{"id":186838,"date":"2021-06-14T12:01:20","date_gmt":"2021-06-14T11:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=186838"},"modified":"2021-06-12T04:30:25","modified_gmt":"2021-06-12T03:30:25","slug":"julian-assange-and-the-collapse-of-the-rule-of-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/06\/julian-assange-and-the-collapse-of-the-rule-of-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Julian Assange and the Collapse of the Rule of Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Hedges gave this talk at a rally on 10 June 2021 night in New York City in support of Julian Assange. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian\u2019s father and brother, also spoke at the event, which was held at The People\u2019s Forum. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

11 Jun 2021 – <\/em>A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.<\/p>\n

This why we are here tonight.\u00a0 Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family.\u00a0 Yes, we demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him be ended.\u00a0 Yes, we honor him up for his courage and his integrity. But the battle for Julian\u2019s liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher.\u00a0 It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era.\u00a0 And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us.<\/p>\n

Tyrannies invert the rule of law.\u00a0 They turn the law into an instrument of injustice.\u00a0 They cloak their crimes in a faux<\/em> legality.\u00a0 They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality.\u00a0 Those, such as Julian, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.<\/p>\n

The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.<\/p>\n

I was in the London courtroom when Julian was being tried by Judge Vanessa Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice-in Wonderland demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison.\u00a0 There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis.\u00a0 Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser.\u00a0 Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision.\u00a0 It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online.\u00a0 It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.<\/p>\n

Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries.\u00a0 But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative, it is the restoration of the rule of law.\u00a0 It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary.\u00a0 But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance.\u00a0 This truth terrifies those in power.<\/p>\n

The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate.\u00a0 Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape.\u00a0 Prove this truth, as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.<\/p>\n

Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes\u2014including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints\u2014the towering civil rights attorneys Len Weinglass and my good friend Michael Ratner, who I would later accompany to meet Julian in the Ecuadoran Embassy, met with Julian in a studio apartment in Central London.\u00a0 Julian\u2019s personal bank cards had been blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents detailing US war crimes had disappeared from his luggage in route to London. Swedish police were fabricating a case against him in a move, Ratner warned, that was about extraditing Julian to the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cWikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political,\u201d Weinglass told Assange. \u201cAs we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the US government doesn\u2019t like the truth coming out. And it doesn\u2019t like to be humiliated. No matter if it\u2019s Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White House. The US government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it. We believe they are going to come after WikiLeaks and you, Julian, as the publisher.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCome after me for what?\u201d asked Julian.<\/p>\n

\u201cEspionage,\u201d Weinglass continued. \u201cThey\u2019re going to charge Bradley Manning with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917. We don\u2019t think it applies to him because he\u2019s a whistleblower, not a spy. And we don\u2019t think it applies to you either because you are a publisher. But they are going to try to force Manning into implicating you as his collaborator.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCome after me for what?<\/p>\n

That is the question.<\/p>\n

They came after Julian not for his vices, but his virtues.<\/p>\n

They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guant\u00e1namo; because he exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; because he exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime; because he exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, that they authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen, and that they secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians; because he exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform; because he exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party; because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.<\/p>\n

Julian exposed the truth.\u00a0 He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite.\u00a0 And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power.\u00a0 \u201cRed Rosa now has vanished too. \u2026\u201d Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. \u201cShe told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded. To refuse to fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, is to bear the mark of Cain. Those in power must feel our wrath, and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience, it means constant acts of social and political disruption, for this organized power from below is the only power that will save us and the only power that will free Julian.\u00a0 Politics is a game of fear.\u00a0 It is our moral and civic duty to make those in power very, very afraid.<\/p>\n

The criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip.\u00a0 It cannot be reformed.\u00a0 It has abolished the rule of law.\u00a0 It obscures and falsifies the truth. It seeks the consolidation of its obscene wealth and power. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically of course, I say, \u201cOff with their heads.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. Until this month, he wrote a weekly column for the online magazine\u00a0<\/em>Truthdig. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Hedges gave this talk at a rally on 10 June 2021 night in New York City in support of Julian Assange. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian\u2019s father and brother, also spoke at the event, which was held at The People\u2019s Forum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":186839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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-186838","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\/186838","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=186838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}