Socialist Action / 1 day ago
By MICHAEL STEVEN SMITH
Book Review: In Defense of Julian Assange
Edited by Tariq Ali and Margaret Kuntsler
Paperback, First Edition, 320 pages
Published 2019 by OR Books
Whistle-blowing, truth-telling journalist and WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange now sits in solitary confinement in London‘s infamous Belmarsh
prison. The Trump administration has asked that he be extradited to
Virginia for trial as a spy.
The just-published book In Defense of Julian Assange demonstrates
convincingly that what is at stake in his upcoming trial is the future
of free journalism, here and abroad. It is edited by British socialist
scholar and writer Tariq Ali and civil rights attorney Margaret Kuntsler.
Assange is an Australian citizen. He never set foot in the United
States. He never published untruthful materials. Yet the Trump
administration wants to reach across the ocean, have him extradited to
the United States, try him and put him in solitary in a maximum-security
prison for the rest of his life. If the government can get away with
this, it will have established a precedent that could lead to the
destruction of free journalism. It is the most significant challenge to
a free press in our lifetimes.
Assange faces a 175-year sentence under the century-old Espionage Act,
passed during World War I to be used against spies. He is charged with
conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War Logs, the
Afghanistan War Logs, and State Department cables that embarrassed U.S.
diplomats around the world and helped spark a 2011 revolt in Tunisia
that was the beginning of the Arab Spring.
Former CIA director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has
called WikiLeaks a “non-state intelligence service.” Hillary Clinton
wanted Assange assassinated by drone. The United Nations special
rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer recently visited him in prison and
concluded that he was being tortured. When he last appeared in court, he
was incoherent and couldn’t remember his name or date of birth.
Julian Assange is not getting the support he needs. Too many
progressive-minded people have been taken in by government propaganda
about him. He detests Hillary Clinton, but many people think he
supported Trump in the last election. In truth, Assange said it’s “a
choice between cholera and gonorrhea.” He insists he did not collaborate
with Russia to help Trump and rape charges against him in Sweden have
been dropped by the prosecutor in that case.
The great human rights attorney and president of the Center for
Constitutional Rights Michael Ratner represented Assange, who was his
last client. Michael died in 2016. Heidi Boghosian, myself and Michael
used to record our WBAI radio show Law And Disorder in the ante-room
outside of Michael’s office in the basement of his home in the Village.
Assange would often call. Michael had a secure encrypted telephone
installed to speak with Assange who had received political asylum in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
We knew what the United States would do if it got its hands on him.
Michael wrote at the time that “if there is one take away from the
shared experience in truth-telling and courage, it is a note of extreme
caution: never doubt the mendacity and cruelty of the state. It will
make pariahs and outcasts of those who will someday be recognized as
heroes.“
The United States claims the right to snatch Assange up in England and
drag him into court in the Eastern District of Virginia where the
evidence he needs to use in his defense will be barred and where the bar
for conviction is low.
Three years after the Bush administration commenced the illegal,
catastrophic war against Iraq, Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006. A
computer genius, Assange devised a way for publishers to receive leaked
materials anonymously. That year, he published his first bombshell, a
shocking video obtained from whistleblower Chelsea Manning who was then
in the military.
The video showed U.S. soldiers in a helicopter committing a war crime,
gunning down and executing almost a dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians in the
streets of Baghdad, including several children and two Reuters
journalists. The soldiers can be heard chuckling about it. A photo of
the murders is shown on In Defense’s cover.
The video, which offered an unvarnished glimpse into the casual
brutality and racism of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, made headlines
around the world, much to the chagrin of U.S. leaders. More embarrassing
leaks followed, and the government undertook a years-long campaign to
close down WikiLeaks.
It has successfully poisoned a lot of people’s minds against Assange,
first smearing him as a rapist and then a Trump supporter responsible
for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. The editors write of a decade-long
character assassination campaign: “The US espionage indictment against
Assange shows that he has been the victim of psychological operation
warfare — rumor, dis-information, and false news — designed to destroy
his reputation and defame his character.“
The people at the helm of the U.S. disinformation and propaganda machine
figured character assassination is just as effective as a bullet to the
back of the head. The smears against him are blown out of the water in
this book.
In Defense is being published by OR Books at the initiative of its
co-founder and editor Colin Robinson and with the support of the Courage
Foundation. It consists of a powerful introduction by the editors
followed by 38 essays, many of them commissioned for the book.
Some of the authors — Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi — are well
known and all are knowledgeable. Jen Robinson the London human rights
barrister is currently Julian’s attorney. She contributes an essay. So
does Ai Weiwei, the internationally-acclaimed Chinese contemporary
artist, activist and dissident, who visited Julian in prison, and
Margaret Kimberly, an editor and senior columnist at Black Agenda Report.
The editors wisely chose to include the indictment of Julian Assange.
Reading it is chilling. The 18-count indictment includes conspiracy to
receive national defense information, obtaining national defense
information, disclosure of national defense information, and computer
intrusion. None of it has anything to do with Sweden, rape charges or
the last U.S. election.
Until now it has been legal for a publisher to publish truthful
information no matter how she or he got it. (Chelsea Manning sits in
jail as of this writing because she will not give further testimony to a
grand jury on the subject. She had previously served seven years in
prison after pleading guilty to furnishing materials to WikiLeaks.) That
was the precedent set in 1971 in the famous New York Times case when
Daniel Ellsberg gave the Pentagon papers to the newspaper and they
published it showing the criminality of the war in Vietnam. Attorney Jim
Goodale was the chief attorney for the Times back then. He is a vigorous
supporter of Assange.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has promised he would deny the U.S.
request for Assange’s extradition if elected prime minister on Dec. 12.
His shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said in Parliament on the day of
Assange’s arrest that it was his “whistle-blowing activity [against]
illegal wars, mass murder, murder of civilians and corruption on a grand
scale that has put Julian Assange in the crosshairs of the U.S.
administration.”
In a letter from his highly restrictive confinement in Belmarsh Prison,
Assange wrote on May 13, 2019: “I am unbroken, albeit literally
surrounded by murderers, but the days when I could read and speak and
organize to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over until I am
free! Everyone else must take my place. I am defenseless and I am
counting on you and others of good character to save my life… Truth,
ultimately, is all we have.“
(You can purchase “In Defense of Julian Assange” at orbooks.com. All
royalties go to The Courage Foundation which supports Assange and others
like him.)
Reprinted with permission from The Indypendent, NYC’s radical newspaper.
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December 2, 2019 in Uncategorized.
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Free Julian Assange! Defend freedom of the press!
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Carl Sagan
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind
and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says
everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the
fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
