November 12, 2018
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.”
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