The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who
has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been
denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be
facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the
publisherthe maniacal goal of the U.S. governmentwould set a legal
precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation
of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason.
It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites. If
Assange is extradited to the United States and sentenced, The New York
Times, The Washington Post and every other media organization, no matter how
tepid their coverage of the corporate state, would be subject to the same
draconian censorship. Under the precedent set, Donald Trumps Supreme Court
would enthusiastically uphold the arrest and imprisonment of any publisher,
editor or reporter in the name of national security.
There are growing signs that the Ecuadorean government of Lenín Moreno is
preparing to evict Assange and turn him over to British police. Moreno and
his foreign minister, José Valencia, have confirmed they are in negotiations
with the British government to resolve the fate of Assange. Moreno, who
will visit Britain in a few weeks, calls Assange an inherited problem and
a stone in the shoe and has referred to him as a hacker. It appears that
under a Moreno government Assange is no longer welcome in Ecuador. His only
hope now is safe passage to his native Australia or another country willing
to give him asylum.
Ecuador has been looking for a solution to this problem, Valencia
commented on television. The refuge is not forever, you cannot expect it to
last for years without us reviewing this situation, including because this
violates the rights of the refugee.
Morenos predecessor as president, Rafael Correa, who granted Assange asylum
in the embassy and made him an Ecuadorean citizen last year, warned that
Assanges days were numbered. He charged that Morenowho cut off Assanges
communications the day after Moreno welcomed a delegation from the U.S.
Southern Commandwould throw him out of the embassy at the first pressure
from the United States.
Assange, who reportedly is in ill health, took asylum in the embassy to
avoid extradition to Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense
charges. He feared that once in Swedish custody for these charges, which he
said were false, he would be extradited to the United States. The Swedish
prosecutors office ended its investigation and extradition request to
Britain in May 2017 and did not file sexual offense charges against Assange.
But the British government said Assange would nevertheless be arrested and
jailed for breaching his bail conditions.
The persecution of Assange is part of a broad assault against
anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist news organizations. The ruling elites,
who refuse to accept responsibility for profound social inequality or the
crimes of empire, have no ideological veneer left to justify their greed,
ineptitude and pillage. Global capitalism and its ideological justification,
neoliberalism, are discredited as forces for democracy and the equitable
distribution of wealth. The corporate-controlled economic and political
system is as hated by right-wing populists as it is by the rest of the
population. This makes the critics of corporatism and
imperialismjournalists, writers, dissidents and intellectuals already
pushed to the margins of the media landscapedangerous and it makes them
prime targets. Assange is at the top of the list.
I took part with dozens of others, including Daniel Ellsberg, William
Binney, Craig Murray, Peter Van Buren, Slavoj Zizek, George Galloway and
Cian Westmoreland, a week ago in a 36-hour international online vigil
demanding freedom for the WikiLeaks publisher. The vigil was organized by
the New Zealand Internet Party leader Suzie Dawson. It was the third Unity4J
vigil since all of Assanges communication with the outside world was
severed by the Ecuadorean authorities and visits with him were suspended in
March, part of the increased pressure the United States has brought on the
Ecuadorean government. Assange has since March been allowed to meet only
with his attorneys and consular officials from the Australian Embassy.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled Friday that those seeking
political asylum have the right to take refuge in embassies and diplomatic
compounds. The court stated that governments are obliged to provide safe
passage out of the country to those granted asylum. The ruling did not name
Assange, but it was a powerful rebuke to the British government, which has
refused to allow the WikiLeaks co-founder safe passage to the airport.
The ruling elites no longer have a counterargument to their critics. They
have resorted to cruder forms of control. These include censorship, slander
and character assassination (which in the case of Assange has sadly been
successful), blacklisting, financial strangulation, intimidation,
imprisonment under the Espionage Act and branding critics and dissidents as
agents of a foreign power and purveyors of fake news. The corporate media
amplifies these charges, which have no credibility but which become part of
the common vernacular through constant repetition. The blacklisting,
imprisonment and deportation of tens of thousands of people of conscience
during the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s are back with a vengeance. It
is a New McCarthyism.
Did Russia attempt to influence the election? Undoubtedly. This is what
governments do. The United States interfered in 81 elections from 1945 to
2000, according to professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University. His
statistics do not include the numerous coups we orchestrated in countries
such as Greece, Iran, Guatemala and Chile or the disastrous Bay of Pigs
invasion in Cuba. We indirectly bankrolled the re-election campaign of
Russias buffoonish Boris Yeltsin to the tune of $2.5 billion.
But did Russia, as the Democratic Party establishment claims, swing the
election to Trump? No. Trump is not Vladimir Putins puppet. He is part of
the wave of right-wing populists, from Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson in
Britain to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who have harnessed the rage and
frustration born of an economic and political system dominated by global
capitalism and under which the rights and aspirations of working men and
women do not matter.
The Democratic Party establishment, like the liberal elites in most of the
rest of the industrialized world, would be swept from power in an open
political process devoid of corporate money. The party elite, including
Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, is a creation of the corporate state.
Campaign finance and electoral reform are the last things the party
hierarchy intends to champion. It will not call for social and political
programs that will alienate its corporate masters. This myopia and naked
self-interest may ensure a second term for Donald Trump; it may further
empower the lunatic fringe that is loyal to Trump; it may continue to erode
the credibility of the political system. But the choice before the
Democratic Party elites is clear: political oblivion or enduring the rule of
a demagogue. They have chosen the latter. They are not interested in reform.
They are determined to silence anyone, like Assange, who exposes the rot
within the ruling class.
The Democratic Party establishment benefits from our system of legalized
bribery. It benefits from deregulating Wall Street and the fossil fuel
industry. It benefits from the endless wars. It benefits from the
curtailment of civil liberties, including the right to privacy and due
process. It benefits from militarized police. It benefits from austerity
programs. It benefits from mass incarceration. It is an enabler of tyranny,
not an impediment.
Demagogues like Trump, Farage and Johnson, of course, have no intention of
altering the system of corporate pillage. Rather, they accelerate the
pillage, which is what happened with the passage of the massive U.S. tax cut
for corporations. They divert the publics anger toward demonized groups
such as Muslims, undocumented workers, people of color, liberals,
intellectuals, artists, feminists, the LGBT community and the press. The
demonized are blamed for the social and economic dysfunction, much as Jews
were falsely blamed for Germanys defeat in World War I and the economic
collapse that followed. Corporations such as Goldman Sachs, in the midst of
the decay, continue to make a financial killing.
The corporate titans, who often come out of elite universities and are
groomed in institutions like Harvard Business School, find these demagogues
crude and vulgar. They are embarrassed by their imbecility, megalomania and
incompetence. But they endure their presence rather than permit socialists
or leftist politicians to impede their profits and divert government
spending to social programs and away from weapons manufacturers, the
military, private prisons, big banks and hedge funds, the fossil fuel
industry, charter schools, private paramilitary forces, private intelligence
companies and other pet programs designed to allow corporations to
cannibalize the state.
The irony is that there was serious meddling in the presidential election,
but it did not come from Russia. The Democratic Party, outdoing any of the
dirty tricks employed by Richard Nixon, purged hundreds of thousands of
primary voters from the rolls, denied those registered as independents the
right to vote in primaries, used superdelegates to swing the vote to Hillary
Clinton, hijacked the Democratic National Committee to serve the Clinton
campaign, controlled the message of media outlets such as MSNBC and The New
York Times, stole the Nevada caucus, spent hundreds of millions of dollars
of dark corporate money on the Clinton campaign and fixed the primary
debates. This meddling, which stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, who
probably could have defeated Trump, is unmentioned. The party hierarchy will
do nothing to reform its corrupt nominating process.
WikiLeaks exposed much of this corruption when it published tens of
thousands of messages hacked from Clinton campaign chairman John Podestas
email account. The messages brought to light the efforts by the Democratic
Party leadership to thwart the nomination of Sanders, and they disclosed
Clintons close ties with Wall Street, including her lucrative Wall Street
speeches. They also raised serious questions about conflicts of interest
with the Clinton Foundation and whether Clinton received advance information
on primary-debate questions.
The Democratic National Committee, for this reason, is leading the Russia
hysteria and the persecution of Assange. It filed a lawsuit that names
WikiLeaks and Assange as co-conspirators with Russia and the Trump campaign
in an alleged effort to steal the presidential election.
But it is not only Assange and WikiLeaks that are being attacked as Russian
pawns. For example, The Washington Post, which has sided with the Democratic
Party in the war against Trump, without critical analysis published a report
on a blacklist posted by the anonymous website PropOrNot. The blacklist was
composed of 199 sites that PropOrNot alleged, with no evidence, reliably
echo Russian propaganda. More than half of those sites were far-right,
conspiracy-driven ones. But about 20 of the sites were major progressive
outlets including AlterNet, Black Agenda Report, Democracy Now!, Naked
Capitalism, Truthdig, Truthout, CounterPunch and the World Socialist Web
Site. PropOrNot, short for Propaganda or Not, accused these sites of
disseminating fake news on behalf of Russia. The Posts headline was
unequivocal: Russian propaganda effort helped spread fake news during the
election, experts say.
In addition to offering no evidence, PropOrNot never even disclosed who ran
the website. Even so, its charge was used to justify the imposition of
algorithms by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon to direct traffic away
from the targeted sites. These algorithms, or filters, overseen by thousands
of evaluators, many hired from the military and security and surveillance
apparatus, hunt for keywords such as U.S. military, inequality and
socialism, along with personal names such as Julian Assange and Laura
Poitras. These keywords are known as impressions. Before the imposition of
the algorithms, a reader could type in the name Julian Assange and be
directed to an article on one of these targeted sites. After the algorithms
were put in place, these impressions directed readers only to mainstream
sites such as The Washington Post. Referral traffic from these impressions
at most of the targeted sites has plummeted, often by more than half.
Challenged by these algorithms and the abolition of net neutrality, these
sites will be pushed further and further to the outer reaches of the media.
Any news or media outlet that addresses the reality of our failed democracy
and exposes the crimes of empire will be targeted. The January 2017 Director
of National Intelligence Report spent seven pages on RT America, where I
have a show, On Contact. The report does not accuse RT America of
disseminating Russian propaganda, but it does allege the network exploits
divisions within American society by giving airtime to dissidents and
critics including whistleblowers, anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, Black
Lives Matter activists, anti-fracking campaigners and the third-party
candidates the establishment is seeking to mute.
If the United States had a public broadcasting system free from corporate
money or a commercial press that was not under corporate control, these
dissident voices would be included in the mainstream discourse. But we
dont. Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm X, Sheldon Wolin, Ralph Nader,
James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Angela Davis and Edward Said once appeared
regularly on public broadcasting. Now critics like these are banned,
replaced with vapid courtiers such as columnist David Brooks. RT America was
forced to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). This act
requires Americans who work for a foreign party to register as foreign
agents. The FARA registration is part of the broader assault on all
independent media, including the effort to silence Assange.
WikiLeaks publication in 2017 of 8,761 CIA files, known as Vault 7,
appeared to be the final indignity. Vault 7 included a description of the
cyber tools used by the CIA to hack into computer systems and devices such
as smartphones. Former CIA software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte was
indicted on charges of violating the Espionage Act by allegedly leaking the
documents.
The publication of Vault 7 saw the United States significantly increase its
pressure on the Ecuadorean government to isolate and eject Assange from the
embassy. Mike Pompeo, then the CIA director, said in response to the leaks
that the U.S. government can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the
latitude to use free speech values against us. Attorney General Jeff
Sessions said Assanges arrest was a priority.
It is up to us to mobilize to protect Assange. His life is in jeopardy. The
Ecuadorean government, violating his fundamental rights, has transformed his
asylum into a form of incarceration. By cutting off his access to the
internet, it has deprived him of the ability to communicate and follow world
events. The aim of this isolation is to pressure Assange out of the embassy
so he can be seized by London police, thrown into a British jail and then
delivered into the hands of Pompeo, John Bolton and the CIAs torturer in
chief, Gina Haspel.
Assange is a courageous and fearless publisher who is being persecuted for
exposing the crimes of the corporate state and imperialism. His defense is
the cutting edge of the fight against government suppression of our most
important and fundamental democratic rights. The government of Prime
Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, where Assange was born, must be
pressured to provide him with the protection to which he is entitled as a
citizen. It must intercede to stop the illegal persecution of the journalist
by the British, American and Ecuadorean governments. It must secure his safe
return to Australia. If we fail to protect Assange, we fail to protect
ourselves.
Chris Hedges
