The Martyrdom of Julian Assange
Matt Dunham / AP
The arrest Thursday of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule
of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the
Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments, in the seizure of Assange are
ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses,
corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate
states and the global ruling elite will be masked from the public. They
presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the
misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and
given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an
Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and
entertainment. The arrest of Assange, I fear, marks the official beginning
of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.
Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate
Julian Assange's rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did
Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian
Embassy-diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory-to arrest a
naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa
May order the British police to grab Assange, who has never committed a
crime? Under what law did President Donald Trump demand the extradition of
Assange, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based
in the United States?
I am sure government attorneys are skillfully doing what has become de
rigueur for the corporate state, using specious legal arguments to
eviscerate enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right
to privacy with no privacy. This is how we have "free" elections funded by
corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron
corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which
corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured
politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process
with no due process. This is how we have a government-whose fundamental
responsibility is to protect citizens-that orders and carries out the
assassination of its own citizens such as the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki
and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press legally permitted to
publish classified information and a publisher sitting in jail in Britain
awaiting extradition to the United States and a whistleblower, Chelsea
Manning, in a jail cell in the United States.
Britain will use as its legal cover for the arrest the extradition request
from Washington based on conspiracy charges. This legal argument, in a
functioning judiciary, would be thrown out of court. Unfortunately, we no
longer have a functioning judiciary. We will soon know if Britain as well
lacks one.
Assange was granted asylum in the embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to
Sweden to answer questions about sexual offense allegations that were
eventually dropped. Assange and his lawyers always argued that if he was put
in Swedish custody he would be extradited to the United States. Once he was
granted asylum and Ecuadorian citizenship the British government refused to
grant Assange safe passage to the London airport, trapping him in the
embassy for seven years as his health steadily deteriorated.
The Trump administration will seek to try Assange on charges that he
conspired with Manning in 2010 to steal the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs
obtained by WikiLeaks. The half a million internal documents leaked by
Manning from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007
video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians,
including children, and two Reuters journalists, provided copious evidence
of the hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence, and routine use of torture, lies,
bribery and crude tactics of intimidation by the U.S. government in its
foreign relations and wars in the Middle East. Assange and WikiLeaks allowed
us to see the inner workings of empire-the most important role of a
press-and for this they became empire's prey.
U.S. government lawyers will attempt to separate WikiLeaks and Assange from
The New York Times and the British newspaper The Guardian, both of which
also published the leaked material from Manning, by implicating Assange in
the theft of the documents. Manning was repeatedly and often brutally
pressured during her detention and trial to implicate Assange in the seizure
of the material, something she steadfastly refused to do. She is currently
in jail because of her refusal to testify, without her lawyer, in front of
the grand jury assembled for the Assange case. President Barack Obama
granted Manning, who was given a 35-year sentence, clemency after she served
seven years in a military prison.
Once the documents and videos provided by Manning to Assange and WikiLeaks
were published and disseminated by news organizations such as The New York
Times and The Guardian, the press callously, and foolishly, turned on
Assange. News organizations that had run WikiLeaks material over several
days soon served as conduits in a black propaganda campaign to discredit
Assange and WikiLeaks. This coordinated smear campaign was detailed in a
leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence
Assessments Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called on the U.S.
to eradicate the "feeling of trust" that is WikiLeaks' "center of gravity"
and destroy Assange's reputation.
Assange, who with the Manning leaks had exposed the war crimes, lies and
criminal manipulations of the George W. Bush administration, soon earned the
ire of the Democratic Party establishment by publishing 70,000 hacked emails
belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic
officials. The emails were copied from the accounts of John Podesta, Hillary
Clinton's campaign chairman. The Podesta emails exposed the donation of
millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the major funders of
Islamic State, to the Clinton Foundation. It exposed the $657,000 that
Goldman Sachs paid to Hillary Clinton to give talks, a sum so large it can
only be considered a bribe. It exposed Clinton's repeated mendacity. She was
caught in the emails, for example, telling the financial elites that she
wanted "open trade and open borders" and believed Wall Street executives
were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement that contradicted
her campaign statements. It exposed the Clinton campaign's efforts to
influence the Republican primaries to ensure that Trump was the Republican
nominee. It exposed Clinton's advance knowledge of questions in a primary
debate. It exposed Clinton as the primary architect of the war in Libya, a
war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential candidate.
Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have
remained hidden, but they can't then call themselves journalists.
The Democratic leadership, intent on blaming Russia for its election loss,
charges that the Podesta emails were obtained by Russian government hackers,
although James Comey, the former FBI director, has conceded that the emails
were probably delivered to WikiLeaks by an intermediary. Assange has said
the emails were not provided by "state actors."
WikiLeaks has done more to expose the abuses of power and crimes of the
American Empire than any other news organization. In addition to the war
logs and the Podesta emails, it made public the hacking tools used by the
CIA and the National Security Agency and their interference in foreign
elections, including in the French elections. It disclosed the internal
conspiracy against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by Labour
members of Parliament. It intervened to save Edward Snowden, who made public
the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence
agencies, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from
Hong Kong to Moscow. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Assange was on a
U.S. "manhunt target list."
A haggard-looking Assange, as he was dragged out of the embassy by British
police, shook his finger and shouted: "The U.K. must resist this attempt by
the Trump administration. . The U.K. must resist!"
We all must resist. We must, in every way possible, put pressure on the
British government to halt the judicial lynching of Assange. If Assange is
extradited and tried, it will create a legal precedent that will terminate
the ability of the press, which Trump repeatedly has called "the enemy of
the people," to hold power accountable. The crimes of war and finance, the
persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the pillaging by
corporations of the nation and the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment
of working men and women to swell the bank accounts of the rich and
consolidate the global oligarchs' total grip on power will not only expand,
but will no longer be part of public debate. First Assange. Then us.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers.
Chris Hedges