On Saturday, there shall be a march from Australia Home in London to Parliament Sq., the centre of British democracy.
Folks will carry photos of the Australian writer and journalist Julian Assange who, on 24 February, faces a court docket that can determine whether or not or not he’s to be extradited to the US and a dwelling loss of life.
I do know Australia Home effectively. As an Australian myself, I used to go there in my early days in London to learn the newspapers from house. Opened by King George V over a century in the past, its vastness of marble and stone, chandeliers and solemn portraits, imported from Australia when Australian troopers have been dying within the slaughter of the First World Battle, have ensured its landmark as an imperial pile of monumental servility.
As one of many oldest “diplomatic missions” in the UK, this relic of empire gives a pleasurable sinecure for Antipodean politicians: a “mate” rewarded or a troublemaker exiled.
Often known as Excessive Commissioner, the equal of an envoy, the present beneficiary is George Brandis, who as Lawyer Normal tried to water down Australia’s Race Discrimination Act and permitted raids on whistleblowers who had revealed the reality about Australia’s unlawful spying on East Timor throughout negotiations for the carve-up of that impoverished nation’s oil and fuel.
This led to the prosecution of whistleblowers Bernard Collaery and “Witness Ok”, on bogus expenses. Like Julian Assange, they’re to be silenced in a Kafkaesque trial and put away.
Australia Home is the best start line for Saturday’s march.
“I confess”, wrote Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1898, “that nations are items on a chessboard upon which is being performed out an awesome recreation for the domination of the world”.
We Australians have been within the service of the Nice Sport for a really very long time. Having devastated our Indigenous folks in an invasion and a conflict of attrition that continues to this present day, we’ve spilt blood for our imperial masters in China, Africa, Russia, the Center East, Europe and Asia. No imperial journey towards these with whom we’ve no quarrel has escaped our dedication.
Deception has been a function. When Prime Minister Robert Menzies despatched Australian troopers to Vietnam within the 1960s, he described them as a coaching workforce, requested by a beleaguered authorities in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Division of Exterior Affairs wrote secretly that “though we’ve careworn the actual fact publicly that our help was given in response to an invite by the federal government of South Vietnam”, the order got here from Washington.
Two variations. The lie for us, the reality for them. As many as 4 million folks died within the Vietnam conflict.
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When Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975, the Australian Ambassador, Richard Woolcott, secretly urged the federal government in Canberra to “act in a manner which might be designed to minimise the general public affect in Australia and present non-public understanding to Indonesia”. In different phrases, to lie. He alluded to the beckoning spoils of oil and fuel within the Timor Sea which, boasted Overseas Minister Gareth Evans, have been value “zillions”.
Within the genocide that adopted, at the least 200,000 East Timorese died. Australia recognised, virtually alone, the legitimacy of the occupation.
When Prime Minister John Howard despatched Australian particular forces to invade Iraq with America and Britain in 2003, he – like George W. Bush and Tony Blair – lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Greater than one million folks died in Iraq.
WikiLeaks was not the primary to name out the sample of felony mendacity in democracies that stay each bit as rapacious as in Lord Curzon’s day. The achievement of the exceptional publishing organisation based by Julian Assange has been to supply the proof.
WikiLeaks has knowledgeable us how unlawful wars are fabricated, how governments are overthrown and violence is utilized in our title, how we’re spied upon by means of our telephones and screens. The true lies of presidents, ambassadors, political candidates, generals, proxies, political fraudsters have been uncovered. One after the other, these would-be emperors have realised they haven’t any garments.
It has been an unprecedented public service; above all, it’s genuine journalism, whose worth might be judged by the diploma of apoplexy of the corrupt and their apologists.
For instance, in 2016, WikiLeaks revealed the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s marketing campaign supervisor John Podesta, which revealed a direct connection between Clinton, the inspiration she shares together with her husband and the funding of organised jihadism within the Center East – terrorism.
One e mail disclosed that Islamic State (ISIS) was bankrolled by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, from which Clinton accepted large “donations”. Furthermore, as US Secretary of State, she permitted the world’s greatest ever arms sale to her Saudi benefactors, value greater than $ 80 billion. Because of her, US arms gross sales to the world – to be used in stricken nations like Yemen – doubled.
Revealed by WikiLeaks and revealed within the New York Instances, the Podesta emails triggered a vituperative marketing campaign towards editor-in-chief Julian Assange, bereft of proof. He was an “agent of Russia working to elect Trump”; the nonsensical “Russiagate” adopted. That WikiLeaks had additionally revealed greater than 800,000 often damning paperwork from Russia was ignored.
On an Australian Broadcasting Company programme, 4 Corners, in 2017, Clinton was interviewed by Sarah Ferguson, who started: “Nobody may fail to be moved by the ache in your face at [the moment of Donald Trump’s inauguration]… Do you keep in mind how visceral it was for you?”
Having established Clinton’s visceral struggling, the fawning Ferguson described “Russia’s position” and the “harm carried out personally to you” by Julian Assange.
Clinton replied, “He [Assange] could be very clearly a device of Russian intelligence. And he has carried out their bidding”.
Ferguson mentioned to Clinton, “Plenty of folks, together with in Australia, suppose that Assange is a martyr of free speech and freedom of knowledge. How would you describe him?”
Once more, Clinton was allowed to defame Assange – a “nihilist” within the service of “dictators” – whereas Ferguson assured her interviewee she was “the icon of your era”.
There was no point out of a leaked doc, revealed by WikiLeaks, known as Libya Tick Tock, ready for Hillary Clinton, which described her because the central determine driving the destruction of the Libyan state in 2011. This resulted in 40,000 deaths, the arrival of ISIS in North Africa and the European refugee and migrant disaster.
For me, this episode of Clinton’s interview – and there are lots of others – vividly illustrates the division between false and true journalism. On 24 February, when Julian Assange steps into Woolwich Crown Court docket, true journalism would be the solely crime on trial.
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I’m typically requested why I’ve championed Assange. For one factor, I like and I like him. He’s a buddy with astonishing braveness; and he has a finely honed, depraved sense of humour. He’s the diametric reverse of the character invented then assassinated by his enemies.
As a reporter in locations of upheaval everywhere in the world, I’ve discovered to match the proof I’ve witnessed with the phrases and actions of these with energy. On this manner, it’s attainable to get a way of how our world is managed and divided and manipulated, how language and debate are distorted to provide the propaganda of false consciousness.
After we talk about dictatorships, we name this brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It’s a reality we hardly ever apply to our personal societies, whatever the path of blood that leads again to us and which by no means dries.
WikiLeaks has uncovered this. That’s the reason Assange is in a most safety jail in London dealing with concocted political expenses in America, and why he has shamed so lots of these paid to maintain the report straight. Watch these journalists now search for cowl because it dawns on them that the American fascists who’ve come for Assange could come for them, not least these on the Guardian who collaborated with WikiLeaks and received prizes and secured profitable e-book and Hollywood offers primarily based on his work, earlier than turning on him.
In 2011, David Leigh, the Guardian’s “investigations editor”, instructed journalism college students at Metropolis College in London that Assange was “fairly deranged”. When a puzzled pupil requested why, Leigh replied, “As a result of he does not perceive the parameters of standard journalism”.
Nevertheless it’s exactly as a result of he did perceive that the “parameters” of the media usually shielded vested and political pursuits and had nothing to do with transparency that the thought of WikiLeaks was so interesting to many individuals, particularly the younger, rightly cynical in regards to the so-called “mainstream”.
Leigh mocked the very concept that, as soon as extradited, Assange would find yourself “carrying an orange jumpsuit”. These have been issues, he mentioned, “that he and his lawyer are saying with a view to feed his paranoia”.
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The present US expenses towards Assange centre on the Afghan Logs and Iraq Logs, which the Guardian revealed and Leigh labored on, and on the Collateral Homicide video displaying an American helicopter crew gunning down civilians and celebrating the crime. For this journalism, Assange faces 17 expenses of “espionage” which carry jail sentences totalling 175 years.
Whether or not or not his jail uniform shall be an “orange jumpsuit”, US court docket information seen by Assange’s attorneys reveal that, as soon as extradited, Assange shall be topic to Particular Administrative Measures, often called SAMS. A 2017 report by Yale College Legislation College and the Heart for Constitutional Rights described SAMS as “the darkest nook of the US federal jail system” combining “the brutality and isolation of most safety items with extra restrictions that deny people virtually any connection to the human world… The web impact is to defend this type of torture from any actual public scrutiny”.
That Assange has been proper all alongside, and getting him to Sweden was a fraud to cowl an American plan to “render” him, is lastly turning into clear to many who swallowed the incessant scuttlebutt of character assassination. “I communicate fluent Swedish and was capable of learn all the unique paperwork”, Nils Melzer, the United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, mentioned lately. “I may hardly imagine my eyes. Based on the testimony of the lady in query, a rape had by no means taken place in any respect. And never solely that: the lady’s testimony was later modified by the Stockholm Police with out her involvement with a view to one way or the other make it sound like a attainable rape. I’ve all of the paperwork in my possession, the emails, the textual content messages”.
Keir Starmer is at the moment operating for election as chief of the Labour Celebration in Britain. Between 2008 and 2013, he was Director of Public Prosecutions and liable for the Crown Prosecution Service. Based on Freedom of Info searches by the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, Sweden tried to drop the Assange case in 2011, however a CPS official in London instructed the Swedish prosecutor to not deal with it as “simply one other extradition”.
In 2012, she obtained an e mail from the CPS: “Do not you dare get chilly ft!!!” Different CPS emails have been both deleted or redacted. Why? Keir Starmer must say why.
On the forefront of Saturday’s march shall be John Shipton, Julian’s father, whose indefatigable help for his son is the antithesis of the collusion and cruelty of the governments of Australia, our homeland.
The roll name of disgrace begins with Julia Gillard, the Australian Labor prime minister who, in 2010, needed to criminalise WikiLeaks, arrest Assange and cancel his passport – till the Australian Federal Police identified that no legislation allowed this and that Assange had dedicated no crime.
Whereas falsely claiming to provide him consular help in London, it was the Gillard authorities’s surprising abandonment of its citizen that led to Ecuador granting political asylum to Assange in its London embassy.
In a subsequent speech earlier than the US Congress, Gillard, a favorite of the US embassy in Canberra, broke data for sycophancy (in accordance with the web site Sincere Historical past) as she declared, over and once more, the constancy of America’s “mates Down Underneath”.
In the present day, whereas Assange waits in his cell, Gillard travels the world, selling herself as a feminist involved about “human rights”, usually in tandem with that different right-on feminist Hillary Clinton.
The reality is that Australia may have rescued Julian Assange and might nonetheless rescue him.
In 2010, I organized to fulfill a outstanding Liberal (Conservative) Member of Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull. As a younger barrister within the 1980s, Turnbull had efficiently fought the British Authorities’s makes an attempt to stop the publication of the e-book, Spycatcher, whose writer Peter Wright, a spy, had uncovered Britain’s “deep state”.
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We talked about his well-known victory at no cost speech and publishing and I described the miscarriage of justice awaiting Assange – the fraud of his arrest in Sweden and its reference to an American indictment that tore up the US Structure and the rule of worldwide legislation.
Turnbull appeared to point out real curiosity and an aide took intensive notes. I requested him to ship a letter to the Australian authorities from Gareth Peirce, the famend British human rights lawyer who represents Assange.
Within the letter, Peirce wrote, “Given the extent of the general public dialogue, often on the premise of completely false assumptions… it is rather onerous to aim to protect for [Julian Assange] any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one however two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to 2 completely different jurisdictions in flip for 2 completely different alleged crimes, neither of that are crimes in his personal nation, and that his private security has turn into in danger in circumstances which can be extremely politically charged”.
Turnbull promised to ship the letter, observe it by means of and let me know. I subsequently wrote to him a number of instances, waited and heard nothing.
In 2018, John Shipton wrote a deeply shifting letter to the then prime minister of Australia asking him to train the diplomatic energy at his authorities’s disposal and convey Julian house. He wrote that he feared that if Julian was not rescued, there could be a tragedy and his son would die in jail. He obtained no reply. The prime minister was Malcolm Turnbull.
Final 12 months, when the present prime minister, Scott Morrison, a former public relations man, was requested about Assange, he replied in his customary manner, “He ought to face the music!”
When Saturday’s march reaches the Homes of Parliament, mentioned to be “the Mom of Parliaments”, Morrison and Gillard and Turnbull and all those that have betrayed Julian Assange must be known as out; historical past and decency is not going to neglect them or those that stay silent now.
And if there may be any sense of justice left within the land of Magna Carta, the travesty that’s the case towards this heroic Australian should be thrown out. Or beware, all of us.
