OMNI
WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE ANTHOLOGY #17,
MAY 21, 2023
US PERSECUTION OF PUBLISHER ASSANGE for TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT US WAR
CRIMES
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
(#9
July 21, 2011; #10, Jan. 30, 2012, #11, May 25, 2018; #12, April 14, 2019; #13,
Feb. 20, 2020; #14, Oct. 6, 2020; #15, Jan. 11, 2021; #16, Aug. 15, 2021).
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Special connection to the University
of Arkansas is its Journalism Department with its Investigative Reporting (IRE)
Student Travel Endowment, and UAF’s motto Veritate
Duce Progredi: “To advance with
truth as our leader.”
CONTENTS #17 Indicting US
Government, Defending Assange and Wikileaks
(2 books, 10 articles, 1interview)
Books
Stefania
Maurizi. Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies.
Kevin Gosztola. Guilty
of Journalism: The Political Case against Julian Assange.
Articles
3 Articles and
1 Interview by Chris Hedges
“Julian
Assange —A Fight We Must Not Lose.”
“The Incredible Accomplishments of Julian Assange That the US wants to
torture him
for.”
On Contact:
Slow-Motion Execution Of Julian Assange
The Chris Hedges Report Show with Italian investigative
journalist Stefania.
Articles by Caitlin Johnstone
“Multiple U.S.
officials confronted about U.S. Assange hypocrisy on World Press
Freedom Day.
“Washington
says “journalism is not a crime” while working to criminalize journalism.
More Defenders
John
Pilger. “The [Australian] Betrayers of Assange.” Condemnation of the Australian Government.
Daniel Ellsberg v. ESPIONAGE ACT. “Losing 1st Amendment Reverses
War of
Independence.”
Jonathan Cook. “Why the Western Media
is Afraid of Julian Assange.”
Ellen Taylor.
“Will Belated Open Letter by The
New York Times and other Media
Outlets Be Enough to Compel Julian
Assange’s Release From Prison?”
Amy Goodman & Denis
Moynihan. “Assange
Attorneys and Journalists Sue
the CIA Over
Spying.”
TEXTS
ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS #17
BOOKS
Stefania Maurizi. Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies. Pluto Press, London. 2020. Foreword
by Ken Loach. Translated by Lesli
Cavanaugh-Bardelli.
An uncovering of the terrifying depths of authoritarian
power that hide behind the infamous story of WikiLeaks
Author Biography
Endorsements Contents Details
*Winner of the
European Award for Investigative and Judicial Journalism 2021*
*Winner of the Premio Alessandro Leogrande Award for Investigative Journalism
2022*
'I want to
live in a society where secret power is accountable to the law and to public
opinion for its atrocities, where it is the war criminals who go to jail, not
those who have the conscience and courage to expose them.'
It is 2008,
and Stefania Maurizi, an investigative journalist with a growing interest in
cryptography, starts looking into the little-known organisation WikiLeaks.
Through hushed meetings, encrypted files and explosive documents, what she
discovers sets her on a life-long journey that takes her deep into the realm of
secret power.
Working
closely with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange and his organisation for her
newspaper, Maurizi has spent over a decade investigating state criminality
protected by thick layers of secrecy, while also embarking on a solitary trench
warfare to unearth the facts underpinning the cruel persecution of Assange and
WikiLeaks.
With
complex and disturbing insights, Maurizi's tireless journalism exposes
atrocities, the shameful treatment of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, on up
to the present persecution of WikiLeaks: a terrifying web of impunity and
cover-ups.
At the heart of the book is the brutality of secret power and the
unbearable price paid by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and truthtellers.
Kevin Gosztola. Foreword by Abby Martin.
Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case against
Julian Assange. Seven
Stories P, NYC, March 7, 2023.
See
all formats and editions
Earn Kindle Points, get Kindle book credit. Learn more.
From an acclaimed independent journalist, this
carefully-documented analysis of the government’s case against Julian Assange
and its implications for press freedom acts as a crucial, compelling guidebook
to Assange’s upcoming trial.
Guilty of Journalism is a joint production of The Censored Press and
Seven Stories Press.
The legal action against Julian Assange is poised to culminate in a trial in
the United States in 2023, and this book will help the public understand the
proceedings. The establishment media's coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange's extradition case has focused on his deteriorating health and what CBS
News called his “secret family,” but most of this coverage failed to detail the
complex issues at stake against Assange. Guilty of Journalism outlines how WikiLeaks exposed the
reality of American wars, the United States government’s unprecedented
indictment against Assange as a publisher, and the media’s role in persuading
the public to “shoot the messenger.”
This new book by Kevin Gosztola, who has spent the last decade covering
Assange, WikiLeaks, and the wider war on whistleblowers, tells the full story
based on testimony from dozens of witnesses. It examines abuses of power by the
CIA and the FBI, including a spying operation that targeted Assange’s family,
lawyers, and doctors. Guilty of Journalism offers a balanced and
comprehensive perspective on all the events leading up to what press freedom
advocates have called the trial of the century.
Articles by Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges. “Julian Assange —A Fight We Must Not Lose.” Consortium
News (5-9-23).
“This legal
lynching marks the official beginning of corporate totalitarianism” — from a
talk the author gave at a rally in New York on World Press Freedom Day. Read here...
Chris Hedges. “The Incredible Accomplishments of Julian
Assange That the US wants to torture him for”.
This is an important article by
Chris Hedges on the recent extradition hearing and the case of Julian Assange
WASHINGTON, D.C – For the past two days, I have been watching
the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The
United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to
extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is
innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January
concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the
“harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit
suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a
government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years. [read more]
Please click here for more
information on Assange’s Defense
On Contact:
Slow-Motion Execution Of Julian Assange
By Chris Hedges, RT. Popular Resistance.org (12-27-21). Julian Assange committed the empire’s
greatest sin – he exposed it as a criminal enterprise. He documented its lies,
callous disregard for human life, rampant corruption, and innumerable war
crimes. Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Labour, Trump or Biden – it
does not matter. The goons who oversee the empire sing from the same satanic
songbook. Empires always kill those who inflict deep and serious wounds.
Assange is in precarious physical and psychological health, and suffered a
stroke during court video proceedings on October 27. -more-
Hedges Interviews Stefania
Maurizi
The Chris Hedges Report Show with Italian
investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, the only international report…
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TRANSCRIPT The following is a rush
transcription and may contain errors. An updated version will be made
available as soon as possible. [I
have abridged the text considerably; click on title for its entirety. –D] Chris Hedges: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have carried out the most
important investigative journalism of our generation, revealing to the public
the inner workings of power through the release of luminous documents. . . . . But talk a little bit
about the global impact these revelations had. Stefania Maurizi: Well, of course, for the
first time, if you are referring to the Afghan war logs, Iraq war logs, or
the cables, all these files allowed for the first time to access to this
information which was secret. So I mean, there was no way to obtain this
information unless you got a copy after 25 years, 30 years, maybe 40 years
when no one care anymore. Maybe the historians, the professional historians,
care at that point, but it was no longer relevant for the public opinion to
take informed decisions, of course. So that was the
explosive part of this secret documentation. For the first time, we got
access to secret information about how the Afghan war work, about the Iraq
war, about the US diplomacy and their deals, their pressure, the political
pressure, their crimes behind the scene. And we could get access as facts
were still very relevant, not after 20 or 30 years or 40 years. And we could get
access without the reductions. Because when you require request these
documents using freedom of information. You often got completely redacted
documents to an extent that they are useless. As a journalist or as a
citizen, they have little use. So this information was really game changing,
really allowed to take the public opinion, the decision they need. The
information they need to take informed decision as citizens. Chris Hedges: I want to ask you about
the 706,910 secret files of the Afghan wars. Before I do, just briefly tell
us the importance of WikiLeaks in the Arab Spring and Tunisia and the
importance of WikiLeaks in terms of Haiti. Those are two good examples of the
impact WikiLeaks had. Stefania Maurizi: Yes, of course. I mean,
when it comes to the WikiLeaks cables, for the first time, the citizens of
these countries were information restricted, are unavailable. They could
access the French assessment about their regimes by the US diplomacy. And
while publicly the US diplomacy was conducting diplomacy as business as
usual, but in the secrecy of their correspondence, they were absolutely not
diplomatic at all about these regimes. So for the first time, this population
could look at the reality of the regime and were vindicated. And this made them
to react to this kind of information and to try to oppose their regime, to
try to change their regime. And this is why Amnesty International has credited WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks cables
with having an important role in the Arab Spring in these countries, of
course. Chris Hedges: And Haiti, because it also exposed US
interference in Haiti. I mean- Stefania Maurizi: Absolutely. Absolutely. Chris Hedges: I mean, a very concerted effort on the part
of the US government to crush the labor movement, to break the movement to
raise the minimum wage because they are all those sweatshops- As a result, none of these people [CIA
agents] ended up in prison. None of these people basically have spent a
single day in prison. And without the WikiLeaks documents, as I said, we
could have imagined, but we could never have obtained the evidence, the solid
evidence, the names, what they had discussed. And these cables are
tremendously important to obtain this evidence of political pressure to grant
impunity to the CIA. Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the Afghan war logs and
the Iraq War logs. The Iraq War logs has 391,832 secret files. Afghan war
logs, 76,910 secret files. What did they reveal? Stefania Maurizi: They’re amazing document. Let me say, I
worked so much on these documents. They are reports from the field, from the
theater of war authored by the soldiers who were there. And basically, they
provide a snapshot of the war. Whatever happened on the theater of war from
January 2004 to December 2009. So six years of war described without any
filter, without any propaganda. So at that point, you could see the war as it
is on the entire theater of war and you could compare what the propaganda
machine was telling to the public and what was really happening. And that’s
the real value of this document. The value, of course, is what they reveal.
The number of civilians, innocent civilians who were killed and the secret
units like Taskforce 373. But the value here is that, for the first time, we
could see these wars as they were as they were happening. Not after 30 years,
after 40 years. And never before, with the exception of the
Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsworth, never before it had been possible
to look at the war as it is ongoing and having this access to secret
information about what was going on. These are tremendously important
document, and to this day, they remain the only source. If you take the
Afghan war logs, for example, they remain the only public source about the
killing, extra judicial killing. And the only source about the innocent
civilians kill before 2007. [Most of
the interview follows, don’t miss it.
–Dick] |
Articles by Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin
A. Johnstone. Multiple U.S.
officials confronted about U.S. Assange hypocrisy on World Press Freedom Day. Mronline.org (5-6-23).
Assange exposed many things about our rulers
during his work with WikiLeaks, but none of those revelations have been as
significant as what he’s forced them to reveal about themselves in the lengths
that they will go to silence a journalist who tells inconvenient truths.
Caitlin
A. Johnstone. Washington
says “journalism is not a crime” while working to criminalize journalism. Mronline.org (4-11-23).
After a certain point criticizing the
hypocrisy and contradictions of the U.S.-centralized empire starts to feel too
easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But hell let’s do it anyway; the barrel’s
right here, and I really hate these particular fish.
MORE DEFENDERS
John Pilger’s
Condemnation of the Australian Government in Sydney 10 Mar 2023.
TRANSCEND Media Service. 10
Mar 2023 – Australia, the ultimate betrayer of Julian Assange. Read more... MARCH 10,
2023
JOHN PILGER. “The Betrayers of Assange.” FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Photograph
Source: Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación Argentina – Videoconferencia con
Julián Assange – Foro Cultura Digital – CC BY-SA 2.0 . . . . [Dick’s abridgement
of an abridgement.]
Alas, my daydream about
Australia doing right by Julian has reached its limits. The teasing of hope by [Prime
Minister] Albanese is now close to a betrayal for which the historical memory
will not forget him, and many will not forgive him. What, then, is he waiting for?
Remember that Julian was
granted political asylum by the Ecuadorean government in 2013 largely because
his own government had abandoned him. That alone ought to bring shame on those
responsible: namely the Labor government of Julia Gillard.
So eager was Gillard to
collude with the Americans in shutting down WikiLeaks for its truth telling
that she wanted the Australian Federal Police to arrest Assange and take away
his passport for what she called his ‘illegal’ publishing. The AFP pointed out
that they had no such powers: Assange had committed no crime.
It is as if you can
measure Australia’s extraordinary surrender of sovereignty by the way it treats
Julian Assange. Gillard’s pantomime grovelling to both houses of the US
Congress is cringing theatre on YouTube. Australia, she
repeated, was America’s ‘great mate’. Or was it ‘little mate’?
Her foreign minister was
Bob Carr, another Labor machine politician whom WikiLeaks exposed as an
American informant, one of Washington’s useful boys in Australia. In his
published diaries, Carr boasted knowing Henry Kissinger; indeed the Great
Warmonger invited the foreign minister to go camping in the California woods,
we learn.
Australian governments
have repeatedly claimed that Julian has received full consular support, which
is his right. When his lawyer Gareth Peirce and I met the Australian consul
general in London, Ken Pascoe, I asked him, ‘What do you know of the Assange
case.’
‘Just what I read in the
papers,’ he replied with a laugh.
[Part II]. . . .
On Julian Assange, the
Prime Minister has two faces. One face teases us with hope of his intervention
with Biden that will lead to Julian’s freedom. The other face ingratiates
itself with ‘POTUS’ and allows the Americans to do what they want with its
vassal: to lay down targets that could result in catastrophe for all of us.
Will Albanese back
Australia or Washington on Julian Assange? If he is ‘sincere’, as the more
do-eyed Labor Party supporters say, what is he waiting for? If he fails to
secure Julian’s release, Australia will cease to be sovereign. We will be
little Americans. Official.
This is not about the
survival of a free press. There is no longer a free press. There are refuges in
the samizdat, such as this site. The paramount issue is justice and
our most precious human right: to be free.
This is an abridged
version of an address by John Pilger in Sydney on 10 March to mark the launch
in Australia of Davide Dormino’s sculpture of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning,
and Edward Snowden, ‘figures of courage’.
John Pilger can be reached through his
website: www.johnpilger.com
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/03/10/the-betrayers-of-assange/
Daniel Ellsberg v. ESPIONAGE ACT
Losing 1st Amendment reverses
War of Independence
Editor.
Mronline.org (1-29-23).
Daniel Ellsberg says using the Espionage Act
against journalist Julian Assange in blatant violation of the First Amendment
means the First Amendment is essentially gone.
Why the western media is
afraid of Julian Assange
Jonathan Cook.
Mronline.org (2-1-23).
The shared desire of the security services
and the corporate media is to disappear Assange in the hope that his
revolutionary model of journalism is abandoned or forgotten for good.
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Assange Attorneys and Journalists Sue
the CIA Over Spying
AUGUST 18, 2022 By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan https://www.democracynow.org/2022/8/18/assange_attorneys_and_journalists_sue_the “Journalists are allowed to request
documents that have been stolen and to publish those documents.” So wrote
U.S. federal Judge John Koeltl in a 2019 opinion dismissing a lawsuit filed
by the Democratic National Committee against Julian Assange, Wikileaks and
others. Assange published documents on the Wikileaks website in the very
manner the judge described. Despite this, Julian Assange has been in solitary
confinement in Britain’s maximum security Belmarsh prison for over three
years. Before that, he spent seven years living in the cramped Ecuadorian
embassy in London. Ecuador granted Assange political asylum as he faced
mounting persecution from the U.S. government for his role in exposing U.S.
war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. is seeking Assange’s
extradition from the United Kingdom to face espionage and conspiracy charges
and up to 175 years in prison. Assange’s legal team is appealing the U.K.’s
approval of the extradition request. Meanwhile, a new case related to
Wikileaks is before Judge Koeltl: journalists and several of Assange’s
attorneys have sued the Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, alleging the CIA spied on them when they visited Assange in the
Ecuadorian embassy, recording conversations and secretly copying their phones
and laptops. “I’m a New York lawyer,” Deborah Hrbek,
an attorney who met with Assange at the embassy several times, said at a news
conference announcing the lawsuit. “I have the right to assume that the U.S.
government is not listening to my private and privileged conversations with
my clients, and that information about other clients and cases I may have on
my phone or laptop are secure from illegal government intrusion. This is not
just a violation of our constitutional rights. This is an outrage.” CIA spying on Julian Assange and his visitors became
public through a Spanish court case against a company, UC Global, and its
director, David Morales. UC Global was hired by Ecuador in 2012 to provide
security for its embassy in London. The CIA, the
new lawsuit alleges, recruited UC Global in January 2017, with the help of
the late casino billionaire and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, when
Morales was at a gun convention in Las Vegas. Morales returned to Spain and,
according to the lawsuit, told his employees that “the company would now be
operating ‘in the big league’ and for the ‘dark side’ with the CIA.” Donald Trump had been a big fan of
Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign, after the site published thousands of
emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton
and members of her inner circle. “WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks,” Trump said in
a speech in October. Then, in March, 2017, Wikileaks published “Vault 7,”
leaked CIA information that the agency
itself later admitted was “the largest data loss in CIA history.” Shortly after the first tranche of Vault
7 documents was published, Mike Pompeo blasted Wikileaks in his first public
speech as Trump’s new CIA Director: “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile
intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service…It
overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from
anti-democratic countries and organizations. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks
for what it really is: a nonstate hostile intelligence service.” Last year, Yahoo News exposed a
2017 CIA plot to kidnap and possibly kill
Julian Assange while in the Ecuadorian embassy. Yahoo reported that the plot
was discussed “at the highest levels of the Trump administration.” Plots to assassinate a publisher,
warrantless surveillance of private conversations and secret duplication of
attorneys’ and journalists’ private electronic devices all echo the
notoriously criminal conduct of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. Back then, the target was whistleblower
Daniel Ellsberg who leaked The Pentagon Papers, a secret history of U.S.
involvement in Vietnam that detailed the extent to which successive U.S.
administrations lied to the public about the war. Dan Ellsberg was charged
with espionage and faced life in prison. President Nixon’s obsession with leaks
led him to order the burglary of Ellberg’s psychiatrist’s office, starting
the chain of events that led to the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s
resignation. When the presiding judge in Ellsberg’s trial learned of the
government’s illegal conduct, he dismissed the case. Fifty years later, First Amendment
protections for publishers of government secrets, illegal CIA spying and more are before a federal judge again.
Judge John Koeltl, as a young lawyer, served on the Watergate Special
Prosecution Force. Now presiding over this case, filed by journalists and
Assange’s attorneys, expect more CIA criminality
to come to light. President Biden and his Justice Department should
immediately drop all charges against Julian Assange. CONTENTS:
WIKILEAKS/ASSANGE NEWSLETTER #16,
August 15, 2021
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