"Chris Hedges: Julian Assange and the Collapse of the Rule of Law".
Collapse? It seems to me, and from this article, that the rule of law
is alive and well. How can we say it has collapsed when it is doing a
fine job for the Ruling Class? Rather than focusing on the law, we
need to change the Ruling Class. Then we will have a chance of
changing the rules.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/12/21, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Chris Hedges: Julian Assange and the Collapse of the Rule of Law
Chris Hedges gave this talk at a rally Thursday night in New York City in
support of Julian Assange. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s father and
brother, also spoke at the event, which was held at The People’s Forum.
by Chris Hedges
June 11th, 2021
By Chris Hedges
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY (Scheerpost) — A society that prohibits the capacity
to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.
This why we are here tonight. Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian
decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family. Yes, we
demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him
be ended. Yes, we honor him up for his courage and his integrity. But the
battle for Julian’s liberty has always been much more than the persecution
of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom of our
era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for
Julian and his family, but for us.
Tyrannies invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of
injustice. They cloak their crimes in a faux legality. They use the
decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality. Those, such
as
Julian, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for
without
the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing
left
in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.
The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the
collapse
of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon
Wolin
calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism
that
maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its
institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally
has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.
I was in the London courtroom when Julian was being tried by Judge Vanessa
Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice-in Wonderland
demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was judicial
farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no
legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage
Act.
The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC
Global,
contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the
privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed
his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in
a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special
Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and
torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical
disintegration.
The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the
London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to
Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial
pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to
criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the
legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that
is
why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public,
limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it
hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry
show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the
Lubyanka.
The Empire is Not Done with Julian Assange
As is clear from the memoir of his attorneys, Michael Ratner, the ends have
always justified the means for those demanding the persecution of Julian
Assange.
MintPress News|Chris Hedges|Jan 4
Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as
radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the
political spectrum is in fact conservative, it is the restoration of the
rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning
democracy, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the
supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power.
The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled
legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their
obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth
and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media
landscape. Prove this truth, as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond
and
Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of
power,
and you are hunted down and persecuted.
Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which
documented numerous US war crimes—including video images of the gunning
down
of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral
Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of
thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that
had approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints—the towering civil rights
attorneys Len Weinglass and my good friend Michael Ratner, who I would
later
accompany to meet Julian in the Ecuadoran Embassy, met with Julian in a
studio apartment in Central London. Julian’s personal bank cards had been
blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents detailing US war crimes had
disappeared from his luggage in route to London. Swedish police were
fabricating a case against him in a move, Ratner warned, that was about
extraditing Julian to the United States.
“WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and
political,” Weinglass told Assange. “As we learned in the Pentagon Papers
case, the US government doesn’t like the truth coming out. And it doesn’t
like to be humiliated. No matter if it’s Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican
or Democrat in the White House. The US government will try to stop you from
publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First
Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it.
We believe they are going to come after WikiLeaks and you, Julian, as the
publisher.”
“Come after me for what?” asked Julian.
“Espionage,” Weinglass continued. “They’re going to charge Bradley Manning
with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917. We don’t think it applies to
him because he’s a whistleblower, not a spy. And we don’t think it applies
to you either because you are a publisher. But they are going to try to
force Manning into implicating you as his collaborator.”
“Come after me for what?
That is the question.
They came after Julian not for his vices, but his virtues.
They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported
deaths of Iraqi civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some
800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo; because he exposed
that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary
General Ban Ki Moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France,
Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans,
fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal
surveillance that included the eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; because he
exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the
June
2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected
president Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military
regime; because he exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and General
David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is
defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, that they authorized
hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in
Yemen, and that they secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on
Yemen, killing scores of civilians; because he exposed that Goldman Sachs
paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be
considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she
would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and
reform; because he exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party;
because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National
Security Agency permits the wholesale government surveillance of our
televisions, computers, smartphones and anti-virus software, allowing the
government to record and store our conversations, images and private text
messages, even from encrypted apps.
Reporters Claim Facebook is Censoring Information on Julian Assange Case
Reporters covering the Julian Assange extradition case claim that Facebook
has stemmed up to 90% of their referral traffic.
MintPress News|Alan Macleod|Oct 6, 2020
Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there
was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that
defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths they came after
Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power.
“Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German
socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is
about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”
We have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and
women
are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and
internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even
habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more
than
commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and
discarded. To refuse to fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the
oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the
domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice,
to
live in truth, is to bear the mark of Cain. Those in power must feel our
wrath, and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience, it means
constant acts of social and political disruption, for this organized power
from below is the only power that will save us and the only power that will
free Julian. Politics is a game of fear. It is our moral and civic duty
to
make those in power very, very afraid.
The criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip. It
cannot
be reformed. It has abolished the rule of law. It obscures and falsifies
the truth. It seeks the consolidation of its obscene wealth and power. And
so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically of course, I say, “Off
with
their heads.”