[D66] Free Julian Assange!

[A.O.]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/13/pilg-a13.html

The Assange arrest is a warning from history
Comment by John Pilger
13 April 2019

John Pilger, well-known and respected filmmaker and investigative
journalist, issued the following statement on the arrest of WikiLeaks
publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in London on April 11.
John Pilger

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy
in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against
the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick
journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost
seven years.

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, “sow 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 WikiLeaks.”

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.

On 12-04-19 10:05, A.O. wrote:
> Tariq Ali
> 11 April 2019
> comments
> Julian Assange Outside the Gate of Hell
> 
> Tariq Ali on the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange earlier today.
> 	
> Julian Assange Outside the Gate of Hell
> 
>     By Authors, www.versobooks.com
>     View Original
>     April 11th, 2019
> 
> I've been to see Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy several times,
> mainly when Rafael Correa was President and the Embassy felt like a
> liberated space. A few weeks ago I met him again. By now Correa's
> successor, Lenín Moreno, had capitulated on every level to the American
> Empire. The Embassy became a prison and Assange's health deteriorated.
> He was in no doubt that Moreno had been asked and had agreed to expel
> him from the Embassy. The US demand for extradition was no longer a
> secret. The Embassy handed him over to the British police earlier today.
> 
> If we lived in a world where laws were respected, then Assange would be
> charged with jumping bail (a minor offense), fined or kept in prison for
> a few weeks and then released to return to his native Australia. But
> both the UK and Australia are, effectively, imperial satrapies and
> likely to bow to US demands. The secret and not-so-secret state in both
> countries work closely with (or under) its US masters. Why do they want
> him so badly? To set an example. To incarcerate and isolate him as a
> warning to others not to follow the Wikileaks path. Chelsea Manning has
> been re-arrested because she refused to testify to a Grand Jury against
> him. Since the Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies are pretty much
> aware of what the US is up to in most parts of the world, the threat
> posed by Wikileaks was that it made its information available to any
> citizen, anywhere in the world, who possessed a computer. US/EU foreign
> policy and its post 9/11 wars have been based on lies, promoted by
> global TV and media networks and often accepted by a majority of North
> American and European citizens. Information contradicting these lies
> challenges the stated motives for war — human rights, democracy,
> freedom, etc.
> 
> Wikileaks has been exposing all this by publishing classified documents
> that shine a light on the real reasons. It is an astonishing record.
> Till now WikiLeaks has published almost 3 million diplomatic cables and
> other US State Department records, comprising some two billion plus
> words. This stupendous and seemingly insurmountable body of internal
> state literature, which if printed would amount to some 30,000 volumes,
> represents something new in the world. This is where the Internet
> becomes a subversive force, challenging the propaganda networks of the
> existing order. Assange and his colleagues made no secret that their
> principal target was the American Empire and its global operations. The
> response of US institution has been hysterical and comical. The Library
> of Congress, blocked Internet access to WikiLeaks. The US National
> Archives even blocked searches of its own database for the phrase
> “WikiLeaks.” So absurd did the taboo become that, like a dog snapping
> mindlessly at everything, eventually it found its mark — its own tail.
> As Julian Assange pointed out: "By March 2012, the Pentagon had gone so
> far as to create an automatic filter to block any emails, including
> inbound emails to the Pentagon, containing the word 'WikiLeaks.'" As a
> result, Pentagon prosecutors preparing the case against US intelligence
> analyst PFC Manning, the alleged source of the Cablegate cables, found
> that they were not receiving important emails from either the judge or
> the defense.
> 
> The British government is insisting that they will follow the law. We
> shall see. The US Department of Justice has stated that Assange could
> face five years in a US prison. Diane Abbot, a leading member of Jerremy
> Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet, said in parliament today:
> 
> 
>     "On this side of the house, we want to make the point that the
> reason we are debating Julian Assange this afternoon – even though the
> only charge he may face in this country is in relation to his bail
> hearings – is entirely to do with the whistleblowing activities of
> Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It is this whistleblowing activity into
> illegal wars, mass murder, murder of civilians and corruption on a grand
> scale that has put Julian Assange in the crosshairs of the US
> administration. It is for this reason that they have once more issued an
> extradition warrant against Julian Assange ... 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.”
> 
> We will learn more in the days and weeks ahead. In the meantime,
> Wikileaks and its founder expect and deserve the solidarity of all those
> of us who believe that citizens should not be treated like children and
> that most politicians in the US/EU orbit are untrustworthy and hate
> their lies and corruptions being exposed.
> 
> 
> On 12-04-19 09:42, A.O. wrote:
>>
>> Statement of the World Socialist Web Site Editorial Board
>>
>> Free Julian Assange!
>> 12 April 2019
>>
>> The World Socialist Web Site emphatically condemns the forcible seizure
>> and arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. We call for an all-out
>> campaign in the UK and internationally to defend Assange, oppose his
>> extradition to the United States, and secure his freedom and return to
>> Australia, with guarantees against any future prosecution.
>>
>> Assange is in grave peril. The US Justice Department has issued a
>> statement claiming that Assange only faces charges that could lead to a
>> prison sentence of up to five years if he has been found guilty. This is
>> a transparent lie, the purpose of which is to facilitate Assange’s
>> extradition and provide the Ecuadorean and British governments with a
>> pretext that they are not turning Assange over to a government that
>> might subject him to torture and execution.
>>
>> If he is transferred to the custody of the United States, anything is
>> possible, including charges of treason that carry a death penalty or
>> indefinite detention as an “enemy combatant.”
>>
>> Assange has become a target because he did what journalists are supposed
>> to do—expose the truth. Along with Chelsea Manning, who remains in
>> prison for refusing to testify against the WikiLeaks publisher, Assange
>> exposed the crimes that emerged out of wars launched on the basis of
>> lies, which have led to the deaths of more than one million people.
>>
>> New crimes are now being prepared. Even as the conspiracy against
>> Assange was unfolding, Trump was meeting with Al-Sisi, the butcher of
>> Cairo, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was issuing threats against Iran.
>>
>> Everyone involved in this crime stands guilty of a monstrous attack on
>> fundamental democratic rights, without even the pretense of due process.
>>
>> Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno, beset by a domestic crisis provoked
>> by popular opposition to his corrupt administration, and desirous of
>> economic aid offered by the White House, broke Ecuador’s own asylum laws
>> to force Assange out. Its actions are a violation of the honor of
>> Ecuadorean workers, who overwhelmingly support Assange.
>>
>> The UK government, headed by Theresa May, is gloating over Assange’s
>> arrest, issuing statements that are clearly prejudicial to any legal
>> proceedings. When May, speaking to parliament, declared the “whole house
>> will welcome the news this morning that the Metropolitan police have
>> arrested Julian Assange,” Tory MPs and many Laborites cheered in approval.
>>
>> Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a pro-forma statement declaring
>> that the extradition of Assange “should be opposed by the British
>> government,” but he kept his mouth shut when May issued her denunciation
>> before parliament and has maintained a silence on Assange during his
>> forced asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy.
>>
>> As for the United States, while the Trump administration is now leading
>> the campaign against Assange, the Democratic Party is solidly behind his
>> persecution, blaming Assange for contributing to the exposure of the
>> crimes for which Hillary Clinton was justly and massively hated. One of
>> the central aims of the Democrats’ anti-Russia campaign has been to
>> justify the attack on WikiLeaks as part of a broader campaign for
>> internet censorship.
>>
>> Added to the list of those responsible is the pseudo-left, the
>> organizations of the upper middle class in the US and internationally,
>> which seized on the initial fraudulent and trumped-up rape allegations
>> against Assange to justify his persecution and their own cowardly
>> abandonment of Assange to American imperialism.
>>
>> For its part, the establishment media, which functions as an arm of the
>> state, has jumped in to support the attack on Assange.
>>
>> On Thursday evening, the editorial boards of the New York Times and the
>> Washington Post issued statements supporting Assange’s extradition. “The
>> government charged Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, not with
>> publishing classified government information, but with stealing it,”
>> declared the New York Times, adding “The administration has begun well
>> by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime.”
>>
>> The Washington Post was even more open in its support of the Trump
>> administration’s campaign against Assange, declaring “Mr. Assange’s case
>> could conclude as a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for
>> civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.”
>>
>> “Mr. Assange is not a free-press hero,” declares the Post. “Unlike real
>> journalists, WikiLeaks dumped material into the public domain.” By the
>> Pos t ’s definition, the only “real journalists” are those that
>> self-censor at the behest of the Pentagon.
>>
>> These newspapers, which once published the Pentagon Papers, are nothing
>> but apologists for US imperialism. One can only imagine the howls of
>> outrage that would issue from the media if it was the Russian government
>> that had carried out the forcible seizure and arrest of a journalist and
>> critic of its foreign policy!
>>
>> In the seven years of Assange’s confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy,
>> much has changed. Most significant is the eruption of class struggle
>> internationally. It is the fear of the emergence of the class struggle,
>> combined with growing opposition to capitalism, that is compelling the
>> ruling elites to destroy all democratic rights, including the freedom of
>> expression, of which Assange's persecution is the most grotesque example.
>>
>> In the working class there is overwhelming sympathy for Assange. A
>> dividing line has opened up in social, economic, and political life. The
>> ruling elites are shedding their democratic pretenses. Their media and
>> the pseudo-socialist opposition—the representatives of the politics of
>> the affluent upper-middle-class—function as defenders of the state and
>> the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy.
>>
>> It is the working class, the broad mass of the population, that must be
>> mobilized to defend Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and all class war
>> prisoners. The demand for their freedom must be a rallying cry for the
>> global working class.
>>
>> The World Socialist Web Site calls on all workers and young people, and
>> all those who uphold democratic rights, to come forward and take an
>> unequivocal stand in defense of Julian Assange. Organize meetings,
>> protests and demonstrations to demand his immediate release and his safe
>> return to Australia!
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> D66 at tuxtown.net
>> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66
>>
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