By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

America is as authoritarian and intolerant of dissent as any tinpot dictatorship. It generally just goes about quashing it in a subtler, more sophisticated way, aided by a conformist, groupthink mainstream media.

In what Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola calls “a not-so-subtle effort to criminalize the journalism of an adversarial media organization that the United States has spent the last decade working to destroy,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been hit with another superseding indictment by the US Department of Justice.

Shadowproof, WSWS, and Consortium News all have solid and informative write-ups on this new development. The indictment adds no new charges, is riddled with inaccuracies, glaring plot holes, and amateurish errors, relies heavily on testimony from a literal convicted pedophile and diagnosed sociopath, and appears to be little more than a feeble attempt to legitimize the injection of the words “hacking” and “hackers” into the prosecutorial narrative.

To quote Assange’s partner Stella Morris, “They didn’t throw the book at Julian. They threw bits of paper found crumpled up in the discard pile.”

The persecution of Julian Assange is a transparent and iron-fisted attempt by the US government to globally criminalize the publication of leaks which embarrass the US-centralized empire, thereby drawing a firm line which journalists all around the world know never to cross.

This is the inverted totalitarian oligarchic empire at its most overtly tyrannical. The imprisonment of Assange was the part of the movie where the villain finally reveals their true face for the monster they’ve always been, where it became clear to anyone paying attention that the US power alliance is as authoritarian and intolerant of real dissent as any tin pot dictator.

But this is the rarest form of imperial censorship. Normally, wherever possible, the power structures which dominate human civilization prefer to do so out of sight and out of mind, ideally having the inmates of the prison serve as their own wardens.

Aaron Maté, one of my favorite journalists on the planet right now, has an interesting new post on Twitter which reads (emphasis my own): “It’s incredible to see book after book churn out the same discredited Russiagate hype. When I talked to an editor at a major publisher about doing a book — you know, based on actual facts — they told me their friends would be mad at them if they published it, so that was it.”

This is a perfect example of the soft tyranny which does most of the key oppression of speech in the empire today. There are no laws prohibiting the publication of Maté’s award-winningjournalism on the subject of the mass psychological operation known as Russiagate. Nobody who published such a book would be tortured and facing a 170-year prison sentence like Julian Assange.

Yet the speech remains restricted. Major publishers won’t touch Maté’s work. You won’t see him as a guest panelist on MSNBC or CNN. Not because those platforms are forbidden from doing so, but because they don't choose to. As former MSNBC host Krystal Ball explained last year, an attitude of conformity has been manufactured from the top down to ensure than those who rise to the top of the most influential platforms are the ones who know how to toe the establishment line without being told. People are hired from the same conformity-enforcing universities by executives who were selected by media-owning plutocrats based on their willingness to protect the status quo their plutocratic kingdoms are built upon, and only those who play ball within that system ever rise to major positions of influence.


https://www.rt.com/op-ed/493060-free-speech-julian-assange/

WikiLeaks - Public Enemy Julian Assange

The Wikileaks revelations shocked the world, and co-founder Julian Assange shot to fame. WikiLeaks exposed U.S. army war crimes, the secret emails of top international politicians and controversial secret service surveillance methods.

Assange’s relentless pursuit of total transparency has changed the face of journalism and given rise to much imitation, as well as fierce criticism. But it seems the spell has broken. After spending seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange is now in a cell at Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London. In many ways, he is being treated as a terrorist. His health has suffered. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer has even referred to a "murderous system” designed to make an example of Assange. Assange took on a very powerful opponent. The U.S.A. is pressing charges for obtaining and disclosing classified information. Now, the extradition hearing is about to begin in London. If Assange is extradited from England to the U.S.A., he faces up to 175 years in jail for espionage. Experts are expecting one of the most significant trials of its kind to date. "WikiLeaks - Public Enemy Julian Assange” is a detailed depiction of the rise and fall of Julian Assange. The film reveals some personal glimpses into different aspects of the story: meetings with Assange’s worried father, talks with high-ranking U.S. officials, an exclusive interview with whistleblower Edward Snowden. And every time the key question re-emerges: Is Julian Assange a journalist or a spy?

 

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https://www.dw.com/en/wikileaks-public-enemy-julian-assange/av-52526807

 

 

 

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The answer is simple: Julian Assange is NOT A SPY. A spy would sell information to another party with the intent to either profit or make another party profit from this information. What Wikileaks did was not for profit... What Julian did was for the COMMON GOOD, for us to know what sort of dangerous, reprovable and reprehensible bullshit our empire gets up to. 

 

FREE ASSANGE NOW!

FREE ASSANGE NOW!

FREE ASSANGE NOW!

 

By Binoy Kampmark

 

 On September 7, Julian Assange will be facing another round of gruelling extradition proceedings, in the Old Bailey, part of a process that has become a form of gradual state-sanctioned torture.

The US Department of Justice hungers for their man. The UK prison authorities are doing little to protect his health. The end result, should it result in his death, will be justifiably described as state-sanctioned murder. 

This picture was not improved upon by a prison visit from his partner, Stella Morris, accompanied by their two children. Almost six months had passed since the last meeting.

Physical distancing was practised during the twenty-minute meeting in Belmarsh Prison. Morris and Assange wore face masks and visors, a state of affairs curious given the conspicuous lack of protective wear that has been given to Assange during the pandemic. A prohibition on touching was observed. 

We had to keep social distancing and Julian was told he would have to self-isolate for two weeks if he touched the children.”

Were officials being careful and considerate? Not according to Assange, who claimed it was the first time he had received a mask “because things are very different behind the doors.” Morris noted a prevailing thinness, a yellow armband to indicate prisoner status, and the fact that he was “in a lot of pain.”

What awaits Assange next month promises to be resoundingly ugly. He will have to ready himself for more pain, applied by Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Throughout her steering of proceedings, Baraitser has remained chillingly indifferent to Assange’s needs, a model of considered cruelty. 

Keen followers of justicia will be crestfallen: limiting access to legal counsel by keeping him caged behind a glass screen; ignoring his health considerations in refusing emergency bail during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her behaviour has been in keeping with that of Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Arbuthnot, who has done her precious bit to soil the citadel of British justice in previous rulings on Assange. 

With a family well and truly embedded in the British intelligence and military establishment, it was alarming to even see her name allocated to the Assange case.

In February 2018, she dismissed an application by the publisher to cancel his arrest warrant for refusing to surrender for his extradition to Sweden. It did not matter that Swedish proceedings against the Australian had been discontinued, or that prosecution proceedings for breaching bail had not been commenced. 

To this ruling came her cool judgment on February 13, 2018 on claims by Assange’s legal team that proceedings for failing to surrender to British authorities were disproportionate and not in the public interest. The judgment is horrendous for a few reasons, and in keeping with the intentionally harsh, and unimaginative way British courts have dealt with his case. 

Arbuthnot, for one, was unmoved by the findings of the UN Human Rights Council Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. His “house arrest” and “harsh restrictions” had been proposed by Assange himself. His time in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London could have been ended by leaving “the embassy whenever he wishes”. He could use the computer facilities, eat what he wanted and see guests. 

This caricature of freedom and choice was topped by her assessment that read grotesquely then, and even more appallingly now. While accepting that Assange “had expressed fears of being returned to the United States from a very early stage in the Swedish extradition proceedings”, she found little merit to them.

Sweden would not have rendered him to the United States. To have done so would have precipitated a diplomatic crisis between the UK, US and Sweden. (And how, pray, would she know?) As for whether Assange would face an extradition request to Britain, he could always: 

be able to argue extraneous considerations, fair trial and conditions of detention in the United States prison system.”

Which brings us to Baraitser, who has served as an appropriately bad replacement after Arbuthnot stood aside from the case, despite refusing to admit to any perception of bias. Very little is known about Baraitser in the public domain, though the investigative outfit Declassified UK has been busy with some dedicated digging.

On February 28, 2020 it filed a Freedom of Information request with the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) seeking a list of all the cases which Baraitser had ruled upon since her appointment in 2011. Of particular interest was her record on extradition rulings. 

Two months elapsed before a reply from the information officer at the HM Courts and Tribunal Service confirming that it held “some information that you have requested”. But the request was flatly turned down for not being consistent with the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. 

“The judiciary is not a public body for the purposes of FOIA…and requests asking to disclose all the cases a named judge ruled on are therefore outside the scope of the FOIA.” This limitation maintained “the independence of the judiciary which also means that the government does not provide guidance or policy on how judges should operate in court.”

The information officer’s reasoning was specious, not least because the FOIA request was premised on identifying what should, in any case, be on the public record: the cases upon which a judge has seen fit to rule upon, with outcomes. This also ignored the fact that some cases involving Baraitser are actually accessible through the legal database Westlaw. 

As a barrister wishing to remain anonymous explained to Declassified, “A court is a public authority for the purposes of the Human Rights Act and a judge is an officer of the court.”

A court also acted in public. “There is no default anonymity of the names of cases, unless children are involved or other certain limited circumstances, nor the judges who rule on them.” 

Undeterred, Declassified persevered and found 24 extradition cases over which Baraitser presided between November 2015 and May 2019 mining Factiva and Westlaw. The results show an overly keen enthusiasm for extradition.

Of these 24 cases, Baraitser ordered the extradition of 23 of the defendants, a 96% extradition record from publicly available evidence.” 

One of Baraitser’s rulings was overturned on appeal, with the appellate court attaching “considerable weight to the likely impact of extradition upon the health and wellbeing of the defendant’s wife”, who would be “left with very little support.” A scintilla of hope, perhaps, is in the offing.

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/09/01/waiting-for-the-old-bailey-julian-assange-and-britains-judicial-establishment/

 

 

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See also:

fading away before the skeleton arguments?...

 

the fluidity of disinterested "justice" in the magna carta country...

 

And many more on this site...

 

Julian Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson says his case needs to be recognised for what it is: persecution for robustly publishing what the powerful do not want the public to see.

WikiLeaks has raised fundamental questions about human rights and free speech both in Australia and around the world – and about Australia’s place in the world.

When WikiLeaks appeared in 2006, it was publishing important information that had been kept from the public but was essential for human rights accountability. From the classified Guantanamo Bay manual detailing US torture techniques to the Minton report detailing Trafigura’s toxic dump on the Ivory Coast affecting more than 100,000 people which the company had suppressed with a gag order in the UK, WikiLeaks’ releases were enabling us as lawyers to have the information we needed to do our job.

As a media lawyer battling for journalists to get access to government documents under freedom of information laws, I have been frustrated by the broad exemptions (and the broad interpretation given to them) used by governments to maintain secrecy and hide their mistakes from the public they are supposed to be accountable to.

This is why investigative journalism operates on leaks. Principled government bureaucrats hand journalists documents when they see wrongdoing because they believe the public ought to know what the government is really doing. Principled corporate employees hand journalists confidential documents which demonstrate unlawful or unethical practices of powerful corporations.

Journalists publish that material with free speech protections provided in the constitutions of liberal democracies around the world – except in Australia, where we rely on a mere implied and limited right to freedom of communication granted to us, by interpretation, by the High Court in 1992.

Australia has no explicit constitutional protection of free speech. In many jurisdictions, whistleblowers have no legal protection, relying instead on the obligation journalists have to protect and maintain the confidentiality of their sources to prevent the identification of the whistleblower and hence protect them from prosecution. Unfortunately, in many nations, journalists can face prosecution if they refuse to reveal their source.

WikiLeaks’ model provides a practical solution: its anonymous submission system was specifically designed to provide protection to journalists and whistleblowers that the law does not provide. Together with its robust publication policy, WikiLeaks provides sources better protection and a promise that their material – once verified – will be published. And published with maximum global effect: WikiLeaks makes its information available to journalists, citizen journalists, activists and lawyers the world over. This is why WikiLeaks is so dangerous to those in power with something to hide – and why WikiLeaks must be defended and protected.

So when I was approached to defend Julian Assange, I said yes without hesitation. It was September 2010: by then WikiLeaks had published Collateral Murder, a video showing the US military killing two Reuters employees in Iraq, and the Afghan War Diary, then ‘‘the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war’’. Chelsea Manning was in a US military prison about to face espionage charges and a possible death penalty for allegedly releasing material to WikiLeaks. But even then, I did not anticipate just how big the story would become.

In Australia, the revelations increased pressure on the government to withdraw from the US coalition of occupation, and in June 2008 Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd announced a drawdown of most Australian combat troops. However, it was a US State Department document later released by WikiLeaks that showed the truth hidden from the Australian public: Fulfilling a campaign pledge, Rudd withdrew about 515 combat troops from Iraq in June 2008, leaving in place about 1000 defence personnel, including a 100-man security detachment for its diplomatic mission in Baghdad, and naval and air patrol assets based in neighbouring countries that support operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Soon after, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War Logs – the largest leak in US military history. The documents demonstrated there were many thousands more civilian deaths than reported or acknowledged by the US government, as well as the systemic failure to investigate reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi forces and abuse in US detention facilities.

Days after, Assange told me there was more to come: he had over a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables and he was going to publish them: it would provide the public unprecedented insight into international diplomacy, US foreign policy and, as a result, Australian acquiescence to its ally’s demands.

Assange was acutely aware of the personal consequences and the persecution that would follow, but felt a duty to the source and to the public to publish the material: ‘‘They will chase me to the end of the earth, but I have to do it.’’

Soon his bank accounts were frozen, WikiLeaks would be cut off from public donations by Mastercard and Visa, the Australian government threatened to cancel his passport and he was wrongfully accused by then prime minister Julia Gillard of unlawful conduct as part of what was reported to be a coordinated international campaign driven by a ‘‘WikiLeaks Task Force’’ in the US.

High-profile US politicians called for him to be killed by drone strike. Assange, busy working on the publication with mainstream media partners, was suddenly the subject of an international manhunt culminating in an Interpol Red Notice and a European Arrest Warrant for a Swedish accusation that had previously been dropped by the Chief Prosecutor in Stockholm because, she said, the evidence “did not disclose any evidence of rape” and that “no crime at all” had been committed.

There were also consequences for me as his lawyer. In the days before ‘‘Cablegate’’ was published, the US State Department leaked to the press a letter it had sent to ‘‘Ms Robinson and Mr Assange’’ accusing us both of putting at risk US national security, military and anti-terrorism operations around the world. The death threats directed at Assange also started being directed at me.

‘‘Cablegate’’ became known as ‘‘the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain’’, and there is no denying the overwhelming public interest in the material. From Tunisia to Tonga, Canberra to Cairo and the West Bank to West Papua, WikiLeaks disclosures revealed corruption, abuse of power and human rights abuse.

WikiLeaks documents were cited in human rights reports about Sri Lankan military operations against the Tamils and in the groundbreaking documentary No Fire Zone, which led to a UN investigation into war crimes. The Iraq War Logs were used by lawyers in filing a case against the UK before the International Criminal Court. And in a landmark judgment in early 2018, the UK Supreme Court held that WikiLeaks cables were admissible as evidence before the British courts. This development is likely to be followed in courts around the Commonwealth.

But what of WikiLeaks’ founder and editor – the person responsible for making all of this possible?

Assange sits in Belmarsh Prison in London, where he has been for more than a year and a half, facing US extradition. This, after spending almost seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy, protecting himself from US extradition. In 2017 Sweden dropped its criminal investigation, only to reopen and re-close it in 2019.

Women’s allegations must always be taken seriously, but so too should due process protections which Assange was denied.

Assange was always willing to face Swedish and British justice, but not at the risk of facing American injustice for publishing information in the public interest.

Throughout that time, successive Australian governments refused to ask for the assurances against extradition he needed to be able to resolve the situation. To the contrary, then foreign minister Bob Carr wrote in Diary of a Foreign Minister that he had been deliberately misleading in his statements to the Australian public – inventing his claim that Assange had more consular assistance than any other citizen – in order to undermine the campaign that Assange’s mother and supporters were trying to start to bring him home. (Carr recently wrote in support of Assange and the need for the Australian government to intervene.)

In 2016, we obtained a ruling from the UN that Assange was being arbitrarily detained and should be immediately permitted to leave the embassy and return home to Australia. Australia took no action.

By 2018, no one could credibly deny the threat of US extradition: the US attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, had said that prosecuting Assange was a priority. Then director of the CIA (and now US Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo declared WikiLeaks a ‘‘hostile non-state intelligence agency’’ and claimed Assange should not benefit from the right to free speech under the US Constitution. Australia took no action.

In 2020, Assange faces 175 years in prison for the 2010 publications for which WikiLeaks won the Walkley Award for most outstanding contribution to journalism and for which Assange won the Sydney Peace Prize.

He is being held on remand, in a high-security prison in London, having not had a visitor since the outbreak of COVID-19. And still Australia takes no action. The Australian government claims it is offering consular assistance. But this case requires more: it needs diplomatic and political action.

The treatment of Assange stands in stark contrast to assistance the Australian government has offered others, such as International Criminal Court lawyer Melinda Taylor, who was visited by Carr when he was still foreign minister, had a passport delivered and then was brought out of Libya.

The fact that Assange faces prosecution under the Espionage Act puts at risk editors and journalists not just in the US but around the world.

Assange is an Australian citizen not based in the US who published truthful information about the US, but he is being sought for extradition and prosecution in the US. Imagine if Saudi Arabia was seeking the extradition and prosecution of an Australian journalist for having published the truth about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, or if China was seeking the extradition of an Australian editor for publishing truthful information about the beginnings of COVID-19. Australia would definitely have something to say about that. Why not when it is about the US?

The US government is trying to claim in the extradition proceedings that Assange put lives at risk with these publications. But during the Chelsea Manning trial in 2013, a US brigadiergeneral in counter-intelligence was unable to identify one casualty. Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell had said in 2010 ‘‘there was no evidence that anyone had been killed because of the leaks’’.

We must recognise this case for what it is and has always been about: the persecution of a publisher for robustly publishing what the powerful do not want the public to see – evidence of war crimes, human rights abuse and corruption.

As Bob Carr has written following his term as Australia’s foreign minister: ‘‘Foreign Minister Payne is entitled to courteously remind Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that ... we are a good ally to the point of giddy excess ...

‘‘We are entitled to one modest request: that in the spirit with which Barack Obama pardoned Chelsea Manning ... it would be better if the extradition of Assange were quietly dropped.’’

Assange has contributed much to human rights accountability through his work for WikiLeaks and yet he is persecuted for that work. It is time his human rights are respected.

 

 

This is an edited extract from A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks Exposes, edited by Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, Monash University Publishing.

 

 

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SMH 6/12/2020

 

 

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Baywatch icon Pamela Anderson has joined WikiLeaks in making an 11th hour plea for the United States to drop charges against Julian Assange ahead of a judge’s ruling on whether he will be extradited from the UK.

The WikiLeaks co-founder is set to appear at England’s Central Criminal Court on Monday, where District Judge Vanessa Baraitser will deliver her judgment on whether he should be extradited to the US to face charges of violating the 1917 Espionage Act. 

If convicted in the US, the 49-year-old could be hit with a 175-year prison sentence due to WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to US wars in the Middle East, as well as diplomatic cables.

Bombshell actress Anderson has been a vocal supporter of Assange for several years and the 53-year-old made an impassioned, last-ditch plea seeking a presidential pardon for the Australian.

 

 

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https://www.rt.com/news/511411-assange-wikileaks-pamela-anderson-pardon-plea/

 

 

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FREE ASSANGE, thank you vanessa... in a travesty of justice...

trump might beat biden to the post... in free assange today, mr biden...