http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56852.htm
Justice For Julian Assange Is Justice For All
Following the final High Court hearing to decide whether or not Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States - for the 'crime' of revealing a landscape of government crimes and lies -- John Pilger looks back on the decade Assange has been fighting for his freedom, and the implications for independent journalists and the very notion of justice.
When I first saw Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison, in 2019, shortly after he had been dragged from his refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy, he said, "I think I am losing my mind."
He was gaunt and emaciated, his eyes hollow and the thinness of his arms was emphasised by a yellow identifying cloth tied around his left arm, an evocative symbol of institutional control.
For all but the two hours of my visit, he was confined to a solitary cell in a wing known as "healthcare", an Orwellian name. In the cell next to him a deeply disturbed man screamed through the night. Another occupant suffered from terminal cancer. Another was seriously disabled.
"One day we were allowed to play Monopoly," he said, "as therapy. That was our healthcare!"
"This is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," I said.
"Yes, only more insane."
Julian's black sense of humour has often rescued him, but no more. The insidious torture he has suffered in Belmarsh has had devastating effects. Read the reports of Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the clinical opinions of Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King's College London and Dr. Quentin Deeley, and reserve a contempt for America's hired gun in court, James Lewis QC, who dismissed this as "malingering".
I was especially moved by the expert words of Dr. Kate Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London. She told the Old Bailey last year that Julian's intellect had gone from "in the superior, or more likely very superior, range" to "significantly below" this optimal level, to the point where he was struggling to absorb information and "perform in the low to average range".
At yet another court hearing in this shameful Kafkaesque drama, I watched him struggle to remember his name when asked by the judge to state it.
For most of his first year in Belmarsh, he was locked up. Denied proper exercise, he strode the length of his small cell, back and forth, back and forth, for "my own half-marathon", he told me. This reeked of despair. A razor blade was found in his cell. He wrote "farewell letters". He phoned the Samaritans repeatedly.
At first he was denied his reading glasses, left behind in the brutality of his kidnapping from the embassy. When the glasses finally arrived at the prison, they were not delivered to him for days. His solicitor, Gareth Peirce, wrote letter after letter to the prison governor protesting the withholding of legal documents, access to the prison library, the use of a basic laptop with which to prepare his case. The prison would take weeks, even months, to answer. (The governor, Rob Davis, has been awarded an Order of the British Empire).
Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were returned. Julian could not call his American lawyers. From the start, he has been constantly medicated. Once, when I asked him what they were giving him, he couldn't say.
At last week's High Court hearing to decide finally whether or not Julian would be extradited to America, he appeared only briefly by video link on the first day. He looked unwell and unsettled. The court was told he had been "excused" because of his "medication". But Julian had asked to attend the hearing and was refused, said his partner Stella Moris. Attendance in a court sitting in judgement on you is surely a right.
This intensely proud man also demands the right to appear strong and coherent in public, as he did at the Old Bailey last year. Then, he consulted constantly with his lawyers through the slit in his glass cage. He took copious notes. He stood and protested with eloquent anger at lies and abuses of process.
The damage done to him in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh (whose brutal regime is celebrated in the latest Bond film) is beyond doubt.
But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt, and a quality of resistance and resilience that is heroism. It is this that may see him through the present Kafkaesque nightmare - if he is spared an American hellhole.
I have known Julian since he first came to Britain in 2009. In our first interview, he described the moral imperative behind WikiLeaks: that our right to the transparency of governments and the powerful was a basic democratic right. I have watched him cling to this principle when at times it has made his life even more precarious.
Almost none of this remarkable side to the man's character has been reported in the so-called "free press" whose own future, it is said, is in jeopardy if Julian is extradited.
Of course, but there has never been a "free press". There have been extraordinary journalists who have occupied positions in the "mainstream" - spaces that have now closed, forcing independent journalism on to the internet.
There, it has become a "fifth estate", a samizdat of dedicated, often unpaid work by those who were honourable exceptions in a media now reduced to an assembly line of platitudes. Words like "democracy", "reform", "human rights" are stripped of their dictionary meaning and censorship is by omission or exclusion.
Last week's fateful hearing at the High Court was "disappeared" in the "free press". Most people would not know that a court in the heart of London had sat in judgement on their right to know: their right to question and dissent.
Many Americans, if they know anything about the Assange case, believe a fantasy that Julian is a Russian agent who caused Hillary Clinton to lose the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump. This is strikingly similar to the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which justified the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of a million or more people.
They are unlikely to know that the main prosecution witness underpinning one of the concocted charges against Julian has recently admitted he lied and fabricated his "evidence".
Neither will they have heard or read about the revelation that the CIA, under its former director, the Hermann Goering lookalike Mike Pompeo, had planned to assassinate Julian. And that was hardly new. Since I have known Julian, he has been under threat of harm and worse.
On his first night in the Ecuadorean embassy in 2012, dark figures swarmed over the front of the embassy and banged on the windows, trying to get in. In the US, public figures - including Hillary Clinton, fresh from her destruction of Libya - have long called for Julian's assassination. The current President Biden damned him as a "hi-tech terrorist".
The former prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, was so eager to please what she called "our best mates" in Washington that she demanded Julian's passport be taken from him - until it was pointed out to her that this would be against the law. The current prime minister, Scott Morrison, a PR man, when asked about Assange, said, "He should face the music."
It has been open season on the WikiLeaks' founder for more than a decade. In 2011, The Guardian exploited Julian's work as if it was its own, collected journalism prizes and Hollywood deals, then turned on its source.
Years of vituperative assaults on the man who refused to join their club followed. He was accused of failing to redact documents of the names of those considered at risk. In a Guardian book by David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange is quoted as saying during a dinner in a London restaurant that he didn't care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.
Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations reporter with Der Spiegel, actually was at the dinner and testified that Assange said nothing of the kind.
The great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg told the Old Bailey last year that Assange had personally redacted 15,000 files. The New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq war leaks, described how Assange took "extraordinary precautions in redacting names of informants".
In 2013, I asked the film-maker Mark Davis about this. A respected broadcaster for SBS Australia, Davis was an eyewitness, accompanying Assange during the preparation of the leaked files for publication in The Guardian and The New York Times. He told me, "Assange was the only one who worked day and night extracting 10,000 names of people who could be targeted by the revelations in the logs."
Lecturing a group of City University students, David Leigh mocked the very idea that "Julian Assange will end up in an orange jumpsuit". His fears were an exaggeration, he sneered. Edward Snowden later revealed that Assange was on a "manhunt timeline".
Luke Harding, who co-authored with Leigh the Guardian book that disclosed the password to a trove of diplomatic cables that Julian had entrusted to the paper, was outside the Ecuadorean embassy on the evening Julian sought asylum. Standing with a line of police, he gloated on his blog, "Scotland Yard may well have the last laugh."
The campaign was relentless. Guardian columnists scraped the depths. "He really is the most massive turd," wrote Suzanne Moore of a man she had never met.
The editor who presided over this, Alan Rusbridger, has lately joined the chorus that "defending Assange protects the free press". Having published the initial WikiLeaks revelations, Rusbridger must wonder if the Guardian's subsequent excommunication of Assange will be enough to protect his own skin from the wrath of Washington.
The High Court judges are likely to announce their decision on the US appeal in the new year. What they decide will determine whether or not the British judiciary has trashed the last vestiges of its vaunted reputation; in the land of Magna Carta this disgraceful case ought to have been hurled out of court long ago.
The missing imperative is not the impact on a collusive "free press". It is justice for a man persecuted and wilfully denied it.
Julian Assange is a truth-teller who has committed no crime but revealed government crimes and lies on a vast scale and so performed one of the great public services of my lifetime. Do we need to be reminded that justice for one is justice for all?
....
http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-instead-of-a-free-press/
Instead of a Free Press
In the failed corporate coverage of Steven Donziger and Julian Assange there is an imposition of darkness, ignorance inflicted on Americans with intent.
Just before the weekend came news that Steven Donziger, the courageous attorney who fought Chevron and won a $9.5 billion environmental case in Ecuador and who now fights the judicial system in America, has been sentenced to six months in prison for a patently ridiculous contempt charge.
He was sentenced, this is to say, without a jury trial after a corrupt judge appointed Chevron’s law firm to conduct the prosecution. Take a sec to read that sentence again if you need to.
If you read anything at all in the corporate press about this travesty, you read something like this, the Reuters lead:
“NEW YORK, Oct 1 (Reuters)—A disbarred American lawyer who spent decades battling Chevron Corp (CVX.N) over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest was sentenced Friday to six months’ imprisonment for criminal contempt charges arising from a lawsuit brought by the oil company.”
In other words, if you read anything at all in the corporate press about this judgment you were misinformed to the point of disinformed. The two meet at the horizon, you see: Misinform incessantly and you have disinformed.
The sins of omission in the coverage — see also The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, here and here — are almost too numerous to count. In the same line, you read nothing at all of this momentous turn in the Donziger case in The New York Times. When reality is simply too embarrassing, or contradicts the liberal authoritarian orthodoxy too baldly, the once-but-no-more newspaper of record simply leaves the news unreported.
The power of leaving out, POLO, is my name for this common phenom.
On the same day the Donziger news arrived, Alan Macleod, the ever-trenchant reporter at MintPress News, tweeted out an interesting bit of information on the state of our media:
“Politico’s defense newsletter is sponsored by Lockheed Martin, its health newsletter by a private pharma group, its tech one by Comcast, and its prescription medication one by a lobbying group dedicated to opposing Medicare for All.
How can this be taken seriously as journalism?”
It can’t, Alan. But just because the answer is open-and-shut obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting question.
Macleod included a screenshot of four Politico news items in which the above information is casually noted in “presented by” form.
Nothing remarkable here, Politico wants you to know. Routine, just as it has been routine for the Public Broadcasting System to ignore the Donziger story entirely. And routine business that Chevron is among PBS’s corporate sponsors.
‘Newspapers Without Government’
Long ago, when he was our new republic’s minister to Paris, Thomas Jefferson, wrote home to Edward Carrington, a fellow Virginian, to note, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Jefferson mailed his letter in 1787, as the ferment of revolution gathered in France. It is time to recognize that we live in that circumstance Jefferson thought the less desirable. America does not have a press by any serious definition of the term. It has a government that, over the course of many decades, has turned the press into an appendage responsible for the manipulation of public opinion.
“Propaganda,” as Edward Bernays noted with extraordinary candor in his 1928 book of that title, “is the executive arm of the invisible government.” This is what Americans have instead of a free press.
Jefferson, who favored an informed, educated citizenry the whole of his life, understood the danger of this fate. He understood, too, that the young United States was just as vulnerable to such an outcome as any Old World nation. The man later elected our third president would not have written as he did were these questions not very high in his mind.
Too many Americans, and maybe most, do not understand the peril of our circumstance. They seem to have little awareness of what it means to live under a government unchecked by a press that counts as an independent pole of power.
Lost in the exceptionalism of “it can’t happen here,” they do not see that living in the dark in a century as dynamic as the 21st is to court the very dangers America is obsessed with avoiding — the danger of authoritarianism (in this case liberal), the danger of proceeding wrongly, the danger of falling behind, the danger of not understanding others as others gather strength and proceed with purpose. The multiple dangers of ignorance, in short.
Have you read anywhere that China just sent the first laden freight train from Shanghai to Hamburg, marking the start of a China-to–Europe rail service? Xinhua had it, nobody else. Have you read anywhere that Venezuela and Iran just signed an agreement to trade the former’s heavy crude for the latter’s condensate? Reuters had a piece, but it focused on the likelihood of U.S. sanctions rather than on what this development means in geopolitical terms. On the latter topic, nothing.
Are you reading anywhere in the corporate press about the unabated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under the government of Naftali Bennett, apartheid Israel’s Arab-murdering prime minister? It is as savage as it was last spring, but I have seen nothing but in the non–Western press.
The ignorance of the world the corporate press cultivates will bite Americans on their backsides soon enough. It is the press’s irresponsibility closer to home that is most unforgivable.
Blackout on Assange
There is the Assange case. The press’s blackout of Julian Assange’s mistreatment since he was imprisoned two years ago is an open-and-shut dereliction of duty. Lately it worsens.
We had news over the summer that a key witness in the American case against Assange fabricated his testimony in exchange for immunity from embezzlement charges pending against him in Iceland. The news appeared in Stundin, an investigative biweekly published in Reykjavik. The American media, from The New York Times on down, published nothing. “A remarkable silence,” as Monthly Review headed its online reprint of the Media Lens original.
More recently, Yahoo! News brought out a piece detailing the CIA’s plans either to kidnap or assassinate Assange during his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Michael Isikoff is a longtime Russiagater who continues to insinuate, hard evidence to the contrary, that Russia hacked the Democratic Party’s mail servers in mid–2016. He remains, on balance, part of the problem, not the solution. But his revelations about the CIA’s plots were nonetheless laudable.
Of this development, nothing in the mainstream dailies or from the broadcasters. The Justice Department case has collapsed, there is prima facie cause to deny the U.S. request to extradite Assange, and every American who depends on the corporate press for his or her information knows nothing about either.
As to the Donziger case, Greg Palast, who has followed it as an investigative journalist since 2007, published a useful précis of the abominable abuses of law and justice just prior to the sentencing last Friday. A year ago Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting brought out a granular analysis of the Reuters cover-up coverage through the summer of 2020.
It is all there: the denial of a jury trial, the unconstitutional order that Donziger turn over his cellular telephone and computer to Chevron during discovery, the assignment of a corrupt judge, the corrupt judge’s assignment of Chevron’s lawyers to prosecute the defendant in a case Chevron brought. There is no precedent in law allowing a private firm to assume the role of public prosecutor — one reason the UN’s high commissioner for human rights condemned Donziger’s treatment shortly before he was sentenced.
And none of it is there in the corporate press. Even those dailies that published on the sentencing left out more than they put in.
Consider once again Alan Macleod’s astute observation as to Politico’s “presented by” coverage. This nonsense is rampant, if you haven’t noticed. Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, PBS, National Public Radio — they are all drowning in conflicting interests insidiously labeled “sponsorships. This phenom goes a very long way to explaining American media’s see-it-to-believe-it betrayals of those they are supposed to serve.
As Macleod notes, you simply can’t call it journalism. But you have to call it the intentional imposition of darkness and ignorance inflicted on Americans.
There is something to learn here. With the exception of Isikoff’s Yahoo! News piece, which lands with me as the exception proving the rule, all of the above-noted stories have been developed by independent journalists via independent media.
Consortium News is high among those that have followed the Assange case with the proper dedication. I have mentioned others: Media Lens, MintPress News, MR’s online editions. (Good old MR.) There are many more doing the work that needs to be done — Jonathan Cook, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté; among non–Western publications there is The Cradle. This is not to diminish the many journalists and publications that deserve places on any such list.
It is to say this: If the American press has any future, it lies with these independent media. The responsibilities they already bear are outsized to their resources but will nonetheless grow greater. Looked at another way, if the American press is ever to come to its senses — and let us not dismiss the possibility — it will be in response to the reformation independent media will force upon them.
If Jefferson were alive, who do you think he would be reading, and who dismissing?
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