{"id":167952,"date":"2020-09-07T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=167952"},"modified":"2020-09-06T10:42:30","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T09:42:30","slug":"the-u-s-is-determined-to-make-julian-assange-pay-for-exposing-the-cruelty-of-its-war-on-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/09\/the-u-s-is-determined-to-make-julian-assange-pay-for-exposing-the-cruelty-of-its-war-on-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Is Determined to Make Julian Assange Pay for Exposing the Cruelty of Its War on Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

2 Sep 2020 – <\/em>On\u00a0September 7, 2020<\/a>, Julian Assange will leave his cell in Belmarsh Prison in London and attend a hearing that will determine his fate. After a long period of isolation, he was finally able to meet his partner\u2014Stella Moris\u2014and see their two sons\u2014Gabriel (age three) and Max (age one)\u2014on August 25. After the visit, Moris\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0that he looked to be in \u201ca lot of pain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hearing that Assange will face has nothing to do with the reasons for his arrest from the embassy of Ecuador in London on April 11, 2019. He was arrested that day for his\u00a0failure<\/a>\u00a0to surrender in 2012 to the British authorities, who would have extradited him to Sweden; in Sweden, at that time, there were accusations of sexual offenses against Assange that were\u00a0dropped<\/a>\u00a0in November 2019. Indeed, after the Swedish authorities decided not to pursue Assange, he should have been released by the UK government. But he was not.<\/p>\n

The true reason for the arrest was never the charge in Sweden; it was the desire of the U.S. government to have him brought to the United States on a range of charges. On April 11, 2019, the UK Home Office spokesperson\u00a0said<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can confirm that Julian Assange was arrested in relation to a provisional extradition request from the United States of America. He is accused in the United States of America of computer-related offenses.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Manning<\/strong><\/p>\n

The day after Assange\u2019s arrest, the campaign group Article 19 published a\u00a0statement<\/a>\u00a0that said that while the UK authorities had \u201coriginally\u201d said they wanted to arrest Assange for fleeing bail in 2012 toward the Swedish extradition request, it had now become clear that the arrest was due to a U.S. Justice Department\u00a0claim<\/a>\u00a0on him. The U.S. wanted Assange on a \u201cfederal charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer.\u201d Assange was accused of helping whistleblower\u00a0Chelsea Manning<\/a>\u00a0in 2010 when Manning passed WikiLeaks\u2014led by Assange\u2014an explosive trove of classified information from the U.S. government that contained clear evidence of war crimes. Manning spent seven years in prison before her sentence was\u00a0commuted<\/a>\u00a0by former U.S. President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

While Assange was in the Ecuadorian embassy and now as he languishes in Belmarsh Prison, the U.S. government has attempted to create an air-tight case against him. The U.S. Justice Department\u00a0indicted<\/a>\u00a0Assange on at least 18 charges, including the publication of classified documents and a charge that he helped Manning crack a password and hack into a computer at the Pentagon. One of the\u00a0indictments<\/a>\u2014from 2018\u2014makes the case against Assange clearly.<\/p>\n

The charge that Assange published the documents is not the central one, since the documents were also published by a range of media outlets such as the New York Times and the Guardian. The key\u00a0charge<\/a>\u00a0is that Assange \u201cactively encouraged Manning to provide more information and agreed to crack a password hash stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a United States government network used for classified documents and communications. Assange is also charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to crack that password hash.\u201d The problem here is that it appears that the U.S. government has no evidence that Assange colluded with Manning to break into the U.S. system.<\/p>\n

Manning does not deny that she broke into the system, downloaded the materials, and sent them to WikiLeaks. Once she had done this, WikiLeaks, like the other media outlets, published the materials. Manning had a very trying seven years in prison for her role in the transmission of the materials. Because of the lack of evidence against Assange, Manning was asked to testify against him before a grand jury. She refused and now is once more in\u00a0prison<\/a>; the U.S. authorities are using her imprisonment as a way to compel her to testify against Assange.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What Manning Sent to Assange<\/strong><\/p>\n

On January 8, 2010, WikiLeaks\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that it had \u201cencrypted videos of U.S. bomb strikes on civilians.\u201d The video, later released as \u201cCollateral Murder<\/a>,\u201d showed in cold-blooded detail how on July 12, 2007, U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters fired 30-millimeter guns at a group of Iraqis in New Baghdad; among those killed were Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. Reuters immediately asked for information about the killing; they were fed the official story and told that there was no video, but Reuters futilely\u00a0persisted<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2009, Washington Post reporter David Finkel published\u00a0The Good Soldiers<\/em><\/a>, based on his time embedded with the 2-16 battalion of the U.S. military. Finkel was with the U.S. soldiers in the Al-Amin neighborhood when they heard the Apache helicopters firing. For his book, Finkel had watched the tape (this is evident from\u00a0pages 96 to 104<\/a>); he defends the U.S. military, saying that \u201cthe Apache crew had followed the rules of engagement\u201d and that \u201ceveryone had acted appropriately.\u201d The soldiers, he wrote, were \u201cgood soldiers, and the time had come for dinner.\u201d Finkel had made it clear that a video existed, even though the U.S. government denied its existence to Reuters.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0is horrifying. It shows the callousness of the pilots. The people on the ground were not shooting at anyone. The pilots fire indiscriminately. \u201cLook at those dead bastards,\u201d one of them says, while another says, \u201cNice,\u201d after they fire at the civilians. A van pulls up at the carnage, and a person gets out to help the injured\u2014including Saeed Chmagh. The pilots request permission to fire at the van, get permission rapidly, and shoot at the van. Army Specialist Ethan McCord\u2014part of the 2-16 battalion that had Finkel embedded with them\u2014surveyed the scene from the ground minutes later. In 2010, McCord\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Wired\u2019s Kim Zetter what he saw:<\/p>\n

\u201cI have never seen anybody being shot by a 30-millimeter round before. It didn\u2019t seem real, in the sense that it didn\u2019t look like human beings. They were destroyed.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the van, McCord and other soldiers found badly injured Sajad Mutashar (age 10) and Doaha Mutashar (age five); their father, Saleh\u2014who had tried to rescue Saeed Chmagh\u2014was dead on the ground. In the video, the pilot saw that there were children in the van; \u201cWell, it\u2019s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,\u201d he says callously.<\/p>\n

Robert Gibbs, the press secretary for President Barack Obama,\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0in April 2010 that the events on the video were \u201cextremely tragic.\u201d But the cat was out of the bag. This video showed the world the actual character of the U.S. war on Iraq, which the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan had\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cillegal.\u201d The release of the video by Assange and WikiLeaks embarrassed the United States government. All its claims of humanitarian warfare had no credibility.<\/p>\n

The campaign to destroy Assange begins at that point. The United States government has made it clear that it wants to try Assange for everything up to\u00a0treason<\/a>. People who reveal the dark side of U.S. power, such as Assange and\u00a0Edward Snowden<\/a>, are given no quarter. There is a long list of people\u2014such as Manning,\u00a0Jeffrey Sterling<\/a>,\u00a0James Hitselberger<\/a>,\u00a0John Kiriakou<\/a>, and\u00a0Reality Winner<\/a>\u2014who, if they lived in countries being targeted by the United States, would be called dissidents. Manning is a hero for exposing war crimes; Assange, who merely assisted her, is being persecuted in plain daylight.<\/p>\n

On January 28, 2007, a few months before he was killed by the U.S. military, Namir Noor-Eldeen took a\u00a0photograph<\/a>\u00a0in Baghdad of a young boy with a soccer ball under his arm steps around a pool of blood. Beside the bright red blood lie a few rumpled schoolbooks. It was Noor-Eldeen\u2019s humane eye that went for that photograph, with the boy walking around the danger as if it were nothing more than garbage on the sidewalk. This is what the U.S. \u201cillegal\u201d war had done to his country.<\/p>\n

All these years later, that war remains alive and well in a courtroom in London; there Julian Assange\u2014who revealed the truth of the killing\u2014will struggle against being one more casualty of the U.S. war on Iraq.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the <\/em>Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of <\/em>LeftWord Books<\/a> and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. <\/em>He is the author of 20 books, including <\/em>The Darker Nations: A People\u2019s History of the Third World<\/a> (The New Press, 2007),<\/em> Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), <\/em>The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South<\/a> (Verso, 2013),<\/em> The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution<\/a> (University of California Press, 2016) and<\/em> Red Star Over the Third World<\/a> (LeftWord, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was produced by <\/em>Globetrotter<\/a>, a project of the <\/em>Independent Media Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On September 7, 2020, Julian Assange will leave his cell in Belmarsh Prison in London and attend a hearing that has nothing to do with the reasons for his arrest from the embassy of Ecuador. On April 11, 2019, the UK Home Office spokesperson said, \u201cWe can confirm that Julian Assange was arrested in relation to a provisional extradition request from the United States of America. He is accused in the United States of America of computer-related offenses.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":167954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[229,918,910,942,487,378,651,234,911,454,572,639,292,70,126,921,113],"class_list":["post-167952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance","tag-activism","tag-assange","tag-big-brother","tag-ecuador","tag-human-rights","tag-journalism","tag-justice","tag-media","tag-surveillance","tag-sweden","tag-torture","tag-uk","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-whistleblowing","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167952\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}