{"id":239033,"date":"2023-07-10T12:01:08","date_gmt":"2023-07-10T11:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=239033"},"modified":"2023-07-10T10:39:15","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T09:39:15","slug":"journalists-abandoned-julian-assange-and-slit-their-own-throats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/journalists-abandoned-julian-assange-and-slit-their-own-throats\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats"},"content":{"rendered":"

The failure by journalists to mount a campaign to free Julian Assange, or expose the vicious smear campaign against him, is one more catastrophic and self-defeating blunder by the news media.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

When Goliaths Infiltrate the Fourth Estate – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

9 Jul 2023 –<\/em> The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent<\/a>, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating<\/a> 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed<\/a> by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated<\/a> a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings<\/a> of Julian\u2019s meetings<\/a> with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than<\/a> four years in the notorious Belmarsh<\/a> high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged<\/a> him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial<\/a>, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday night at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Stella Assange, an attorney who is married to Julian; Matt Kennard, co-founder and chief investigator of Declassified UK<\/a>, and I examined the collapse of the press, especially with regard to Julian\u2019s case. You can watch our discussion here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I\u2019m living in 1984,\u201d Matt said. \u201cThis is a journalist who revealed more crimes of the world\u2019s superpower than anyone in history. He\u2019s sitting in a maximum-security prison in London. The state that wants to bring him over to that country to put him in prison for the rest of his life is on record as spying<\/a> on his privileged conversations with his lawyers. They\u2019re on record plotting to assassinate<\/a> him. Any of those things, if you told someone from a different time \u2018Yeah this is what happened and he was sent anyway and not only that, but the media didn\u2019t cover it at all.\u2019 It\u2019s really scary. If they can do that to Assange, if civil society can drop the ball and the media can drop the ball, they can do that to any of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Julian and WikiLeaks released the secret diplomatic cables and Iraq War logs, which exposed<\/a> numerous U.S. war crimes, including torture and the murder of civilians, corruption, diplomatic scandals, lies and spying by the U.S. government, the commercial media had no choice but to report the information. Julian and WikiLeaks shamed them into doing their job. But, even as they worked with Julian, organizations such as The New York Times and The Guardian were determined to destroy him. He threatened their journalistic model and exposed their accommodation with the centers of power.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey hated him,\u201d Matt said of the mainstream media reporters and editors. \u201cThey went to war with him immediately after those releases. I was working for The Financial Times in Washington in late 2010 when those releases happened. The reaction of the office at The Financial Times was one of the major reasons I got disillusioned with the mainstream media.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julian went from being a journalistic colleague to a pariah as soon as the information he provided to these news organizations was published. He endured, in the words<\/a> of Nils Melzer, at the time the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture<\/a>, \u201ca relentless and unrestrained campaign of public mobbing, intimidation and defamation.\u201d These attacks included \u201ccollective ridicule, insults and humiliation, to open instigation of violence and even repeated calls for his assassination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julian was branded<\/a> a hacker, although all the information he published was leaked to him by others. He was smeared<\/a> as a sexual predator and a Russian spy, called<\/a> a narcissist and accused<\/a> of being unhygienic and slovenly<\/a>. The ceaseless character assassination, amplified by a hostile media, saw him abandoned by many who had regarded him a hero.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce he had been dehumanized<\/a> through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide,\u201d Melzer concluded<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel, all of which published WikiLeaks documents provided by Julian, published <\/a>a joint open letter on Nov. 28, 2022 calling on the U.S. government \u201cto end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the demonization of Julian, which these publications helped to foster, had already been accomplished.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was pretty much an immediate shift,\u201d Stella recalled. \u201cWhile the media partners knew that Julian still had explosive material that still had to be released, they were partners. As soon as they had what they thought they wanted from him, they turned around and attacked him. You have to put yourself in the moment where the press was in 2010 when these stories broke. They were struggling for a financial model to survive. They hadn\u2019t really adapted to the age of the internet. You had Julian coming in with a completely new model of journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

There followed a WikiLeaks-isation<\/a> of U.S. media outlets such as The New York Times, which adopted the innovations pioneered by WikiLeaks, including providing secure channels for whistleblowers to leak documents.<\/p>\n

\u201cJulian was a superstar,\u201d Stella said. \u201cHe came from outside the \u2018old boys\u2019 network. He talked about how these revelations should lead to reform and how the Collateral Murder video<\/a> reveals that this is a war crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Julian was outraged when he saw the heavy redactions of the information he exposed in newspapers such as The Guardian. He criticized these publications for self-censoring to placate their advertisers and the powerful.<\/p>\n

He exposed these news organizations, as Stella said, \u201cfor their own hypocrisy, for their own poor journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI find it very ironic that you have all this talk of misinformation, that\u2019s just cover for censorship,\u201d Stella said. \u201cThere are all these new organizations that are subsidized to find misinformation. It\u2019s just a means to control the narrative. If this whole disinformation age really took truth seriously, then all of these disinformation organizations would hold WikiLeaks up as the<\/em> example, right? Julian\u2019s model of journalism was what he called scientific journalism. It should be verifiable. You can write up an analysis of a news item, but you have to show what you\u2019re basing it on. The cables are the perfect example of this. You write up an analysis of something that happened and you reference the cables and whatever else you\u2019re basing your news story on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a completely new model of journalism,\u201d she continued. \u201cIt is one [that] journalists who understood themselves as gatekeepers hated<\/em>. They didn\u2019t like the WikiLeaks model. WikiLeaks was completely reader-funded. Its readers were global and responding enthusiastically. That\u2019s why PayPal, MasterCard, Visa and Bank of America started the banking blockade<\/a> in December 2010. This has become a standardized model of censorship to demonetize, to cut channels off from their readership and their supporters. The very first time this was done was in 2010 against WikiLeaks within two or three days of the U.S. State Department cables being published.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Visa cut off WikiLeaks, Stella noted, it continued<\/a> to process donations to the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n

Julian\u2019s \u201cmessage was journalism can lead to reform, it can lead to justice, it can help victims, it can be used in court and it has been used<\/a> in court in the European Court of Human Rights, even at<\/a> the U.K. Supreme Court in the Chagos case<\/a> here,\u201d she said. \u201cIt has been used as evidence. This is a completely new approach to journalism. WikiLeaks is bigger than journalism because it\u2019s authentic, official documents. It\u2019s putting internal history into the public record at the disposal of the public and victims of state-sponsored crime. For the first time we were able to use these documents to seek justice, for example, in the case of the German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was abducted and tortured<\/a> by the CIA. He was able to use WikiLeaks cables at the European Court of Human Rights when he sued Macedonia for the rendition<\/a>. It was a completely new approach. It brought journalism to its maximum potential.\u201d<\/p>\n

The claims of objectivity and neutrality propagated by the mainstream media are a mechanism to prevent journalism from being used to challenge injustices or reform corrupt institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s completely alien, the idea that you might use journalism as a tool to better the world and inform people of what\u2019s happening,\u201d Matt said. \u201cFor them it\u2019s a career. It\u2019s a status symbol. I never had a crisis of conscience because I never wanted to be a journalist if I couldn\u2019t do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor people who come out of university or journalism school, where do you go?\u201d he asked. \u201cPeople get mortgages. They have kids. They want to have a normal life\u2026You enter the system. You slowly get all your rough edges shorn off. You become part of the uniformity of thought. I saw it explicitly at The Financial Times.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very insidious system,\u201d Matt went on. \u201cJournalists can say to themselves \u2018I can write what I like,\u2019 but obviously they can\u2019t. I think it\u2019s quite interesting starting Declassified with Mark Curtis in the sense that journalists don\u2019t know how to react to us. We have a complete blackout in the mainstream media.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere has been something really sinister that has happened in the last twenty years, particularly at The Guardian,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Guardian is just state-affiliated media. The early WikiLeaks releases in 2010 were done with The Guardian. I remember 2010 when those releases were happening with The Guardian and The New York Times. I\u2019d read the same cables being covered in The Guardian and The New York Times and I\u2019d always thought \u2018Wow, we\u2019re lucky to have The Guardian because The New York Times were taking a much more pro-U.S. pro-government position.\u2019 That\u2019s now flipped. I\u2019d much prefer to read The New York Times covering this stuff. And I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s perfect. Neither of them were perfect, but there was a difference. I think what\u2019s happened is clever state repression.\u201d<\/p>\n

The D-notice committee<\/a>, he explained, is composed of journalists and state security officials in the U.K. who meet every six months. They discuss what journalists can and can\u2019t publish. The committee sends out regular advisories<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Guardian ignored<\/a> advisories not to publish the revelations of illegal mass surveillance released by Edward Snowden. Finally, under intense pressure, including threats by the government to shut the paper down, The Guardian agreed to permit two Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ<\/a>) officials to oversee the destruction of the hard drives and memory devices that contained material provided by Snowden. The GCHQ officials on July 20, 2013 filmed three Guardian editors as they destroyed<\/a> laptops with angle grinders and drills. The deputy editor of The Guardian, Paul Johnson<\/a> \u2014 who was in the basement\u00a0 during the destruction<\/a> of the laptops \u2014 was appointed to the D-notice committee. He served at the D-notice committee for four years. In his last committee meeting Johnson was thanked<\/a> for \u201cre-establishing links\u201d between the committee and The Guardian. The paper\u2019s adversarial reporting, by then, had been neutralized.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe state realized after the war in Iraq that they needed to clamp down on the freedom in the British media,\u201d Matt said. \u201cThe Daily Mirror under Piers Morgan\u2026I don\u2019t know if anyone remembers back in 2003, and I know he is a controversial character and he\u2019s hated by a lot of people, including me, but he was editor at The Daily Mirror. It was a rare opening of what a mainstream tabloid newspaper can do if it\u2019s doing proper journalism against the war, an illegal war. He had headlines made out of oil company logos. He did Bush and Blair with blood all over their hands, amazing stuff, every day for months. He had John Pilger on the front page, stuff you would never see now. There was a major street movement against the war. The state thought \u2018Shit, this is not good, we\u2019ve gotta clamp down.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This triggered the government campaign to neuter the press.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t say we have a functioning media in terms of the newspapers,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not just about Assange,\u201d Matt continued. \u201cThis is about all of our futures, the future for our kids and our grandkids. The things we hold dear, democracy, freedom of speech, free press, they\u2019re very, very fragile, much more fragile than we realize. That\u2019s been exposed by Assange. If they get Assange, the levies will break. It\u2019s not like they\u2019re going to stop. That\u2019s not how power works. They don\u2019t pick off one person and say we\u2019re going to hold off now. They\u2019ll use those tools to go after anyone who wants to expose them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re working in an environment in London where there\u2019s a journalist imprisoned for exposing war crimes, maybe not consciously but somewhere you [know you] shouldn\u2019t do that,\u201d Matt said. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t question power. You shouldn\u2019t question people who are committing crimes secretly because you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen\u2026The U.K. government is trying to introduce laws which make it explicit that you can\u2019t publish [their crimes]. They want to formalize what they\u2019ve done to Assange and make it a crime to reveal war crimes and other things. When you have laws and a societal-wide psyche that you cannot question power, when they tell you what is in your interest, that\u2019s fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/span><\/p>\n

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

Copyright 2022 Chris Hedges<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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

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