February 18, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
On Saturday, there will be a march from Australia
House in London to Parliament Square, the centre of
British democracy. People will carry pictures of the
Australian publisher and journalist Julian Assange
who, on 24 February, faces a court that will decide
whether or not he is to be extradited to the United
States and a living death.
I know Australia House well. As an Australian
myself, I used to go there in my early days in
London to read the newspapers from home. Opened by
King George V over a century ago, its vastness of
marble and stone, chandeliers and solemn portraits,
imported from Australia when Australian soldiers
were dying in the slaughter of the First World War,
have ensured its landmark as an imperial pile of
monumental servility.
As one of the oldest “diplomatic missions” in the
United Kingdom, this relic of empire provides a
pleasurable sinecure for Antipodean politicians: a
“mate” rewarded or a troublemaker exiled.
Known as High Commissioner, the equivalent of an
ambassador, the current beneficiary is George
Brandis, who as Attorney General tried to water down
Australia’s Race Discrimination Act and approved
raids on whistleblowers who had revealed the truth
about Australia’s illegal spying on East Timor
during negotiations for the carve-up of that
impoverished country’s oil and gas.
This led to the prosecution of whistleblowers
Bernard Collaery and “Witness K”, on bogus charges.
Like Julian Assange, they are to be silenced in a
Kafkaesque trial and put away.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
Australia House is the ideal starting point for
Saturday’s march.
“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India,
in 1898, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard
upon which is being played out a great game for the
domination of the world.””
We Australians have been in the service of the
Great Game for a very long time. Having devastated
our Indigenous people in an invasion and a war of
attrition that continues to this day, we have spilt
blood for our imperial masters in China, Africa,
Russia, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. No
imperial adventure against those with whom we have
no quarrel has escaped our dedication.
Deception has been a feature. When Prime Minister
Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam
in the 1960s, he described them as a training team,
requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It
was a lie. A senior official of the Department of
External Affairs wrote secretly that “although we
have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance
was given in response to an invitation by the
government of South Vietnam”, the order came from
Washington.”
Two versions. The lie for us, the truth for them.
As many as four million people died in the Vietnam
war.
When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the
Australian Ambassador, Richard Woolcott, secretly
urged the government in Canberra to “act in a way
which would be designed to minimise the public
impact in Australia and show private understanding
to Indonesia.” In other words, to lie. He alluded
to the beckoning spoils of oil and gas in the Timor
Sea which, boasted Foreign Minister Gareth Evans,
were worth “zillions”.
In the genocide that followed, at least 200,000
East Timorese died. Australia recognised, almost
alone, the legitimacy of the occupation.
When Prime Minister John Howard sent Australian
special forces to invade Iraq with America and
Britain in 2003, he — like George W. Bush and Tony
Blair — lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction. More than a million people died in
Iraq.
WikiLeaks was not the first to call out the
pattern of criminal lying in democracies that remain
every bit as rapacious as in Lord Curzon’s day. The
achievement of the remarkable publishing
organisation founded by Julian Assange has been to
provide the proof.
WikiLeaks has informed us how illegal wars are
fabricated, how governments are overthrown and
violence is used in our name, how we are spied upon
through our phones and screens. The true lies of
presidents, ambassadors, political candidates,
generals, proxies, political fraudsters have been
exposed. One by one, these would-be emperors have
realised they have no clothes.
It has been an unprecedented public service;
above all, it is authentic journalism, whose value
can be judged by the degree of apoplexy of the
corrupt and their apologists.
For example, in 2016, WikiLeaks published the
leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager
John Podesta, which revealed a direct connection
between Clinton, the foundation she shares with her
husband and the funding of organised jihadism in the
Middle East — terrorism.
One email disclosed that Islamic State (ISIS) was
bankrolled by the governments of Saudi Arabia and
Qatar, from which Clinton accepted huge “donations”.
Moreover, as US Secretary of State, she approved the
world’s biggest ever arms sale to her Saudi
benefactors, worth more than $80 billion. Thanks to
her, US arms sales to the world — for use in
stricken countries like Yemen — doubled.
Revealed by WikiLeaks and published in The
New York Times, the Podesta emails triggered a
vituperative campaign against editor-in-chief Julian
Assange, bereft of evidence. He was an “agent of
Russia working to elect Trump”; the nonsensical
“Russiagate” followed. That WikiLeaks had also
published more than 800,000 frequently damning
documents from Russia was ignored.
On an Australian Broadcasting Corporation
programme, Four Corners, in 2017, Clinton
was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson, who began: “No
one could fail to be moved by the pain on your face
at [the moment of Donald Trump’s inauguration] … Do
you remember how visceral it was for you?”
Having established Clinton’s visceral suffering,
the fawning Ferguson described “Russia’s role” and
the “damage done personally to you” by Julian
Assange.
Clinton replied, “He [Assange] is very clearly a
tool of Russian intelligence. And he has done their
bidding.”
Ferguson said to Clinton, “Lots of people,
including in Australia, think that Assange is a
martyr of free speech and freedom of information.
How would you describe him?”
Again, Clinton was allowed to defame Assange — a
“nihilist” in the service of “dictators” — while
Ferguson assured her interviewee she was “the icon
of your generation”.
There was no mention of a leaked document,
revealed by WikiLeaks, called Libya Tick Tock,
prepared for Hillary Clinton, which described her as
the central figure driving the destruction of the
Libyan state in 2011. This resulted in 40,000
deaths, the arrival of ISIS in North Africa and the
European refugee and migrant crisis.
For me, this episode of Clinton’s interview — and
there are many others – vividly illustrates the
division between false and true journalism. On 24
February, when Julian Assange steps into Woolwich
Crown Court, true journalism will be the only crime
on trial.
I am sometimes asked why I have championed
Assange. For one thing, I like and I admire him. He
is a friend with astonishing courage; and he has a
finely honed, wicked sense of humour. He is the
diametric opposite of the character invented then
assassinated by his enemies.
As a reporter in places of upheaval all over the
world, I have learned to compare the evidence I have
witnessed with the words and actions of those with
power. In this way, it is possible to get a sense of
how our world is controlled and divided and
manipulated, how language and debate are distorted
to produce the propaganda of false consciousness.
When we speak about dictatorships, we call this
brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It is a truth
we rarely apply to our own societies, regardless of
the trail of blood that leads back to us and which
never dries.
WikiLeaks has exposed this. That is why Assange
is in a maximum security prison in London facing
concocted political charges in America, and why he
has shamed so many of those paid to keep the record
straight. Watch these journalists now look for cover
as it dawns on them that the American fascists who
have come for Assange may come for them, not least
those on the Guardian who collaborated with
WikiLeaks and won prizes and secured lucrative book
and Hollywood deals based on his work, before
turning on him.
In 2011, David Leigh, the Guardian’s
“investigations editor”, told journalism students at
City University in London that Assange was “quite
deranged”. When a puzzled student asked why, Leigh
replied, “Because he doesn’t understand the
parameters of conventional journalism”.
But it’s precisely because he did understand that
the “parameters” of the media often shielded vested
and political interests and had nothing to do with
transparency that the idea of WikiLeaks was so
appealing to many people, especially the young,
rightly cynical about the so-called “mainstream”.
Leigh mocked the very idea that, once extradited,
Assange would end up “wearing an orange jumpsuit”.
These were things, he said, “that he and his lawyer
are saying in order to feed his paranoia”.
The current US charges against Assange centre on
the Afghan Logs and Iraq Logs, which the Guardian published
and Leigh worked on, and on the Collateral Murder
video showing an American helicopter crew gunning
down civilians and celebrating the crime. For this
journalism, Assange faces 17 charges of “espionage”
which carry prison sentences totalling 175 years.
Whether or not his prison uniform will be an
“orange jumpsuit”, US court files seen by Assange’s
lawyers reveal that, once extradited, Assange will
be subject to Special Administrative Measures, known
as SAMS. A 2017 report by Yale University Law
School and the Center for Constitutional Rights
described SAMS as “the darkest corner of the US
federal prison system” combining “the brutality and
isolation of maximum security units with additional
restrictions that deny individuals almost any
connection to the human world … The net effect is to
shield this form of torture from any real public
scrutiny.”
That Assange has been right all along, and
getting him to Sweden was a fraud to cover an
American plan to “render” him, is finally becoming
clear to many who swallowed the incessant
scuttlebutt of character assassination. “I speak
fluent Swedish and was able to read all the original
documents,” Nils Melzer, the United Nations
Rapporteur on Torture, said recently, “I could
hardly believe my eyes. According to the testimony
of the woman in question, a rape had never taken
place at all. And not only that: the woman’s
testimony was later changed by the Stockholm Police
without her involvement in order to somehow make it
sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents
in my possession, the emails, the text messages.”
Keir Starmer is currently running for election as
leader of the Labour Party in Britain. Between 2008
and 2013, he was Director of Public Prosecutions and
responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service.
According to Freedom of Information searches by the
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, Sweden tried to
drop the Assange case in 2011, but a CPS official in
London told the Swedish prosecutor not to treat it
as “just another extradition”.
In 2012, she received an email from the CPS:
“Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!” Other CPS emails
were either deleted or redacted. Why? Keir Starmer
needs to say why.
At the forefront of Saturday’s march will be John
Shipton, Julian’s father, whose indefatigable
support for his son is the antithesis of the
collusion and cruelty of the governments of
Australia, our homeland.
The roll call of shame begins with Julia
Gillard, the Australian Labor prime minister who, in
2010, wanted to criminalise WikiLeaks, arrest
Assange and cancel his passport– until the
Australian Federal Police pointed out that no law
allowed this and that Assange had committed no
crime.
While falsely claiming to give him consular
assistance in London, it was the Gillard
government’s shocking abandonment of its citizen
that led to Ecuador granting political asylum to
Assange in its London embassy.
In a subsequent speech before the US Congress,
Gillard, a favourite of the US embassy in Canberra,
broke records for sycophancy (according to the
website Honest History) as she declared, over and
again, the fidelity of America’s “mates Down Under”.
Today, while Assange waits in his cell, Gillard
travels the world, promoting herself as a feminist
concerned about “human rights”, often in tandem with
that other right-on feminist Hillary Clinton.
The truth is that Australia could have rescued
Julian Assange and can still rescue him.
In 2010, I arranged to meet a prominent Liberal
(Conservative) Member of Parliament, Malcolm
Turnbull. As a young barrister in the 1980s,
Turnbull had successfully fought the British
Government’s attempts to prevent the publication of
the book, Spycatcher, whose author Peter
Wright, a spy, had exposed Britain’s “deep state”.
We talked about his famous victory for free
speech and publishing and I described the
miscarriage of justice awaiting Assange — the fraud
of his arrest in Sweden and its connection with an
American indictment that tore up the US Constitution
and the rule of international law.
Turnbull appeared to show genuine interest and an
aide took extensive notes. I asked him to deliver a
letter to the Australian government from Gareth
Peirce, the renowned British human rights lawyer who
represents Assange.
In the letter, Peirce wrote, “Given the extent of
the public discussion, frequently on the basis of
entirely false assumptions… it is very hard to
attempt to preserve for [Julian Assange] any
presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now
hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of
potential extradition to two different jurisdictions
in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of
which are crimes in his own country, and that his
personal safety has become at risk in circumstances
that are highly politically charged.”
Turnbull promised to deliver the letter, follow
it through and let me know. I subsequently wrote to
him several times, waited and heard nothing.
In 2018, John Shipton wrote a deeply moving
letter to the then prime minister of Australia
asking him to exercise the diplomatic power at his
government’s disposal and bring Julian home. He
wrote that he feared that if Julian was not rescued,
there would be a tragedy and his son would die in
prison. He received no reply. The prime minister was
Malcolm Turnbull.
Last year, when the current prime minister, Scott
Morrison, a former public relations man, was asked
about Assange, he replied in his customary way, “He
should face the music!”
When Saturday’s march reaches the Houses of
Parliament, said to be “the Mother of Parliaments”,
Morrison and Gillard and Turnbull and all those who
have betrayed Julian Assange should be called out;
history and decency will not forget them or those
who remain silent now.
And if there is any sense of justice left in the
land of Magna Carta, the travesty that is the case
against this heroic Australian must be thrown out.
Or beware, all of us.
The march on Saturday, 22 February begins
at Australia House in Aldwych, London WC2B 4LA, at
12.30pm: assemble at 11.30pm
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
