Ask the
parents of the
15-year-old boy choked
with a wire and then
shot to death by U.S.
Marines in Ramadi,
what
they think of Julian
Assange.
By Chris Hedges: Ask the Iraqi parents of
Sabiha Hamed Salih, aged 15, and Ashwaq Hamed Salih, aged 16, who were killed
by shrapnel in Baghdad on July 31, 2004, what they think of Julian Assange.
Ask the man and his two young daughters who
saw their wife and mother shot to death and were themselves wounded in a car
fired upon by U.S. Marines in Fallujah on July 22, 2005, what they think of
Julian Assange.
Ask the parents of Huda Haleem, an
18-year-old girl, and Raghad Muhamad Haleem, a 5-year-old boy, shot dead by
U.S. soldiers on June 2, 2006, in Iraq’s Diyala province what they think of
Julian Assange.
Ask the parents of the 15-year-old boy
choked with a wire and then shot to death by U.S. Marines in Ramadi on Aug. 10,
2006, what they think of Julian Assange.
Ask the relatives of Ahmed Salam Mohammad,
who was shot dead on Nov. 27, 2006, when U.S. troops attacked a wedding party
near Mosul, an attack that also left four wounded, what they think of Julian
Assange.
Ask the families of the over one dozen people shot to death
with .50-caliber machine guns by bantering U.S. Apache helicopter crews in east
Baghdad in July 2007—the crew members can be heard laughing at the “dead
bastards” and saying “light ’em up” and “keep shooting, keep shooting”—a
massacre that included two journalists for Reuters—Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed
Chmagh—what they think of Julian Assange. Ask the then 10-year-old Sajad
Mutashar and his 5-year-old sister, Doaha, both wounded, whose 43-year-old
father, Saleh, was shot to death from the air as he attempted to assist one of
the wounded men in the Baghdad street what they think of Julian Assange.
There is nothing like the boot of the
oppressor on your neck to give you moral clarity.
None of these war crimes, and hundreds more
reported to the U.S. military but never investigated, would have been made
public without Julian, Chelsea
Manning and WikiLeaks. That is the role of journalists—to give a
voice to those who without us would have no voice, to hold the powerful to
account, to give the forgotten and the demonized justice, to speak the truth.
We have watched over the last decade as
freedom of the press and legal protection for those who expose government
abuses and lies have been obliterated by wholesale government surveillance and
the criminalizing of the leaking and, with Julian’s persecution, publication of
these secrets. The press has been largely emasculated in the United States. The
repeated use of the Espionage Act,
especially under the Obama administration, to charge and sentence
whistleblowers has shut down our ability to shine a light into the inner
workings of power and empire. Governmental officials with a conscience, knowing
all of their communications are monitored, captured and stored by intelligence
agencies, are too frightened to reach out to reporters. The last line of
defense lies with those with the skills that allow them to burrow into the
records of the security and surveillance state and with the courage to make
them public, such as Edward
Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Jeremy
Hammond, now serving a 10-year prison term in the United States for
hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc.,
or Stratfor. The price of resistance is high not only for them, but for those
such as Julian willing to publish this information. As Sarah
Harrison has pointed out: “This is our
data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it.”
Even if Julian were odious, which he is
not, even if he carried out a sexual offense, which he did not, even if he was
a poor houseguest—a bizarre term for a man trapped in a
small room for nearly seven years under house arrest—which he was
not, it would make no difference. Julian is not being persecuted for his vices.
He is being persecuted for his virtues.
His arrest eviscerates all pretense of the
rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities carried by the
Ecuadorian, British and U.S. governments in the seizure of Julian two months
ago from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London are ominous. They presage a world
where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially
war crimes, carried out by 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, no matter what their nationality, will be hunted
down around the globe and seized, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given
lifetime prison terms. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where journalism is
outlawed and replaced with propaganda, trivia, entertainment and indoctrination
to make us hate those demonized by the state as our enemies.
The arrest of Julian marks the official
beginning of the corporate totalitarianism and constant state surveillance, now
far advanced in China, that will soon define our lives. The destruction of all
protection of the rule of law, which is what we are witnessing, is essential to
establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian state.
The BBC China correspondent Stephen
McDonell was locked out of WeChat in China a few days
ago after posting photos of the candlelight vigil in Hong Kong marking 30 years
since student protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen
Square were gunned down by Chinese soldiers in June 1989.
“Chinese friends started asking on WeChat
what the event was?” he wrote. “Why were people gathering? Where was it? That
such questions were coming from young professionals here shows the extent to
which knowledge of Tiananmen 1989 has been made to disappear in China. I
answered a few of them, rather cryptically, then suddenly I was locked out of
WeChat.”
In order to get back on WeChat he had to
agree that he was responsible for spreading “malicious rumors” and provide what
is called a faceprint.
“I was instructed to hold my phone up—to
‘face front camera straight on’—looking directly at the image of a human head.
Then told to ‘Read numbers aloud in Mandarin Chinese.’ My voice was captured by
the App at the same time it scanned my face.”
Governmental abuse of WeChat, he wrote,
“could deliver to the Communist Party a life map of pretty much everybody in
this country, citizens and foreigners alike. Capturing the face and voice image
of everyone who was suspended for mentioning the Tiananmen crackdown
anniversary in recent days would be considered very useful for those who want
to monitor anyone who might potentially cause problems.”
This is almost certainly our future, and it
is a future that Julian has fought courageously to prevent.
In another sign the noose is tightening,
the offices of the Australian
Broadcasting Corp., the country’s national broadcaster, were raided by
federal police last Wednesday. The raid was carried out because the
broadcaster had disclosed
detailed accounts of Australian special forces in Afghanistan
killing unarmed people, including children. That story was generated, in part,
by a leak of hundreds of classified military documents. The police raid and
search through raw footage and thousands of files, emails and internal
documents appear to be part of a hunt for the source, who will, no doubt, be
arrested and imprisoned.
Under what law did Ecuadorian President
Lenín Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’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
nationalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Prime Minister Theresa May
order the British police to grab Julian, who has never committed a crime? Under
what law did Donald Trump demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S.
citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States?
The psychological torture of
Julian—documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture and ill
treatment, Nils Melzer—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at
the end of the novel “1984.” It is said the Gestapo broke bones and the East
German Stasi secret police broke souls. Today, we too have refined the cruder
forms of torture of the Gestapo. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more
effective. This is why Julian, his physical and psychological health in serious
decline, has been moved to a prison hospital. We can all be taken to George
Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to be made compliant and harmless. These “special
administrative measures”—and you can be sure there are American intelligence
operatives here assisting the British in the psychological torture of
Julian—have destroyed thousands of detainees in black sites around the globe.
These techniques, including prolonged solitary confinement, are the staple form
of control in maximum-security prisons in the United States, where the
corporate state makes war on its most oppressed and politically astute underclass—African
Americans.
There has been a coordinated smear campaign
against Julian by our Thought Police, one that is amplified by the very media
organizations that published WikiLeaks material. The campaign was detailed in a
leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments
Branch and dated March 8, 2008. The document called for eradicating the
“feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and destroying
Julian’s reputation.
This character assassination was championed
by the Democratic Party establishment after WikiLeaks published 70,000 hacked
emails 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 principal 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
provided to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning, should have remained hidden, that the
public did not have a right to know, but they can’t then call themselves
journalists.
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 Snowden from extradition
to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow after he made
public the wholesale surveillance of the American public by our intelligence
agencies. The Snowden leaks also revealed that Julian was on a U.S. “manhunt
target list.”
We must build popular movements to force
the British government to halt the extradition and judicial lynching of Julian.
We must build popular movements to force the Australian government to intervene
on behalf of Julian. We must build popular movements to reclaim democracy and
the rule of law. If Julian is extradited and tried, it will create a legal
precedent that will terminate the ability of the press, which Donald Trump has
attacked as “the enemy of the people,” to hold power accountable. The crimes of
war and finance, the persecution of dissidents, minorities and immigrants, the
pillaging of the ecosystem and the ruthless impoverishment of working men and
women to swell the profits of corporations and consolidate the global
oligarchs’ total grip on power will no longer be part of public debate. First
Julian. Then us.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the
Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The
Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and
The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. https://www.truthdig.com/author/chris_hedges/
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment