John Pilger: Eyewitness to the Agony of Julian Assange
October 2, 2020
Journalist and filmmaker John Pilger has watched Julian Assanges
extradition trial from the public gallery at Londons Old Bailey. He spoke
with Timothy Erik Ström of Arena magazine, Australia.
Pilger and Assange, London 2011. (Oct. 7, 2011 Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty
Images Europe)
Q: Having watched Julian Assanges trial firsthand, can you describe the
prevailing atmosphere in the court?
The prevailing atmosphere has been shocking. I say that without hesitation;
I have sat in many courts and seldom known such a corruption of due process;
this is due revenge. Putting aside the ritual associated with British
justice, at times it has been evocative of a Stalinist show trial. One
difference is that in the show trials, the defendant stood in the court
proper. In the Assange trial, the defendant was caged behind thick glass,
and had to crawl on his knees to a slit in the glass, overseen by his guard,
to make contact with his lawyers. His message, whispered barely audibly
through face masks, WAS then passed by post-it the length of the court to
where his barristers were arguing the case against his extradition to an
American hellhole.
Consider this daily routine of Julian Assange, an Australian on trial for
truth-telling journalism. He was woken at five oclock in his cell at
Belmarsh prison in the bleak southern sprawl of London. The first time I saw
Julian in Belmarsh, having passed through half an hour of security checks,
including a dogs snout in my rear, I found a painfully thin figure sitting
alone wearing a yellow armband. He had lost more than 10 kilos in a matter
of months; his arms had no muscle. His first words were: I think I am
losing my mind.
I tried to assure him he wasnt. His resilience and courage are formidable,
but there is a limit. That was more than a year ago. In the past three
weeks, in the pre-dawn, he was strip-searched, shackled, and prepared for
transport to the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, in a truck that his
partner, Stella Moris, described as an upended coffin. It had one small
window; he had to stand precariously to look out. The truck and its guards
were operated by Serco, one of many politically connected companies that run
much of Boris Johnsons Britain.
The journey to the Old Bailey took at least an hour and a half. Thats a
minimum of three hours being jolted through snail-like traffic every day. He
was led into his narrow cage at the back of the court, then look up,
blinking, trying to make out faces in the public gallery through the
reflection of the glass. He saw the courtly figure of his dad, John Shipton,
and me, and our fists went up. Through the glass, he reached out to touch
fingers with Stella, who is a lawyer and seated in the body of the court.
We were here for the ultimate of what the philosopher Guy Debord called The
Society of the Spectacle: a man fighting for his life. Yet his crime is to
have performed an epic public service: revealing that which we have a right
to know: the lies of our governments and the crimes they commit in our name.
His creation of WikiLeaks and its failsafe protection of sources
revolutionised journalism, restoring it to the vision of its idealists.
Edmund Burkes notion of free journalism as a fourth estate is now a fifth
estate that shines a light on those who diminish the very meaning of
democracy with their criminal secrecy. Thats why his punishment is so
extreme.
Assange being arrested and removed from Ecuadorian embassy, April 11. 2019.
The sheer bias in the courts I have sat in this year and last year, with
Julian in the dock, blight any notion of British justice. When thuggish
police dragged him from his asylum in the Ecuadorean embassylook closely at
the photo and youll see he is clutching a Gore Vidal book; Assange has a
political humour similar to Vidalsa judge gave him an outrageous 50-week
sentence in a maximum-security prison for mere bail infringement.
For months, he was denied exercise and held in solitary confinement
disguised as heath care. He once told me he strode the length of his cell,
back and forth, back and forth, for his own half-marathon. In the next cell,
the occupant screamed through the night. At first he was denied his reading
glasses, left behind in the embassy brutality. He was denied the legal
documents with which to prepare his case, and access to the prison library
and the use of a basic laptop. Books sent to him by a friend, the journalist
Charles Glass, himself a survivor of hostage-taking in Beirut, were
returned. He could not call his American lawyers. He has been constantly
medicated by the prison authorities. When I asked him what they were giving
him, he couldnt say. The governor of Belmarsh has been awarded the Order of
the British Empire.
At the Old Bailey, one of the expert medical witnesses, Dr Kate Humphrey, a
clinical neuropsychologist at Imperial College, London, described the
damage: Julians intellect had gone from in the superior, or more likely
very superior range to significantly below this optimal level, to the
point where he was struggling to absorb information and perform in the low
average range.
This is what the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Professor Nils
Melzer calls psychological torture, the result of a gang-like mobbing by
governments and their media shills. Some of the expert medical evidence is
so shocking I have no intention of repeating it here. Suffice to say that
Assange is diagnosed with autism and Aspergers syndrome and, according to
Professor Michael Kopelman, one of the worlds leading neuropsychiatrists,
he suffers from suicidal preoccupations and is likely to find a way to
take his life if he is extradited to America.
James Lewis QC, Americas British prosecutor, spent the best part of his
cross-examination of Professor Kopelman dismissing mental illness and its
dangers as malingering. I have never heard in a modern setting such a
primitive view of human frailty and vulnerability.
My own view is that if Assange is freed, he is likely to recover a
substantial part of his life. He has a loving partner, devoted friends and
allies and the innate strength of a principled political prisoner. He also
has a wicked sense of humour.
But that is a long way off. The moments of collusion between the judge a
Gothic-looking magistrate called Vanessa Baraitser, about whom little is
knownand the prosecution acting for the Trump regime have been brazen.
Until the last few days, defence arguments have been routinely dismissed.
The lead prosecutor, James Lewis QC, ex SAS and currently Chief Justice of
the Falklands, by and large gets what he wants, notably up to four hours to
denigrate expert witnesses, while the defences examination is guillotined
at half an hour. I have no doubt, had there been a jury, his freedom would
be assured.
The dissident artist Ai Weiwei came to join us one morning in the public
gallery. He noted that in China the judges decision would already have been
made. This caused some dark ironic amusement. My companion in the gallery,
the astute diarist and former British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:
I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who
for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at
least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own
professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching
a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does
not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I
have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made,
she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments
before her.
I strongly expect the final decision was made in this case even before
opening arguments were received.
The plan of the US Government throughout has been to limit the information
available to the public and limit the effective access to a wider public of
what information is available. Thus we have seen the extreme restrictions on
both physical and video access. A complicit mainstream media has ensured
those of us who know what is happening are very few in the wider
population.
There are few records of the proceedings. They are: Craig Murrays personal
blog, Joe Laurias live reporting on Consortium News, and the World
Socialist Website. American journalist Kevin Gosztolas blog, Shadowproof,
funded mostly by himself, has reported more of the trial than the major US
press and TV, including CNN, combined.
In Australia, Assanges homeland, the coverage follows a familiar formula
set overseas. The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Latika
Bourke, wrote this recently:
The court heard Assange became depressed during the seven years he spent in
the Ecuadorian embassy where he sought political asylum to escape
extradition to Sweden to answer rape and sexual assault charges.
There were no rape and sexual assault charges in Sweden. Bourkes lazy
falsehood is not uncommon. If the Assange trial is the political trial of
the century, as I believe it is, its outcome will not only seal the fate of
a journalist for doing his job but intimidate the very principles of free
journalism and free speech. The absence of serious mainstream reporting of
the proceedings is, at the very least, self-destructive. Journalists should
ask: who is next?
How shaming it all is. A decade ago, The Guardian exploited Assanges work,
claimed its profit and prizes as well as a lucrative Hollywood deal, then
turned on him with venom. Throughout the Old Bailey trial, two names have
been cited by the prosecution, The Guardians David Leigh, now retired as
investigations editor and Luke Harding, the Russiaphobe and author of a
fictional Guardian scoop that claimed Trump adviser Paul Manafort and a
group of Russians visited Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. This never
happened, and The Guardian has yet to apologise. The Harding and Leigh book
on Assangewritten behind their subjects backdisclosed a secret password
to a WikiLeaks file that Assange had entrusted to Leigh during the
Guardians partnership. Why the defence has not called this pair is
difficult to understand.
Assange is quoted in their book declaring during a dinner at a London
restaurant that he didnt care if informants named in the leaks were harmed.
Neither Harding nor Leigh was at the dinner. John Goetz, an investigations
reporter with Der Spiegel, was at the dinner and testified that Assange said
nothing of the kind. Incredibly, Judge Baraitser stopped Goetz actually
saying this in court.
However, the defence has succeeded in demonstrating the extent to which
Assange sought to protect and redact names in the files released by
WikiLeaks and that no credible evidence existed of individuals harmed by the
leaks. The great whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg said that Assange had
personally redacted 15,000 files. The renowned New Zealand investigative
journalist Nicky Hager, who worked with Assange on the Afghanistan and Iraq
war leaks, described how Assange took extraordinary precautions in
redacting names of informants.
Q: What are the implications of this trials verdict for journalism more
broadlyis it an omen of things to come?
The Assange effect is already being felt across the world. If they
displease the regime in Washington, investigative journalists are liable to
prosecution under the 1917 US Espionage Act; the precedent is stark. It
doesnt matter where you are. For Washington, other peoples nationality and
sovereignty rarely mattered; now it does not exist. Britain has effectively
surrendered its jurisdiction to Trumps corrupt Department of Justice. In
Australia, a National Security Information Act promises Kafkaesque trials
for transgressors. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been raided
by police and journalists computers taken away. The government has given
unprecedented powers to intelligence officials, making journalistic
whistle-blowing almost impossible. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says
Assange must face the music. The perfidious cruelty of his statement is
reinforced by its banality.
Evil, wrote Hannah Arendt, comes from a failure to think. It defies
thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine
the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated
because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Q: Having followed the story of WikiLeaks closely for a decade, how has this
eyewitness experience shifted your understanding of whats at stake with
Assanges trial?
I have long been a critic of journalism as an echo of unaccountable power
and a champion of those who are beacons. So, for me, the arrival of
WikiLeaks was exciting; I admired the way Assange regarded the public with
respect, that he was prepared to share his work with the mainstream but
not join their collusive club. This, and naked jealousy, made him enemies
among the overpaid and undertalented, insecure in their pretensions of
independence and impartiality.
I admired the moral dimension to WikiLeaks. Assange was rarely asked about
this, yet much of his remarkable energy comes from a powerful moral sense
that governments and other vested interests should not operate behind walls
of secrecy. He is a democrat. He explained this in one of our first
interviews at my home in 2010.
What is at stake for the rest of us has long been at stake: freedom to call
authority to account, freedom to challenge, to call out hypocrisy, to
dissent. The difference today is that the worlds imperial power, the United
States, has never been as unsure of its metastatic authority as it is today.
Like a flailing rogue, it is spinning us towards a world war if we allow it.
Little of this menace is reflected in the media.
WikiLeaks, on the other hand, has allowed us to glimpse a rampant imperial
march through whole societiesthink of the carnage in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria, Yemen, to name a few, the dispossession of 37 million people
and the deaths of 12 million men, women and children in the war on
terrormost of it behind a façade of deception.
Julian Assange is a threat to these recurring horrorsthats why he is being
persecuted, why a court of law has become an instrument of oppression, why
he ought to be our collective conscience: why we all should be the threat.
The judges decision will be known on the 4th of January.
