https://socialistaction.org/2020/05/09/free-julian-assange-defend-civil-liberties/
Free Julian Assange! Defend Civil Liberties!
May 9, 2020
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We reprint below two speeches from the April 19, 2020 webinar “The
Prosecution of Julian Assange and the Fight for Free Speech”
Watch the webinar here: https://youtu.be/lLIXTfuR3YI
You can contribute to Julian Assange’s defense here:
https://defend.wikileaks.org/donate/
The two speeches below are by Joe Lombardo, the National Co-Coordinator
of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and Jim Lafferty, the
Executive Director Emeritus of the Los Angles National Lawyers Guild and
a board member of the LA-area ACLU. Attracting thousands of viewers, the
event was live streamed in the U.S. and around the world. Moderated by
Jeff Mackler, Steering Committee member of the newly-constituted
Committee to Defend Julian Assange and Civil Liberties and author of
Obama’s National Security State: The Meaning of the Edward Snowden
Revelations, the webinar featured presentations by the defense
committee’s co-chairs, Noam Chomsky, Alice Walker and Daniel Ellsberg.
Other speakers were Assange’s London-based attorney, Jennifer Robinson,
Nathan Fuller, Director of the Courage Foundation (formed to defend
WikiLeaks founder Assanage, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and other
whistleblowers), and Nozomi Hayase, journalist, liberation psychologist
and contributor to the new book, In Defense of Julian Asssange. The
webinar was sponsored by the Committee to Defend Julian Assange and
Civil Liberties, the Courage Foundation, the National Lawyers Guild and
UNAC.
The right to print the truth about U.S. wars
By JOE LOMBARDO
Julian Assange’s struggle for free speech and freedom is critically
important for the antiwar movement and for any movement for social
change. The right to speak out and protest is essential to our
movements. Julian Assange was doing just that; he was speaking truth to
power and so the powerful U.S. government seeks to shut him down
permanently via burying him in a U.S. prison with a threatened sentence
of 178 years. If they succeed, other journalists who criticize the U.S.
government – regardless of what country they are from – will fear when
they speak the truth, and so will we.
It was the “collateral murder” video that Chelsea Manning sent to
WikiLeaks, and they published, that enraged the U.S. government the most
and made them go after Assange. I saw that video at the founding
conference of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), where it was
shown to the 800 activists present. It was introduced by Ethan McCord,
who was a soldier at the massacre in Iraq that the video records.
Through that experience, Ethan McCord began questioning the war and
later became a vocal opponent and then a speaker at our antiwar conference.
The video depicts an American helicopter flying above a group of people
in Baghdad. Some were reporters and had cameras, but the Americans did
not know what they were carrying, and so they shot and killed or wounded
the whole group. Taken from the helicopter you can hear the American
soldiers laughing as they shoot and kill the civilians and reporters on
the ground. Soon after a van arrived to try and help the wounded. The
soldiers fired on the van, killing the driver who was the father of two
young children who were in the back seat. The children were both
wounded. Soon after American soldiers arrived on foot. Ethan McCord was
one of them. He carried a young girl from the back seat of the van and
had to pull out a piece of glass that was stuck in her eye.
Exposing U.S. war crimes
This was a war crime. It is one of many that the U.S. is responsible for
in its never-ending wars. The U.S. covered it up. They classified the
video and made the entire incident disappear until Chelsea Manning sent
the video to WikiLeaks and they published it.
The U.S. routinely classifies anything that it does not want people to
see. There were no secret military codes or information about maneuvers
or secret weapons. The video just showed a war crime. And war crimes
should not be covered up. War crimes should be exposed. That’s what
WikiLeaks, Assange and Manning did. They provided a necessary service
for the people of the world. They told the truth.
By classifying this video we were all denied our right to know what the
U.S. did and continues to do around the world. The U.S. military, which
today operates in 172 countries, has 20 times the number of foreign
military bases than all other nations in the world combined.
To the warmongers, the truth is a crime and not their illegal and
immoral wars. So, the U.S. has gone after Julian Assange, Chelsea
Manning. It can be expected to do so with regard to all truth tellers.
U.S. war on the truth
This U.S. war on the truth is growing in intensity. Conducted in the
name of “national security” or their phony “war on terrorism,” every
form of war is justified, including overt wars, drone wars, Special
Operation wars, death squad and privatized army wars.
The Telecommunications Act, enacted under the Clinton administration,
removed many of the safeguards that prevented media domination by
wealthy right-wing groups. When we organize in the streets today we are
likely told that there is a police-established “free speech zone” –
often a far distance from the event we are focused on – to which our
protest must be confined. The attacks on Julian Assange come in the
context of these ever-escalating assaults on free speech and democratic
rights.
Today we meet virtually via this webinar format because the coronavirus
prevents us from meeting in person. The authoritarian leaders around the
world, including Trump in the U.S. government, are using this crisis to
press for legislation to advance the interests of the wealthy at the
expense of working people. They are establishing new rules with little
opposition. These include attacks on civil liberties. However, the
crisis is also creating a new consciousness among millions of people.
When we emerge from today’s necessary confinement and isolation, we must
push back against these new rules and attacks on civil liberties which
the powers that be will seek to make permanent long after the present
COVID-19 pandemic has passed. We can expect that there will be many more
aroused people ready willing to fight for civil liberties and democratic
rights, for the rights of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and to oppose
today’s endless wars for plunder and profit.
The attack on Assange is an attack on all of us. Recalling the refrain
that helped organize the early labor movement in the U.S., “An injury to
one is an injury to all!” Let’s free Julian Assange
We Must Defend Julian Assange if We Are to Have Freedom of the Press and
Democracy in America
By JIM LAFFERTY
Julian Assange is being prosecuted by the United States under the old
Espionage Act, passed during World War I, for use against spies. He is
the first journalist ever charged under that Act. He’s charged with
conspiring with Chelsea Manning to publish the Iraq War logs which,
among many documents, contain a video, now known as the “Collateral
Murder Video”, showing American troops committing war crimes, as they
gun down 10 Iraqi civilians, including two children and two Reuters
reporters.
In prosecuting Assange for espionage, the Trump Administration has dug
deep, and come up with a buried subsection of the Espionage Act to
prosecute anyone who simply “receives” or “retains” or “possesses
national defense information.” Matt Taibbi, in the new book entitled In
Defense of Julian Assange, makes the point that if the government is
allowed to get away with using this tool to successfully prosecute
reporters and publishers, in very short order we will have no reporters
and no publishers.
Shamefully, not all in the U.S. media, or all on the left and in the
civil liberties community, have supported Julian Assange as they should
have; have not understood the threat to themselves, as well as to a free
press and the democracy that depends upon a free press, that is
threatened by the prosecution of Assange. Many on the left have been
dissuaded from supporting Assange because of one or another of the false
charges and rumors circulated against Assange, circulated in some cases
by the U.S. government. Hillary Clinton didn’t lose the 2016 election
because of anything Assange did. She lost it because of what she did not
do. And both women involved in that phony, so-called “Assange sex
scandal” months and months ago publically denied that he ever assaulted
them, that their government’s charges were not true!
But what is true, and what should greatly alarm us, is that the Trump
Administration is hell-bound on a campaign to silence any journalists
and publishers who dare to expose the too-many-to-name crimes and
corrupt acts of the U.S. and other western imperialist countries; crimes
such as the multitude of U.S. war crimes in the Middle East disclosed to
the public by Julian Assange, in WikiLeaks!
And what is also true, sisters and brothers, is that our brother Julian
Assange is now facing 175 years in a US prison if he is extradited back
to the United States. Meanwhile, Julian has been locked away for a year
in an isolated cell in England, where, so far, his on-going extradition
hearing has made a kangaroo court look good. His treatment in England,
according to the medical doctors who have examined him, amounts to
torture; torture that has taken a grave toll on Julian, physically and
mentally. Locked away in solitary confinement, Julian can’t even talk to
his lawyers for more than 10-minutes at a time…and then with great
difficulty.
Speaking of Julian, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur
on torture, says, “In 20 years of working with war victims, violence and
political persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic states
unite to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual
for so long a time and with such little respect for human dignity and
status of rights. Julian Assange’s collective persecution must end here
and now!”
And Julian Assange, himself, on May 13 of last year, writing from his
horrific British imprisonment, tells us that, “I am unbroken, albeit
literally surrounded by murderers, but the days when I could read and
speak and organize to defend myself, my ideals and my people are over
until I am free! Everyone else must take my place. I am defenseless and
am counting on you and others of good character to save my life….Truth,
ultimately, is all we have.”
And so, sisters and brothers, the question that confronts us today is
this: will we let Julian Assange’s case become a final nail in the
coffin of a free and independent press in America? Or will the almost
unimaginable injustice of his case arouse our justifiable anger and
inspire us to fight like hell to save Julian’s life, as we fight like
hell to save freedom of the press? For without a free press we will
never win back our now clearly lost democracy.
And so I urge us to keep reaching out to our sisters and brothers, as we
are today, and tell them the truth about Julian Assange; and, urge them
to join the growing numbers of Assange supporters who are fighting to
save Julian Assange’s life and, even more critical, fighting to save
freedom of the press in America; freedom to write and speak and publish
the truth! For Julian is right: truth, ultimately, is all we have.
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Assange: Empire of Surveillance and Imperialism
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Book Review: The Trials of Julian Assange
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--
___
Steven Pinker
“It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer.
But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming
naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's
highest callings.
[Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Time Magazine, August 7, 2005]”
― Steven Pinker