We must, in every way
possible, put pressure on the British government to halt the judicial lynching
of Assange
The arrest Thursday of Julian
Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free
press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S.
governments, in the seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the
internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes,
carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite will be masked from
the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to
expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham
trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an
Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and
entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning of
the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.
Under what law did Ecuadorian
President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian Assange’s rights of asylum
as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to
enter the Ecuadorian Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to
arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister
Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a
crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of
Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in
the United States?
I am sure government attorneys
are skillfully doing what has become de rigueur for the corporate state, using
specious legal arguments to eviscerate enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This
is how we have the right to privacy with no privacy. This is how we have “free”
elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and
under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in
which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured
politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with
no due process. This is how we have a government—whose fundamental
responsibility is to protect citizens—that orders and carries out the
assassination of its own citizens such as the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki
and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press legally permitted to
publish classified information and a publisher sitting in jail in Britain
awaiting extradition to the United States and a whistleblower, Chelsea Manning,
in a jail cell in the United States.
Britain will use as its legal
cover for the arrest the extradition request from Washington based on
conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a functioning judiciary, would be
thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no longer have a functioning judiciary.
We will soon know if Britain as well lacks one.
Assange was
granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden
to answer questions about sexual
offense allegations that were eventually dropped. Assange and his
lawyers always argued that if he was put in Swedish custody he would be
extradited to the United States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian
citizenship the British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the
London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his health
steadily deteriorated.
The Trump administration will
seek to try Assange on charges that he conspired with Manning in
2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs obtained
by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents leaked by Manning from the
Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S.
helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including
children, and two Reuters journalists, provided copious evidence of the
hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies, bribery
and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its foreign
relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks allowed us to see
the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this
they became empire’s prey.
U.S. government lawyers will
attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange from The New York Times and the
British newspaper The Guardian, both of which also published the leaked
material from Manning, by implicating Assange in the theft of the documents.
Manning was repeatedly and often brutally pressured during her detention and
trial to implicate Assange in the seizure of the material, something she
steadfastly refused to do. She is currently in jail because of her refusal to
testify, without her lawyer, in front of the grand jury assembled for the
Assange case. President Barack Obama granted Manning, who was given a 35-year
sentence, clemency after she served seven years in a military prison.
Once the documents and videos
provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks were published and disseminated by
news organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian, the press
callously, and foolishly, turned on Assange. News organizations that had run
WikiLeaks material over several days soon served as conduits in a black
propaganda campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear
campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber
Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The
document called on the U.S. to eradicate the “feeling of trust” that is
WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroy Assange’s reputation.
Assange, who with the Manning
leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and criminal manipulations of the George
W. Bush administration, soon earned the ire of the Democratic Party
establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The emails were
copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from Saudi
Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to the Clinton
Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton
to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe. It exposed
Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She was caught in the emails, for example,
telling the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and
believed Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a
statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton
campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump
was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions
in a primary debate. It exposed Clinton as the primary architect of the war in
Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential
candidate. Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs,
should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves journalists.
The Democratic leadership,
intent on blaming Russia for its election loss, charges that the Podesta emails
were obtained by Russian government hackers, although James Comey, the former
FBI director, has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks
by an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state
actors.”
WikiLeaks has done more to
expose the abuses of power and crimes of the American Empire than any other
news organization. In addition to the war logs and the Podesta emails, it made
public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and
their interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections. It
disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy
Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened to save
Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of the American
public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to the United States by
helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed that
Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”
A haggard-looking Assange, as
he was dragged out of the embassy by British police, shook his finger and
shouted: “The U.K. must resist this attempt by the Trump administration. … The
U.K. must resist!”
We all must resist. We must,
in every way possible, put pressure on the British government to halt the
judicial lynching of Assange. If Assange is extradited and tried, it will
create a legal precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which
Trump repeatedly has called “the enemy of the people,” to hold power
accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents,
minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the nation and the
ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and women to swell the
bank accounts of the rich and consolidate the global oligarchs’ total grip on
power will not only expand, but will no longer be part of public debate. First
Assange. Then us.
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