Former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce says Assange is being pursued by the US for ‘being a journalist’ and ‘telling the truth’
This would all be over if Assange would hurry up and die in the foreign prison. That way his death could be blamed on some poor sap in Belmarsh prison. A win win.
A delegation of Australian members of parliament met with US officials in Washington on Wednesday and called for the release of WikiLeaks founder and Australian citizen Julian Assange, who faces up to 175 years in prison if extradited to the US and convicted for exposing US war crimes.
The delegation includes six MPs from different ends of the political spectrum in a show of unity aimed at freeing Assange. More than 60 Australian MPs also signed a letter in support of the trip that called for the US to drop the charges against the WikiLeaks founder.
After meeting with Biden administration officials at the Department of Justice in Washington, the Australian delegation held a press conference and said they would keep up the pressure on the US. Barnaby Joyce, the leader of Australia’s National Party and former deputy prime minister, said Assange was only guilty of being a journalist.
“Literally, all sides of politics have come together and united on this one key message, which is that an Australian citizen, Julian Assange, should come home,” Joyce said, according to Fox News.
“The only crime that we see that Julian Assange has been charged with is the crime of being a journalist, the crime of telling the truth.
We can only begin fighting this from where we’re at. None of us individually have the power to rip the veil of secrecy away from the empire, but we do each individually have the ability to call out its lies where they can be seen and help wake people up to the fact that we’re being deceived and manipulated.
I saw a video clip of Julian Assange speaking in London in 2010 where he made an important observation while explaining the philosophy behind his work with WikiLeaks. He said that all our political theories are to some extent “bankrupt” in our current situation, because our institutions are so shrouded in secrecy that we can’t even know what’s really going on in the world.
“We can all write about our political issues, we can all push for particular things we believe in, we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say actually it’s all bankrupt,” Assange said. “And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt and particular lines of political thought, is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions — how they operate in practice, these titanic organizations, how they behave inside, not just through stories but through vast amounts of internal documentations — until we know that, how can we possibly make a diagnosis? How can we set the direction to go until we know where we are? We don’t even have a map of where we are. So our first task is to build up a sort of intellectual heritage that describes where we are. And once we know where we are, then we have a hope of setting course for a different direction. Until then, I think all political theories — to greater and lesser extents of course — are bankrupt.”
It’s an extremely important point if you think about it: how can we form theories about how our governments should be operating when we have no idea how they are currently operating? How can a doctor prescribe the correct treatment when he hasn’t yet made a diagnosis?
Political theories are in this sense “bankrupt”, because they are formed in the dark, without our being able to see precisely what’s happening and what’s going wrong.
The nature of our institutions is hidden from us, and that includes not only our government institutions but the political, media, corporate and financial institutions which control so much of our society. Their nature is hidden not only by a complete lack of transparency but by things like propaganda, internet censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the fact that all the most loudly amplified voices in our society are those who more or less support status quo politics.
The fact that all the most important aspects of our civilization’s operation are hidden, manipulated and obfuscated by the powerful makes a joke of the very idea of democracy, because how can people know what government policies to vote for if they can’t even clearly see those policies? How can people know what to vote for when everything about their understanding of the world is being actively distorted for the benefit of the powerful?
The use of the phrase “journalism is not a crime” is an interesting choice since the most common individual case you’ll hear it used in reference to is surely that of Julian Assange, who has been locked in a maximum security prison for four years while the US government works to extradite him for the crime of good journalism.
After a certain point criticizing the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US-centralized empire starts to feel too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But hell let’s do it anyway; the barrel’s right here, and I really hate these particular fish.
Russian security services have formally filed espionage charges against Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained in Russia since his arrest last month. Gershkovich reportedly denies the spying allegations and says he was engaged in journalistic activity in Russia.
This news came out at the same time as a joint statement was published by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell condemning Gershkovich’s detention as a violation of press freedoms.
“Let there be no mistake: journalism is not a crime,” the senators write. “We demand the baseless, fabricated charges against Mr. Gershkovich be dropped and he be immediately released and reiterate our condemnation of the Russian government’s continued attempts to intimidate, repress, and punish independent journalists and civil society voices.”
The use of the phrase “journalism is not a crime” is an interesting choice since the most common individual case you’ll hear it used in reference to is surely that of Julian Assange, who has been locked in a maximum security prison for four years while the US government works to extradite him for the crime of good journalism. Every pro-Assange demonstration I’ve ever been to has featured signs with some variation of the phrase “journalism is not a crime,” and any Assange supporter will be intimately familiar with that refrain.
So as an Assange supporter it sounds a bit odd to hear that slogan rolled out by two DC swamp monsters who have both enthusiastically supported the persecution of the world’s most famous journalist.
“He has done enormous damage to our country and I think he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law,” McConnell said of Assange after WikiLeaks published thousands of diplomatic cables in 2010.
“Neither WikiLeaks, nor its original source for these materials, should be spared in any way from the fullest prosecution possible under the law,” Schumer said in 2010.
“Now that Julian Assange has been arrested, I hope he will soon be held to account for his meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government,” Schumer tweeted when Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorian embassy in London almost exactly four years ago. (Assange has not been charged with anything related to Russia or the 2016 election, and allegations of collusion with Russia remain completely unsubstantiated to this day.)
These are two of the most powerful elected officials in the world, puffing and posing as brave defenders of press freedoms after having actively facilitated their government’s attempts to destroy those very press freedoms.
“As long as the Biden administration continues to deploy tools like the Espionage Act to imprison those who dare to expose war crimes, no publisher and no journalist will be safe,” said one of the tribunal’s co-chairs.
As Julian Assange awaits the final appeal of his looming extradition to the United States while languishing behind bars in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, leading left luminaries and free press advocates gathered in Washington, D.C. on Friday for the fourth sitting of the Belmarsh Tribunal, where they called on U.S. President Joe Biden to drop all charges against the WikiLeaks publisher.
“From Ankara to Manila to Budapest to right here in the United States, state actors are cracking down on journalists, their sources, and their publishers in a globally coordinated campaign to disrupt the public’s access to information,” co-chair and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman said during her opening remarks at the National Press Club.
“The Belmarsh Tribunal… pursues justice for journalists who are imprisoned or persecuted [and] publishers and whistleblowers who dare to reveal the crimes of our governments,” she continued.
“Assange’s case is the first time in history that a publisher has been indicted under the Espionage Act,” Goodman added. “Recently, it was revealed that the CIA had been spying illegally on Julian, his lawyers, and some members of this very tribunal. The CIA even plotted his assassination at the Ecuadorean Embassy under [former US President Donald] Trump.”
Assange – who suffers from physical and mental health problems including heart and respiratory issues – could be imprisoned for 175 years if fully convicted of Espionage Act violations. Among the classified materials published by WikiLeaks – many provided by whistleblower Chelsea Manning – are the infamous “Collateral Murder” video showing a US Army helicopter crew killing a group of Iraqi civilians, the Afghan War Diary, and the Iraq War Logs, which revealed American and allied war crimes.
According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested on December 7, 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh Prison, for which the tribunal is named.
Human rights, journalistic, peace, and other groups have condemned Assange’s impending extradition and the US government’s targeting of a journalist who exposed American war crimes.
On the 8th of August at 3:00 Eastern, Roger Waters will be joined by retired U.S. Army major Todd Pierce in an event to support Wikileaks’ Julian Assange and his resistance to being extradited to the U.S. on bogus espionage charges.
In what his lawyers have described as a “brief but significant moment in the case,” a British magistrates’ court has signed off on Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States, bringing the WikiLeaks founder one step closer to a US trial under the Espionage Act which threatens press freedoms worldwide.
“He is a war criminal,” President Biden said of Vladimir Putin following allegations of war crimes in Bucha, Ukraine earlier this month. “I think it is a war crime. … He should be held accountable.”
And that’s all I’d like to say here today, really. That this discrepancy is very interesting.
I mean, can we take a moment to deeply appreciate the irony of this? Because it’s so obscene and outrageous it’s actually hard to take in unless you really let it absorb. The most powerful government in the world, which serves as the hub of the most powerful empire that has ever existed, is working to extradite a journalist for exposing its war crimes while simultaneously rending its garments over war crime allegations against another government.
I mean, damn. You would think a power structure that had recently been caught red-handed committing war crimes and is currently in the process of imprisoning a journalist for exposing those war crimes would at least have the sense not to yell too loudly about war crimes for a little while. But this is how confident the empire is in its ability to control the narrative.
Really take it in. Really digest it. The more you think about it, the freakier it gets. Not only is the empire persecuting a journalist for exposing its war crimes while at the same time demanding that others be held accountable for war crimes, it is also attacking the free press for reporting the truth about the powerful while at the very same time engaging in a massive propaganda operation which holds that it is involved in Ukraine to protect its freedom and democracy.
I mean, the gall. The absolute temerity. The balls on this empire, man.
I have said it before and I will say it again: Assange exposed many ugly realities about the powerful in his work with WikiLeaks, but everything that he has managed to expose thereafter simply by forcing them to prosecute him far surpasses the revelations in those publications.
If the highest form of journalism is exposing the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world, then Julian Assange is the highest form of journalist.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Meanwhile, Assange’s mental and physical health continue to deteriorate. He suffered a stroke in late October as the extradition hearing began. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer was not surprised. Melzer wrote in a Twitter post that the “U.K. is literally torturing him to death,” adding, “As we warned after examining him, unless relieved of the constant pressure of isolation, arbitrariness & persecution, his health would enter a downward spiral endangering his life.”
In a patently political decision, the U.K. High Court reversed the British lower court’s denial of extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on a narrow ground, despite the recent revelations of a CIA plot to kidnap and assassinate him.
Assange was charged by the Trump administration with violation of the Espionage Act for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. He could be sentenced to 175 years in prison if he is tried and convicted in the United States. But instead of dismissing Trump’s indictment, the Biden administration continues to pursue the case against Assange, notwithstanding the grave threats his prosecution poses to investigative and national security journalism.
The High Court judges did not question U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s conclusion that it would be “oppressive” to extradite Assange due to his mental health. Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, testified that Assange “suffers from a recurrent depressive disorder … sometimes accompanied by psychotic features, often with ruminative suicidal ideas.” He added that the “imminence of extradition or extradition itself would trigger a suicide attempt, but it was Mr. Assange’s mental disorder that would lead to an inability to control his wish to commit suicide.” Although the Biden administration challenged Kopelman’s credibility, the High Court affirmed Baraitser’s reliance on his testimony, which was corroborated by an experienced developmental psychiatrist, Quinton Deeley, who said Assange’s Asperger’s diagnosis means he is at heightened risk of suicide if extradited to the United States.
Marjorie Cohn sits on the national advisory board of AssangeDefense. She is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and a member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.
The US government has won its appeal against a lower British court’s rejection of its extradition request to prosecute Julian Assange for journalistic activity under the Espionage Act. Rather than going free, the WikiLeaks founder will continue to languish in Belmarsh Prison where he has already spent over two and a half years despite having been convicted of no crime.
“As a result, that extradition request will now be sent to British Home Secretary Prita Patel, who technically must approve all extradition requests but, given the U.K. Government’s long-time subservience to the U.S. security state, is all but certain to rubber-stamp it,” writes Glenn Greenwald. “Assange’s representatives, including his fiancee Stella Morris, have vowed to appeal the ruling, but today’s victory for the U.S. means that Assange’s freedom, if it ever comes, is further away than ever: not months but years even under the best of circumstances.”
“Mark this day as fascism casts off its disguises,” tweeted journalist John Pilger of the ruling.
Media freedom plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told. The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world. #SummitForDemocracypic.twitter.com/ilitbdzSd1
This ruling which allows the US to continue working to extradite a journalist for exposing US war crimes comes on the final day of Washington’s so-called “Summit for Democracy“, where the US Secretary of State made a grandiose show about how press freedom “plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told” and said “The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world.”
This ruling comes on the same day as two journalists formally received the Nobel Peace Prizes they’d been rewarded and demanded protections for journalists in their acceptance speech.
This ruling comes after it was revealed that the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and assassinate Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy after the 2017 Vault 7 releases embarrassed the agency.
This ruling comes after it was revealed that CIA proxies spied on Assange and his lawyers at the Ecuadorian embassy, thereby making a fair trial in the United States impossible.
This ruling comes after recent investigative reports on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes reminded us why it’s so important for the press to be able to conduct critical natsec journalism on the most powerful military force ever assembled.
The High Court has ruled that Julian #Assange can be extradited to the US. “How can it be fair, how can it be right, how can it be possible, to extradite Julian to the very country which plotted to kill him?” said Stella Moris. Mark this day as fascism casts off its disguises.
The facts are in and the case is closed: the US and its allies do not care about press freedoms beyond the extent that they can be used to conduct propaganda. The way journalists who offend the powerful are dealt with by the US government and the way they are dealt with by the Saudi monarchy differ only in terms of speed and messiness.
The masks are crumbling. Even when he is silenced, immobilized, locked up and hidden from public view, Julian Assange continues to shine a light on the abusive mechanisms of power. He is arguably exposing them more now than ever before.
As fascism casts off its disguises, it becomes more and more important to highlight the hypocrisy, fraudulence and depravity of the people who rule our world.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Assange, who is being held at London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, had been expected to attend the twoday hearing by video link, but Fitzgerald said Assange had been put on a high dose of medication and “doesn’t feel able to attend.”
Australia-The country where police beat people in the streets for not wearing a mask.
LONDON – U.S. authorities launched a new battle on Wednesday to make Julian Assange face American justice, telling British judges that if they agree to extradite the WikiLeaks founder on espionage charges, he could serve any U.S. prison sentence he receives in his native Australia.
In January, a lower U.K. court refused a U.S. request to extradite Assange over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret American military documents a decade ago. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange, who has spent years in hiding and in British prisons as he fights extradition, was likely to kill himself if held under harsh U.S. prison conditions.
Appealing against the January decision, an attorney for the U.S. government on Wednesday denied that Assange’s mental health was too fragile to withstand the U.S. judicial system. Lawyer James Lewis said Assange “has no history of serious and enduring mental illness” and does not meet the threshold of being so ill that he cannot resist harming himself.
U.S. prosecutors have indicted Assange on 17 espionage charges and one charge of computer misuse over Wiki-Leaks’ publication of thousands of leaked military and diplomatic documents. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, but Lewis said that “the longest sentence ever imposed for this offense is 63 months.”
Lewis said American authorities had promised that Assange would not be held before trial in a top-security “Supermax” prison or subjected to strict isolation conditions and, if convicted, would be allowed to serve his sentence in Australia. Lewis said the assurances “are binding on the United States.”
“Once there is an assurance of appropriate medical care, once it is clear he will be repatriated to Australia to serve any sentence, then we can safely say the district judge would not have decided the relevant question in the way that she did,” he said.
The U.S. also says a key defense witness, neuropsychiatrist Michael Kopelman, misled the previous judge by omitting to mention that Stella Moris, a member of WikiLeaks’ legal team, was also Assange’s partner and had two children with him. Lewis said that information was “a highly relevant factor to the question of likelihood to suicide.” Assange’s lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, accused U.S. lawyers of seeking to “minimize the severity of Mr. Assange’s mental disorder and suicide risk.”
Fitzgerald said in a written submission that Australia has not yet agreed to take Assange if he is convicted. Even if Australia did agree, Fitzgerald said the U.S. legal process could take a decade, “during which Mr. Assange will remain detained in extreme isolation in a U.S. prison.”
Assange, who is being held at London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, had been expected to attend the twoday hearing by video link, but Fitzgerald said Assange had been put on a high dose of medication and “doesn’t feel able to attend.”
Assange later appeared on the video link at times, seated at a table in a prison room wearing a black face mask.
The U.S. requested to extradite Julian Assange over WikiLeaks’ publication of secret American military documents a decade ago. MATT DUNHAM/AP FILE
Netflix will begin streaming a brazen hatchet job on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for its American subscribers on October 24th, just three days prior to a significant court date in Assange’s fight against extradition from the UK to the United States on October 27th.
“You can stream We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks on Netflix starting Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET,” Netflix Schedule reports.
We Steal Secrets was a “documentary” that is now so outdated beyond its 2013 release that one of its central characters, Chelsea Manning, is referred to by a dead name throughout its entirety. Why choose this specific moment to release it?
After all, We Steal Secrets was so egregious in its spin that not only did WikiLeaks supporters like World Socialist Website and journalist Jonathan Cook pan it as a smear at the time, but WikiLeaks itself went to the trouble of publishing a line-by-line refutation of the mountains of propaganda distortion heaped on the narrative by filmmaker Alex Gibney.
“The title (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’) is false,” WikiLeaks writes at the beginning of its response. “It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.”
“Gibney’s latest release—We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks—is something else again,” World Socialist Website wrote in 2013. “The 130-minute feature is a political hatchet job against Julian Assange and dovetails with the media and US government campaign against the WikiLeaks web site. Whether Gibney has shifted to the right or simply revealed the fatal limitations of his liberal ‘oppositional’ views is a matter for a separate discussion. In any event, his newest work is an effort at disinformation.”
This would not be the first time Netflix has helped circulate narratives that advance the interests of the US empire, or the second, or the third, having already run blatantly propagandistic “documentaries” advancing imperial interests in nations like Ukraine, Russia, Egypt, and multipleonesaboutSyria. Netflix has also signed deals with the Obamas and with British royalty.
So they’re not exactly looking out for the little guy, which from a company worth an estimated $229 billion should come as no surprise.
Still, such open facilitation of the world’s most powerful government in its campaign to imprison a journalist for inconvenient journalistic activity is a special kind of reprehensible. If there is a healthy humanity in the future, it will look back on the worldwide smear campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks with horror.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
MCViewPoint 