By James Cogan
4 January 2019
During a December 30 interview
on the US cable television talk show “Fox and Friends,” Rudy Giuliani, the
right-wing Republican former mayor of New York and now attorney for President
Donald Trump, blurted out some basic truths about WikiLeaks and its founder and
publisher, Julian Assange.
Giuliani said: “Let’s take the
Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers were stolen property, weren’t they? It was
in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Nobody went to
jail at the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
Giuliani was referring to the
1971 publication of a mass of leaked documents that exposed decades of lies and
crimes committed by successive American governments throughout the Vietnam War.
The Nixon administration went to the US Supreme Court to outlaw the publication
but the court ruled that the US Constitution’s First Amendment, guaranteeing
free speech, protected the media outlets.
Once leaked information was
provided to a “media publication,” Giuliani stated, “they can publish it for
the purpose of informing people.”
He continued: “You can’t put
Assange in a different position. He was a guy who communicated. We may not like
what he communicated, but he was a media facility. He was putting that
information out. Every newspaper and station grabbed it and published it.”
Giuliani was discussing, not
the 2010 leaks published by WikiLeaks exposing US war crimes and diplomatic
intrigues, but the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Lurid and absurd
allegations have been made that WikiLeaks was part of a nefarious conspiracy
with Russia to assist the Trump campaign.
In July 2016, WikiLeaks
published leaked emails revealing that the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
had sought to undermine self-styled “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders and
ensure that Hillary Clinton was nominated as the Democratic Party’s
presidential candidate.
In October 2016, WikiLeaks
published leaked emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, which
included transcripts of speeches Clinton had given to corporate audiences
during which she pledged support to Wall Street and boasted of her role in
organising the murderous US-led war on Libya in 2011.
WikiLeaks has denied that
Russia was the source of the leaks and, in November 2016, Assange correctly
defended its decision to publish them in the public interest.
Giuliani categorically denied
there was ever any relationship or contact between the Trump campaign and
WikiLeaks. He stated on “Fox and Friends”: “I was with Donald Trump day in and
day out throughout the last four months of the campaign. He was as surprised as
I was about the WikiLeaks disclosures, sometimes surprised to the extent of ‘oh
my God, did they really say that?’ We were wondering if it was true or not.
They never denied it.
“The thing that really got
Hillary is not so much that they were revealed, but that they were true… She
really did completely screw Bernie Sanders. Every bit of that was absolutely
true. Just like the Pentagon Papers put a different view on Vietnam, this put a
different view on Hillary Clinton.”
He continued: “No press person
or person disseminating that, for the purpose of informing, did anything
wrong.”
Nothing Giuliani said is new
or even controversial. Assange is a journalist and editor. WikiLeaks is a media
organisation. When it was entrusted by whistleblowers with leaked information,
WikiLeaks published it “for the purpose of informing people.” Assange has
committed no crime. The attempts under Obama’s administration and now Trump’s
to have him extradited to the US to stand trial on charges of espionage or
conspiracy constitute a fundamental attack on freedom of speech and an
independent and critical media.
Since 2010, when the American
state apparatus launched its vendetta, every genuine defender of democratic
rights has been obliged, as a matter of political principle, to stand behind
Assange and WikiLeaks, and the fight for his unconditional protection from
US-led persecution.
Indeed, from this standpoint,
the most noteworthy aspect of Giuliani’s statements is that they were made by a
ruthless representative of the American financial and corporate elite, and on
Fox News, the station that in 2010 broadcast calls for Assange to be
assassinated.
Giuliani, a fervent supporter
of Trump’s fascistic “America First” agenda of war with China and the
destruction of workers’ rights and civil liberties in the US itself, does not
have the slightest concern for freedom of speech or democracy. His only motive
in telling the truth about Assange and WikiLeaks is to rebut the claims
circulating around the Mueller investigation and the possible use of
accusations of collusion with Russia to impeach the president and replace him
with Vice President Mike Pence.
A wing of the American ruling
class, represented by the Democratic Party, factions of the Republican Party
and sections of the military-intelligence apparatus, are outraged by Trump’s
seeming lack of concern with confronting Russia.
Even before he was
inaugurated, that wing of the establishment demanded that Trump escalate a
confrontational policy against Moscow, from the standpoint that conflict with
China could be best pursued if Beijing were denied any ability to seek
assistance from Russia. They believe Pence, a Christian fundamentalist and
extreme right-wing ideologue, would be a more malleable figure than the erratic
and unstable billionaire real estate speculator.
On a world scale, the
allegations of Russian “interference” have been used as the pretext for a
massive campaign of censorship, directed by companies such as Google and
Facebook against, above all, left-wing, anti-imperialist and anti-war websites
and social media postings.
The American state apparatus
also has used them to bully the Ecuadorian government, which in 2012 provided
Assange with asylum in its London embassy, to turn against the WikiLeaks
publisher. In April 2017, Mike Pompeo, then CIA director and now Trump’s
secretary of state, declared—after WikiLeaks published the explosive “Vault 7”
leaks exposing criminal CIA operations—that the media organisation would be
treated as a “non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state
actors such as Russia.”
In March 2018, on the dictates
of Washington, Ecuador cut off Assange’s right to communicate with the outside
world and has taken other punitive measures to try and pressure him to leave
the embassy and hand himself over to British police to face imprisonment and
extradition to the US.
A multitude of media
publications, political parties and trade unions—from the New York Times and
the Guardian, to the Australian Labor Party and an array of pseudo-left
organisations internationally—refuse to defend Assange and WikiLeaks because
they support the plans of US imperialism for confrontation and war with Russia
and China. They are hostile to the democratic rights of the working class
because they represent the capitalist elite and upper middle-class layers,
whose privileges and positions depend on the historically unprecedented levels
of social inequality and the concentration of global wealth in the hands of a
parasitic financial oligarchy centred in the US and other imperialist
countries.
Predictably, not a word about
Giuliani’s statements has been said by the political and media establishment in
the US, Europe or Australia.
The silence in Australia is of
particular significance. Assange is an Australian citizen. In the face of
persecution by the governments of other states, he has always been entitled to,
but denied, the full diplomatic, legal and political support of the Australian
government.
The categorical statement by a
figure as repelling as Giuliani, that there are no grounds to prosecute
Assange, serves only to expose the perfidy of the current Liberal-National
Party Coalition government, the Labor Party, the Greens, as well as the media,
the trade unions and civil liberties organisations. Their refusal to defend
Assange testifies to the utter rot of democracy in the country.
The Socialist Equality Party
(SEP) in Australia announced last month that it will organise and seek the
broadest support for political demonstrations in Sydney on March 3 and
Melbourne on March 10.
The rallies will demand that
the Australian government end its collaboration with the US-led persecution of
Assange and immediately intervene, using the full scope of its diplomatic and
legal powers, to insist that the British government allow the WikiLeaks
publisher to leave the Ecuadorian embassy and unconditionally return to
Australia, if he chooses to do so. Assange must be given a blanket guarantee
that any request by the Trump administration to extradite him from Australia to
the US would be rejected out of hand.
In the forthcoming Australian
election, the SEP will raise these demands as one of the main policies of its
candidates for both upper- and lower-house seats in parliament. It will conduct
the widest campaign in the working class and among youth, in Australia and
internationally, to compel the Australian government to act to secure the
freedom of Julian Assange.
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