Chris Hedges hits the nail on the head
The Martyrdom of Julian Assange
Chris Hedges
11
April, 2019
The
arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the
rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities,
embraced by the Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the
seizure of Assange are ominous. They presage a world where the
internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially
war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling
elite will be masked from the public. They presage a world where
those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power
will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given
lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an
Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and
entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official
beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our
lives.
Under
what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate
Julian Assange’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under
what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian
Embassy—diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory—to arrest a
naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister
Theresa May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never
committed a crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand
the extradition of Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news
organization is not based in the United States?
I
am sure government attorneys are skillfully doing what has become de
rigueur for the corporate state, using specious legal arguments to
eviscerate enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the
right to privacy with no privacy. This is how we have “free”
elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate
media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a
legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the
legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law.
This is how we have the right to due process with no due process.
This is how we have a government—whose fundamental responsibility
is to protect citizens—that orders and carries out the
assassination of its own citizens such as the radical cleric Anwar
al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press
legally permitted to publish classified information and a publisher
sitting in jail in Britain awaiting extradition to the United States
and a whistleblower, Chelsea Manning, in a jail cell in the United
States.
Britain
will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request
from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in
a functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately,
we no longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if
Britain as well lacks one.
Assange
was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to
Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were
eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he
was put in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United
States. Once he was granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the
British government refused to grant Assange safe passage to the
London airport, trapping him in the embassy for seven years as his
health steadily deteriorated.
The
Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he
conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war
logs obtained by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents
leaked by Manning from the Pentagon and the State Department, along
with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning
down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters
journalists, provided copious evidence of the hypocrisy,
indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies, bribery
and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its
foreign relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks
allowed us to see the inner workings of empire—the most important
role of a press—and for this they became empire’s prey.
U.S.
government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange
from The New York Times and the British newspaper The Guardian, both
of which also published the leaked material from Manning, by
implicating Assange in the theft of the documents. Manning was
repeatedly and often brutally pressured during her detention and
trial to implicate Assange in the seizure of the material, something
she steadfastly refused to do. She is currently in jail because of
her refusal to testify, without her lawyer, in front of the grand
jury assembled for the Assange case. President Barack Obama granted
Manning, who was given a 35-year sentence, clemency after she served
seven years in a military prison.
Once
the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks
were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New
York Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly,
turned on Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material
over several days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda
campaign to discredit Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear
campaign was detailed in a leaked Pentagon document prepared by the
Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008.
The document called on the U.S. to eradicate the “feeling of trust”
that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroy Assange’s
reputation.
Assange,
who with the Manning leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and
criminal manipulations of the George W. Bush administration, soon
earned the ire of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing
70,000 hacked emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) and senior Democratic officials. The emails were copied from
the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
The Podesta emails exposed the donation of millions of dollars from
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of Islamic State, to
the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that Goldman Sachs
paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can only be
considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton’s repeated mendacity. She
was caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites
that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall
Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a
statement that contradicted her campaign statements. It exposed the
Clinton campaign’s efforts to influence the Republican primaries to
ensure that Trump was the Republican nominee. It exposed Clinton’s
advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. It exposed
Clinton as the primary architect of the war in Libya, a war she
believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.
Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs,
should have remained hidden, but they can’t then call themselves
journalists.
The
Democratic leadership, intent on blaming Russia for its election
loss, charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian
government hackers, although James Comey, the former FBI director,
has conceded that the emails were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by
an intermediary. Assange has said the emails were not provided by
“state actors.”
WikiLeaks
has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the
American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the
war logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools
used by the CIA and the National Security Agency and their
interference in foreign elections, including in the French elections.
It disclosed the internal conspiracy against British Labour Party
leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. It intervened
to save Edward Snowden, who made public the wholesale surveillance of
the American public by our intelligence agencies, from extradition to
the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The
Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt
target list.”
A
haggard-looking Assange, as he was dragged out of the embassy by
British police, shook his finger and shouted: “The U.K. must resist
this attempt by the Trump administration. … The U.K. must resist!”
We
all must resist. We must, in every way possible, put pressure on the
British government to halt the judicial lynching of Assange. If
Assange is extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent
that will terminate the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly
has called “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable.
The crimes of war and finance, the persecution of dissidents,
minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by corporations of the
nation and the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working
men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich and consolidate
the global oligarchs’ total grip on power will not only expand, but
will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange. Then us.
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