THE FALL AND RISE OF JULIAN ASSANGE
...the slow motion crucifixion of a journalist and publisher.
By Ricardo Patiño - Londres, Reunión con Julian Assange, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30748755
“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.” —Julian Assange
It’s a long way down the steps of a dungeon to that place where all pity and mercy is abandoned, where the victim—or patient as he was sometimes called—was forced to lie down on a horrible machine called “the rack”. For a long while he listened to the creaking of this contraption, his agony was slowly tightened up—bound at one end by the ankles—the man’s arms were pulled back over his head to the end of his endurance as the device pulled his spine apart. The long dead English kings and their nobles once kept these horrors out of sight. Today their descendants pay lip service to decency and make much ado over the rule of law.
Julian Assange, in declining health, is being dragged to each Station of the Cross as his frail body is being prodded down dark steps toward a Super Max dungeon.
Looking further back to Ancient Rome there was crucifixion, when this kind of dirty work was an open spectacle of hideous suffering, humiliation, and depraved neglect. One could not dare ignore the power of Rome. But people cannot let their guard down today, as methods of intimidation change with the times. The people can be tormented by the denial of basic due process and protection of law. Julian Assange published shocking and disturbing facts about the United States and the UK; but these governments are both reading from the same script of state power, the US Espionage Act. There should be no confusion about this because the guts of the Espionage Act is now, as it was in 1917, about silencing dissent. Assange has committed no crime, but the state actors who declare his publishing to be so damn objectionable have put him in London’s Belmarsh Prison.
The brutalization of Julian Assange is built into his prolonged imprisonment. In the restricted space inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London he spent seven years of his life, where he sought political asylum in 2012; it was there that he lived in conditions amounting to House Arrest. In the beginning, Julian was able to use his computer and continue his active association with WikiLeaks. The first years of his stay at the embassy passed cordially while Ecuador’s President, Rafael Correa, was in office. This happier time did not continue after Lenín Moreno was elected Ecuador’s President in 2017. After that the changes in Julian’s daily life were increasingly difficult.
On April 21, 2017, Trump’s Attorney General announced that Assange’s arrest was a priority for the United States.
WSWS.ORG: Julian Assange’s Ecuadorian Citizenship Revoked
On March 27, 2018, a delegation from US Southern Command visited Ecuador, stating that the purpose of the discussions was to strengthen “security cooperation” and “exchange ideas and reiterate US commitment to the longstanding partnership.”
One day later, the Ecuadorian authorities imposed a communications blackout on Assange, blocking any internet or phone contact with the outside world and preventing his friends and supporters from visiting him.
His communications were partially restored in October 2018 under strict, anti-democratic conditions. Assange was required to “comply scrupulously” with a “prohibition” on “activities that could be considered as political and interference in the internal affairs of other States, or that may cause harm to the good relations of Ecuador with any other State.” His visitors were required to provide the Ecuadorian authorities with ID details and surrender their mobile phones and other devices—a procedure that was used to facilitate the US-backed surveillance of Assange and his associates, including his lawyers.
On April 11, 2019, Julian Assange was removed by force from the Embassy, to Belmarsh, where he was to face the legal formalities of extradition to the US.
Donald Trump was not the origin —and Joe Biden will not be the end— of the United States in decline; but they are covering the same ground when it comes to the persecution and scourging of Julian Assange.
Talking Post with Yonden Lhatoo ‘This is a war of propaganda’,… John Pilger
Yonden Lhatoo: Can you give us an idea from your personal interaction with Julian?—give us a sense of what’s happening to him as a man now,—as a human being.
John Pilger: Well, I have it through his wife and others: I haven’t seen him for about 18 months in prison. But I’m always—when I have seen him—I’ve been astonished at his resilience. I don’t know how the man has kept going but he has;—but at some cost, as we know from the court case. And I don’t think there is any doubt in my mind, as there is no doubt in the minds of his loved ones, that if Julian goes to the United States and is effectively dropped in a penal hellhole, that will be the end of him, literally. He will die.
Anything is better, of course, than going to the United States. But the torture—and it’s not a word I use idly,— the torture he suffered has cost the man terribly. If Julian is extradited to the United States I think it will effectively end real independent, investigative journalism. Who will take that risk again?—if the United States and other countries…the United States mainly—can reach anywhere in the world, and take a journalist for writing something or revealing something it doesn’t approve of?
“What times are these when a conversation about a tree is almost a crime because it contains so many silences about so many crimes?”
—Bertolt Brecht (trans. Reinhard Lettau)
The brutalization of Julian Assange is built into his prolonged imprisonment.
Mohamed Elmaazi: UK Official Secrets Act takes cues from Espionage Act
These potential amendments would be the first major changes to the law since 1989. They come as the U.K. and U.S. governments continue to seek the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in receiving and publishing the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, Guantanamo Bay detainee files, and U.S. diplomatic cables.
Proposals would expand possible imprisonment for leakers, recipients of leaks and secondary publishers–including journalists–from the current maximum of two years to as high as 14 years in prison.
Furthermore, so-called “unjustifiable barriers to prosecution,” such as a requirement that the state actually prove that “unauthorized disclosures” are “damaging,” would be replaced with a less stringent test, like proving knowledge or belief on the part of the defendant that a disclosure “was likely to cause” or “risked causing” damage.
This is the standard in the U.S. for prosecutions under the Espionage Act, the 1917 law which Assange is accused of violating 17 times (even though he is not a U.S. citizen). Charges function as strict liability offenses, and intent is largely treated as irrelevant.
The United States government will not be outdone by the British in matters of excessive force or sadistic talent. Nonetheless, Julian Assange has reported honorably on the catastrophe overtaking the world. And published sources from WikiLeaks have established a very reliable record. It’s important that reckless governments in the US and UK are held to account and never given free rein to interfere with precedents that protect journalism and a publisher’s right to expose all government crimes done in secret—such as crimes against peace—or the subversion of justice at home or abroad. Mercy come now: a sight that redeems. Julian Assange must go to his wife and children, a free man.
There is a prayer that finds a place for itself in every act of devotion. Another expression of what is possible. Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, recently offered asylum to our brother Julian in that land.
Officials at Belmarsh Prison allowed Julian and Stella to get married there and have a ceremony. Chris Hedges and Craig Murray were on the invited list.
The Chris Hedges Report The Marriage Of Julian Assange
Inside the prison, Julian Assange and Stella Moris are being married. Craig and I were on the list of the six guests invited to the wedding, but the prison authorities, in an example of the institutional sadism that characterizes all prisons, denied us entry. Craig, who was to have been one of two witnesses, was informed that he could not enter because he would “endanger the security of the prison.”
The day is bittersweet. Julian may never be able to live with his wife and family. Yet it is an affirmation of love and commitment and hope carried out in a small side room with folding chairs and a laminate table. The prison authorities denied Julian and Stella the use of the chapel. The ceremony was witnessed by six family members, including Julian and Stella’s two young sons, one of whom fell asleep and the other of whom was preoccupied with a paper plane and tried to turn on one of the alarms. Two guards were stationed in the room.
The Biden administration is determined to extradite Julian and charge him with 17 counts of the Espionage Act, which would send him to prison for 170 years.
I sat through some of the court proceedings in London. It was a judicial farce, especially since the Spanish security firm UC Global at the Ecuadorian Embassy, where Julian had taken refuge for seven years, recorded all of Julian’s conversations with his attorneys and turned them over to the CIA. That fact alone should invalidate the trial. But there is also the bald fact that Julian never committed a crime.
If Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting, allowing the government to charge any reporter who possesses classified documents, and any whistleblower who leaks classified information, under the Espionage Act. The inner workings of power will be shrouded in darkness, with very ominous consequences for press freedom and democracy.
Adrienne Rich What Kind of Times Are These
WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light — ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.
image: zenad-nabil-jeNlxmCD96Y-unsplash.jpg
Copeland, yes it's an outrage and Assange should be, must be, freed immediately. There is so much to be outraged about, maybe more than ever, even though there is always and has always been so much harm done to innocent others in the name of so-called justice, terrible harm, appalling cruelty and injustice. I applaud you and all those who are calling attention to it. If something can be done to change this situation it must come from those who have the influence, the power to take decisions and move obstacles. In my limited little world there is no such power or influence.