Assange: No way out?
Courageous
publishers like Julian Assange and principled churchmen like Cardinal
Jozsef Mindszenty are a rarity: Neither would be silenced; and both had to seek
asylum; but the similarity ends there, explains Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern Special
to Consortium News
During World War II Cardinal
Jozsef Mindszenty was a huge critic of fascism and wound up in prison. In Oct.
1945 he became head of the Church in Hungary and spoke out just as strongly
against Communist oppression. He wound up back in prison for eight more years,
including long periods of solitary confinement and endured other forms of
torture. In 1949 he was sentenced to life in a show trial that generated
worldwide condemnation.
Two weeks after the trial
began in early 1949, Pope Pius XII (having failed to speak out forcefully
against the Third Reich) did summon the courage to condemn what was happening
to Mindszenty. Pius excommunicated everyone involved in the Mindszenty trial.
Then, addressing a
huge crowd on St. Peter’s Square, he asked, “Do you want a Church that remains
silent when she should speak … a Church that does not condemn the suppression
of conscience and does not stand up for the just liberty of the people … a
Church that locks herself up within the four walls of her temple in unseemly
sycophancy …?”
When the Hungarian revolution
broke out in 1956, Mindszenty was freed, but only for four days. When
Soviet tanks rolled back into Budapest, he fled to the U.S. embassy and was
given immediate asylum by President Eisenhower.
There the Cardinal stayed
cooped up for the next 15 years. Mindszenty’s mother was permitted to
visit him four times a year, and the communist authorities stationed secret
police outside the embassy ready to arrest him should he try to leave.
Sound familiar?
Where is the voice of
conscience to condemn what is happening to Julian Assange, whose only “crime”
is publishing documents exposing the criminal activities and corruption of
governments and other Establishment elites? Decades ago, the U.S. and “civilized
world” had nothing but high praise for the courageous Mindszenty. He became a
candidate for sainthood.
And Assange? He has been
confined in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for six years —from June 19,
2012—the victim of a scurrilous slander campaign and British threats to arrest
him, should he ever step outside. The U.S. government has been putting
extraordinary pressure on Ecuador to end his asylum and top U.S. officials have
made it clear that, as soon as they get their hands on him, they will manufacture
a reason to put him on trial and put him in prison. All for spreading unwelcome
truth around.
A Suppression of Conscience
One might ask, is “unseemly
sycophancy” at work among the media? The silence of what used to be the noble
profession of journalism is deafening. John Pilger — one of the few journalists
to speak out on Julian Assange’s behalf, labels journalists who fail to stand
in solidarity with Assange in exposing the behavior of the Establishment,
“Vichy journalists — after the Vichy government that served ad enabled the
German occupation of France.”
Pilger adds:
“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 … 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.'”
WikiLeaks and 9/11: What if?
In an op-ed published
several years ago by The Los Angeles Times, two members of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Coleen Rowley and Bogdan Dzakovic,
pointed out that — If WikiLeaks had been up and running before 9/11 —
frustrated FBI investigators might have chosen to leak information that their
superiors bottled up, perhaps averting the terrorism attacks.
“There were a lot of us in the
run-up to Sept. 11 who had seen warning signs that something
devastating might be in the planning stages. But we worked for ossified
bureaucracies incapable of acting quickly and decisively. Lately, the two of us
have been wondering how things might have been different if there had been a
quick, confidential way to get information out.”
Fourth Estate on Life Support
In 2010, while he was still a
free man, the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity gave its
annual award to Assange. The citation read:
“It seems altogether fitting
and proper that this year’s award be presented in London, where Edmund Burke
coined the expression “Fourth Estate.” Comparing the function of the press to
that of the three Houses then in Parliament, Burke said: “…but in the Reporters
Gallery yonder, there sits a Fourth Estate more important far then they all.”
The year was 1787—the year the
U.S. Constitution was adopted. The First Amendment, approved four years
later, aimed at ensuring that the press would be free of government
interference. That was then.
With the Fourth Estate now on
life support, there is a high premium on the fledgling Fifth Estate, which uses
the ether and is not susceptible of government or corporation control. Small
wonder that governments with lots to hide feel very threatened.
It has been said: “You shall
know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” WikiLeaks is helping make
that possible by publishing documents that do not lie.
Last spring, when we chose
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for this award, Julian said he would accept only
“on behalf or our sources, without which WikiLeaks’ contributions are of no
significance.”
We do not know if Pvt. Bradley
Manning gave WikiLeaks the gun-barrel video of July 12, 2007 called “Collateral
Murder.” Whoever did provide that graphic footage, showing the brutality of the
celebrated “surge” in Iraq, was certainly far more a patriot than the
“mainstream” journalist embedded in that same Army unit. He suppressed what
happened in Baghdad that day, dismissed it as simply “one bad day in a surge that
was filled with such days,” and then had the temerity to lavish praise on the
unit in a book he called “The Good Soldiers.”
Julian is right to emphasize
that the world is deeply indebted to patriotic truth-tellers like the sources
who provided the gun-barrel footage and the many documents on Afghanistan and
Iraq to WikiLeaks. We hope to have a chance to honor them in person in the
future.
Today we honor WikiLeaks, and
one of its leaders, Julian Assange, for their ingenuity in creating a new
highway by which important documentary evidence can make its way, quickly and
confidentially, through the ether and into our in-boxes. Long live the Fifth
Estate!”
Eventually a compromise was
found in 1971 when Pope Paul VI lifted the excommunications and Mindszenty was
able to leave the U.S. embassy. Can such a diplomatic solution be found
to free Assange? It is looking more and more unlikely with each passing
year.
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