{"id":251684,"date":"2024-01-01T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=251684"},"modified":"2024-01-01T06:40:13","modified_gmt":"2024-01-01T06:40:13","slug":"john-pilger-on-the-betrayers-of-julian-assange","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/01\/john-pilger-on-the-betrayers-of-julian-assange\/","title":{"rendered":"John Pilger, on the Betrayers of Julian Assange"},"content":{"rendered":"
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New Matilda<\/p><\/div>\n

20 Jul 2023 – More than a decade on from his forced asylum and subsequent torture in 2012 at the hands of British and US authorities, Julian Assange remains abandoned by his own government and the media.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour, often dispensed with an infectious giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes of the state try to silence him and his moral revolution in journalism.<\/p>\n

My own high point was when a judge in the Royal Courts of Justice leaned across his bench and growled at me: \u2018You are just a peripatetic Australian like Assange.\u2019 My name was on a list of volunteers to stand bail for Julian, and this judge spotted me as the one who had reported his role in the notorious case of the expelled Chagos Islanders. Unintentionally, he delivered me a compliment.<\/p>\n

I saw Julian in Belmarsh not long ago. We talked about books and the oppressive idiocy of the prison: the happy-clappy slogans on the walls, the petty punishments; they still won\u2019t let him use the gym. He must exercise alone in a cage-like area where there is a sign that warns about keeping off the grass. But there is no grass. We laughed; for a brief moment, some things didn\u2019t seem too bad.<\/p>\n

The laughter is a shield, of course. When the prison guards began to jangle their keys, as they like to do, indicating our time was up, he fell quiet. As I left the room he held his fist high and clenched as he always does. He is the embodiment of courage.<\/p>\n

Those who are the antithesis of Julian: in whom courage is unheard of, along with principle and honour, stand between him and freedom. I am not referring to the Mafia regime in Washington whose pursuit of a good man is meant as a warning to us all, but rather to those who still claim to run a just democracy in Australia.<\/p>\n

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Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. (IMAGE: La Moncloa, Flickr)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anthony Albanese was mouthing his favourite platitude, \u2018enough is enough\u2019 long before he was elected prime minister of Australia last year. He gave many of us precious hope, including Julian\u2019s family. As prime minister he added weasel words about \u2018not sympathising\u2019 with what Julian had done. Apparently we had to understand his need to cover his appropriated posteria in case Washington called him to order.<\/p>\n

We knew it would take exceptional\u00a0political\u00a0if not moral courage for Albanese to stand up in the Australian Parliament and say:<\/p>\n

\u2018As prime minister, it is my government\u2019s responsibility to bring home an Australian citizen who is clearly the victim of a great, vindictive injustice: a man who has been persecuted for the kind of journalism that is a true public service, a man who has not lied, or deceived \u2013 like so many of his counterfeit in the media \u2013 but has told people the truth about how the world is run.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I call on the United States,\u2019 a courageous and moral Prime Minister Albanese might say, \u2018to withdraw its extradition application: to end the malign farce that has stained Britain\u2019s once admired courts of justice and to allow the release of Julian Assange unconditionally to his family. For Julian to remain in his cell at Belmarsh is an act of torture, as the United Nations Rapporteur has called it<\/a>. It is how a dictatorship behaves.\u2019<\/p>\n

Alas, my daydream about Australia doing right by Julian has reached its limits. The teasing of hope by 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018illegal\u2019 publishing. The AFP pointed out that they had no such powers: Assange had committed no crime.<\/p>\n

It is as if you can measure Australia\u2019s extraordinary surrender of sovereignty by the way it treats Julian Assange. Gillard\u2019s pantomime grovelling to both houses of the US Congress is\u00a0cringing theatre on YouTube.\u00a0Australia, she repeated, was America\u2019s \u2018great mate\u2019. Or was it \u2018little mate\u2019?<\/p>\n