewered by C. J. Hopkins): “Assange is a real asshole. He’s a dirty, smelly-cat, skateboarding, shit-smearing rapist and Russian agent. Yeah, it may not be such a good idea for the USG to be prosecuting him, though it’s such a minor charge and it’s about hacking and not publishing secrets and not all that dangerous. And did I tell you what an asshole he is?! In the context of what’s going on, I really want to make sure to detail for you day after day what an asshole he is. That’s the important thing that you should know. He’s such an asshole. And don’t forget Russian agent! Have I mentioned that he’s an asshole?”

These are two different discourses, which have, and are meant to have, opposite political effects. It’s clear that people spreading each of these discourses spend their energy on, care about, and are doing different things, and really want their audience to care about and do different things. One group of people is defending Assange and encouraging its audience to defend him from USG prosecution; the other, while ostensibly distancing itself from the USG position, is in fact acting as the USG’s amicus curiae, helping to prosecute Assange on “other” charges, and encouraging its audience not to be concerned about what happens to him. Let’s not be fooled about this. Assange may be an asshole, but the people spreading the latter discourse are definitely scumbags.

The lies and diversions will not stop. But I do want to deconstruct two of the favorite deceptive and irrelevant cinders that becloud the eyes of those hesitant to see themselves as accomplices of the USG’s and the Trump administration’s war on a free press.

Held Harmless

The first is the denial that the charge the USG has brought against Assange poses any threat to press freedom. The New York Times (NYT) practically celebrates it: “The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime”—that is, “not with publishing classified government information, but with stealing it, skirting — for now — critical First Amendment questions.”

Hey, if the NYT, publisher of the Pentagon Papers, whose own lawyer warned that “the prosecution of [Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” says that the charge against Assange is “well begun” and not critical to “First Amendment questions”—well, that’s going to be good enough to calm the fears of most liberals.

Indeed, according to the Washington Post, [WaPo] not only is Julian Assange ”not a free-press hero,” and not only is his prosecution “not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn,” but his case can be considered “a victory for the rule of law.” That’s because “the indictment does not charge Assange with violating the Espionage Act.” Besides, “he is long overdue for personal accountability.”

Thus, the other iconic liberal journal, recently idealized by iconic liberal Hollywood (Spielberg-Hanks-Steep!) for its iconic liberal courage in publishing iconic liberal hero Danial Ellsberg’s thousands of stolen (“an indisputable crime”) “Top Secret” national security documents, The Pentagon Papers, has issued its authoritative verdict. It has told its post-The Post, virtue-assured, iconic liberal audience that the prosecution of Julian Assange, who published Chelsea Manning’s stolen documents—not a single one of which was classified “Top Secret” and most of which, including the Collateral Murder video, were not classified at all—is, again, something to celebrate. No threat to civil liberties. Long overdue. Personal accountability and all. Well played, Mr. President.

Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg—the real one, not the one in the movie—expresses quite another opinion, in a voice that has earned its authority [with his emphasis]: “The truth is that EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.”

Two little things here.

One, contrary to the NYT assertion, Julian Assange did not commit the “indisputable crime” of “stealing” classified government information, and he is not charged with that. Chelsea Manning committed that crime, and was prosecuted and convicted for it. Chelsea Manning downloaded classified and unclassified government data without any help from Julian Assange. Manning did not get, and did not need, anyone’s help to get “unauthorized access” to and “steal” information.

Nobody “hacked” into anything. Chelsea Manning had authorized access, had her own password, and downloaded tons of data before Assange was even in the picture. In fact, Manning first tried to give the data to the NYT and WaPo—‘cause, you know, she, too, was still dreaming the iconic-liberal-hero-Pentagon-Papers dream. Only when they—out watching the movie, maybe—sent her to voicemail did she turn to Wikileaks, where the dream was not yet impossible.

So, contrary to the impression given by the iconic liberal papers of record, Julian Assange is not charged with “hacking” or helping Manning “hack” into a computer. He is not charged with doing anything that made it possible for Manning to get the information she gave to the American and the world public through Wikileaks.

The indictment charges Assange with trying (and failing) to help Manning decrypt (“crack”) another user’s password—not because Manning needed it to gain access, but because it might help conceal that it was she who was downloading data. Assange is accused of helping Manning cover her tracks. As Glenn Greenwald says, in his piece methodically making the point: “even if one accepts all of the indictment’s claims as true, Assange was not trying to hack into document files to which Manning had no access, but rather trying to help Manning avoid detection as a source.”

Of course, the government’s theory of the crime will be that Assange’s failed attempt to help Manning avoid detection in that way is an intrinsic and necessary part of Manning’s “theft” of data itself.

In the abstract, it’s not a ridiculous theory, because helping someone get away with it is undeniably abetting the commission of the crime. In the context of journalism, it is also a dangerous theory. Because every journalist who receives classified information is, undeniably, abetting that crime. (Just as every journalist of any worth is a “hostile, non-state intelligence agent.”)

If the iconic liberal press wants to cheer on the USG/Trump administration’s prosecution of that action, as part of a “conspiracy” to “knowingly access a computer without authorization,” it is cheering on an expansive definition of that charge to include, as Greenwald says, journalists’ “ethical obligation to take steps to protect their sources from retaliation, which sometimes includes granting them anonymity and employing technical measures to help ensure that their identity is not discovered.” It is cheering on the prosecution of any publisher in the future doing what the NYT and WaPo did with the Pentagon Papers.

It is also, we should all acknowledge, cheering on Donald Trump for undertaking precisely the criminalization of standard journalistic abetting of sources that, it is said, the Obama administration declined to pursue, on exactly the same evidence. If the NYT and WaPo are praising the Trump administration for it’s “well begun” and “long overdue” prosecution of Assange on this charge, they are implicitly, it should be pointed out explicitly, denouncing the Obama administration for its ill-advised failure to be as aggressively reactionary. That is how the iconic liberal media rolls.

Not to fear, I am sure the government will be successful in presenting its theory of this crime in the Eastern District of Virginia, known as the “Espionage Court.” Ask John Kiriakou about Assange’s chances there.

I am also sure that this will not be the only charge Julian Assange faces in that court. If you think that, after pursuing and demonizing him as a “terrorist” and “hostile non-state intelligence” agent (for Russia yet!) for 9 years, the US government is going to be satisfied with a maximum five-year (out-in-three) sentence for Julian Assange, I have a bridge to sell you.

The moment he sets foot on US soil, Julian Assange will be hit with other charges—charges, probably under the Espionage Act, that carry long prison sentences. I know that, anyone who is not a child knows that, and the editors of the NYT and WaPo know that. When the editors of the NYT write that the government is: “skirting — for now— critical First Amendment questions,” they are telling you they know that.

This is another round of that cowardly game where liberal pundits pretend to believe in the professed objectives of the government so they can claim to be abetting its actions in innocent good faith, and when it all turns to shit they can say: “We didn’t know that was gonna happen!” and be all liberal-outraged at the danger to the un-skirted First Amendment.

The mainstream media will cover is asses on that now by parading legal analysts who point out that the extradition treaty with the UK does not allow additional charges to be added after extradition.

First of all, I’m sure Theresa May and all sorts of UK pols and pundits will be really mad and stamp their feet if the US government somehow reneges on that. So Trump, Bolton, and Pompeo wouldn’t dare.

But here’s how I know, and know that the NYT and WaPo know, that the government will bring more charges against Assange: The lawyer who represented the NYT in the Pentagon Papers case, whom they all know very well, and who, we know, knows what he’s talking about, tells us so.

In his article entitled, “The Indictment of Assange is a Snare and a Delusion,” James Goodale, explains how the USG has written into the present indictment the legal justification for bringing new charges without violating the extradition treaty. The treaty—surprise, surprise—makes an exception for new charges “based on the same facts as the offense for which extradition was granted.” While the indictment does not charge Assange under the Espionage Act, it does lay out a set of facts that predicate a case for conspiracy under the Act, which it mentions explicitly—per Goodale,  on Page 5 of the indictment, referring to Title 18 U.S. Code, Sections 793(c) and 793(e).

As Goodale says: “The indictment is…a snare and a delusion…Once [Assange] is here, he will be hit, no doubt, with multiple charges.”

No doubt. A done deal. And all on the legal up-and-up. Theresa won’t even have to stress her sensible shoes. Though I’m sure, along with the NYT and WaPo editorial boards, she’ll say something like “We didn’t foresee that. But it is within the law”

But there is not a chance, not a scintilla of a shred of a possibility, that the editors of the NYT and WaPo, and of the major television networks, do not know what James Goodale, and now you and I, know about the inevitability of the USG bringing more charges against Assange. They are deliberately deceiving you when they pretend that they don’t.

In fact, an ABC report suggests that other, “death penalty” charges were already made, or were at least “on the table” against Assange.

The Ecuadorian government has been working with the UK government for over a year, and with the US government for six months—through the two countries’ ambassadors in Germany—to craft a deal that would enable them to eject Assange without looking too villainous. And the single sticking point of that was the death penalty. U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell,“one of President Donald Trump’s closest envoys in Europe,” eventually got Rod Rosenstein to agree to take the death penalty “off the table,” and Grenell then made a verbal pledge to Ecuador.

The negotiation process and timing presented in this account indicate that death penalty charges was definitely on the table, and only taken off recently and reluctantly.

Furthermore, the telephone game of passing on an indirect, second-hand, “verbal pledge” through Trump’s pal, combined with the fact that the DOJ will “not confirm that the U.S. agreed to take any sentence off the table,” does not inspire confidence in the durability of this “pledge.” Lenin Moreno may be the one stamping his feet in disapproval, after depositing the $4 billion the US arranged for him to get from the IMF.

At any rate, everyone who is not a child knows that, if Julian Assange is extradited to the United States, different charges with stiffer penalties will be added, and he will spend at least twenty, and probably all the remaining, years of his life in prison. As John Kiriakou says, from experience: “No matter what happens, no matter what the charges, Julian cannot and will not get a fair trial in the Eastern District of Virginia.”

Swedish Victims Unit

The other deliberately deceptive diversion, an especially alluring bait for liberals, is the infamous Swedish case. This is being resurrected in an oddly pernicious way in the UK, where the battle over what happens to Julian Assange and any possible independent media is being decided. There, a multi-party coterie of MPs and peers is leading a campaign, with an open letter to the present and shadow Home Secretaries, urging them to “do everything you can…to ensure” that Assange be extradited to Sweden, “in the event Sweden makes an extradition request.”  This campaign has been a great success, and “extradition to Sweden” has become the main theme and demand of the British liberal commentariat regarding the Assange case.

It might strike one as a little odd that there should be a furious political campaign to pressure the British government to honor an extradition request that has not been made. The signatories of the letter express no concern—“we make no assessment”—about whether the UK should honor the extradition demand that has been made and is actually in process, that of the United States. But the signatories definitely assess, in its absence, that the non-existent Swedish extradition request is valid, and that, just in case it appears, the UK government must pledge in advance to “give every assistance to Sweden” in honoring it.

Why? Well, clearly the letter writers stand in a different relation, and assume their audience stands in a different relation, to the issues involved in the actual U.S. versus the hypothetical Swedish extradition request. Thus, they feel comfortable flatly expressing no interest at all in the inevitable and terrible consequences that would result from honoring the U.S. extradition, while insisting, regarding the presumptive issue of a Swedish extradition, that “We must send a strong message of the priority the UK has in tackling sexual violence and the seriousness with which such allegations are viewed.” On a 1-10 scale of what issues are worth assessing, Sweden’s imagined interrogation of Assange for sexual allegations gets a 10, the US’s actual drive to imprison Assange for revealing war crimes is set at a firm 0. It’s a discourse in which the concerns about US extradition disappear.

To be clear, about what’s being done behind the “sex crime allegation” smoke, they explicitly do not oppose extradition to the US, and do not urge anyone to do so. They are trying to replace “no extradition to the US” in the public discourse with “extradition to Sweden”—which ends up meaning extradition to the US anyway. The purpose of this rhetorical rigamarole is, by getting everyone to think or do nothing about it, to surreptitiously but effectively support extradition to the U.S, It permits politicians and the public to support it by allowing it, while thinking/telling themselves they are supporting something else.

Let’s not think and talk and do something about Julian Assange being extradited to and imprisoned in the United States, which is actually about to happen. That would require us to make a fight we really don’t want to wage against our government, based on our professed free-speech, free-press principles that we really don’t want to protect for a guy we’ve been trained come to loathe.

Let’s instead think and talk and do something about the imaginary alternative of Assange being extradited and questioned in Sweden. That will confirm our virtuous seriousness about sexual assault allegations and wash our hands us of the stains that would come—and we are implicitly admitting we know would come—from delivering him into the hands of the U.S. government/Trump administration’s prison system. Let Sweden do that! We make no assessment about it.

As Jonathan Cook demonstrates, the British Guardian-liberal commentariat is now firmly committed to promoting that diversionary discourse: “In other words, the public conversation in the U.K, …, is going to be about who has first dibs on Assange….So, the concern is not that Assange is facing rendition to the U.S. It is that the U.S. claim might ‘overshadow’ an outstanding legal case in Sweden.”

It’s the epitome of an avoidance mechanism; it substitutes in people’s minds a non-existent problematic, which they can be more comfortable thinking about and acting upon, for the actual problem and decision they face.

A principal target of this campaign by those in the UK is, of course, Jeremy Corbyn and his left Labourites. Corbyn, who may become Prime Minister and have the real power to stop Assange’s extradition, came out of the gate, on April 11^th, with a very strong and clear statement:: “The extradition of Julian Assange to the US for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan should be opposed by the British government.”

This statement was reinforced by being embedded in a tweet that includes a clip of the Collateral Murder video, in which his shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbot reminds us that, in that incident, the US “killed 18 civilians and two Reuters journalists” and that “Julian Assange is not being pursued to protect US National Security. He is being pursued because he has exposed wrongdoing by US administrations and their military forces.”

For the many partners of US imperialism scattered across the spectrum of British politics, this kind of strong, simple, and direct refusal of the US’s extradition order—especially by a man and woman who may form a government—cannot be allowed to stand. On the other hand, it so powerfully echoes the disgust so many Britons feel about US imperialism that it makes it hard for the ostensibly leftist politicians and commentators to come out and say directly, “We must not oppose the US extradition.”

So, a “left” reason must be conjured up to steer Corbyn and Abbot away from their clear and explicit rejection of the US extradition request and into that murkier discourse where concerns about actual US extradition disappear, and “no extradition to the US” is replaced with “extradition to Sweden.”  ‘Cause nobody wants to be soft on sex crimes.

And the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn has worked. He now says Julian Assange “must answer” sexual assault allegations if Sweden decides to re-open their investigation.

This is Corbyn, on April 13, acceding to the demand of the letter that was sent on April 12^thand reinforced by a tsunami of pressure from the British media, to change the subject: Yes, OK, the important thing to talk about is the hypothetical Swedish extradition over sex allegations, not the actual American extradition for exposing war crimes.

Repeating, again, the strange insistence that the hypothetical is more urgent than the actual, that everyone must take a position on what the UK must do if Sweden does something it hasn’t.

The point of this campaign, the reason the letter was put out the day after his tweet, was to get that statement from Jeremy Corbyn. The present volatility in British politics makes it quite possible that there will soon be a general election, and quite possible that Corbyn will win it—all before Assange’s extradition case plays out in British courts. It was very important to get Corby on record saying: “the British government must extradite Assange to Sweden.”

The British imperialist poodles are laying out the plan B in the case Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. It is very unlikely that Sweden will reopen their Assange investigation, but the message is being sent to Swedish poodles and the US big dog: If he does become PM, we’ve already arranged a way out. We’ve created a political frame which allows Corbyn to keep his word not to allow direct British extradition to the US, while forcing him to allow extradition to Sweden (from which Assange will immediately be passed on to the US). In that circumstance, Sweden, at the behest of the US and UK, will obediently play its assigned role, re-open the investigation and demand extradition. Corbyn has already complied. He has been played. In two days.

We might even see in this discourse the British liberal imperialists’ not-so-subtle plea to Sweden, whether or not Corbyn is elected: Please, reopen the damn investigation and demand that we extradite Assange to you! Knowing full well Sweden would onwardly extradite him to the US. It’s UK Guardian lefties, caught between the popular disgust with US imperialism and their own toadying commitment to it, sending a message to Sweden: Don’t make us be the bad guys here. You started this. You end it.

Of course, the real point here, which the advocates of this line are pretending to miss and energetically trying to disappear from everyone’s line of sight, is that Sweden is no more interested in prosecuting Assange for his alleged sexual offense then the UK is for his bail jumping. The sex allegation from Sweden, like the bail jumping allegation in the UK, is just a doorway to his extradition to the United States.

It may make it easier for UK and US liberals to swallow the extradition of Assange if it’s slathered in “sex crime” rather than “bail jumping” dressing. But whatever pretext it’s done behind, that’s the endgame for the UK and Sweden. Either you accept that’s the case, as Assange and his legal team have been saying for years, or, in the face of the irrefutable fact of the American extradition request, you continue to deny it. Really, does anyone—does Jeremy Corbyn or a single one of the signatories of that British letter—think the USG/Trump administration would notdemand extradition from Sweden? Or that Sweden would not comply? What mental gymnastics does it take to make the inevitability of that disappear from your mind? “Let’s pretend!”

This is a desperate attempt by Assange-haters who want to maintain some leftist credibility to revive a specious smear that is irrefutably belied by the reality of the American indictment and extradition demand: that Assange sought Asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in order to “flee” sexual allegations, to “escape Swedish Justice.”

I will not attempt to judge the allegations that were made against Assange in Sweden. The specifics of those allegations, which have undergone a number of permutations, and the peculiarities of Swedish law, which can be misleading to Americans, make for a rat’s nest of sexual and political complications. The more you look into it, the more you are struck by how banal, confused, and sad the incidents in question are.

I share the opinion of Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape that “the pursuit of Assange is political” and “the allegations against him are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction.”You can find comprehensive accounts that will help you make up your mind here, here, here, here, here, here.

I’ll point out three crucial things to know in the present context, which are usually presented in deceptively fallacious ways.

First, of all, Assange is not, and never was. charged with a crime in Sweden. No decision to prosecute him was ever taken. The British letter itself recognizes this, speaking of the hope that “the formal investigation … can be concluded and, if appropriate, a charge can be made.” It was, in the prosecutor’s language, a “preliminary investigation.” Assange was wanted for questioning, and the Swedish government demanded his apprehension and extradition for that purpose, not to bring him to trial.

Second, Julian Assange was always available for questioning by Swedish prosecutors. He appeared voluntarily for questioning in Sweden, after which he was told he was free to leave the country. He and his lawyers always said he was available for questioning by Swedish prosecutors in London, via satellite (options that were standard practice), or in Sweden, if Sweden would assure him that he would not be extradited to the U.S. It was the British Crown Protection Service (CPS) that dissuaded the Swedes from coming to London to question Assange early on, in 2010 and 2011. And, when “Swedish authorities were eager to give up the case” and “drop extradition proceedings” in 2012-13, it was the British who pressured them to keep it going, with a CPS lawyer exclaiming: ““Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

Third, the Swedish prosecutor did interview Assange about the last remaining allegation in 2016 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, without any extradition, as she always could have. (The investigation into other allegations was dropped in 2015.) Assange submitted to the Swedish prosecutor’s insistence that the questioning take place without his lawyer present. After that questioning the investigation was dropped. No criminal charges were filed; no decision to prosecute him was ever made.

What’s quite clear in all this, although made to disappear from consideration and appear as its opposite, is that Julian Assange was never trying to “escape Swedish justice”; he was, as his lawyer, Jennifer Robinson says (in a Sky News interview with Sophy Ridge that I urge everyone to watch), “escaping American injustice.” As Robinson points out, if Assange had gone to the Ecuadorian embassy to flee the Swedish charges, he would have left the Ecuadorian embassy when they were dropped. But, of course, it wasn’t those charges he was trying to avoid. Assange’s one consistent concern in all this, his reason for seeking and being granted political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, was to avoid being extradited to the US, by Sweden or the UK. He had, and was right to have, a fear of that.

There is an obvious fault in the logic of people who continue to push the “Assange was fleeing sex crime allegations” line, which they somehow never see. They say Assange is responsible for not confronting sex crime allegations because he would not go to Sweden; they never say Swedish authorities are responsible for refusing to confront the sex crime allegations on their own terms because they wouldn’t give up on an irrelevant extradition to the US. The Swedes’ first priority was not questioning Assange; it was getting him to Sweden with the option of onward extradition to the US. Assange was saying, “Let’s get rid of an entirely irrelevant third-party that is preventing an investigation into the allegations on their own terms.” The Swedes were saying: “No, we insist on preserving the prerogatives and interests of that irrelevant third-party as a condition of our investigation into these sex crime allegations.” The Swedes weren’t taking that position for the sake of the women making the allegations. Who was centering and who was deprecating “the seriousness with which such allegations are viewed”?

Even under the worst interpretation for him, there is no conceivable logic here in which the Swedish prosecutors are not at least as responsible as Julian Assange for not doing what was necessary to deal with sexual assault allegations. Nobody who did not demand that the Swedes abjure American extradition can claim that their primary concern was the sexual allegations. If you say he’s bluffing, call it! Unless it’s you who doesn’t want to show your cards.

But in order to see that logic, you have to remain aware of the third party that’s in the game, and the pushers of that narrative construct it in such a way to make that third party disappear. Again, the purpose of this discourse is to hide the role of the U.S. in order to protect it.

These facts also show how hypocritical it is for the British to be now promoting this line of diversion. Never mind how utterly phony it is for the government that refused Spain’s extradition request for human-rights criminal Pinochet, despite its own highest court’s ruling, to be now proclaiming its sacred duty to obey the Swedish and American extradition demands. As we’ve seen, it was the British who prevented the Swedes from interviewing Assange early on in this whole affair. They, too, were more concerned about something else then they were about seriously investigating sex-crimes allegations. They, too, were more concerned about someone else than they were about the women making the accusations. Now, rather than accounting for what they did in that respect over the past seven years, British imperial poodles are hypocritically posing as defenders of sex-crime investigation in order to continue diverting attention from the real dealer at the table.

Sweden isn’t going to re-open the sex-crime investigation and take Julian Assange off their hands, and they know it. (Absent a post-Corbyn-victory Plan B above. And if the Swedes did, the investigation would be quickly concluded with no charges brought on the basis of the allegations, and whole case would disappear into the ether as Assange was quickly bundled on the plane to America.) The issue isn’t whether Julian Assange will be prosecuted for sex-crime allegations, for bail jumping, or for being an asshole. The only issue is whether he will be extradited to the US and sent to prison for decades for publishing true facts about US crimes around the world.

End Game

That fight is now taking place, and will be decided, in London. It is imperative that everyone in the UK and US keep constant pressure on that one point. It is imperative that everyone refuse to be drawn into a discourse that changes the subject and diverts attention on to some other issue. The only purpose of such a discourse is to protect the US extradition project by disappearing it behind something else.

There’s no avoiding it. We have to support Julian Assange. Period.

Jim Kavanagh edits The Polemicist.

Source: OffGuardian

Julian Assange is not the first victim of imperial lawlessness, with its ruthless disregard for legal and moral principles, and he will definitely not be the last.

It is, or ought to be, a fundamental principle of a society based upon the rule of law, that this is indeed the case. If an individual, or group of individuals, transgress upon the law then they ought to be held accountable. That ought to apply regardless of that person’s status. We know of course that this is an ideal not always applied. There is ample sociological evidence to that effect.

A related principle is that a person is presumed innocent until they either plead guilty or are found guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction applying the law to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

Whether or not Mr Assange will ever receive a fair trial is a moot point. There has been a veritable torrent of prejudicial pre-trial publicity. Even the Judge who dealt with Mr Assange’s charge of breaching his bail conditions (in respect of non-existent Swedish charges of alleged sexual assault) felt the need to describe Mr Assange as a “narcissist,” the relevance of which to a charge of breaching bail escapes me.

The judge then declined sentencing jurisdiction and transferred Mr Assange to a higher court, which had the capacity to impose a 12-month sentence instead of the six months available to a lowly magistrate. Mr Assange had spent six and a half years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, a detention that a United Nations panel found to be arbitrary and contrary to his human rights. Again, the legal justification for transferring Mr Assange to a higher court for admittedly breaching his bail on non-existent charges escapes me.

Returning to Mrs May’s triumphalist claim that no-one is above the law, her rhetoric immediately raises the question: if that is indeed true why is she and members of the government and those of governments before her not standing trial for the many and egregious breaches of international law perpetrated by successive British governments?

Let us look briefly that just four examples from recent history where, if indeed the standard of “no one is above the law” truly applied, it would rapidly deplete the ranks of United Kingdom politicians, past and present.

Afghanistan. In December 2001 the United States and its allies, including the United Kingdom, invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly because the Taliban Government refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC. The Taliban Government, far from refusing the United States request, asked for evidence of bin Laden’s alleged involvement in the attacks. That is after all, the basic requirement of the “rules based legal order”. That evidence was never provided.

We now know that the decision to invade Afghanistan was made in July 2001, two months before the 9/11 attacks. The real reasons for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan had more to do with the refusal of the Afghan government to give the contract for a gas pipeline from the Caspian basin to an American company, and instead of giving the contract to the Argentinian Bridas Corporation.

17 ½ years later the United States and the United Kingdom are you still there. Millions of Afghans were forced into seeking refuge across the border, principally into Iran and Pakistan. The heroin trade, much reduced under the Taliban, now flourishes under US protection. Military bases are used as black sites for torture as well is providing springboards for hybrid warfare against the former Soviet republics on Afghanistan’s border and in China’s Xinjiang province. The latter is a key element in China’s BRI that the United States is determined to oppose and undermine at every opportunity.

In 2017 when an International Criminal Court prosecutor announced an intention to investigate war crimes allegedly committed by United States and Allied forces in Afghanistan, the United States reaction was to issue threats and a refusal to grant visas to ICC investigators. The May government was completely silent about this blatant attempt to obstruct justice, in itself a serious criminal offence.

Iraq. In 2003 the United Kingdom was a strong supporter of the Bush regime plan to invade Iraq, which just happened to be a major oil producer. There was the usual flimflam about Iraq’s alleged violations of United Nations Security Council resolutions dating back to the 1990 Gulf war. That had as much credence as the tales of Iraq’s fabled weapons of mass destruction.

Any doubt that this was anything other then a blatant regime change operation, with other goals including destroying one of Israel’s designated enemies; getting the United States a stronger foothold in the middle east; and turning over Iraq’s oil production to the major US and other western corporations; was demolished by, inter alia, Britain’s own Chilcott report.

And the number of prosecutions for this illegal war of aggression that devastated a society, gave birth to the ISIS plague, killed more than 1 million civilians and made millions more refugees? Absolutely zero.

Libya. After a massive propaganda campaign, nearly all of it entirely false, against Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1973. This resolution authorised the imposition of a no fly zone over Libyan territory and the right to use “all necessary measures” to prevent attacks on civilians. It did not authorise what NATO allies the United Kingdom and France did next, which was to apply massive military force to Libya.

This resulted in the destruction of a country, which up until that point had enjoyed Africa’s highest living standard; the brutal murder of its leader without even the pretence of minimum legal standards; a massive exodus of refugees; and an ongoing Civil War in which the United Kingdom is backing longtime CIA asset General Haftar.

How many United Kingdom politicians have been held accountable for these multiple breaches of international law? Again, absolutely zero.

Chagos Islands. This was a uniquely British piece of international banditry, albeit on behalf of the United States who wanted a military base in the Indian Ocean. The Labour government of Harold Wilson was only too happy to oblige. The short version of the chronicle of sustained and systematic abuse of the Chagos Islanders is that Mauritius was forced to agree to the Chagos Islanders being severed from their control. The Islanders were in turn forcibly evicted from their homes under appalling circumstances. The island was then handed over to the Americans for military purposes. There is strong evidence that the island of Diego Garcia, the principal island in the Chagos Group, is also used as a ‘black site’ for illegal renditions and torture.

The entire horror story is documented in the opinion of the International Court of Justice (www.icj-cij.org 25 February 2019) and an excellent summary by Craig Murray on his website (www.craigmurray.org.uk 26 March 2019). The majority opinion of the court (13:1) was that the United Kingdom was in breach of multiple legal obligations. The court rejected all of the arguments put forward by the United Kingdom to justify what it had done. The reaction of the UK government to the decision was to announce that it was going to ignore it.

The reaction to the ICJ decision provides the clearest possible illustration of the gap between the rhetoric of May about no-one being above the law, and the reality daily confronted by the victims of great power machinations.

Although it is probably of little comfort to Mr Assange, his experiences have helped to shed light on the brutality and ruthless disregard for the legal and moral principles reportedly held by those espousing sanctimonious claptrap in the House of Commons and elsewhere.

Mr Assange is not the first victim of imperial lawlessness. He will definitely not be the last.

James O’Neill is a barrister at law and geopolitical analyst. He may be contacted at [email protected].

Source: The London Economic

His dehumanisation allows for his permanent exile from society and gives licence to the state to inflict whatever penalties they choose to impose.

While the TV news shows him being pulled screaming from the embassy, we are fed lies to distract us from what Assange and WikiLeaks have achieved: the huge cache of information they released that exposed the barbarity of US-led oil wars in the Middle East.

Through half-closed eyes, we watched footage secretly obtained from US government sources by WikiLeaks of the helicopter gunships killing Reuters journalists and civilians, then returning to finish off their rescuers.

The barbarity of wars

Uncomfortable truths about the “war on terror” have been replaced with stories of how Assange murdered his own cat and smeared faeces on the walls of the embassy.

We are told that he wore the same socks for days, skateboarded through the corridors and ate food with his hands.

It ends with pictures of the wretched man being hauled off to Belmarsh Prison, Britain’s very own Guantanamo.

His dehumanisation allows for his permanent exile from society and gives licence to the State to inflict whatever penalties they choose to impose.

Additionally, without courageous people like Assange, they have carte blanche to impose their barbarities across the world. This principle has not been lost, even on those in the military.

Wikileaks collateral murder video

Mike Lyons, a Royal Navy submariner and today a member for Veterans for Peace, has said:

“I remember unashamedly shedding a tear the first time I saw the collateral murder video. To see such callousness and disregard for human life by the crews of the Apache helicopters made me question the part I played in the military machine.”

For expressing these views, Lyons was court-martialled and served seven months in a military prison before being “dishonorably” discharged.

Lies about Assange have been accompanied by farce.

The Swedish allegations

His embassy arrest was made on the grounds of his “failure to appear in court” for a hearing based on an expired Swedish extradition request.

Contrary to most press reports, there were two women involved, one from Enköping and the second living in Stockholm. After separate sexual encounters with him, the two wanted to track Assange down to be tested for sexually-transmitted diseases.

The mass media have incorrectly reported that he was charged with rape. They chose to ignore the words of the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finné, who said, “I don’t think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape.”

They also choose not to report that on 19 May 2017, Finné applied to the Stockholm District Court to rescind Assange’s arrest warrant, effectively ending the investigation against him.

Sweden tried to drop Assange’s extradition, but the English Crown Prosecution Service has continued to behave as if it is still in place.

Finally, the two women who made the complaints against him withdrew them, with one saying that she had been pressured into making them by prosecutors linked to Swedish intelligence and their US overseers.

She was “shocked” when they arrested him because she only “wanted him to take [an HIV]test”. She “did not want to accuse Assange of anything . . . it was the police who made up the charges”.

She has been quoted as saying, “I have not been raped” and that she had been “railroaded by police and others”.

Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape have stated :

“The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . . The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will.”

What sentence would Julian Assange face?

Behind all this has been the US government who, according to Edward Snowden, have placed Assange on a “manhunt target list”.

Washington’s bid to get him, say Australian diplomatic cables, is “unprecedented in scale and nature”.

According to John Pilger: “a secret grand jury has spent years attempting to contrive a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted”.

To date, all the US has managed to come up with is a sealed indictment charging Assange with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer”.

Although this count carries a maximum five year sentence — less than the time Assange has been trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy — it hasn’t stopped Republican Senator, Ben Sasse, tweeting that he should serve “the rest of his life” in prison and US ex-Vice President Joe Biden declaring that Assange is a “cyber-terrorist”.

Is journalism the next target?

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who worked with Assange and WikiLeaks to help Edward Snowden escape US arrest said:

“If you’re cheering Assange’s arrest based on a US extradition request, your allies in your celebration are the most extremist elements of the Trump Administration, whose primary and explicit goal is to criminalize reporting on classified docs & punish [WikiLeaks] for exposing war crimes.”

If Assange and WikiLeaks are succesfully criminalised, the next step will be to outlaw independent online news sources like The London Economic as a practice run before they come for newspapers like The Guardian.

On a personal note, I write as someone who was a whistleblower.

During the four-and-a-half years I sought to bring corruption to light, I was sacked and lost my income and reputation, but it was nothing compared to the sacrifices made by Julian Assange, and others such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

They have suffered imprisonment, torture and exile in their attempts to inform the public of State-inflicted horrors. They have my undying gratitude for their sacrifice and courage for the “crime” of being truth-tellers in a time of lies, cynicism and war.

David Wilson is an anti-war activist, co-founder of War Child and whistleblower

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which]there would be no advance towards civilisation”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange’s principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”. The Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.

These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.

If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian calls truthful “things”, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?

What is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.

David McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange]would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and WilLeaks.”

Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.

In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.

Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.

“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”

And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.

John Pilger – Julian Assange’s arrest is an assault on journalism

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

They will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions to keep us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away.

For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and “experts” telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a “mainstream” voice was raised in his defence in all that time.

From the moment he sought asylum, Assange was cast as an outlaw. His work as the founder of Wikileaks – a digital platform that for the first time in history gave ordinary people a glimpse into the darkest recesses of the most secure vaults in the deepest of Deep States – was erased from the record.

Assange was reduced from one of the few towering figures of our time – a man who will have a central place in history books, if we as a species live long enough to write those books – to nothing more than a sex pest, and a scruffy bail-skipper.

The political and media class crafted a narrative of half-truths about the sex charges Assange was under investigation for in Sweden. They overlooked the fact that Assange had been allowed to leave Sweden by the original investigator, who dropped the charges, only for them to be revived by another investigator with a well-documented political agenda.

They failed to mention that Assange was always willing to be questioned by Swedish prosecutors in London, as had occurred in dozens of other cases involving extradition proceedings to Sweden. It was almost as if Swedish officials did not want to test the evidence they claimed to have in their possession.

The media and political courtiers endlessly emphasised Assange’s bail violation in the UK, ignoring the fact that asylum seekers fleeing legal and political persecution don’t usually honour bail conditions imposed by the very state authorites from which they are seeking asylum.

The political and media establishment ignored the mounting evidence of a secret grand jury in Virginia formulating charges against Assange, and ridiculed Wikileaks’ concerns that the Swedish case might be cover for a more sinister attempt by the US to extradite Assange and lock him away in a high-security prison, as had happened to whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

They belittled the 2016 verdict of a panel of United Nations legal scholars that the UK was “arbitrarily detaining” Assange. The media were more interested in the welfare of his cat.

They ignored the fact that after Ecuador changed presidents – with the new one keen to win favour with Washington – Assange was placed under more and more severe forms of solitary confinement. He was denied access to visitors and basic means of communications, violating both his asylum status and his human rights, and threatening his mental and physical wellbeing.

Equally, they ignored the fact that Assange had been given diplomatic status by Ecuador, as well as Ecuadorean citizenship. Britain was obligated to allow him to leave the embassy, using his diplomatic immunity, to travel unhindered to Ecuador. No “mainstream” journalist or politician thought this significant either.

They turned a blind eye to the news that, after refusing to question Assange in the UK, Swedish prosecutors had decided to quietly drop the case against him in 2015. Sweden had kept the decision under wraps for more than two years.

It was a freedom of information request by an ally of Assange, not a media outlet, that unearthed documents showing that Swedish investigators had, in fact, wanted to drop the case against Assange back in 2013. The UK, however, insisted that they carry on with the charade so that Assange could remain locked up. A British official emailed the Swedes: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

Most of the other documents relating to these conversations were unavailable. They had been destroyed by the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service in violation of protocol. But no one in the political and media establishment cared, of course.

Similarly, they ignored the fact that Assange was forced to hole up for years in the embassy, under the most intense form of house arrest, even though he no longer had a case to answer in Sweden. They told us – apparently in all seriousness – that he had to be arrested for his bail infraction, something that would normally be dealt with by a fine.

And possibly most egregiously of all, most of the media refused to acknowledge that Assange was a journalist and publisher, even though by failing to do so they exposed themselves to the future use of the same draconian sanctions should they or their publications ever need to be silenced. They signed off on the right of the US authorities to seize any foreign journalist, anywhere in the world, and lock him or her out of sight. They opened the door to a new, special form of rendition for journalists.

This was never about Sweden or bail violations, or even about the discredited Russiagate narrative, as anyone who was paying the vaguest attention should have been able to work out. It was about the US Deep State doing everything in its power to crush Wikileaks and make an example of its founder.

It was about making sure there would never again be a leak like that of Collateral Murder, the military video released by Wikileaks in 2007 that showed US soldiers celebrating as they murdered Iraqi civilians. It was about making sure there would never again be a dump of US diplomatic cables, like those released in 2010 that revealed the secret machinations of the US empire to dominate the planet whatever the cost in human rights violations.

Now the pretence is over. The British police invaded the diplomatic territory of Ecuador – invited in by Ecuador after it tore up Assange’s asylum status – to smuggle him off to jail. Two vassal states cooperating to do the bidding of the US empire. The arrest was not to help two women in Sweden or to enforce a minor bail infraction.

No, the British authorities were acting on an extradition warrant from the US. And the charges the US authorities have concocted relate to Wikileaks’ earliest work exposing the US military’s war crimes in Iraq – the stuff that we all once agreed was in the public interest, that British and US media clamoured to publish themselves.

Still the media and political class is turning a blind eye. Where is the outrage at the lies we have been served up for these past seven years? Where is the contrition at having been gulled for so long? Where is the fury at the most basic press freedom – the right to publish – being trashed to silence Assange? Where is the willingness finally to speak up in Assange’s defence?

It’s not there. There will be no indignation at the BBC, or the Guardian, or CNN. Just curious, impassive – even gently mocking – reporting of Assange’s fate.

And that is because these journalists, politicians and experts never really believed anything they said. They knew all along that the US wanted to silence Assange and to crush Wikileaks. They knew that all along and they didn’t care. In fact, they happily conspired in paving the way for today’s kidnapping of Assange.

They did so because they are not there to represent the truth, or to stand up for ordinary people, or to protect a free press, or even to enforce the rule of law. They don’t care about any of that. They are there to protect their careers, and the system that rewards them with money and influence. They don’t want an upstart like Assange kicking over their applecart.

Now they will spin us a whole new set of deceptions and distractions about Assange to keep us anaesthetised, to keep us from being incensed as our rights are whittled away, and to prevent us from realising that Assange’s rights and our own are indivisible. We stand or fall together.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. He is entirely reader supported and you can donate here Jonathan Cook Blog.

Source: RT

For the army of smug liberals, many of them leading columnists in newspapers such as the Guardian, that noise they hear right now is the death rattle of their collective moral conscience.

Source: Rogue Journalist

Everyone who has ever denied that this was happening needs to hang their heads in shame for scoffing at a very real threat to press freedoms everywhere.

“Just confirmed: #Assange has been arrested not just for breach of bail conditions but also in relation to a US extradition request,” tweeted Robinson.

“From #Assange: The US warrant was issued in December 2017 and is for conspiracy with Chelsea Manning in early 2010,” Robinson added.

So there you have it. Extradited for journalism. In a blur, everything that Assange and WikiLeaks have been warning about for years has been proven correct, contrary to mountains of claims to the contrary by establishment loyalists everywhere. The same government which tortured Chelsea Manning is in the process of extraditing her publisher so that they can silence him forever. Everyone who has ever denied that this was happening needs to hang their heads in shame for scoffing at a very real threat to press freedoms everywhere when they could have been opposing this obscene agenda. It’s time for some serious soul searching.

The time to act is now. It’s too late to prevent Assange from losing his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy, so the goal now is to fight extradition. Activist groups are swiftly organizing as I type this, so it will be easy for people around the world to find rallies to attend and online movements to help boost. I encourage everyone in the US, the UK and Australia to contact their elected representatives and politely but urgently inform them that the agenda to extradite Assange to the US must be fought at all costs. Educate yourself as best as you can on Assange’s case, and inform everyone you know about what’s going on.

This is seriously gut wrenching news. Here are ten thoughts on the matter in no particular order:

1 – The Metropolitan police were let into the embassy by the Ecuadorian ambassador, his political asylum revoked under entirely false pretenses in gross violation of international law. Shame on Ecuador.

2 – Assange is an Australian citizen. As of this writing, the Australian government has still not interceded to protect its citizen. Shame on Australia.

3 – The US government is setting a precedent which, if carried out, will constitute a grave threat to press freedoms the world over and a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act. Shame on America.

4 – The UK government is collaborating with the US government’s efforts to imprison a journalist for publishing evidence of US war crimes, just as it has collaborated with the US government in perpetrating war crimes. Shame on the UK.

5 – This arrest warrant was issued under the Trump administration, in full alignment with what the Trump administration has openly been saying about its agenda to silence WikiLeaks. Shame on Trump, and shame on anyone who continues to support him.

6 – This arrest is a Trump administration action, and has nothing to do with the 2016 Russia nonsense that Democrats have been shrieking about, yet these same Democrats who claim to oppose Trump and oppose his war on the press are currently cheerleading for Trump’s prosecution of a journalist who told the truth. Shame on Democrats.

7 – I am going to have a zero tolerance policy for QAnon cultists who try to tell me that this is actually 5-D chess by Trump to overthrow the Deep State. Stay out of my comments, stay out of my social media notifications, stay the hell away from me, and please rethink your worldview.

8 – The precedent set by imprisoning a foreign journalist under the Espionage Act will enable the US government to arrest leak publishers anywhere in the world who expose its crimes. This will cripple our ability to hold the most powerful institution on the planet to account in any way. There is no excuse for any journalist anywhere not to oppose this tooth and claw. If you see anyone calling themselves a journalist but failing to oppose Assange’s extradition, you should call them out for the frauds that they are.

9 – And yes, like it or not, Assange is a journalist. There is no legitimate argument to the contrary.

10 – This is it, folks. This is where we find out what we’re made of as a species. This is where we find out if humanity gets to survive, and if it deserves to. If we can’t stop the empire from imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts right in front of our eyes, we might as well roll over and tap out right now, because if we lose this one it’s never going to get any better from there. If we can’t pass this test, the oligarchs and the opaque government agencies which are allied with them will march us into extinction or Orwellian dystopia, and there’ll be no tool in our toolbox to stop them. We need to seriously dig deep on this one.

WHAT TO DO

• FOLLOW / share widely @Wikileaks and @DefendAssange
• RALLY
  *UK court hearings
  *Global Rallies
• PRESSURE Politicians
  *No US Extradition
  *Abide by @UN Decision
• MONITOR Media
  Correct disinformation with FACTS
• DONATE Legal DefenceFund http://Defend.wikileaks.org

Caitlin Johnstone’s articles are entirely reader-supported. See https://caitlinjohnstone.com/

Julian Assange is being punished for removing the veil of freedom, human rights, and civil liberties from the face of an empire of hypocrisy and lies.

BREAKING NEWS 11 April 2019: Julian Assange arrested by the Metropolitan Police at the Ecuador Embassy.

What he has revealed about state duplicity, human rights abuses and corruption goes beyond anything published in the world’s “mainstream” media. 

Source: Middle East Eye

After over six months of being cut off from outside world, on 14 October Ecuador has partly restored Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s communications with the outside world from its London embassy where the founder has been living for over six years.

The treatment – real and threatened – meted out to Assange by the US and UK governments contrasts sharply with the service Wikileaks has done their publics in revealing the nature of elite power, as shown in the following snapshot of Wikileaks’ revelations about British foreign policy in the Middle East.

Conniving with the Saudis

Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008 cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the US embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

American influence

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no US officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former US President George W Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then prime minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured US officials that his government “would consult with the US regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the US and UK”. The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the US is undermined by this cable.

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the US deputy secretary of state, having talked with foreign secretary William Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Deception over Diego Garcia

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major US base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve”.

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the US in May 2009, then UK foreign secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the US, apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the US to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at US bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow US cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the US was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.

Spying on the UK

Cables show the US spying on the Foreign Office, collecting information on British ministers. Soon after the appointment of Ivan Lewis as a junior foreign minister in 2009, US officials were briefing the office of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about rumours that he was depressed and had a reputation as a bully, and on “the state of his marriage”.

Washington was also shown to have been spying on the UK mission to the UN, along with other members of the Security Council and the UN Secretary General.

In addition, Wikileaks cables reveal that journalists and the public are considered legitimate targets of US intelligence operations. In October 2009, Joint Services Publication 440, a 2,400-page restricted document written in 2001 by the Ministry of Defence, was leaked. Somewhat ironically, it contained instructions for the security services on how to avoid leaks of information by hackers, journalists, and foreign spies.

The document refers to investigative journalists as “threats” alongside subversive and terrorist organisations, noting that “the ‘enemy’ is unwelcome publicity of any kind, and through any medium”.

Britain’s GCHQ is also revealed to have spied on Wikileaks itself – and its readers. One classified GCHQ document from 2012 shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly collect the IP addresses of visitors to the Wikileaks site in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines such as Google.

Championing free media

The British government is punishing Assange for the service that Wikileaks has performed. It is ignoring a UN ruling that he is being held in “arbitrary detention” at the Ecuadorian embassy, while failing, illegally, to ensure his health needs are met. Whitehall is also refusing to offer diplomatic assurances that Assange will not be extradited to the US – the only reason he remains in the embassy.

Smear campaigns have portrayed Assange as a sexual predator or a Russian agent, often in the same media that have benefitted from covering Wikileaks’ releases.

Many journalists and activists who are perfectly aware of the fake news in some Western media outlets, and of the smear campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, are ignoring or even colluding in the more vicious smearing of Assange.

More journalists need to champion the service Wikileaks performs and argue for what is at stake for a free media in the right to expose state secrets.

– Mark Curtis is a historian and analyst of UK foreign policy and international development and the author of six books, the latest being an updated edition of Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.

Source: Medium

Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying.

I write a lot about the plight of Julian Assange for the same reason I write a lot about the Iraq invasion: his persecution, when sincerely examined, exposes undeniable proof that we are ruled by a transnational power establishment which is immoral and dishonest to its core.

Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that the problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power has responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. The persecution of Assange has proved his thesis about the world absolutely correct.

Anyone who offends the US-centralized empire will find themselves subject to a trial by media, and the media are owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the empire. To believe what mass media news outlets tell you about those who stand up to imperial power is to ignore reality.

Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they’ll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they’ll be far more likely to consent to Assange’s silencing and imprisonment. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it’s as good as putting a bullet in his head.

The fact that the mass media can keep saying day after day “Hey, you know that bloke at the embassy who shares embarrassing truths about very powerful people? He’s a stinky Nazi rapist Russian spy who mistreats his cat” without raising suspicion shows you how propagandized the public already is. A normal worldview unmolested by corrupt narrative control would see someone who circulates inconvenient facts about the powerful being called pretty much all the worst things in the world and know immediately that that person is being lied about by those in power.

Relentless smear campaigns against Assange have given the unelected power establishment the ability to publicly make an example of a journalist who published uncomfortable truths without provoking the wrath of the masses. It’s a town square flogging that the crowd has been manipulated into cheering for. Narrative control has enabled them to have their cake and eat it too: they get to act like medieval lords and inflict draconian punishment against a speaker of undeniable facts and leave his head on a spike in the town square as a warning to other would-be truth tellers, and have the public believe that such a bizarre violation of modern human rights is perfectly fine and acceptable.

There are people who worked really hard to get journalism degrees, toiled long hours to earn the esteemed privilege of appearing on the front pages of a major publication, only to find themselves writing articles with headlines like “Julian Assange is a stinky, stinky stink man.”

Ordinary citizens often find themselves eager to believe the smear campaigns against Assange because it is easier than believing that their government would participate in the deliberate silencing and imprisoning of a journalist for publishing facts.

And yes, Julian Assange is most certainly a journalist. Publishing important information about what’s going on in the world so the public can inform themselves is precisely the thing that journalism is. There is no conventional definition of journalism which differs from this. Anyone who says Assange is not a journalist is telling a lie that they may or may not actually believe in order to justify his persecution and their support for it.

Another reason people can find themselves eager to believe smears about Assange is that the raw facts revealed by WikiLeaks publications punch giant holes in the stories about the kind of world, nation and society that most people have been taught to believe they live in since school age. These kinds of beliefs are interwoven with people’s entire egoic structures, with their sense of self and who they are as a person, so narratives which threaten to tear them apart can feel the same as a personal attack. This is why you’ll hear ordinary citizens talking about Assange as though he attacked them personally; all he did was publish facts about the powerful, but since those facts conflict with tightly held identity constructs, the cognitive dissonance that was caused to them can be interpreted as feeling like he’d slapped them in the face.

We live in a reality where unfathomably powerful world-dominating government agencies are scrutinized and criticized far, far less than a guy trapped in an embassy who published inconvenient facts about those agencies.

Assange disrupts establishment narratives even in his persecution. Liberal establishment loyalists in America still haven’t found a rational answer to criticisms that in supporting Assange’s criminal prosecution they are supporting a Trump administration agenda. You now have the same people who’ve been screaming that Trump is Hitler and that he’s attacking the free press cheering for the possibility of that same administration imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts.

The precedent that would be set by the US prosecuting a foreign journalist for merely publishing factual information would constitute a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act, for America and for the entire world.

The billionaire media has invalidated itself with its refusal to defend Assange. They know the precedent set by his prosecution for WikiLeaks publications would kill the ability of the press to hold power to account, but they don’t care because they know they never do that. For all their crying about Jamal Khashoggi and Jim Acosta’s hurt feelings, they do not actually care about journalism or “the free press” in any meaningful way.

Whenever I see a blue checkmark account on Twitter bashing Assange I mentally translate whatever they’re saying into “There is nothing I won’t do to advance my career in corporate media. If you’re in a position to promote me I will literally get down on my knees right this very second and let you do whatever you want to my body.”

I sometimes feel like I respect professional propagandists who smear Assange more than I respect ordinary citizens who go around smearing him for free. What do these people think they’ll get as a reward for their work as pro bono CIA propagandists? A gold star from Big Brother? They’re like slaves who beat and betray other slaves that fall out of line in order to win favor with the master, except they’re not even achieving that. The professional manipulators are at least cheering for their own class to continue to have its leadership’s interests advanced; ordinary people who do it are cheering for their own oppression.

Even lower in my view are the self-proclaimed leftists and anarchists who view themselves as oppositional to the establishment but still help advance this smear campaign. It is impossible to attack Assange without supporting the Orwellian empire which is persecuting him. I don’t care what mental gymnastics you’re doing to justify your pathetic cronyism; what you are doing benefits the most powerful and depraved people on this planet.

Anyone who participates in the ongoing smear campaign against Assange and Wikileaks is basically just saying “Extremely powerful people should be able to lie to us without any difficulty or opposition at all.”

Everyone should always be extremely suspicious of anyone who defends the powerful from the less powerful. It’s amazing that this isn’t more obvious to more people.

Contrary to the narratives promoted by establishment smear merchants, Julian Assange is not hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy. He is hiding from injustice. Everyone who knows anything about the US government’s prosecution of leakers and whistleblowers knows he has no shot at a fair trial, and would face brutal mistreatment at the hands of the same regime which tortured Chelsea Manning.

The persecution of Assange is essentially a question that mankind is asking itself: do we want to (A) continue down the path of omnicidal, ecocidal Orwellian dystopia, or do we want to (B) pull up and away from that trajectory and shrug off the oppressive power establishment which is driving us toward either total extinction or total enslavement? So far, A is the answer we’ve been giving ourselves to that question. But, as long as we switch before it’s too late, we can always change our answer.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Media Lens

This is John Pilger’s foreword to the new Media Lens book, ‘Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality’, published by Pluto Press.

Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Driven from the “mainstream”, Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism’s veneration of “approved opinions” while “unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality.”

Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship. This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new “groupthink”, as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.

Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the “MeToo” zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.

With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the “mainstream”, a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism. Sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful “democracies” regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.

In Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens — remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4 News.

Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.

The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.

I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media’s power.

What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards was a teacher, David Cromwell is a former scientist. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism — a term rarely used; let’s call it true objectivity — is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.

I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz, in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.

Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain’s pioneering health service.

The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as “austerity”, with its deceitful, weasel language of “efficiency savings” (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and “hard choices” (the willful destruction of the premises of civilised life in modern Britain).

“Austerity” is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.

Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but does it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to “providing a breadth of view” and to properly inform the public of “matters of public policy”, the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation’s most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: “Bill which gives power to GPs passes.” This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC’s coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by Cardiff University, Wales, found that the BBC reflected the government line “overwhelmingly” while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation’s much-vaunted “principle” of impartiality was never a consideration.

One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers. The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing.

Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly — onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.

With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”. They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.

With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.

The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, “I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.”

Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered “vile abuse”. Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: “That’s a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone ‘the most massive turd’? Vile abuse?”

Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, “I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronising.”

Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, “It’s difficult to imagine what Ecuador’s London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in.”

Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as “thoughtful and progressive”. What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be “one of us” and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?

Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of “fake news” is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox news, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom the Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.

“[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives,” wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as “a form of narcissism”.

“How did this man ….,” brayed the Guardian’s Zoe Williams, “get on the ballot in the first place?” A choir of the paper’s precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.

Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.

Supported by a “psyops” campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the US Agency of International Aid, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.

The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency, Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be “Syria Civil Defence” and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.

The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organisations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no “mainstream” reporter reports Syria, from Syria.

In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as “propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government”.

This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet — “Have you ever been invited to North Korea?”

So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the “perception”.

When he was US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called “a war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.

Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerised the German public.

She told me the “messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above”, but on the “submissive void” of an uninformed public.

“Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked.

“Everyone,” she said. “Propaganda always wins, if you allow it.”

Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto Press.

¡No pasaran! Confronting the Rise of the Far-Right

2 March 2019  ¡NO PASARAN! Conference in London to organise against Europe-wide rise of the far-right. Bringing together activists, MPs, campaigners from across Europe.

Details and registration…

Source: Newsweek

We are witnessing one of the most serious attacks on journalism in recent times. A simple retraction and apology will not be enough.

The story went viral, repeated uncritically by many media outlets around the world, including Newsweek. This falsely cast Assange into the center of a conspiracy between Putin and Trump. The Guardian even had the gall to post a call to its readers to donate to protect “independent journalism when factual, trustworthy reporting is under threat.”

These three meetings with Manafort did not happen.

As The Guardian admitted, the Embassy’s visitor logs show no such visits. The Guardian claims they saw a separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency that lists “Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of several well-known guests.’

Manafort, through his spokesman, has stated: “This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.”

It appears The Guardian editors tried to backpedal from the original story with post-publication stealth edits, but they have not issued a correction or apology.

The journalists who wrote this story must surely know that guests who enter the embassy must be registered in logs, as pointed out by the former first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy from 2010 to July 2018.

Ecuadorian intelligence has spent millions of dollars on setting up security cameras inside its embassy in London to monitor Julian Assange and his visitors. The Guardian has previously published still shots from those cameras. However, in the case of the claimed Manafort visit, they apparently demanded no such verification.

They also overlooked the simple fact that millions of pounds have been spent over the years by the Metropolitan police and secret services on monitoring the entrances of the embassy 24/7.

This is part of a series of stories from The Guardian, such as its recent claim of a “Russia escape plot” to enable Assange to flee the embassy, which is not true.

What do these stories have in common? They all give the UK and Ecuador political cover to arrest Assange and for the US to extradite him. Any journalists worth their salt should be investigating who is involved in these plots.

Mike Pompeo, when he was CIA director, said the U.S. was “working to take down” WikiLeaks. This was months after WikiLeaks released thousands of files on the CIA, the “largest leak of CIA documents in history,” called Vault 7. The Guardian seems determined to link Assange to Russia, in full knowledge that such claims are prejudicial in the context of Mueller’s probe in the US and the Democratic National Committee lawsuit against WikiLeaks.

Numerous commentators have criticized The Guardian for its coverage of Assange. Glenn Greenwald, former columnist for The Guardian, writes that the paper has “…such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him.” Another former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, writes: “The propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with Trump, and Trump’s supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.”

Hours before The Guardian published its article, WikiLeaks received knowledge of the story and “outed” it, with a denial, to its 5.4 million Twitter followers. The story then made the front page, and The Guardian asserted they had not received a denial prior to publication—as they had failed to contact the correct person.

A simple retraction and apology will not be enough. This persecution of Assange is one of the most serious attacks on journalism in recent times.

Kristinn Hrafnsson is an Icelandic investigative journalist who has worked with WikiLeaks since 2009, as spokesperson for the organization from 2010 to 2016 and editor-in-chief since September 2018.

Source: TruthDig

President Moreno seeks to discredit Assange and prepare for his expulsion from Ecuador’s London embassy, as part of  moves to ingratiate himself with the USA and UK.

Source: La Republica

 If he ends up in the hands of the UK authorities in the upcoming months and the US asks for his extradition, where will the British media stand?

Recently, his detention in the Ecuadorian embassy in London has been joined by isolation, strict rules and various forms of pressure which seem to have no other purpose than to break him down. A grip meant to destroy his physical and mental ability to resist until he either breaks down or he steps out of the Ecuadorian embassy,  unleashing the beginning of his own end.

Because if he does step out, he will be arrested by the UK authorities, and at that point the US could request his extradition so that they can put him in jail for publishing classified US documents. Julian Assange is in extremely precarious  conditions.

After eight months of failed attempts, la Repubblica was finally able to visit the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after  the current Ecuadorian president, Lenin Moreno had cut him off from all contacts last March with the exception of his lawyers. No contact with friends, stars, journalists, no phone calls, no internet access. Indeed a very heavy isolation regime for anyone, but for Julian Assange in particular, considering that he has been confined to that tiny embassy for the last six years, and also  considering that for Assange the internet is not an optional like any other: it’s his world.

As soon as we saw him, we realised he has lost a lot of weight. Too much. He is so skinny. Not even his winter sweater can hide his skinny shoulders. His nice-looking face, captured by photographers all around the world, is very tense. His long hair and beard make him look like a hermit, though not a nutter: as we exchange greetings, he seems very lucid and rational.

This regime of complete isolation would have broken anyone down, yet Assange is holding up: he spends his time thinking and preparing his defence against the US prosecution. But he spends too much time completely alone, with the exception of the security guards at the embassy. He is completely alone throughout the weekends. He is alone during the night, in the embassy building which has been girded with a scaffolding that makes  intrusions in the middle of the night easy.

The Ecuadorian embassy is problematic for journalists as well: to be authorised to visit Julian Assange, we have been asked by the Ecuadorian authorities to provide: “Brand, model, serial number, IMEI number and telephone number (if applicable) of each of the telephone sets, computers, cameras and other electronic equipment that the applicant wants to enter with to the Embassy and keep during their interview”. Such a request, unfortunately, exposes journalists to serious risks of surveillance of their communications. But in order to be able to visit Assange we provided this data, hoping we could keep our phones. As it turned out, providing that data was useless: when we entered the embassy, our phones were seized anyway.

The friendly atmosphere we had always experienced during our visits over the last six years is now gone. The Ecuadorian diplomat who had always supported the WikiLeaks founder, Fidel Narvaez, has been removed. Not even the cat is there anymore.  With its funny striped tie and ambushes on the ornaments of the Christmas tree at the embassy’s entrance, the cat had helped defuse tension inside the building for years.  But Assange has preferred to spare the cat an isolation which has become unbearable and allow it a healthier life.

The news that surfaced last week, revealing the existence of criminal charges against Julian Assange by the US authorities, charges which were supposed to remain under seal until it was impossible for Assange to evade arrest, vindicates what Assange has feared for years. He is now waiting for the charges to be unsealed, but in the meantime he is silent: the risk that he could suddenly lose Ecuador’s protection due to some public statement is not improbable these days.

Two years ago, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) established that the UK (at that time Sweden as well) is responsible for detaining Assange arbitrarily: it should free him and compensate him. London did not welcome this decision: they tried to appeal it, but lost the appeal and since then have simply ignored it.

The British media has never called on the UK authorities to comply with the UN body’s decision, quite the opposite: some even lashed out against the UN body. If Julian Assange ends up in the hands of the UK authorities in the upcoming months and the US asks for his extradition, where will the British media stand?

Never before has the life of the WikiLeaks founder been so crucially in the hands of public opinion and in the hands of one of the few powers whose mission it is to reign in the worst instincts of our governments: the press.

Source: Rogue Journalist

The power establishment, which uses lies and secrecy to manipulate and deceive us, hates having the light of truth shone upon it more than anything.

Insider sources have reportedly confirmed to the Washington Post that Assange has been charged. Because those charges are sealed, it’s impossible to know what they are or how they’re being justified. If you ask #Resistance Twitter, it’s because it’s #MuellerTime and Assange is about to be arrested under some mysterious charges involving WikiLeaks’ publication of non-government, non-classified emails in 2016. If you ask QAnon cultists, it’s because Donald Trump is planning to extradite Assange so as to rescue him and deal a fatal blow to the Deep State.

If you ask people who actually know what they’re talking about, however, it’s most likely for WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and/or last year’s CIA leak publications, and most likely using the Espionage Act. This would constitute a deadly blow to press freedoms, and arguably a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act.

It also proves once again that Julian Assange was completely right.

I’ve had so, so many arguments with people this year about Assange’s publicly stated rationale for remaining in the Ecuadorian embassy, where he was granted political asylum by Ecuador’s previous government on the basis that the US was seeking his extradition. The refrain that he can “leave whenever he wants” is extremely common, with Assange’s detractors insisting that he’d never be arrested and extradited to the United States, and that he is instead hiding from (non-existent) Swedish rape charges.

The narrative that Assange couldn’t possibly be hiding from the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning has been aggressively promulgated by mainstream outlets like the The Guardian, as in this article by James Ball from earlier this year titled “The only barrier to Julian Assange leaving Ecuador’s embassy is pride”, claiming that “The WikiLeaks founder is unlikely to face prosecution in the US.”

Ball’s article includes the following galaxy-brained excerpts:

“Visitors, like fish, stink in three days.”

“There is no public criminal case against Assange or WikiLeaks in the US, though Assange frequently says there is evidence of sealed indictments against him and his associates, and there have been publicly disclosed surveillance warrants against WikiLeaks staff, as well as FBI interest in Assange and his current and former co-workers (including me, as I worked with WikiLeaks for a few months in 2010 and 2011). There is no real reason to believe anything has changed with Assange’s situation in the US.” 

“The problem for both sides is that neither wants to lose face: Assange wants to be a symbol of resistance against an overreaching US state, and does not want to admit his asylum was about his personal actions and not those of WikiLeaks. Ecuador does not want to suggest it made a mistake in granting Assange asylum.”

Ball was at best completely wrong, and at worst knowingly lying about the very real possibility of secret US charges. We know that the charges are from the US government, so they’ve got nothing to do with any rape or bail violation allegations. But the narrative that Assange is a stinky, stinky weirdo hiding in a cupboard has been so aggressively promulgated by imperial propagandists like Ball it’s (for me at least) literally impossible to talk about Assange’s plight on social media without some stranger coming up and spewing it all over the conversation.

And it’s no mystery why that is. The alternative to making Assange the creepy rapist hiding from justice would be to acknowledge the possibility of what we now know for certain: that a vast, sprawling superpower, with so many extremely tight alliances that it is effectively the center of a globe-spanning empire, is working to extradite an Australian journalist from an Ecuadorian embassy in the United Kingdom so that it can punish him for publishing facts. Much, much easier to have him be the stinky cupboard man than the center of an assault on speech with implications stretching to all future generations and every corner of the globe.

Julian Assange founded an innovative leak outlet on the premise that corrupt power can be fought with truth and transparency. Corrupt power responded by silencing, persecuting and smearing him. In so doing they succeeded in slowing down the leaks, minimizing the impact of publications, and nullifying Assange’s ability to defend himself, and in exchange they have publicly proved that his thesis was, and is, absolutely correct.

There is a power establishment which uses lies and secrecy to manipulate and deceive us, and it hates having the light of truth shone upon it more than anything. We know that for certain now. There is no doubt whatsoever.

Julian Assange was never hiding from justice. Julian Assange is, and always has been, hiding from injustice. He has been proven right about his reasons for seeking political asylum from Ecuador, as he has been proven right about so very much before.

Follow Caitlin Johnstone via her website, Facebook, Twitter, and her podcast. Her articles are entirely reader-supported and you can donate on Patreon or Paypal, or by buying her new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or her previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

Source: Truthdig

What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is met with indifference and sneering contempt. 

Courageous free speech activist, journalist and whistleblower, whose only “crime” is that of a true journalist — telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.

The signs are that Ecuador could be on the brink of evicting Julian Assange from its London embassy, with the prospect that the British government will deliver him into the arms of Donald Trump. In this open letter, originally published in April 2018, twenty-seven writers, journalists, film-makers, artists, academics, former intelligence officers and democrats call on the government of Ecuador to allow Julian Assange his right of freedom of speech.

Citing his critical tweets about the recent detention of Catalan president Carles Puidgemont in Germany, and following pressure from the US, Spanish and UK governments, the Ecuadorian government has installed an electronic jammer to stop Assange communicating with the outside world via the internet and phone.

As if ensuring his total isolation, the Ecuadorian government is also refusing to allow him to receive visitors. Despite two UN rulings describing his detention as unlawful and mandating his immediate release, Assange has been effectively imprisoned since he was first placed in isolation in Wandsworth prison in London in December 2010. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish case against him collapsed and was withdrawn, while the United States has stepped up efforts to prosecute him. His only “crime” is that of a true journalist — telling the world the truths that people have a right to know.

Under its previous president, the Ecuadorian government bravely stood against the bullying might of the United States and granted Assange political asylum as a political refugee. International law and the morality of human rights was on its side.

Today, under extreme pressure from Washington and its collaborators, another government in Ecuador justifies its gagging of Assange by stating that “Assange’s behavior, through his messages on social media, put at risk good relations which this country has with the UK, the rest of the EU and other nations.”

This censorious attack on free speech is not happening in Turkey, Saudi Arabia or China; it is right in the heart of London. If the Ecuadorian government does not cease its unworthy action, it, too, will become an agent of persecution rather than the valiant nation that stood up for freedom and for free speech.

If the EU and the UK continue to participate in the scandalous silencing of a true dissident in their midst, it will mean that free speech is indeed dying in Europe. This is not just a matter of showing support and solidarity. We are appealing to all who care about basic human rights to call on the government of Ecuador to continue defending the rights of a courageous free speech activist, journalist and whistleblower.

We ask that his basic human rights be respected as an Ecuadorian citizen and internationally protected person and that he not be silenced or expelled.

If there is no freedom of speech for Julian Assange, there is no freedom of speech for any of us — regardless of the disparate opinions we hold.

We call on President Moreno to end the isolation of Julian Assange now.

LIST OF SIGNATORIES (IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER)

Pamela Anderson actress and activist
Jacob Appelbaum freelance journalist
Renata Avila International Human Rights Lawyer
Sally Burch British/Ecuadorian journalist
Alicia Castro Argentina’s ambassador to the United Kingdom 2012-16
Naomi Colvin Courage Foundation
Noam Chomsky linguist and political theorist
Brian Eno musician
Joseph Farrell WikiLeaks Ambassador and board member of The Centre for Investigative Journalism
Teresa Forcades Benedictine nun, Montserrat Monastery
Charles Glass American-British author, journalist, broadcaster
Chris Hedges journalist
Srecko Horvat philosopher, Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25)
Jean Michel Jarre, musician
John Kiriakou former CIA counterterrorism officer and former senior investigator, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Lauri Love, computer scientist and activist
Ray McGovern former CIA analyst, Presidential advisor
John Pilger journalist and film-maker
Angela Richter, theater director, Germany
Saskia Sassen sociologist, Columbia University
Oliver Stone film-maker
Vaughan Smith English journalist
Yanis Varoufakis economist, former Greek finance minister
Natalia Viana investigative journalist and co-director of Agencia publica, Brazil
Ai Weiwei artist
Vivienne Westwood fashion designer and activist
Slavoj Žižek philosopher, Birkbeck Institute for Humanities