Tag Archives: Julian Assange imprisonment

Assange and Auschwitz, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on December 7, 2019 | 2 comments

The world is averting its eyes to the injustices being heaped on Julian Assange, just as it did to the injustices heaped on European Jews by the Nazis. From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

When I read that Angela Merkel visited Auschwitz this week (for the first time ever, curiously, after 14 years as Chancellor, and now it’s important?), my first thought was: she should have visited Julian Assange instead. I don’t even know why, it just popped into my head. And then reflecting on it afterwards, of course first I wondered if it’s acceptable to compare nazi victims to Assange in any way, shape or form.

There are many paths to argue it is not. He is not persecuted solely for being part of a group of people (we can’t really use “race” here). There are not millions like him who are being tortured and persecuted for the same reasons he is. There is no grand scheme to take out all like him. There is no major police or army force to execute any such scheme. These things are all obvious.

But I grew up in Holland, where unlike in Merkel’s Germany, the aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust was very much present. I looked it up, and it’s already almost 10 years ago that I wrote Miep Gies Died Today, in which I explained this. Miep Gies was a woman who worked for Anne Frank’s father Otto, helped hide the family in the annex, and after the war secured Anne’s diary (or we would never have known about it) and handed it to Otto Frank.

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They’re Murdering My Son – Julian Assange’s Father Tells of Pain and Anguish, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on September 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

The treatment meted out to Julian Assange by the American and British governments tells you all you need to know about them. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Julian Assange’s father, John Shipton, gave an interview to Strategic Culture Foundation over the weekend. After arriving from his home country of Australia, Shipton is visiting several European states, including Russia, to bring public attention to the persecution of Julian Assange by British authorities over his role as a publisher and author.

First though an introduction to the Assange case. Few media figures can be attributed with transforming international politics and the global media landscape. Arguably, Julian Assange, author, publisher and founder of the Wikileaks whistleblower website (2006), is in the top tier of world-changing individuals over the past decade.

The Australian-born Assange has previously been awarded with accolades and respect for his truth-telling journalism which exposed massive crimes, corruption and nefarious intrigues by the US government and its Western allies.

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The World’s Most Important Political Prisoner, by Craig Murray

Posted on September 16, 2019 | 1 comment

No bona fide bail jumper has experienced anywhere near the severity of punishment being meted out to Julian Assange by the British government. From Craig Murray at lewrockwell.com:

We are now just one week away from the end of Julian Assange’s uniquely lengthy imprisonment for bail violation. He will receive parole from the rest of that sentence, but will continue to be imprisoned on remand awaiting his hearing on extradition to the USA – a process which could last several years.

At that point, all the excuses for Assange’s imprisonment which so-called leftists and liberals in the UK have hidden behind will evaporate. There are no charges and no active investigation in Sweden, where the “evidence” disintegrated at the first whiff of critical scrutiny. He is no longer imprisoned for “jumping bail”. The sole reason for his incarceration will be the publishing of the Afghan and Iraq war logs leaked by Chelsea Manning, with their evidence of wrongdoing and multiple war crimes.

In imprisoning Assange for bail violation, the UK was in clear defiance of the judgement of the UN Working Group on arbitrary Detention, which stated

Under international law, pre-trial detention must be only imposed in limited instances. Detention during investigations must be even more limited, especially in the absence of any charge. The Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr. Assange’s continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offense that cannot post facto justify the more than 6 years confinement that he has been subjected to since he sought asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. Mr. Assange should be able to exercise his right to freedom of movement in an unhindered manner, in accordance with the human rights conventions the UK has ratified,

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Why is Julian Assange Being Tortured to Death? by Karen Kwiatkowski

Posted on September 14, 2019 | Leave a comment

After what Julian Assange has gone through, how many journalists will challenge the establishment and its false narratives? From Karen Kwiatkowski at lewrockwell.com:

I think we already know the answer.  We need to go further and try and understand what this partially veiled, but completely serious, US and UK destruction of a modern journalist means for all of us.

Assange is an advocate for whistleblowers, a promoter of information access and information security for everyone, not just governments and major government-connected corporations.  He, with the help of information security specialists, codewriters, truthtellers and witnesses around the world, received and published material that embarrassed and exposed a number of powerful organizations, including the US government and its many cronies and beneficiaries.

Why is he being tortured to death?  Why is he still being subjected to new and experimental variants of BZ fresh from Porton Down, and deprived, not only of friends, relatives, and unsupervised access to his legal team, but to food and basic care?

The short answer is that he is being held on behalf of the United States and he is being chemically and physically interrogated in Belmarsh (the British Gitmo) in order to reveal his private cryptographic keys, and the names and cryptographic information relating to others within the Wikileaks information network.  The arrest of Ola Bini in April with new charges filed last month, and the re-arrest and incarceration of Chelsea Manning, speak to part of the effort to find the anonymous leakers of information from the NSA vaults, specifically their hacking tools cache leaked in 2016.  This is generally indicated but not completely put forth in the US indictment.

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Is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth Alive?Why Don’t We Hear Much About Julian Assange? by Michelle Wood

Posted on September 11, 2019 | 1 comment

The mainstream media is undoubtedly hoping that they won’t have to say anything about Julian Assange until he dies in jail. From Michelle Wood at medium.com:

Image: Michelle Wood

In Orwell’s dystopian fiction 1984, the government’s mission through the Ministry of Truth is to supply its people with news, entertainment, books, films, plays and songs, packed with the information it wants the people to know. It constructs lies to fit the narrative it wishes to establish and sets about rewriting historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line.

Have we slept walked our way into 1984 with the curious witchhunt of Julian Assange?

From the time Wikileaks published Collateral Murder in 2010, exposing the slaying of Iraqi civilians at the hands of merciless US Apache soldiers, in what became the biggest news story of its time, the United States has wanted Julian Assange silenced and forgotten.

He has lived in a state of confinement since May 2010 when he was arrested and jailed in the United Kingdom, lived under house arrest for a further 18 months in England and then sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy from June 2012 .Yet many people think Assange was in a position where he could simply walk free.

Has there been a well crafted smear campaign to dehumanise Assange and coax the public into forgetting him? How else could he have been detained within two tiny rooms devoid of sunlight for more than six years without public commentary and concern? The apparent dismantling of Assange’s character and disinformation has been thorough. Most people do not know the specifics of his case, but “believe” he is an arrogant rapist and an ungrateful, badly behaved houseguest, smearing faeces on the embassy walls and being cruel to his cat. These disputed claims are now so well accepted it’s inconceivable that they could actually be lies.

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Assange Lawyer Reveals The Pentagon Was Behind Bringing Down WikiLeaks’ Assange, by Joe Martino

Posted on June 22, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Pentagon does not like its secrets disclosed. From Joe Martino at collective-evolution.com:

IN BRIEF

  • The Facts:One of Assange’s lawyers has confirmed that it was the Pentagon who was behind the smear and aggression to bring down Julian Assange, not the Obama admin.
  • Reflect On:Why does our government’s work so hard to protect secrets related to wrongdoing that no one supports? Why do we spend more time arguing over if Assange is right or wrong when we already know the actions of our governments are dreadful?

As free and open journalism remains under attack, a lawyer for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange has confirmed that it’s the Pentagon, and not the White House or any other government agency whose secrets he has leaked, that has been pushing for years to smear and bring down Julian Assange.

Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson was granted a meeting with Obama administration insiders and had asked if they “really wanted” the publisher so they could access his whistleblowers and because he warned that “there are dangerous precedents here,” Robertson said they responded simply:

We don’t want him, but the Pentagon does, and the Pentagon may eventually get its way.

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The Real Reason Why Uncle Sam Wants to Imprison Julian Assange, by Mark Nestmann

Posted on June 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

Mark Nestmann clearly makes the case that Assange’s prosecution is because he revealed the US government’s dirty laundry. From Nestmann at nestmann.com:

On June 16, 1918, a sickly and frail man climbed the steps to the bandstand at the Stark County Workhouse in Canton, Ohio to make a speech. For more than two hours, he railed against America’s recent entry into World War I. “Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters,” he said. “Be true to yourself and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”

Two weeks later, the man was seized by US marshals and charged with ten counts of violating the Espionage and Sedition Act for his statements in his speech in Canton. A jury found him guilty on three of the ten counts, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The mainstream media rejoiced over the sentence. The reaction of The Washington Post was typical. “His activities in opposition to the war preparation were dangerous … His conviction …  serves notice to all that disloyalty and sedition, even though masquerading under the guise of free speech, will not be tolerated.”

Eugene Debs, the defendant in this case, was a five-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. And while I hardly agree with his socialist views, he had every right to speak his mind on that long-ago summer day. After all, the First Amendment to the Constitution reads:

Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

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The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange, by Chris Hedges

Posted on June 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

The last thing Julian Assange can expect in the US is a fair trial. From Chris Hedges at truthdig.com:

The Coming Show Trial of Julian Assange

LONDON—On Friday morning I was in a small courtroom at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Julian Assange, held in Belmarsh Prison and dressed in a pale-blue prison shirt, appeared on a video screen directly in front of me. Assange, his gray hair and beard neatly trimmed, slipped on heavy, dark-frame glasses at the start of the proceedings. He listened intently as Ben Brandon, the prosecutor, seated at a narrow wooden table, listed the crimes he allegedly had committed and called for his extradition to the United States to face charges that could result in a sentence of 175 years. The charges include the release of unredacted classified material that posed a “grave” threat to “human intelligence sources” and “the largest compromises of confidential information in the history of the United States.” After the prosecutor’s presentation, Assange’s attorney, Mark Summers, seated at the same table, called the charges “an outrageous and full-frontal assault on journalistic rights.”

Most of us who have followed the long persecution of Assange expected this moment, but it was nevertheless deeply unsettling, the opening of the final act in a Greek tragedy where the hero, cursed by fortuna, or fate, confronts the dark forces from which there is no escape.

For more information on the Assange case, see Chris Hedges interview U.N. special rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer and read the transcript. Also, see Hedges interview WikiLeaks Editor in Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson.

The publication of classified documents is not a crime in the United States, but if Assange is extradited and convicted it will become one. Assange is not an American citizen. WikiLeaks, which he founded and publishes, is not a U.S.-based publication. The message the U.S. government is sending is clear: No matter who or where you are, if you expose the inner workings of empire you will be hunted down, kidnapped and brought to the United States to be tried as a spy. The extradition and trial of Assange will mean the end of public investigations by the press into the crimes of the ruling elites. It will cement into place a frightening corporate tyranny. Publications such as The New York Times and The Guardian, which devoted pages to the WikiLeaks revelations and later amplified and legitimized Washington’s carefully orchestrated character assassination of Assange, are no less panicked. This is the gravest assault on press freedom in my lifetime.

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Ai Weiwei: “Why Hong Kong can be a new Tiananmen and why Assange is a political prisoner”

Posted on June 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Chinese government is bent on crushing dissent, and Western governments are moving in the same direction. From an interview with Ai Weiwei at repubblica.it:

An exclusive interview with the most famous Chinese artist, dissident and activist on Beijing expanding his power, the European countries “like Italy begging for China’s money”, the death of Europe as we know it, human rights under attack, the comeback of the 1930s and the “total failure of today’s intellectuals”

LONDON. Ai Weiwei, 61, is the most famous Chinese artist and dissident, he is based in Berlin but this week he came to London for a couple of cultural initiatives. Moreover, he met Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder jailed in a London prison and now at risk of extradition. Ai has always been a prominent advocate of Assange’s cause but in this interview done in a West London hotel he talks also about Hong Kong protests, the decay of both Europe and the West, the “total failure” of intellectuals nowadays and why our times are similar to the 1930s.

Mr Ai Weiwei, what do you think about the Hong Kong demonstrations? Are they going to be successful?
“Well, Hong Kong’s demonstrations are very grand scale, it’s very impressive. But I would not measure the demonstration as successful or not. If the demonstration has content or meaning, then a demonstration is always successful. There were over one million people in the streets in Hong Kong. China’s political inference wants to make Hong Kong become another Mainland-controlled territory. According to reports, 90 percent of the people taking part in the demostrations are from 19 to 25 years old. That shows great hope for a new generation of Chinese. And I’m deeply impressed to see young people organizing it on such a scale, but rationally, peacefully and making a continuous effort in trying to protect Hong Kong’s freedom. That is extremely interesting. And also it’s a new lesson for the world to know. There are people who are concerned about China’s brutal violations of human rights, also because China is trying to expand its influence in territories where law, freedom and democracy are established”.

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Freeing Julian Assange: Part Two, by Suzie Dawson

Posted on June 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

The allegation that Julian Assange has been in bed with Russia goes all the way back to 2o09. From Suzie Dawson at contraspin.co.nz:

Part One

The myth that became Russiagate was seven years in the making. In this article we examine just how far back the real conspiracy stretches.

A Lie Too Big To Fail

The public has been led to believe that the 2016 election and the resulting Mueller Report is the definitive evidence that WikiLeaks was somehow in cahoots with Russia, reinforcing the premise that they were in a political alliance with, or favoured, Donald Trump and his Presidential election campaign.

Prominent Russiagate-skeptics have long pointed out the multitude of gaping holes inherent in those theories, including the advocacy group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) who have produced credible forensic work analysing the 2016 WikiLeaks releases, that resoundingly debunks officials claims.

In the course of researching this article, I stumbled across a major discovery that augments that: the false notion of WikiLeaks being a front for Russian intelligence isn’t new – it has been pushed by media since 2009.

It turns out the circulation of the WikiLeaks-Russia myth was a tried and true diversionary, smear tactic that was simply regurgitated in 2016.

Julian Assange believed that UK intelligence agencies were behind the pushing of that narrative, and he was publicly stating so at the end of last decade.

He wouldn’t make such claims lightly, and other emerging facts support his suspicion.

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