NOV 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 conspiracyagainst 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.”
Columnist
Chris
Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York
Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to
New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…
Cartoonist
Mr.
Fish, also known as Dwayne Booth, is a cartoonist who primarily creates for
Truthdig.com and Harpers.com. Mr. Fish's work has also appeared nationally in
The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Vanity…
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