The
Lies About Assange Must Stop Now
By John
Pilger
Ed Note - This article has
been updated to correct an error. We
had inadvertently omitted a portion
of Mr Pilgers article and repost it
now, in it's entirety. I apologize
to the author and the ICH community
for this mistake. Peace and Joy -
Tom Feeley
November 24/25, 2019 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Newspapers
and other media in the United States, Britain
and Australia have recently declared a passion
for freedom of speech, especially their right to
publish freely. They are worried by the "Assange
effect".
It is
as if the struggle of truth-tellers like Julian
Assange and Chelsea Manning is now a warning to
them: that the thugs who dragged Assange out of
the Ecuadorean embassy in April may one day come
for them.
A
common refrain was echoed by the Guardian last
week. The extradition of Assange, said the
paper, "is not a question of how wise Mr.
Assange is, still less how likable. It's not
about his character, nor his judgement. It's a
matter of press freedom and the public's right
to know."
What
the Guardian is trying to do is separate Assange
from his landmark achievements, which have both
profited the Guardian and exposed its own
vulnerability, along with its propensity to suck
up to rapacious power and smear those who reveal
its double standards.
The
poison that has fueled the persecution of Julian
Assange is not as obvious in this editorial as
it usually is; there is no fiction about Assange
smearing faeces on embassy walls or being awful
to his cat.
Instead, the weasel references to "character"
and "judgement" and "likeability" perpetuate an
epic smear which is now almost a decade old.
Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on
Torture, used a more apt description. "There has
been," he wrote, "a relentless and unrestrained
campaign of public mobbing." He explains
mobbing as "an endless stream of humiliating,
debasing and threatening statements in the
press". This "collection ridicule" amounts to
torture and could lead to Assange's death.
Having
witnessed much of what Melzer describes , I can
vouch for the truth of his words. If Julian
Assange were to succumb to the cruelties heaped
upon him, week after week, month after month,
year upon year, as doctors warn, newspapers like
the Guardian will share the responsibility.
A few
days ago, the Sydney Morning Herald's man in
London, Nick Miller, wrote a lazy, specious
piece headlined, "Assange has not been
vindicated, he has merely outwaited justice."
He was referring to Sweden's abandonment of the
so-called Assange investigation.
Miller's report is not untypical for its
omissions and distortions while masquerading as
a tribune of women's rights. There is no
original work, no real inquiry: just smear.
There
is nothing on the documented behaviour of a
clutch of Swedish zealots who hi jacked the
"allegations" of sexual misconduct against
Assange and made a mockery of Swedish law and
that society's vaunted decency.
He
makes no mention that in 2013, the Swedish
prosecutor tried to abandon the case and emailed
the Crown Prosecution Service in London to say
it would no longer pursue a European Arrest
Warrant, to which she received the reply: "Don't
you dare!!!" (Thanks to Stefania Maurizi of La
Repubblica)
Other
emails show the CPS discouraging the Swedes from
coming to London to interview Assange - which
was common practice - thus blocking progress
that might have set him free in 2011.
There
was never an indictment. There were never
charges. There was never a serious attempt to
put "allegations" to Assange and question him -
behaviour that the Swedish Court of Appeal ruled
to be negligent and the General Secretary of the
Swedish Bar Association has since condemned.
Both
the women involved said there was no rape.
Critical written evidence of their text
messages was wilfully withheld from Assange's
lawyers, clearly because it undermined the
"allegations".
One of
the women was so shocked that Assange was
arrested, she accused the police of railroading
her and changing her witness statement. The
chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed the
"suspicion of any crime."
The
Sydney Morning Herald man omits how an ambitious
and compromised politician, Claes Borgstrom,
emerged from behind the liberal facade of
Swedish politics and effectively seized and
revived the case.
Borgstrom enlisted a former political
collaborator, Marianne Ny, as the new
prosecutor. Ny refused to guarantee that Assange
would not be sent on to the United States if he
was extradited to Sweden, even though, as The
Independent reported, "informal discussions have
already taken place between the US and Swedish
officials over the possibility of the WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange being delivered into
American custody, according to diplomatic
sources." This was an open secret in Stockholm.
That libertarian Sweden had a dark, documented
past of rendering people into the hands of the
CIA was not news.
The
silence was broken in 2016 when the United
Nations Working Party on Arbitrary Detention, a
body that decides whether governments are
meeting their human rights obligations, ruled
that Julian Assange was unlawfully detained by
Britain and called on the British government to
set him free.
Both
the governments of Britain and Sweden had taken
part in the UN's investigation, and agreed to
abide by its ruling, which carried the weight of
international law. The British foreign
secretary, Philip Hammond, stood up in
Parliament and abused the UN panel.
The
Swedish case was a fraud from the moment the
police secretly and illegally contacted a
Stockholm tabloid and ignited the hysteria that
was to consume Assange. WikiLeaks' revelations
of America's war crimes had shamed the
hand-maidens of power and its vested interests,
who called themselves journalists; and for this,
the unclubbable Assange would never be forgiven.
It was
now open season. Assange's media tormenters cut
and pasted each other's lies and vituperative
abuse. "He really is the most massive turd,"
wrote the Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore. The
received wisdom was that he had been charged,
which was never true. In my career, reporting
from places of extreme upheaval and suffering
and criminality, I have never known anything
like it.
In
Assange's homeland, Australia, this "mobbing"
reached an apogee. So eager was the Australian
government to deliver its citizen to the United
States that the prime minister in 2013, Julia
Gillard, wanted to take away his passport and
charge him with a crime - until it was pointed
out to her that Assange had committed no crime
and she had no right to take away his
citizenship.
Julia
Gillard, according to the website Honest
History, holds the record for the most
sycophantic speech ever made to the US Congress.
Australia, said she to applause, was America's
"great mate". The great mate colluded with
America in its hunt for an Australian whose
crime was journalism. His right to protection
and proper assistance was denied.
When
Assange's lawyer, Gareth Peirce, and I met two
Australian consular officials in London, we were
shocked that all they knew about the case "is
what we read in the papers".
This
abandonment by Australia was a principal reason
for the granting of political asylum by Ecuador.
As an Australian, I found this especially
shaming.
When
asked about Assange recently, the current
Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said,
"He should face the music". This kind of
thuggery, bereft of any respect for truth and
rights and the principles and law, is why the
mostly Murdoch controlled press in Australia is
now worried about its own future, as the
Guardian is worried, and The New York Times is
worried. Their concern has a name: "the Assange
precedent."
They
know that what happens to Assange can happen to
them. The basic rights and justice denied him
can be denied to them. They have been warned.
All of us have been warned.
Whenever I see Julian in the grim, surreal world
of Belmarsh prison, I am reminded of the
responsibility of those of us who defend him.
There are universal principles at stake in this
case. He himself is fond of saying: "It's not
me. It's far wider."
But at
the heart of this remarkable struggle - and it
is, above all, a struggle - is one human being
whose character, I repeat character, has
demonstrated the most astonishing courage. I
salute him.
This is an edited version of an address John
Pilger gave at the launch in London of In
Defense of Julian Assange, an anthology
published by Or Books, New York.
See
also: www.dontextraditeassange.com
Follow John Pilger on twitter
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