I began listening to this because I wanted to see if I could send it to my
older daughter who said something the other day which led me to believe that
she believes all the negative things the corporate media have said about
Assange. Sadly, as I listened, I realized that she wouldn't believe a word that
anyone says in this video. She doesn't know or respect the people who are
speaking. And that is why we, the people, are in so much trouble. We are
fragmented. Our perceptions of reality depend on the news sources we consult.
We choose whom to believe, based on preference. Each of us thinks that we are
using the proper criteria to judge whom to believe. My daughter would say,
"Well, what would you expect from my crazy old left wing mother?" I would say,
"My daughter began believing what she heard on tv when she was five or six
years old, and what she heard on tv, reinforced by all of the people around
her, convinced her that her mother, who was already weird because she was
partially blind, probably didn't know anything.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, May 10, 2020 10:45 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Free Julian Assange! Defend Civil Liberties!
https://socialistaction.org/2020/05/09/free-julian-assange-defend-civil-liberties/
Free Julian Assange! Defend Civil Liberties!
May 9, 2020
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We reprint below two speeches from the April 19, 2020 webinar “The Prosecution
of Julian Assange and the Fight for Free Speech”
Watch the webinar here: https://youtu.be/lLIXTfuR3YI You can contribute to ;
Julian Assange’s defense here:
https://defend.wikileaks.org/donate/
The two speeches below are by Joe Lombardo, the National Co-Coordinator of the
United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and Jim Lafferty, the Executive
Director Emeritus of the Los Angles National Lawyers Guild and a board member
of the LA-area ACLU. Attracting thousands of viewers, the event was live
streamed in the U.S. and around the world. Moderated by Jeff Mackler, Steering
Committee member of the newly-constituted Committee to Defend Julian Assange
and Civil Liberties and author of Obama’s National Security State: The Meaning
of the Edward Snowden Revelations, the webinar featured presentations by the
defense committee’s co-chairs, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker and Daniel Ellsberg.
Other speakers were Assange’s London-based attorney, Jennifer Robinson, Nathan
Fuller, Director of the Courage Foundation (formed to defend WikiLeaks founder
Assanage, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers), and Nozomi
Hayase, journalist, liberation psychologist and contributor to the new book, In
Defense of Julian Asssange. The webinar was sponsored by the Committee to
Defend Julian Assange and Civil Liberties, the Courage Foundation, the National
Lawyers Guild and UNAC.
The right to print the truth about U.S. wars By JOE LOMBARDO
Julian Assange’s struggle for free speech and freedom is critically important
for the antiwar movement and for any movement for social change. The right to
speak out and protest is essential to our movements. Julian Assange was doing
just that; he was speaking truth to power and so the powerful U.S. government
seeks to shut him down permanently via burying him in a U.S. prison with a
threatened sentence of 178 years. If they succeed, other journalists who
criticize the U.S.
government – regardless of what country they are from – will fear when they
speak the truth, and so will we.
It was the “collateral murder” video that Chelsea Manning sent to WikiLeaks,
and they published, that enraged the U.S. government the most and made them go
after Assange. I saw that video at the founding conference of the United
National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), where it was shown to the 800 activists
present. It was introduced by Ethan McCord, who was a soldier at the massacre
in Iraq that the video records.
Through that experience, Ethan McCord began questioning the war and later
became a vocal opponent and then a speaker at our antiwar conference.
The video depicts an American helicopter flying above a group of people in
Baghdad. Some were reporters and had cameras, but the Americans did not know
what they were carrying, and so they shot and killed or wounded the whole
group. Taken from the helicopter you can hear the American soldiers laughing
as they shoot and kill the civilians and reporters on the ground. Soon after a
van arrived to try and help the wounded. The soldiers fired on the van, killing
the driver who was the father of two young children who were in the back seat.
The children were both wounded. Soon after American soldiers arrived on foot.
Ethan McCord was one of them. He carried a young girl from the back seat of
the van and had to pull out a piece of glass that was stuck in her eye.
Exposing U.S. war crimes
This was a war crime. It is one of many that the U.S. is responsible for in its
never-ending wars. The U.S. covered it up. They classified the video and made
the entire incident disappear until Chelsea Manning sent the video to WikiLeaks
and they published it.
The U.S. routinely classifies anything that it does not want people to see.
There were no secret military codes or information about maneuvers or secret
weapons. The video just showed a war crime. And war crimes should not be
covered up. War crimes should be exposed. That’s what WikiLeaks, Assange and
Manning did. They provided a necessary service for the people of the world.
They told the truth.
By classifying this video we were all denied our right to know what the U.S.
did and continues to do around the world. The U.S. military, which today
operates in 172 countries, has 20 times the number of foreign military bases
than all other nations in the world combined.
To the warmongers, the truth is a crime and not their illegal and immoral wars.
So, the U.S. has gone after Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning. It can be
expected to do so with regard to all truth tellers.
U.S. war on the truth
This U.S. war on the truth is growing in intensity. Conducted in the name of
“national security” or their phony “war on terrorism,” every form of war is
justified, including overt wars, drone wars, Special Operation wars, death
squad and privatized army wars.
The Telecommunications Act, enacted under the Clinton administration, removed
many of the safeguards that prevented media domination by wealthy right-wing
groups. When we organize in the streets today we are likely told that there is
a police-established “free speech zone” – often a far distance from the event
we are focused on – to which our protest must be confined. The attacks on
Julian Assange come in the context of these ever-escalating assaults on free
speech and democratic rights.
Today we meet virtually via this webinar format because the coronavirus
prevents us from meeting in person. The authoritarian leaders around the world,
including Trump in the U.S. government, are using this crisis to press for
legislation to advance the interests of the wealthy at the expense of working
people. They are establishing new rules with little opposition. These include
attacks on civil liberties. However, the crisis is also creating a new
consciousness among millions of people. When we emerge from today’s necessary
confinement and isolation, we must push back against these new rules and
attacks on civil liberties which the powers that be will seek to make permanent
long after the present
COVID-19 pandemic has passed. We can expect that there will be many more
aroused people ready willing to fight for civil liberties and democratic
rights, for the rights of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and to oppose today’s
endless wars for plunder and profit.
The attack on Assange is an attack on all of us. Recalling the refrain that
helped organize the early labor movement in the U.S., “An injury to one is an
injury to all!” Let’s free Julian Assange
We Must Defend Julian Assange if We Are to Have Freedom of the Press and
Democracy in America By JIM LAFFERTY
Julian Assange is being prosecuted by the United States under the old Espionage
Act, passed during World War I, for use against spies. He is the first
journalist ever charged under that Act. He’s charged with conspiring with
Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs which, among many documents,
contain a video, now known as the “Collateral Murder Video”, showing American
troops committing war crimes, as they gun down 10 Iraqi civilians, including
two children and two Reuters reporters.
In prosecuting Assange for espionage, the Trump Administration has dug deep,
and come up with a buried subsection of the Espionage Act to prosecute anyone
who simply “receives” or “retains” or “possesses national defense information.”
Matt Taibbi, in the new book entitled In Defense of Julian Assange, makes the
point that if the government is allowed to get away with using this tool to
successfully prosecute reporters and publishers, in very short order we will
have no reporters and no publishers.
Shamefully, not all in the U.S. media, or all on the left and in the civil
liberties community, have supported Julian Assange as they should have; have
not understood the threat to themselves, as well as to a free press and the
democracy that depends upon a free press, that is threatened by the prosecution
of Assange. Many on the left have been dissuaded from supporting Assange
because of one or another of the false charges and rumors circulated against
Assange, circulated in some cases by the U.S. government. Hillary Clinton
didn’t lose the 2016 election because of anything Assange did. She lost it
because of what she did not do. And both women involved in that phony,
so-called “Assange sex scandal” months and months ago publically denied that he
ever assaulted them, that their government’s charges were not true!
But what is true, and what should greatly alarm us, is that the Trump
Administration is hell-bound on a campaign to silence any journalists and
publishers who dare to expose the too-many-to-name crimes and corrupt acts of
the U.S. and other western imperialist countries; crimes such as the multitude
of U.S. war crimes in the Middle East disclosed to the public by Julian
Assange, in WikiLeaks!
And what is also true, sisters and brothers, is that our brother Julian Assange
is now facing 175 years in a US prison if he is extradited back to the United
States. Meanwhile, Julian has been locked away for a year in an isolated cell
in England, where, so far, his on-going extradition hearing has made a kangaroo
court look good. His treatment in England, according to the medical doctors who
have examined him, amounts to torture; torture that has taken a grave toll on
Julian, physically and mentally. Locked away in solitary confinement, Julian
can’t even talk to his lawyers for more than 10-minutes at a time…and then with
great difficulty.
Speaking of Julian, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on
torture, says, “In 20 years of working with war victims, violence and political
persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic states unite to
deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for so long a time
and with such little respect for human dignity and status of rights. Julian
Assange’s collective persecution must end here and now!”
And Julian Assange, himself, on May 13 of last year, writing from his horrific
British imprisonment, tells us that, “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 am counting on you and others of
good character to save my life….Truth, ultimately, is all we have.”
And so, sisters and brothers, the question that confronts us today is
this: will we let Julian Assange’s case become a final nail in the coffin of a
free and independent press in America? Or will the almost unimaginable
injustice of his case arouse our justifiable anger and inspire us to fight like
hell to save Julian’s life, as we fight like hell to save freedom of the press?
For without a free press we will never win back our now clearly lost democracy.
And so I urge us to keep reaching out to our sisters and brothers, as we are
today, and tell them the truth about Julian Assange; and, urge them to join the
growing numbers of Assange supporters who are fighting to save Julian Assange’s
life and, even more critical, fighting to save freedom of the press in America;
freedom to write and speak and publish the truth! For Julian is right: truth,
ultimately, is all we have.
Related Articles
NY Free Julian Assange Rally Registers Broad Support April 6, 2020 By MARTY
GOODMAN Feb. 15 was the first large event in New York City calling for freedom
for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who faces 175 years imprisonment under
the Espionage Act of 1917 for exposing U.S. war crimes, torture, and human
rights abuse.
Assange: Empire of Surveillance and Imperialism March 18, 2020 By KATU ARKONADA
The trial against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a perfect metaphor for
how United States imperialism operates in the world today. The Armed
Book Review: The Trials of Julian Assange December 2, 2019 By MICHAEL STEVEN
SMITH Book Review: In Defense of Julian AssangeEdited by Tariq Ali and Margaret
KuntslerPaperback, First Edition, 320 pagesPublished 2019 by OR Books
Whistle-blowing, truth-telling
--
___
Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer.
But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming
naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's
highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker
