The Last Stand of Julian Assange

ExColdTypetraIssue 213 / September 2020 The last stand of Julian Assange By Jonathan Cook Art:Antoniowww.flickr.comSegoviaMarín / ColdType Extra September 2020 For years, journalists cheered the abuse of Julian Assange. Now they’ve paved his path to a US gulag By JONATHAN COOK of character assassination against Assange by western governments and a compliant media, the sole ourt hearings in Britain over the justification for this relentless attack on press free- US administration’s extradition case dom is that a 49-year-old man published documents against Julian Assange begin in ear- exposing US war crimes. That is the reason – and the nest on September 7. The decade-long only reason – that the US is seeking his extradition saga that brought us to this point and why he has been languishing in what amounts should appall anyone who cares about to solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security our increasingly fragile freedoms. prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. His lawyers’ A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his appeals for bail have been refused. Cliberty for 10 years. According to UN experts, he has While the press corps abandoned Assange a dec- been arbitrarily detained and tortured for much of ade ago, echoing official talking points that pilloried that time through intense physical confinement and him over toilet hygiene and his treatment of his cat, endless psychological pressure. He has been bugged Assange is today exactly where he originally pre- and spied on by the CIA during his time in political dicted he would be if western governments got their asylum, in Ecuador’s London embassy, in ways that way. What awaits him is rendition to the US so he can violated his most fundamental legal rights. The judge be locked out of sight for the rest of his life. overseeing his hearings has a serious conflict of inter- There were two goals the US and UK set out to est – with her family embedded in the UK security achieve through the visible persecution, confinement services – that she did not declare and which should and torture of Assange. have required her to recuse herself from the case. First, he and Wikileaks, the transparency or- All indications are that Assange will be extradited ganisation he co-founded, needed to be disabled. to the US to face a rigged grand jury trial meant to Engaging with Wikileaks had to be made too risky ensure he sees out his days in a maximum-security to contemplate for potential whistleblowers. That is prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years. why Chelsea Manning – the US soldier who passed None of this happened in some Third-World, tinpot on documents relating to US war crimes in Iraq and dictatorship. It happened right under our noses, in Afghanistan for which Assange now faces extradition a major western capital, and in a state that claims – was similarly subjected to harsh imprisonment. She to protect the rights of a free press. It happened not later faced punitive daily fines while in jail to pres- in the blink of an eye but in slow motion – day after sure her into testifying against Assange. day, week after week, month after month, year after The aim has been to discredit Wikileaks and simi- year. lar organisations and stop them from publishing ad- And once we strip out a sophisticated campaign ditional revelatory documents – of the kind that show www.coldtype.net | Page 2 ColdType September 2020 Extra FIRST THE SCOOP: Julian Assange holds the Guardian of July 26, 2010. The paper, along with other imajor international publica- tions, gladly used the WikiLeaks leaks to sell their products. Then the Guardian turned its back on Assange. western governments are not the “good guys” manag- course, fully vindicated – that he was evading US ing world affairs for the benefit of mankind, but are efforts to extradite him and lock him away for good. in fact highly militarised, global bullies advancing The media continued with their mockery even as evi- the same ruthless colonial policies of war, destruction dence mounted that a grand jury had been secretly and pillage they always pursued. convened to draw up espionage charges against him And second, Assange had to be made to suffer and that it was located in the eastern district of Vir- horribly and in public – to be made an example of – ginia, where the major US security and intelligence to deter other journalists from ever following in his services are headquartered. Any jury there is domi- footsteps. He is the modern equivalent of a severed nated by US security personnel and their families. head on a pike displayed at the city gates. His hope of a fair trial was non-existent. The very obvious fact – confirmed by the media Instead we have endured eight years of misdirec- coverage of his case – is that this strategy, advanced tion by the corporate media and its willing complic- chiefly by the US and UK (with Sweden playing a less- ity in his character assassination, which has laid er role), has been wildly successful. Most corporate the ground for the current public indifference to As- media journalists are still enthusiastically colluding sange’s extradition and widespread ignorance of its in the vilification of Assange – mainly at this stage horrendous implications. by ignoring his awful plight. Corporate journalists have accepted, entirely at face value, a series of rationalisations for why the Story hiding in plain sight interests of justice have been served by locking As- hen he hurried into Ecuador’s embassy sange away indefinitely – even before his extradition back in 2012, seeking political asylum, – and trampling his most basic legal rights. The other journalists from every corporate me- side of the story – Assange’s, the story hiding in plain W dia outlet ridiculed his claim – now, of sight – has invariably been missing from the cover- ColdType | Mid-February 2020 | www.coldtype.net | Page 3 ColdType Extra September 2020 age, whether it has been CNN, the New York Times, emails, allegedly “hacked” by Russia, from the Demo- the BBC or the Guardian. cratic party’s servers. The content of those emails, obscured in the coverage at the time and largely for- From Sweden to Clinton gotten now, revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton’s irst, it was claimed that Assange had fled ques- camp and efforts to sabotage the party’s primaries to tioning over sexual assault allegations in Swe- undermine her rival for the presidential nomination, den, even though it was the Swedish authori- Bernie Sanders. ties who allowed him to leave; even though the Foriginal Swedish prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed Guardian fabricates a smear the investigation against him, saying “There is no hose on the authoritarian right have shown suspicion of any crime whatsoever”, before it was little concern over Assange’s lengthy con- picked up by a different prosecutor for barely confinement in the embassy, and later jailing in cealed, politicised reasons; and even though Assange Belmarsh, for his exposure of US war crimes, later invited Swedish prosecutors to question him Twhich is why little effort has been expended on win- where he was (in the embassy), an option they regu- ning them over. The demonisation campaign against larly agreed to in other cases but resolutely refused Assange has focused instead on issues that are likely in his. to trigger liberals and the left, who might otherwise It was not just that none of these points was ever have qualms about jettisoning the First Amendment provided as context for the Sweden story by the cor- and locking people up for doing journalism. porate media. Or that much else in Assange’s favour Just as the Swedish allegations, despite their was simply ignored, such as tampered evidence in non-investigation, tapped into the worst kind of the case of one of the two women who alleged sexual kneejerk identity politics on the left, the “hacked” assault and the refusal of the other to sign the rape emails story was designed to alienate the Democrat- statement drawn up for her by police. ic party base. Extraordinarily, the claim of Russian The story was also grossly and continuously hacking persists even though years later – and after misreported as relating to “rape charges” when a major “Russiagate” inquiry by Robert Mueller – it Assange was wanted simply for questioning. No still cannot be stood up with any actual evidence. charges were ever laid against him because the In fact, some of those closest to the matter, such as second Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny – and her former UK ambassador Craig Murray, have insist- British counterparts, including Sir Keir Starmer, ed all along that the emails were not hacked by Rus- then head of the prosecution service and now sia but were leaked by a disenchanted Democratic leader of the Labour party – seemingly wished to party insider. avoid testing the credibility of their allegations by An even more important point, however, is that actually questioning Assange. Leaving him to rot a transparency organisation like Wikileaks had no in a small room in the embassy served their pur- choice, after it was handed those documents, but to poses much better. expose abuses by the Democratic party – whoever When the Sweden case fizzled out – when it be- was the source. came clear that the original prosecutor had been The reason that Assange and Wikileaks became right to conclude that there was no evidence to justify entwined in the Russiagate fiasco – which wasted the further questioning, let alone charges – the political energies of Democratic party supporters on a cam- and media class shifted tack. paign against Trump that actually strengthened rath- Suddenly Assange’s confinement was implicitly er than weakened him – was because of the credulous justified for entirely different, political reasons – coverage, once again, of the issue by almost the entire because he had supposedly aided Donald Trump’s corporate media.

Load more