Published on
Thursday, September 03, 2020
byCommon Dreams
For Years, Journalists Cheered Assange's Abuse. Now They've Paved His Path
To a US Gulag
Journalists had a chance to join Assange in his struggle to rebuild
journalism. Instead, they fled the battlefield, leaving him as a sacrificial
offering to their corporate masters.
byJonathan Cook
"All indications are that Assange will be extradited to the US to face a
rigged grand jury trial meant to ensure he sees out his days in a
maximum-security prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years," writes
Cook. (Photo: Hollie Adams/Getty Images)
"All indications are that Assange will be extradited to the US to face a
rigged grand jury trial meant to ensure he sees out his days in a
maximum-security prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years," writes
Cook. (Photo: Hollie Adams/Getty Images)
Court hearings in Britain over the US administration's extradition case
against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that
brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our
increasingly fragile freedoms.
A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his liberty for 10 years.
According to UN experts, he has been arbitrarily detained and tortured for
much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless
psychological pressure. He has been bugged and spied on by the CIA during
his time in political asylum, in Ecuador's London embassy, in ways that
violated his most fundamental legal rights. The judge overseeing his
hearings has a serious conflict of interest-with her family embedded in the
UK security services-that she did not declare and which should have required
her to recuse herself from the case.
All indications are that Assange will be extradited to the US to face a
rigged grand jury trial meant to ensure he sees out his days in a
maximum-security prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years.
None of this happened in some Third-World, tinpot dictatorship. It happened
right under our noses, in a major western capital, and in a state that
claims to protect the rights of a free press. It happened not in the blink
of an eye but in slow motion-day after day, week after week, month after
month, year after year.
And once we strip out a sophisticated campaign of character assassination
against Assange by western governments and a compliant media, the sole
justification for this relentless attack on press freedom is that a
49-year-old man published documents exposing US war crimes. That is the
reason-and the only reason-that the US is seeking his extradition and why he
has been languishing in what amounts to solitary confinement in Belmarsh
high-security prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. His lawyers' appeals for
bail have been refused.
Severed head on a pike
While the press corps abandoned Assange a decade ago, echoing official
talking points that pilloried him over toilet hygiene and his treatment of
his cat, Assange is today exactly where he originally predicted he would be
if western governments got their way. What awaits him is rendition to the US
so he can be locked out of sight for the rest of his life.
There were two goals the US and UK set out to achieve through the visible
persecution, confinement, and torture of Assange.
First, he and Wikileaks, the transparency organization he co-founded, needed
to be disabled. Engaging with Wikileaks had to be made too risky to
contemplate for potential whistleblowers. That is why Chelsea Manning-the US
soldier who passed on documents relating to US war crimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan for which Assange now faces extradition-was similarly subjected
to harsh imprisonment. She later faced punitive daily fines while in jail to
pressure her into testifying against Assange.
The aim has been to discredit Wikileaks and similar organizations and stop
them from publishing additional revelatory documents-of the kind that show
western governments are not the "good guys" managing world affairs for the
benefit of mankind, but are in fact highly militarized, global bullies
advancing the same ruthless colonial policies of war, destruction, and
pillage they always pursued.
And second, Assange had to be made to suffer horribly and in public-to be
made an example of-to deter other journalists from ever following in his
footsteps. He is the modern equivalent of a severed head on a pike displayed
at the city gates.
The very obvious fact-confirmed by the media coverage of his case-is that
this strategy, advanced chiefly by the US and UK (with Sweden playing a
lesser role), has been wildly successful. Most corporate media journalists
are still enthusiastically colluding in the vilification of Assange-mainly
at this stage by ignoring his awful plight.
Story hiding in plain sight
When he hurried into Ecuador's embassy back in 2012, seeking political
asylum, journalists from every corporate media outlet ridiculed his
claim-now, of course, fully vindicated-that he was evading US efforts to
extradite him and lock him away for good. The media continued with their
mockery even as evidence mounted that a grand jury had been secretly
convened to draw up espionage charges against him and that it was located in
the eastern district of Virginia, where the major US security and
intelligence services are headquartered. Any jury there is dominated by US
security personnel and their families. His hope of a fair trial was
non-existent.
Instead, we have endured eight years of misdirection by the corporate media
and its willing complicity in his character assassination, which has laid
the ground for the current public indifference to Assange's extradition and
widespread ignorance of its horrendous implications.
Corporate journalists have accepted, entirely at face value, a series of
rationalizations for why the interests of justice have been served by
locking Assange away indefinitely-even before his extradition-and trampling
his most basic legal rights. The other side of the story-Assange's, the
story hiding in plain sight-has invariably been missing from the coverage,
whether it has been CNN, the New York Times, the BBC or the Guardian.
From Sweden to Clinton
First, it was claimed that Assange had fled questioning over sexual assault
allegations in Sweden, even though it was the Swedish authorities who
allowed him to leave; even though the original Swedish prosecutor, Eva
Finne, dismissed the investigation against him, saying "There is no
suspicion of any crime whatsoever," before it was picked up by a different
prosecutor for barely concealed, politicized reasons; and even though
Assange later invited Swedish prosecutors to question him where he was (in
the embassy), an option they regularly agreed to in other cases but
resolutely refused in his.
It was not just that none of these points was ever provided as context for
the Sweden story by the corporate media. Or that much else in Assange's
favor was simply ignored, such as tampered evidence in the case of one of
the two women who alleged sexual assault and the refusal of the other to
sign the rape statement drawn up for her by police.
The story was also grossly and continuously misreported as relating to "rape
charges" when Assange was wanted simply for questioning. No charges were
ever laid against him because the second Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny-and
her British counterparts, including Sir Keir Starmer, then head of the
prosecution service and now leader of the Labour party-seemingly wished to
avoid testing the credibility of their allegations by actually questioning
Assange. Leaving him to rot in a small room in the embassy served their
purposes much better.
When the Sweden case fizzled out-when it became clear that the original
prosecutor had been right to conclude that there was no evidence to justify
further questioning, let alone charges-the political and media class shifted
tack.
Suddenly Assange's confinement was implicitly justified for entirely
different, political reasons - because he had supposedly aided Donald
Trump's presidential election campaign in 2016 by publishing emails,
allegedly "hacked" by Russia, from the Democratic party's servers. The
content of those emails, obscured in the coverage at the time and largely
forgotten now, revealed corruption by Hillary Clinton's camp and efforts to
sabotage the party's primaries to undermine her rival for the presidential
nomination, Bernie Sanders.
Guardian fabricates a smear
Those on the authoritarian right have shown little concern over Assange's
lengthy confinement in the embassy, and later jailing in Belmarsh, for his
exposure of US war crimes, which is why little effort has been expended on
winning them over. The demonization campaign against Assange has focused
instead on issues that are likely to trigger liberals and the left, who
might otherwise have qualms about jettisoning the First Amendment and
locking people up for doing journalism.
Just as the Swedish allegations, despite their non-investigation, tapped
into the worst kind of kneejerk identity politics on the left, the "hacked"
emails story was designed to alienate the Democratic party base.
Extraordinarily, the claim of Russian hacking persists even though years
later-and after a major "Russiagate" inquiry by Robert Mueller-it still
cannot be stood up with any actual evidence. In fact, some of those closest
to the matter, such as former UK ambassador Craig Murray, have insisted all
along that the emails were not hacked by Russia but were leaked by a
disenchanted Democratic party insider.
An even more important point, however, is that a transparency organization
like Wikileaks had no choice, after it was handed those documents, but to
expose abuses by the Democratic party-whoever was the source.
The reason that Assange and Wikileaks became entwined in the Russiagate
fiasco-which wasted the energies of Democratic party supporters on a
campaign against Trump that actually strengthened rather than weakened
him-was because of the credulous coverage, once again, of the issue by
almost the entire corporate media. Liberal outlets like the Guardian
newspaper even went so far as to openly fabricate a story-in which it
falsely reported that a Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and unnamed "Russians"
secretly visited Assange in the embassy-without repercussion or retraction.
Assange's torture ignored
All of this made possible what has happened since. After the Swedish case
evaporated and there were no reasonable grounds left for not letting Assange
walk free from the embassy, the media suddenly decided in chorus that a
technical bail violation was grounds enough for his continuing confinement
in the embassy-or, better still, his arrest and jailing. That breach of
bail, of course, related to Assange's decision to seek asylum in the
embassy, based on a correct assessment that the US planned to demand his
extradition and imprisonment.
None of these well-paid journalists seemed to remember that, in British law,
failure to meet bail conditions is permitted if there is "reasonable
cause"-and fleeing political persecution is very obviously just such a
reasonable cause.
Similarly, the media willfully ignored the conclusions of a report by Nils
Melzer, a Swiss scholar of international law and the United Nations' expert
on torture, that the UK, US, and Sweden had not only denied Assange his
basic legal rights but had colluded in subjecting him to years of
psychological torture - a form of torture, Melzer has pointed out, that was
refined by the Nazis because it was found to be crueler and more effective
at breaking victims than physical torture.
Assange has been blighted by deteriorating health and cognitive decline as a
result, and has lost significant weight. None of that has been deemed worthy
by the corporate media of more than a passing mention-specifically when
Assange's poor health made him incapable of attending a court hearing.
Instead, Melzer's repeated warnings about the abusive treatment of Assange
and its effects on him have fallen on deaf ears. The media has simply
ignored Melzer's findings, as though they were never published, that Assange
has been, and is being, tortured. We need only pause and imagine how much
coverage Melzer's report would have received had it concerned the treatment
of a dissident in an official enemy state like Russia or China.
A power-worshipping media
Last year British police, in coordination with an Ecuador now led by a
president, Lenin Moreno, who craved closer ties with Washington, stormed the
embassy to drag Assange out and lock him up in Belmarsh prison. In their
coverage of these events, journalists again played dumb.
They had spent years first professing the need to "believe women" in the
Assange case, even if it meant ignoring evidence, and then proclaiming the
sanctity of bail conditions, even if they were used simply as a pretext for
political persecution. Now that was all swept aside in an instant. Suddenly
Assange's nine years of confinement over a non-existent sexual assault
investigation and a minor bail infraction were narratively replaced by an
espionage case. And the media lined up against him once again.
A few years ago the idea that Assange could be extradited to the US and
locked up for the rest of his life, his journalism recast as "espionage",
was mocked as so improbable, so outrageously unlawful that no "mainstream"
journalist was prepared to countenance it as the genuine reason for his
seeking asylum in the embassy. It was derided as a figment of the fevered,
paranoid imaginations of Assange and his supporters, and as a self-serving
cover for him to avoid facing the investigation in Sweden.
But when British police invaded the embassy in April last year and arrested
him for extradition to the US on precisely the espionage charges Assange had
always warned were going to be used against him, journalists reported these
developments as though they were oblivious to this backstory. The media
erased this context not least because it would have made them look like
willing dupes of US propaganda, like apologists for US exceptionalism and
lawlessness, and because it would have proved Assange right once more. It
would have demonstrated that he is the real journalist, in contrast to their
pacified, complacent, power-worshipping corporate journalism.
The death of journalism
Right now every journalist in the world ought to be up in arms, protesting
at the abuses Assange is suffering, and has suffered, and the fate he will
endure if extradition is approved. They should be protesting on front pages
and in TV news shows against the endless and blatant abuses of legal process
at Assange's hearings in the British courts, including the gross conflict of
interest of Lady Emma Arbuthnot, the judge overseeing his case.
They should be in uproar at the surveillance the CIA illegally arranged
inside the Ecuadorian embassy while Assange was confined there, nullifying
the already dishonest US case against him by violating his client-lawyer
privilege. They should be expressing outrage at Washington's maneuvers,
accorded a thin veneer of due process by the British courts, designed to
extradite him on espionage charges for doing work that lies at the very
heart of what journalism claims to be-holding the powerful to account.
Journalists do not need to care about Assange or like him. They have to
speak out in protest because approval of his extradition will mark the
official death of journalism. It will mean that any journalist in the world
who unearths embarrassing truths about the US, who discovers its darkest
secrets, will need to keep quiet or risk being jailed for the rest of their
lives.
That ought to terrify every journalist. But it has had no such effect.
Careers and status, not truth
The vast majority of western journalists, of course, never uncover one
significant secret from the centers of power in their entire professional
careers-even those ostensibly monitoring those power centers. These
journalists repackage press releases and lobby briefings, they tap sources
inside government who use them as a conduit to the large audiences they
command, and they relay gossip and sniping from inside the corridors of
power.
That is the reality of access journalism that constitutes 99 percent of what
we call political news.
Nonetheless, Assange's abandonment by journalists-the complete lack of
solidarity as one of their number is persecuted as flagrantly as dissidents
once sent to the gulags-should depress us. It means not only that
journalists have abandoned any pretense that they do real journalism, but
that they have also renounced the aspiration that it be done by anyone at
all.
It means that corporate journalists are ready to be viewed with even greater
disdain by their audiences than is already the case. Because through their
complicity and silence, they have sided with governments to ensure that
anyone who truly holds power to account, like Assange, will end up behind
bars. Their own freedom brands them as a captured elite-irrefutable evidence
that they serve power, they do not confront it.
The only conclusion to be drawn is that corporate journalists care less
about the truth than they do about their careers, their salaries, their
status, and their access to the rich and powerful. As Ed Herman and Noam
Chomsky explained long ago in their book Manufacturing Consent, journalists
join a media class after lengthy education and training processes designed
to weed out those not reliably in sympathy with the ideological interests of
their corporate employers.
A sacrificial offering
Briefly, Assange raised the stakes for all journalists by renouncing their
god-"access"-and their modus operandi of revealing occasional glimpses of
very partial truths offered up by "friendly", and invariably anonymous,
sources who use the media to settle scores with rivals in the centers of
power.
Instead, through whistleblowers, Assange rooted out the unguarded,
unvarnished, full-spectrum truth whose exposure helped no one in power-only
us, the public, as we tried to understand what was being done, and had been
done, in our names. For the first time, we could see just how ugly, and
often criminal, the behavior of our leaders was.
Assange did not just expose the political class, he exposed the media class
too-for their feebleness, for their hypocrisy, for their dependence on the
centers of power, for their inability to criticize a corporate system in
which they were embedded.
Few of them can forgive Assange that crime. Which is why they will be there
cheering on his extradition, if only through their silence. A few liberal
writers will wait till it is too late for Assange, till he has been packaged
up for rendition, to voice half-hearted, mealy-mouthed or agonized columns
arguing that, unpleasant as Assange supposedly is, he did not deserve the
treatment the US has in store for him.
But that will be far too little, far too late. Assange needed solidarity
from journalists and their media organizations long ago, as well as
full-throated denunciations of his oppressors. He and Wikileaks were on the
front line of a war to remake journalism, to rebuild it as a true check on
the runaway power of our governments. Journalists had a chance to join him
in that struggle. Instead, they fled the battlefield, leaving him as a
sacrificial offering to their corporate masters.
