One by one our strongest defenders of Freedom are taken down. If they
were all herded together and murdered, the cry for vengeance would
ring out. But taken down singly, all that is heard is the whisper of
a whimper.
Carl Jarvis
*****
Crucifying Julian Assange
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Julian Assange's sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been
transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from
communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His
Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the
process of being revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical
care. His efforts for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules,
including Ecuadorian orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside
the embassy in fighting revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf
of Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in
Ecuador, led by Lenín Moreno—who calls Assange an "inherited problem" and an
impediment to better relations with Washington—is making the WikiLeaks
founder's life in the embassy unbearable. Almost daily, the embassy is
imposing harsher conditions for Assange, including making him pay his
medical bills, imposing arcane rules about how he must care for his cat and
demanding that he perform a variety of demeaning housekeeping chores.
The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political
asylum and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so
unpleasant he will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British
and extradited to the United States. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael
Correa, whose government granted the publisher political asylum, describes
Assange's current living conditions as "torture."
His mother, Christine Assange, said in a recent video appeal, "Despite
Julian being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for
courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the
public interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain—silenced in solitary
confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of
London. The modern-day cage of political prisoners is no longer the Tower of
London. It's the Ecuadorian Embassy."
"Here are the facts," she went on. "Julian has been detained nearly eight
years without charge. That's right. Without charge. For the past six years,
the U.K. government has refused his request for access to basic health
needs, fresh air, exercise, sunshine for vitamin D and access to proper
dental and medical care. As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated.
His examining doctors warned his detention conditions are life-threatening.
A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes in the
embassy in London."
"In 2016, after an in-depth investigation, the United Nations ruled that
Julian's legal and human rights have been violated on multiple occasions,"
she said. "He'd been illegally detained since 2010. And they ordered his
immediate release, safe passage and compensation. The U.K. government
refused to abide by the U.N.'s decision. The U.S. government has made
Julian's arrest a priority. They want to get around a U.S. journalist's
protection under the First Amendment by charging him with espionage. They
will stop at nothing to do it."
"As a result of the U.S. bearing down on Ecuador, his asylum is now under
immediate threat," she said. "The U.S. pressure on Ecuador's new president
resulted in Julian being placed in a strict and severe solitary confinement
for the last seven months, deprived of any contact with his family and
friends. Only his lawyers could see him. Two weeks ago, things became
substantially worse. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, who
rightfully gave Julian political asylum from U.S. threats against his life
and liberty, publicly warned when U.S. Vice President Mike Pence recently
visited Ecuador a deal was done to hand Julian over to the U.S. He stated
that because of the political costs of expelling Julian from their embassy
was too high, the plan was to break him down mentally. A new, impossible,
inhumane protocol was implemented at the embassy to torture him to such a
point that he would break and be forced to leave."
Assange was once feted and courted by some of the largest media
organizations in the world, including The New York Times and The Guardian,
for the information he possessed. But once his trove of material documenting
U.S. war crimes, much of it provided by Chelsea Manning, was published by
these media outlets he was pushed aside and demonized. A leaked Pentagon
document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated
March 8, 2008, exposed a black propaganda campaign to discredit WikiLeaks
and Assange. The document said the smear campaign should seek to destroy the
"feeling of trust" that is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity" and blacken
Assange's reputation. It largely has worked. Assange is especially vilified
for publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The Democrats and former
FBI Director James Comey say the emails were copied from the accounts of
John Podesta, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, by
Russian government hackers. Comey has said the messages were probably
delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were
not provided by "state actors."
The Democratic Party—seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian
"interference" rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of
the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and
the corporate coup d'état that the party helped orchestrate—attacks Assange
as a traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not
bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not
committed a crime. Now, stories in newspapers that once published material
from WikiLeaks focus on his allegedly slovenly behavior—not evident during
my visits with him—and how he is, in the words of The Guardian, "an
unwelcome guest" in the embassy. The vital issue of the rights of a
publisher and a free press is ignored in favor of snarky character
assassination.
Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to
Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense charges that were eventually
dropped. Assange feared that once he was in Swedish custody he would be
extradited to the United States. The British government has said that,
although he is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden, Assange will be
arrested and jailed for breaching his bail conditions if he leaves the
embassy.
WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and
crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in
addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States
military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton
campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National
Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in
foreign elections, including in the French elections. He disclosed the
conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour
members of Parliament. And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden,
who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the
government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from
Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed, ominously, that
Assange was on a U.S. "manhunt target list."
What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is
met with indifference and sneering contempt. Once he is pushed out of the
embassy, he will be put on trial in the United States for what he published.
This will set a new and dangerous legal precedent that the Trump
administration and future administrations will employ against other
publishers, including those who are part of the mob trying to lynch Assange.
The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but
a betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this
complicity.
Even if the Russians provided the Podesta emails to Assange, he should have
published them. I would have. They exposed practices of the Clinton
political machine that she and the Democratic leadership sought to hide. In
the two decades I worked overseas as a foreign correspondent I was routinely
leaked stolen documents by organizations and governments. My only concern
was whether the documents were forged or genuine. If they were genuine, I
published them. Those who leaked material to me included the rebels of the
Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN); the Salvadoran army, which
once gave me blood-smeared FMLN documents found after an ambush; the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua; the Israeli intelligence service, the
Mossad; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Central Intelligence
Agency; the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebel group; the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO); the French intelligence service, Direction
Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, or DGSE; and the Serbian government of
Slobodan Milosovic, who was later tried as a war criminal.
We learned from the emails published by WikiLeaks that the Clinton
Foundation received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of
the major funders of Islamic State. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton
paid her donors back by approving $80 billion in weapons sales to Saudi
Arabia, enabling the kingdom to carry out a devastating war in Yemen that
has triggered a humanitarian crisis, including widespread food shortages and
a cholera epidemic, and left close to 60,000 dead. We learned Clinton was
paid $675,000 for speaking at Goldman Sachs, a sum so massive it can only be
described as a bribe. We learned Clinton told the financial elites in her
lucrative talks that she wanted "open trade and open borders" and believed
Wall Street executives were best-positioned to manage the economy, a
statement that directly contradicted her campaign promises. We learned the
Clinton campaign worked to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that
Donald Trump was the Republican nominee. We learned Clinton obtained advance
information on primary-debate questions. We learned, because 1,700 of the
33,000 emails came from Hillary Clinton, she was the primary architect of
the war in Libya. We learned she believed that the overthrow of Moammar
Gadhafi would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. The war
she sought has left Libya in chaos, seen the rise to power of radical
jihadists in what is now a failed state, triggered a massive exodus of
migrants to Europe, seen Libyan weapon stockpiles seized by rogue militias
and Islamic radicals throughout the region, and resulted in 40,000 dead.
Should this information have remained hidden from the American public? You
can argue yes, but you can't then call yourself a journalist.
"They are setting my son up to give them an excuse to hand him over to the
U.S., where he would face a show trial," Christine Assange warned. "Over the
past eight years, he has had no proper legal process. It has been unfair at
every single turn with much perversion of justice. There is no reason to
consider that this would change in the future. The U.S. WikiLeaks grand
jury, producing the extradition warrant, was held in secret by four
prosecutors but no defense and no judge. The U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty
allows for the U.K. to extradite Julian to the U.S. without a proper basic
case. Once in the U.S., the National Defense Authorization Act allows for
indefinite detention without trial. Julian could very well be held in
Guantanamo Bay and tortured, sentenced to 45 years in a maximum-security
prison, or face the death penalty. My son is in critical danger because of a
brutal, political persecution by the bullies in power whose crimes and
corruption he had courageously exposed when he was editor in chief of
WikiLeaks."
Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by
design. It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope,
I fear, for a free press.
"We need to make our protest against this brutality deafening," his mother
said. "I call on all you journalists to stand up now because he's your
colleague and you are next. I call on all you politicians who say you
entered politics to serve the people to stand up now. I call on all you
activists who support human rights, refugees, the environment, and are
against war, to stand up now because WikiLeaks has served the causes that
you spoke for and Julian is now suffering for it alongside of you. I call on
all citizens who value freedom, democracy and a fair legal process to put
aside your political differences and unite, stand up now. Most of us don't
have the courage of our whistleblowers or journalists like Julian Assange
who publish them, so that we may be informed and warned about the abuses of
power."
Chris Hedges
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