JUNE 18, 2018
by JOHN PILGER
The persecution of Julian
Assange must end. Or it will end in tragedy.
The Australian government and
prime minister Malcolm Turnbull have an historic opportunity to decide which it
will be.
They can remain silent, for
which history will be unforgiving. Or they can act in the interests of justice
and humanity and bring this remarkable Australian citizen home.
Assange does not ask for
special treatment. The government has clear diplomatic and moral obligations to
protect Australian citizens abroad from gross injustice: in Julian’s case, from
a gross miscarriage of justice and the extreme danger that await him should he
walk out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London unprotected.
We know from the Chelsea
Manning case what he can expect if a US extradition warrant is successful — a
United Nations Special Rapporteur called it torture.
I know Julian Assange well; I
regard him as a close friend, a person of extraordinary resilience and courage.
I have watched a tsunami of lies and smear engulf him, endlessly, vindictively,
perfidiously; and I know why they smear him.
In 2008, a plan to destroy
both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated 8 March,
2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the
US Defence Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy
the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity”.
This would be achieved, they
wrote, with threats of “exposure [and] criminal prosecution” and a unrelenting
assault on reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its
editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being
and on the very principle of freedom of speech.
Their main weapon would be
personal smear. Their shock troops would be enlisted in the media — those who
are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth.
The irony is that no one told
these journalists what to do. I call them Vichy journalists — after the Vichy
government that served and enabled the German occupation of wartime France.
Last October, the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation journalist Sarah Ferguson interviewed Hillary Clinton,
over whom she fawned as “the icon for your generation”.
This was the same Clinton who
threatened to “obliterate totally” Iran and, who, as US secretary of State in
2011, was one of the instigators of the invasion and destruction of Libya as a
modern state, with the loss of 40,000 lives. Like the invasion of Iraq, it was
based on lies.
When the Libyan President was
murdered publicly and gruesomely with a knife, Clinton was filmed whooping and
cheering. Thanks largely to her, Libya became a breeding ground for ISIS and
other jihadists. Thanks largely to her, tens of thousands of
refugees fled in peril across the Mediterranean, and many drowned.
Leaked emails published by
WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton’s foundation – which she shares with
her husband – received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the
main backers of ISIS and terrorism across the Middle East.
As Secretary of State, Clinton
approved the biggest arms sale ever — worth $80 billion — to Saudi Arabia, one
of her foundation’s principal benefactors. Today, Saudi Arabia is using these
weapons to crush starving and stricken people in a genocidal assault on Yemen.
Sarah Ferguson, a highly paid
reporter, raised not a word of this with Hillary Clinton sitting in front of
her.
Instead, she invited Clinton
to describe the “damage” Julian Assange did “personally to you”. In response,
Clinton defamed Assange, an Australian citizen, as “very clearly a tool of
Russian intelligence” and “a nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a
dictator”.
She offered no evidence — nor
was asked for any — to back her grave allegations.
At no time was Assange offered
the right of reply to this shocking interview, which Australia’s
publicly-funded state broadcaster had a duty to give him.
As if that wasn’t enough,
Ferguson’s executive producer, Sally Neighour, followed the interview with a
vicious re-tweet: “Assange is Putin’s bitch. We all know it!”
There are many other examples
of Vichy journalism. The Guardian, reputedly once a great liberal
newspaper, conducted a vendetta against Julian Assange. Like a spurned lover,
the Guardian aimed its personal, petty, inhuman and craven attacks at
a man whose work it once published and profited from.
The former editor of the Guardian, Alan
Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published in
2010, “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”. Awards
were lavished and celebrated as if Julian Assange did not exist.
WikiLeaks’ revelations became
part of the Guardian’s marketing plan to raise the paper’s cover
price. They made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks and Assange struggled
to survive.
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 abused
Assange as a “damaged personality” and “callous”.
They also revealed the secret
password Julian had given the Guardian in confidence and which was
designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.
With Assange now trapped in
the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, who had enriched himself on the backs of both
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, stood among the police outside the embassy
and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”.
The question is why.
Julian Assange has committed
no crime. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish episode was bogus
and farcical and he has been vindicated.
Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff
of Women Against Rape summed it up when they wrote, “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.”
This truth was lost or buried
in a media witch-hunt that disgracefully associated Assange with rape and
misogyny. The witch-hunt included voices who described themselves as on the
left and as feminist. They willfully ignored the evidence of extreme danger should
Assange be extradited to the United States.
According to a document
released by Edward Snowden, Assange is on a “Manhunt target list”. One leaked
official memo says: “Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the
terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever.”
In Alexandra, Virginia – the
suburban home of America’s war-making elite — a secret grand jury, a throwback
to the middle ages — has spent seven years trying to concoct a crime for which
Assange can be prosecuted.
This is not easy; the US
Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. Assange’s
crime is to have broken a silence.
No investigative journalism in
my lifetime can equal the importance of what WikiLeaks has done in calling
rapacious power to account. It is as if a one-way moral screen has been pushed
back to expose the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to
endless warfare and the division and degradation of “unworthy” lives: from
Grenfell Tower to Gaza.
When Harold Pinter
accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he referred to “a vast
tapestry of lies up on which we feed”. He asked why “the systematic brutality,
the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought” of
the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America’s imperial crimes
“never happened … even while [they] were happening, they never happened.”
In its revelations of
fraudulent wars (Afghanistan, Iraq) and the bald-faced lies of governments (the
Chagos Islands), WikiLeaks has allowed us to glimpse how the imperial game is
played in the 21st century. That is why Assange is in mortal danger.
Seven years ago, in Sydney, I
arranged to meet a prominent Liberal Member of the Federal Parliament, Malcolm
Turnbull.
I wanted to ask him to deliver
a letter from Gareth Peirce, Assange’s lawyer, to the government. We talked
about his famous victory — in the 1980s when, as a young barrister, he had
fought the British Government’s attempts to suppress free speech and prevent
the publication of the book Spycatcher — in its way, a WikiLeaks of
the time, for it revealed the crimes of state power.
The prime minister of
Australia was then Julia Gillard, a Labor Party politician who had declared
WikiLeaks “illegal” and wanted to cancel Assange’s passport — until she was
told she could not do this: that Assange had committed no crime: that WikiLeaks
was a publisher, whose work was protected under Article 19 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia was one of the original
signatories.
In abandoning Assange, an
Australian citizen, and colluding in his persecution, Prime Minister Gillard’s
outrageous behaviour forced the issue of his recognition, under international
law, as a political refugee whose life was at risk. Ecuador invoked the 1951
Convention and granted Assange refuge in its embassy in London.
Gillard has recently been
appearing in a gig with Hillary Clinton; they are billed as pioneering
feminists.
If there is anything to
remember Gillard by, it a warmongering, sycophantic, embarrassing speech she
made to the US Congress soon after she demanded the illegal cancellation of
Julian’s passport.
Malcolm Turnbull is now the
Prime Minister of Australia. Julian Assange’s father has written to Turnbull.
It is a moving letter, in which he has appealed to the prime minister to bring
his son home. He refers to the real possibility of a tragedy.
I have watched Assange’s
health deteriorate in his years of confinement without sunlight. He has had a
relentless cough, but is not even allowed safe passage to and from a hospital
for an X-ray.
Malcolm Turnbull can remain
silent. Or he can seize this opportunity and use his government’s diplomatic
influence to defend the life of an Australian citizen, whose courageous public
service is recognised by countless people across the world. He can bring Julian
Assange home.
This is an abridged version of
an address by John Pilger to a rally in Sydney, Australia, to mark Julian
Assange’s six years’ confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
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