440 years since this:
The Habeas Corpus Act 1679 is an Act of the Parliament of England (31 Cha. 2 c. 2) passed during the reign of King Charles II to define and strengthen the ancient prerogative writ of habeas corpus, whereby persons unlawfully detained can be ordered to be prosecuted before a court of law. Progress?
The Age of Injustice
by Paul Craig Roberts
April 11, 2019, brought us a new word for Judas: Moreno—the puppet president of Ecuador who sold Julian Assange to Washington for his 30 pieces of silver.
This morning’s arrest of Assange inside the Ecudoran embassy in London is the first stage in Washington’s attempt to criminalize the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Washington’s man in Quito said he revoked Assange’s political asylum and Ecuadoran citizenship because Assange engaged in free speech.
As race and gender diverse police dragged Assange out of the embassy this morning, I reflected on the utter corruption of three governments—the U.S., the U.K., and Ecuador—and their institutions.
The British police showed no shame as they carted Assange from his embassy prison of the last seven years to a British jail as a way station on the way to an American one. If the British police had any integrity, the entire force would have called in sick.
If the British parliament had any integrity, they would have blocked London’s contribution to Washington’s upcoming show trial.
If the British had a prime minister instead of a Washington agent, Assange would have been released a long time ago, not held in de facto imprisonment until Washington found Moreno’s price.
If the Ecuadoran ambassador in London had any integrity, he would have publicly resigned rather than call in the police to take Assange. Is the ambassador so soulless that he can live with himself as the man who helped Moreno dishonor the reputation of Ecuador?
If the Anglo-American journalists had any integrity, they would be up in arms over the criminalization of their profession.
President Trump has survived a three-year ordeal similar to Assange’s seven-year ordeal. Trump knows how corrupt US intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Justice (sic) are. If Trump had any integrity, he would bring the shameful and embarrassing persecution of Assange to an immediate end by issuing a pre-trial pardon. This would also end the illegal re-imprisonment of Manning.
But integrity is not something that thrives in Washington, or in London, or in Quito.
When the Justice (sic) Department does not have a crime with which to charge its intended victim, the department trots out “conspiracy.” Assange is accused of being in a conspiracy with Manning to obtain and publicize secret government data, such as the film, which was already known to a Washington Post reporter who failed his newspaper and his profession by remaining silent, of U.S. soldiers committing extraordinary war crimes without remorse. As a U.S. soldier, it was actually Manning’s duty to report the crimes and the failure of U.S. troops to disobey unlawful orders. Manning was supposed to report the crimes to his superiors, not to the public, but he knew the military had already covered up the massacre of journalists and civilians and did not want another My Lai-type event on its hands.
I don’t believe the charge against Assange. If Wikileaks cracked the code for Manning, Wikileaks did not need Manning.
The alleged Grand Jury that allegedly produced the indictment was conducted in secret over many years as Washington searched for something that might be pinned on Assange. If there actually was a grand jury, the jurors were devoid of integrity, but how do we know there was a grand jury?
Why should we believe anything Washington says after “Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people,” “Iranian nukes,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” “Russiagate,” and on and on ad infinitum. Why believe Washington is telling the truth this time?
As the grand jury was secret because of “national security,” will the trial also be secret and the evidence secret? Is what we have here a Star Chamber proceeding in which a person is indicted in secret and convicted in secret on secret evidence? This is the procedure used by tyrannical governments who have no case against the person they intend to destroy.
The governments in Washington, London, and Quito are so shameless that they do not mind demonstrating to the entire world their lawlessness and lack of integrity.
Perhaps the rest of the world is itself so shameless that there will be no adverse consequences for Washington, London, and Quito. On the other hand, perhaps the frameup of Assange, following the Russiagate hoax and the shameless attempt to overthrow democracy in Venezuela and install Washington’s agent as president of that country, will make it clear to all that “the free world” is led by a rogue and lawless government. Washington is speeding up the decline of its empire as Washington makes it clear that Washington is worthy of no respect.
No confidence that justice will be served can be placed in any American trial. In Assange’s trial justice is not possible. With Assange convicted by the media, even a jury convinced of his innocence will convict him rather than face denunciation for freeing a “Russian spy.”
Assange’s conviction will make it impossible for media to report leaked information that is unfavorable to the government. As the precedent expands, future prosecutors will claim the Assange case as a precedent for prosecuting critics of the government who will be charged with intended harm to the government. The age of justice and accountable government is being brought to an end.
The following from: http://vfpuk.org/articles/costs-of-war/julian-assange-vfp-uk-statement/
JULIAN ASSANGE – VFP UK STATEMENT
British Veterans call on our government to respect the rights of journalists and whistle-blowers and refuse to extradite Julian Assange to the US.
We oppose the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States and are deeply concerned that journalism and whistleblowing is being criminalised by the US and actively supported by British authorities. The indefinite detention of Chelsea Manning and the persecution of Reality Winner and John Kiriakou have demonstrated that a whistle blower will not receive a fair trial in the US court system. We believe the authorities are seeking a show trial for the purpose of revenge and to intimidate journalists.
The release of the Iraq War Logs and The Afghan War Diaries revealed the true human cost of our wars in the Middle East. Wikileaks acted in the public interest by releasing these documents and Julian Assange, as a journalist, was right to publish in association with newspapers including The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. Without these documents, the public would have remained ignorant about the true number of civilian casualties and deaths, the torture and abuse of detainees, the killing of two Reuters journalists by US military personnel in helicopter gunships, the killing of Iraqi soldiers trying to surrender, and the abuses and civilian deaths caused by private military contractors.
VFP UK feel that the personal insults the judge made at Westminster Magistrates Court about Assange highlight a lack of fair and unbiased treatment.
We call on our government to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange to the US, and to respect the rights of whistle blowers and journalists.
Statement made and issued Fri 12 April 2019.
By John Pilger
The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.
But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.
Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s “paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.
The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilisation”. The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.
Assange’s principal media tormentor, the Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years”. The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.
With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.
With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding joined the police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh”. The Guardian has since published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.
But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”
These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It all available on the WikiLeaks site.
The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.
When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.
If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what the Guardian calls truthful “things”, what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?
What is to stop the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, and Der Spiegel in Germany and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. The list is long.
David McCraw, lead lawyer of the New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between the New York Times and WilLeaks.”
Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalised by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.
In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.
Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.
The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”
What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?
In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.
She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.
“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”
And did.
The rest, she might have added, is history.
Top photo | Julian Assange gestures as he arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, after the WikiLeaks founder was arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police and taken into custody, April 11, 2019. Victoria Jones | PA via AP
John Pilger is an award-winning journalist. His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Aftonbladet (Sweden), Il Manifesto (Italy).
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.
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