WikiLeaks Party News

We call on Prime Minister Rudd to defend Assange’s rights

In a media statement  ast week we congratulated Mr Rudd on his elevation to Leader of the Australian Labor Party and Prime Minister elect. Recalling his tempering of former Prime Minister Gillard’s prejudicial statements about Assange and WikiLeaks in December 2010, we urged Mr Rudd to act now to insist Swedish investigators use the mutual legal assistance protocols to interview Mr Assange in the UK.

New online forum for volunteers

This week we are excited to launch a new online forum for WikiLeaks Party volunteers that will help you to connect with other volunteers, share ideas, work on projects together and plan events. We invite you to join the forums that you think you can contribute to - whether this is just one - or all of them.

The general secretary of Reporters Without Borders Christophe Deloire, and WikiLeaks foundator Julian Assange co-sign today an Op-Ed in Le Monde to call out the states of the European Union to protect Edward Snowden.

On October 12, 2012, the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize for contributing to the “advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” The EU should show itself worthy of this honor and show its will to defend freedom of information, regardless of fears of political pressure from its so-called closest ally, the United States.

Now that Edward Snowden, the young American who revealed the global monitoring system known as Prism, has requested asylum from 20 countries, the EU nations should extend a welcome, under whatever law or status seems most appropriate.

Although the United States remains a world leader in upholding the ideal of freedom of expression, the American attitude toward whistleblowers sullies the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In 2004, the UN special rapporteur for freedom of expression, as well as his counterparts in the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe issued a joint call to all governments to protect whistleblowers from all “legal, administrative or employment-related sanctions if they act in ‘good faith.’” Whistleblowers were defined as “individuals releasing confidential or secret information although they are under an official or other obligation to maintain confidentiality or secrecy.”

More recently, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe resolved in 2010 that, “the definition of protected disclosures shall include all bona fide warnings against various types of unlawful acts.” The Assembly’s Resolution 1729 concluded that member countries’ laws “should therefore cover both public and private sector whistle-blowers, including members of the armed forces and special services.”

Some are calling for a manhunt for Snowden on the grounds that he is a traitor, and others are trying to cloak the issues he raised in legalistic complexities. But what serious person can deny that Edward Snowden is a whistleblower?

The digital communications specialist’s revelations have enabled the international press, including theWashington Post, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, to shine a light on a surveillance system that tracks tens of millions of citizens, Europeans among them.

Targeted by an apparatus that threatens their sovereignty as well as their principles, the EU countries owe Snowden a debt of gratitude for his revelations, which were clearly in the public interest.

This young man will remain abandoned in the transit zone of the Moscow airport only if the European countries abandon their principles, as well as a major part of the raison d’être of the EU. Expressions of diplomatic outrage will be empty gestures if the person responsible for the revelations is left isolated and abandoned.

Beyond the necessity of providing a legal shield for whistleblowers, the protection of privacy is a matter of clear public interest, especially in the realm of freedom of information. Frank La Rue, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, noted in a report last June that “arbitrary and unlawful infringements of the right to privacy...threaten the protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

The confidentiality of written and oral exchanges is essential to ensuring the exercise of freedom of information. But when journalists’ sources are compromised, as happened in the case of The Associated Press; when the United States abuses the Espionage Act, a 1917 law that has been invoked a total of nine times against whistleblowers, six of these cases under the Obama administration; when the government tries to silence WikiLeaks by imposing a financial embargo on the organization and by subjecting associates and friends of Julian Assange to abusive searches when they enter the United States, when the site’s founder and his colleagues are threatened with U.S. prosecution, more than American democracy is threatened.

Indeed, the very model of democracy that the heirs of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin are responsible for upholding has been robbed of its essence.

By what right is the United States exempt from principles that it demands be applied elsewhere?

In January, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a historic speech in which she defined freedom of expression as a cornerstone of American diplomacy. She reiterated that position in February, 2011, in another speech in which she said that “on the spectrum of internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness.”

Eloquent words. They may have brought encouragement to dissidents in Tehran, Beijing, Havana, Asmara, Ashgabat, Moscow and so many other capitals. But how disappointing to find that the skyscrapers of American surveillance have reached a size to match China’s technological Great Wall.

The White House and State Department message of democracy and defence of human rights has lost considerable credibility. One sign of widespread concern – Amazon has reported a 6,000% increase in sales of the George Orwell classic, 1984.

Now, with Big Brother watching us from a Washington suburb, the key institutions of American democracy must play their assigned roles of counterweight to the executive branch and its abuses. The system of checks and balances is more than a slogan for avid readers of Tocqueville and Montesquieu.

American leaders should realize the glaring contradiction between their soaring odes to freedom and the realities of official actions, which damage the image of their country.

Members of Congress must be capable of holding back the tide of security provisions of the Patriot Act by recognizing the legitimate rights of men and women who sound the alarm. The Whistleblower Protection Act must be amended to ensure effective protection for whistleblowers who act in the public interest – an interest completely separate from immediate national concerns as intelligence services interpret them.

http://en.rsf.org/why-european-nations-must-protect-03-07-2013,44886.html

Wikileaks Party Senate candidate Alison Broinowski talks about Julian Assange and Wikileaks and why so many people want to shut them up and close them down.

Just before the September election, I heard a senior representative of a major airline explain to a meeting in Sydney how transparency and openness with the public were essential for revealing problems and avoiding accidents, yet he couldn’t discern any connection between that and my support for WikiLeaks, which he was quick to dismiss as

“…a mob of hackers and anarchists.”

That’s the mantra we often hear from journalists, who can be assumed to know a hacker when they see one.

In several of the journalists’ books, the pattern is similar: they begin with WikiLeaks’ humble origins, its increasingly sensational revelations and its rise to global prominence, but about half-way through the mood regularly sours. Snide accounts of Assange’s troubles in Sweden are backed up by interviews with former friends and collaborators about their fallings-out with him, claims about WikiLeaks’ dire straits and the impasse at the Embassy of Ecuador in London typically follow, with the common implication either that this Australian is an uncouth, difficult, upstart who has only himself to blame, or that he is a dangerous man who has to be stopped.

Mainstream journalists commonly seem to hate academics and authors, imagining they have limitless paid leisure for writing (and I have been all three). They appear to hate Assange even more for calling what he does ‘scientific journalism’, and for publishing scoops beyond their dreams.

WikiLeaks received more leaks in five years than all the corporate press in 30 years, according to Antony Loewenstein:

see video

Press freedom notwithstanding, the mainstream media in the US circumscribe themselves, apparently for fear of losing the holy grail of power, access, and influence. Even though Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, admits that exposing wrongdoing is ‘what journalists are supposed to do’, he took care to consult the US Administration in advance of publication of the WikiLeaks material, calling this ‘responsible’ behaviour. Journalists at the New York Timesand at the Guardian, to whom Assange passed the warlogs, broke deals with him, distorted the stories they released in an effort to be ‘responsible’, and then turned on him personally in their books, articles, and television interviews.

Some Australians were less hostile. The Sydney Morning Herald, whose freelance journalist Philip Dorling is its channel to WikiLeaks, called Assange‘the Ned Kelly of the Internet age’, presumably intending that as a compliment [David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, London: Guardian Books, 2011: 224].

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-people-mostly-governments-and-old-media-hate-wikileaks,5892

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

“Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is where you’re destined for”. P. Cavafy, trans. Edmund Keeley

John Shipton, despite his size, glides with insect-like grace across surfaces. He moves with a hovering sense, a holy man with message and meaning. As Julian Assange’s father, he has found himself a bearer of messages and meaning, attempting to convince those in power that good sense and justice should prevail over brute stupidity and callousness. His one object: release Julian.

At the now defunct Druids Café on Swanston Street in Melbourne, he materialised out of the shadows, seeking candidates to stump for the incipient WikiLeaks Party over a decade ago. The intention was to run candidates in the 2013 Senate elections in Australia, providing a platform for the publisher, then confined in the less than commodious surrounds of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Soft, a voice of reed and bird song, Shipton urged activists and citizens to join the fray, to save his son, to battle for a cause imperishably golden and pure. From this summit, power would be held accountable, institutions would function with sublime transparency, and citizens could be assured that their privacy would be protected.

In the documentary Ithaka, directed by Ben Lawrence, we see Shipton, Assange’s partner, Stella, the two children, the cat, glimpses of brother Gabriel, all pointing to the common cause that rises to the summit of purpose. The central figure, who only ever manifests in spectral form – on screen via phone or fleeting footage – is one of moral reminder, the purpose that supplies blood for all these figures. Assange is being held at Belmarsh, Britain’s most secure and infamous of prisons, denied bail, and being crushed by judicial procedure. But in these supporters, he has some vestigial reminders of a life outside.

The film’s promotion site describes the subject as, “The world’s most famous political prisoner, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange” a figure who has “become an emblem of an international arm wrestle over freedom of journalism, government corruption and unpunished war crimes.” But it takes such a moment as Stella’s remarks in Geneva reflecting on the freshly erected statue of her husband to give a sense of breath, flesh and blood. “I am here to remind you that Julian isn’t a name, he isn’t a symbol, he’s a man and he’s suffering.”

And suffer he shall, if the UK Home Secretary Priti Patel decides to agree to the wishes of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ insists that their man face 17 charges framed, disgracefully and archaically, from a US law passed during the First World War and inimical to free press protections. (The eighteenth, predictably, deals with computer intrusion.) The Espionage Act of 1917 has become the crutch and support for prosecutors who see, in Assange, less a journalist than an opportunistic hacker who outed informants and betrayed confidences. Seductively, he gathered a following and persuaded many that the US imperium was not flaxen of hair and noble of heart. Beneath the impostor lay the bodies of Collateral Murder, war crimes and torture. The emperor not only lacked clothes but was a sanctimonious murderer to boot.

Material for Lawrence comes readily enough, largely because of a flat he shared with Shipton during filming in England. The notable pauses over bread and a glass of wine, pregnant with meaning, the careful digestion of questions before the snappy response, and the throwaway line of resigned wisdom, are all repeated signatures. In the background are the crashes and waves of the US imperium, menacing comfort and ravaging peace. All of this is a reminder that individual humanity is the best antidote to rapacious power.

Through the film, the exhausting sense of media, that estate ever present but not always listening, comes through. This point is significant enough; the media – at least in terms of the traditional fourth estate – put huge stock in the release of material from WikiLeaks in 2010, hailing the effort and praising the man behind it. But relations soured, and tabloid nastiness set in. The Left found tell-all information and tales of Hillary Clinton too much to handle while the Right, having initially revelled in the revelations of WikiLeaks in 2016, took to demonising the herald. Perversely, in the United States, accord was reached across a good number of political denizens: Assange had to go, and to go, he had to be prosecuted in the United Kingdom and extradited to the United States.

The documentary covers the usual highlights without overly pressing the viewer. A decent run-up is given to the Ecuadorian stint lasting 7 years, with Assange’s bundling out, and the Old Bailey proceedings covering extradition. But Shipton and Stella Moris are the ones who provide the balancing acts in this mission to aid the man they both love.

Shipton, at points, seems tired and disgusted, his face abstracted in pain. He is dedicated, because the mission of a father is to be such. His son is in, as he puts it, “the shit”, and he is going to damn well shovel him out of it. But there is nothing blindingly optimistic about the endeavour.

The film has faced, as with its subject, the usual problems of distribution and discussion. When Assange is mentioned, the dull minded exit for fear of reputation, and the hysterical pronounce and pounce. In Gabriel Shipton’s words, “All of the negative propaganda and character assassination is so pervasive that many people in the sector and the traditional distribution outlets don’t want to be seen as engaging in advocacy for Julian.”

Where Assange goes, the power monopolies recoil. Distribution and the review of a documentary such as Ithaka is bound to face problems in the face of such a compromised, potted media terrain. Assange is a reminder of plague in the patient of democracy, pox on the body politic.

Despite these efforts, Shipton and Assange’s new wife are wandering minds, filled with experiences of hurt and hope. Shipton, in particular, gives off a smell of resignation before the execution. It’s not in the sense of Candide, where Panglossian glory occupies the mind and we accept that the lot delved out is the best possible of all possible worlds. Shipton offers something else: things can only get worse, but he would still do it again. As we all should, when finding our way to Ithaka.

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/julian-assange-in-ithaka/

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