Mr. Fish did the cartoon which didn't get transferred when I pasted the
article into a plain text email. I guess I should have just deleted his name,
along with all of the stuff above the title.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2018 12:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Crucifying Julian Assange
So who wrote this piece, Mr. Fish, or Chris Hedges. Fish's name is at the top,
Hedges at the bottom.
Either way, it's a good piece; I'd just like to know who deserves the credit.
I suspect Hedges, since Mr. Fish isn't a proper byline.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2018 9:26 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Crucifying Julian Assange
From Truthdig
Crucifying Julian Assange
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Julian Assange’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been
transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from
communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His Ecuadorian
citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the process of being
revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical care. His efforts
for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules, including Ecuadorian
orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside the embassy in fighting
revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf of
Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in Ecuador, led
by Lenín Moreno—who calls Assange an “inherited problem” and an impediment to
better relations with Washington—is making the WikiLeaks founder’s life in the
embassy unbearable. Almost daily, the embassy is imposing harsher conditions
for Assange, including making him pay his medical bills, imposing arcane rules
about how he must care for his cat and demanding that he perform a variety of
demeaning housekeeping chores.
The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political asylum
and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so unpleasant he
will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British and extradited to
the United States. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, whose
government granted the publisher political asylum, describes Assange’s current
living conditions as “torture.”
His mother, Christine Assange, said in a recent video appeal, “Despite Julian
being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for
courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the public
interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain—silenced in solitary
confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of
London. The modern-day cage of political prisoners is no longer the Tower of
London. It’s the Ecuadorian Embassy.”
“Here are the facts,” she went on. “Julian has been detained nearly eight years
without charge. That’s right. Without charge. For the past six years, the U.K.
government has refused his request for access to basic health needs, fresh air,
exercise, sunshine for vitamin D and access to proper dental and medical care.
As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated.
His examining doctors warned his detention conditions are life-threatening.
A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes in the
embassy in London.”
“In 2016, after an in-depth investigation, the United Nations ruled that
Julian’s legal and human rights have been violated on multiple occasions,”
she said. “He’d been illegally detained since 2010. And they ordered his
immediate release, safe passage and compensation. The U.K. government refused
to abide by the U.N.’s decision. The U.S. government has made Julian’s arrest a
priority. They want to get around a U.S. journalist’s protection under the
First Amendment by charging him with espionage. They will stop at nothing to do
it.”
“As a result of the U.S. bearing down on Ecuador, his asylum is now under
immediate threat,” she said. “The U.S. pressure on Ecuador’s new president
resulted in Julian being placed in a strict and severe solitary confinement for
the last seven months, deprived of any contact with his family and friends.
Only his lawyers could see him. Two weeks ago, things became substantially
worse. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, who rightfully gave
Julian political asylum from U.S. threats against his life and liberty,
publicly warned when U.S. Vice President Mike Pence recently visited Ecuador a
deal was done to hand Julian over to the U.S. He stated that because of the
political costs of expelling Julian from their embassy was too high, the plan
was to break him down mentally. A new, impossible, inhumane protocol was
implemented at the embassy to torture him to such a point that he would break
and be forced to leave.”
Assange was once feted and courted by some of the largest media organizations
in the world, including The New York Times and The Guardian, for the
information he possessed. But once his trove of material documenting U.S. war
crimes, much of it provided by Chelsea Manning, was published by these media
outlets he was pushed aside and demonized. A leaked Pentagon document prepared
by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated March 8, 2008,
exposed a black propaganda campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and Assange. The
document said the smear campaign should seek to destroy the “feeling of trust”
that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and blacken Assange’s reputation. It
largely has worked. Assange is especially vilified for publishing 70,000 hacked
emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior
Democratic officials. The Democrats and former FBI Director James Comey say the
emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Democratic candidate
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, by Russian government hackers. Comey has
said the messages were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary.
Assange has said the emails were not provided by “state actors.”
The Democratic Party—seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian
“interference” rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of the
working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and the
corporate coup d’état that the party helped orchestrate—attacks Assange as a
traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not bound by
any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not committed a
crime. Now, stories in newspapers that once published material from WikiLeaks
focus on his allegedly slovenly behavior—not evident during my visits with
him—and how he is, in the words of The Guardian, “an unwelcome guest” in the
embassy. The vital issue of the rights of a publisher and a free press is
ignored in favor of snarky character assassination.
Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to
Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense charges that were eventually
dropped. Assange feared that once he was in Swedish custody he would be
extradited to the United States. The British government has said that, although
he is no longer wanted for questioning in Sweden, Assange will be arrested and
jailed for breaching his bail conditions if he leaves the embassy.
WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes
of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition
to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in
our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made
public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency,
their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections,
including in the French elections. He disclosed the conspiracy against British
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour members of Parliament. And
WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale
surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the
United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks
also revealed, ominously, that Assange was on a U.S. “manhunt target list.”
What is happening to Assange should terrify the press. And yet his plight is
met with indifference and sneering contempt. Once he is pushed out of the
embassy, he will be put on trial in the United States for what he published.
This will set a new and dangerous legal precedent that the Trump administration
and future administrations will employ against other publishers, including
those who are part of the mob trying to lynch Assange.
The silence about the treatment of Assange is not only a betrayal of him but a
betrayal of the freedom of the press itself. We will pay dearly for this
complicity.
Even if the Russians provided the Podesta emails to Assange, he should have
published them. I would have. They exposed practices of the Clinton political
machine that she and the Democratic leadership sought to hide. In the two
decades I worked overseas as a foreign correspondent I was routinely leaked
stolen documents by organizations and governments. My only concern was whether
the documents were forged or genuine. If they were genuine, I published them.
Those who leaked material to me included the rebels of the Farabundo Marti
National Liberation Front (FMLN); the Salvadoran army, which once gave me
blood-smeared FMLN documents found after an ambush; the Sandinista government
of Nicaragua; the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad; the Federal Bureau
of Investigation; the Central Intelligence Agency; the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK) rebel group; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the French
intelligence service, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, or DGSE;
and the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosovic, who was later tried as a war
criminal.
We learned from the emails published by WikiLeaks that the Clinton Foundation
received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major
funders of Islamic State. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton paid her
donors back by approving $80 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, enabling
the kingdom to carry out a devastating war in Yemen that has triggered a
humanitarian crisis, including widespread food shortages and a cholera
epidemic, and left close to 60,000 dead. We learned Clinton was paid $675,000
for speaking at Goldman Sachs, a sum so massive it can only be described as a
bribe. We learned Clinton told the financial elites in her lucrative talks that
she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed Wall Street executives
were best-positioned to manage the economy, a statement that directly
contradicted her campaign promises. We learned the Clinton campaign worked to
influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Donald Trump was the
Republican nominee. We learned Clinton obtained advance information on
primary-debate questions. We learned, because 1,700 of the
33,000 emails came from Hillary Clinton, she was the primary architect of the
war in Libya. We learned she believed that the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi
would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate. The war she sought
has left Libya in chaos, seen the rise to power of radical jihadists in what is
now a failed state, triggered a massive exodus of migrants to Europe, seen
Libyan weapon stockpiles seized by rogue militias and Islamic radicals
throughout the region, and resulted in 40,000 dead.
Should this information have remained hidden from the American public? You can
argue yes, but you can’t then call yourself a journalist.
“They are setting my son up to give them an excuse to hand him over to the
U.S., where he would face a show trial,” Christine Assange warned. “Over the
past eight years, he has had no proper legal process. It has been unfair at
every single turn with much perversion of justice. There is no reason to
consider that this would change in the future. The U.S. WikiLeaks grand jury,
producing the extradition warrant, was held in secret by four prosecutors but
no defense and no judge. The U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty allows for the U.K.
to extradite Julian to the U.S. without a proper basic case. Once in the U.S.,
the National Defense Authorization Act allows for indefinite detention without
trial. Julian could very well be held in Guantanamo Bay and tortured, sentenced
to 45 years in a maximum-security prison, or face the death penalty. My son is
in critical danger because of a brutal, political persecution by the bullies in
power whose crimes and corruption he had courageously exposed when he was
editor in chief of WikiLeaks.”
Assange is on his own. Each day is more difficult for him. This is by design.
It is up to us to protest. We are his last hope, and the last hope, I fear, for
a free press.
“We need to make our protest against this brutality deafening,” his mother
said. “I call on all you journalists to stand up now because he’s your
colleague and you are next. I call on all you politicians who say you entered
politics to serve the people to stand up now. I call on all you activists who
support human rights, refugees, the environment, and are against war, to stand
up now because WikiLeaks has served the causes that you spoke for and Julian is
now suffering for it alongside of you. I call on all citizens who value
freedom, democracy and a fair legal process to put aside your political
differences and unite, stand up now. Most of us don’t have the courage of our
whistleblowers or journalists like Julian Assange who publish them, so that we
may be informed and warned about the abuses of power.”
Chris Hedges
