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it seems brandis never understood the value of truth.....

A weary world needs heroes, and now we have a new one. Julian Assange has long been a hero to his natural supporters: the usual crowd of rich actors, preachy human rights lawyers and professional activists. Celebrities look after their own, and there is no doubt that Assange is in the club.

 

GEORGE BRANDIS — SMH-01-07-2024

 

Now, with his dramatic release and the huge publicity attending his return, he has transcended his status as a darling of the glitterati to become a national figure. The ABC in particular could barely contain its elation, with wall-towall coverage. Patricia Karvelas described it as ‘‘undoubtedly the biggest political story of the week’’, overlooking the more prosaic news of inflation rising to 4 per cent and the likelihood of yet higher interest rates – something with a lot more impact on Australians than the homecoming of a feted felon.

Assange’s repatriation was an exercise in stage management that would have made his Hollywood cheer squad proud. Being escorted by both an ambassador and a high commissioner was completely unnecessary, but it added gravitas to the show. What other convicted Australian receives a welcome home call from the prime minister?

Whatever else it was, Assange’s case was a flagrant violation of the consular principle that all Australians who get into trouble overseas should be treated equally by the government.

Of course, the fact that Assange is a criminal is of no concern to his admirers. No sooner had they got off the plane than his lawyers started to walk back the significance of the conviction. But a guilty plea is an admission of guilt, whether it’s part of a plea deal or not. The crime to which Assange pleaded – conspiracy to commit espionage – is a serious one, recognised, in one form or another, by every legal system in the world. If Assange had committed the same offence against Australian law, he would have been prosecuted under the Criminal Code. His culpability is no less because he committed the same offence against American law.

Assange’s supporters have never made any secret of the fact that he did what he was accused of. Many actually boast about the fact that this was the greatest release of classified documents in American history. The crime of espionage usually involves unlawfully obtaining, and communicating, classified information. Do those who celebrate Assange say that there should be no such law? Or that those who break it should not be prosecuted if their motives are pure?

Assange’s apologists argue that this was journalism. Certainly, it was publication, but since when is a massive data dump – unsifted, unanalysed and unredacted – journalism?

The fact that the documents published by Assange contained the unredacted names of numerous intelligence sources also shows how wickedly reckless his conduct was. These included people in Afghanistan and Iraq who put their lives on the line to help Western – including Australian – forces. It was painful to watch Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles on the ABC’s Insiders yesterday, trying to walk away from his earlier, accurate statement that the leaks put the lives of Australian soldiers at risk.

We should see through Assange’s lawyers’ carefully worded formulation that ‘‘there is no evidence’’ that such people suffered harm. They have seized on a remark to that effect by the judge who sentenced him. But rubber-stamping a plea deal is not a fact-finding exercise. There was no evidence because none was put before the court. As is obvious from the fact that the proceedings lasted barely two hours, this was not a forensic process.

I know the view of Australian intelligence agencies (which briefed me when I was Australia’s attorneygeneral) that it was likely Assange’s leak cost lives. This assessment was shared by our Five Eyes partners. But you don’t need to be an intelligence professional (or a minister briefed by them) to understand how Assange imperilled those whose identities he exposed.

If a Western intelligence source in a hostile country is publicly named, what are the chances they will not be pursued by militants whose standard methods include assassination of domestic opponents? Does anyone seriously think the Taliban would have turned a blind eye to people they regarded as Western spies? At the weekend, News Limited newspapers carried the case of Majid Jamali Fashi, arrested by the Iranian theocracy as the clear result of the leak, and hanged.

Even if none of the sources exposed by Assange did come to harm, at the time he published the documents he could not have known that. At the very least, he hazarded innocent lives for his own gratification.

The comparison is sometimes made between Assange and Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. But the Pentagon Papers were a historical document – the CIA’s own internal history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. They did not expose current sources; their publication did not put innocent lives at risk.

If similarities with famous Americans are sought, the truer comparison is with Donald Trump. If you drew a Venn diagram of admirers of Assange and Trump supporters, the circles would not intersect. Yet the likenesses are endless. The same paranoid conviction that the ‘‘deep state’’ is out to get them. The same belief that they are above the law. The same refusal to accept the integrity of legal processes. The same egocentricity and selfrighteousness. The same creepy narcissism. The same cultish devotion from their acolytes. They even affect the same defiant gesture: the vaguely fascistic raised fist.

For some Australians, Assange will forever be a favourite son. In a land where Ned Kelly is a national icon, being a criminal is no bar to public acclaim. I do not doubt that Anthony Albanese read the national mood correctly when he said last year that this had gone on for long enough. It was naturally touching to see Assange embraced by his overjoyed father and his stoic wife.

But let sentiment not blind us to the brutal truth that Julian Assange played dice with the lives of numberless, uncelebrated people, who had the courage to help Australia and our allies as we fought murderous enemies like the Taliban. They are the only heroes here.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor [of BULLSHIT?] at ANU.

 

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Assange – the aftermath    By Greg Barns

 

On March 12 last year, former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr summed up why the Americans were determined to send the now free Julian Assange to a maximum security jail for over 170 years. 

 

Asked by the now retired ABC broadcaster Philip Adams: “ Why is Julian Assange still there [Belmarsh prison]? Why is the US so determined to hold him?”, Carr replied;

“It’s almost a self-loathing in one corner of the American security state. At a time when American dominance, leadership, primacy is challenged, not least because of their own seething pathologies, and… America with the manifestations of a failed state. Assange getting away with exposing an American war crime. An undoubted American war crime. You can see it on video by typing in Collateral Murder. American serviceman from an Apache helicopter killing civilians, shooting twelve civilians on the ground during the appalling war in Iraq.”

Carr got it in one. Yet despite what should be unchallengeable logic and reasoning, there are still those in Australia who see Assange as an enemy. These include, most prominently, the Nine newspapers columnist Peter Hartcher, a reliable scribbler for the security and defence establishment in this country, and the former head of the defence industry funded think tank ASPI, Peter Jennings.

On the weekend Hartcher, writing in his Saturday column (which reminds one of those lengthy ‘essays’ from the Australian’s Paul Kelly in their being in need of a good edit), trotted out the usual estabouishment ‘complaints’ and smears about, and of, Assange. Firstly, Assange’s “claims to be a journalist is hotly contested by actual journalists,” writes Hartcher. Forgetting conveniently that the WikiLeaks organisation was given Australia’s top journalists’ award, a Walkley, in 2011. In fact in 2019 the Walkley Foundation issued a statement, after Assange was unlawfully removed from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he had sought asylum in 2012. That statement noted that “Wikileaks, with Julian Assange as its editor, received a Walkley Award in Australia for its outstanding contribution to journalism. Walkley judges said Wikileaks applied new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup”. One of those many inconvenient truths was the exposure by video of US helicopter attacks in Baghdad that killed 11 civilians including two Reuters journalists.” Perhaps Mr Hartcher forgot that inconvenient truth.

Then Hartcher, to bolster his claim, quotes Australian journalist Peter Greste, once, jailed in Egypt on false charges, and who is now an academic. I have spoken with Greste and met with him, along with my Australian Campaign colleagues. He is not, these days, fixated on whether Assange is a journalist or publisher and told us as much in an online meeting held on 6 February 2023.

But most disturbing is Hartcher’s clear parroting of the Canberra lines about what a reckless individual Assange was and remains. “ Assange may be out of jail, but in Australian public life he is on probation. Is he capable of actual, ethical journalism? How will he repay the Australian government for its intense efforts in his cause – for having “saved” his life?”, Hartcher writes, after reciting a litany of ‘faults’ about WikiLeaks publications such as the 2016 Democratic National Committee emails. Which, by the way, did not enable Trump’s election. It was Clinton’s incapacity to connect with those who didn’t work at Goldman Sachs or in Silicon Valley that was the problem.

But there you have it, ‘Justice Hartcher’ sentences Assange to probation. The patronising tone of Hartcher is not unusual, but it does demonstrates just how out of touch this journalist really is. He is ignoring the House of Representatives resolution in support of Assange earlier this year which was passed 86 to 42, and which reflected what we, in the Assange Australian campaign were picking up. That is, the vast majority of Australians wanted Assange home.

No doubt Hartcher’s ‘judgement’ will be welcomed by his friends in the Department of Defence, in DFAT and in the security agencies. Many in those worlds would love to see Assange behind bars again.

That this is their thinking is demonstrated by one of their number, Peter Jennings, the former ASPI boss. Like Hartcher, Jennings, writing in The Australian on Saturday, runs the defence and security establishment line against Assange.  Except that Jennings’ attack is disgraceful. As a former Defence official at the time of the release of military reports by Wikileaks about Afghanistan and Iraq in 2010 and 2011. Jennings rattles off the names of sadly departed Australian soldiers and then says, “It is by no means clear that the material put online by Assange did not cause deaths.” This is a smear and Jennings must know that. There is no evidence that Assange caused deaths through his revelations about clear cases of misconduct by the US and its allies in both those theatres of war.

And why bother to publish Jennings anyway? His views are as predictable as that of his former employer, ASPI.

Assange has done the world a favour. It is critical that we all know what happens when our governments, in our name, undertake military and security operations. Particularly so in the case of Australia which is pathetically joined at the hip in any Washington adventurism.

https://johnmenadue.com/assange-the-aftermath/

 

media’s villainous role....

JULIAN ASSANGE: FREEDOM THIS TIME, NO THANKS TO THE MEDIA

 

It was the media, led by the Guardian, that kept Assange behind bars. Their villainy will soon be erased because they write the script about what’s going on in the world.

 

JONATHAN COOK

 

 

It is only right that we all take a moment to celebrate the victory of Julian Assange’s release from 14 years of detention, in varying forms, to be united, finally, with his wife and children – two boys who have been denied the chance to ever properly know their father. 

His last five years were spent in Belmarsh high-security prison as the United States sought to extradite him to face a 175-year jail sentence for publishing details of its state crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

For seven years before that he was confined to a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Quito awarded him political asylum to evade the clutches of a law-breaking US empire determined to make an example of him.

His seizure by UK police from the embassy on Washington’s behalf in 2019, after a more US-aligned government came to power in Ecuador, proved how clearly misguided, or malicious, had been those who accused him of “evading justice”.

Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world. 

No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him or kidnap him off the streets of London. 

Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers. 

That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

Media no watchdog

Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to. 

Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation. 

For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars. 

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies. 

Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were supposedly dropped. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week. 

In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on. 

Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities. 

The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger. 

That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has spent even a cursory amount of time studying the background to the case knows. 

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange. 

And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, concededin court in 2013.

Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right. 

That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship. 

Character assassination

But it is not just these glaring reporting failures that kept Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the entire media acted in concert in his character assassination, making it not only acceptable but respectable to hate him.

It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian. 

Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower for the right not to be locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism. 

The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

For the record, so we do not forget how Assange was kept confined for so long, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes.

Long-time BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling. 

Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge” while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians. 

This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling ever approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website. 

This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before. 

Too little too late

The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination. A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?” 

For while the establishment media has busily fixed our gaze on the supposed character flaws of Assange, it has kept our attention away from the true villains, those who committed the crimes he exposed: Blair, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and many more. 

We need to recognise a pattern here. When the facts cannot be disputed, the establishment has to shoot the messenger. 

In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.

Sadly, to secure his freedom, Assange was compelled to make a deal pleading guilty to one of the charges levelled against him under the Espionage Act. 

Highlighting the enduring bad faith of the Guardian, the same paper that so readily ridiculed Assange’s years of detention to avoid being locked away in a US super-max jail, ran an article this week, as Assange was released, stressing the “dangerous precedent” for journalism set by his plea deal.

Washington’s treatment of Assange was always designed to send a chilling message to investigative journalists that, while it is fine to expose the crimes of Official Enemies, the same standards must never be applied to the US empire itself.

How is it possible that the Guardian is learning that only now, after failing to grasp that lesson earlier, when it mattered, during Assange’s long years of political persecution? 

The even sadder truth is that the media’s villainous role in keeping Assange locked up will soon be erased from the record. That is because the media are the ones writing the script we tell ourselves about what is going on in the world.

They will quickly paint themselves as saints, not sinners, in this episode. And, without more Assanges to open our eyes, we will most likely believe them.

https://www.declassifieduk.org/julian-assange-freedom-this-time-no-thanks-to-the-media/

 

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SEE ALSO: https://johnmenadue.com/assange-freed/