State Responses to the Torture of Julian Assange, Morally Disengaging Media, and What It Means for Us All, Part 1

Dr Lissa Johnson – New Matilda

Talk to the totalitarian hand:While Julian Assange rots in prison for publishing journalism, clinical psychologist Dr Lissa Johnson explains some of the science behind how we got here, and also how we push back.

(IMAGE: Steve Rhodes, Flickr)

6 Aug 2019 – On Sunday June 28th 2019, Western democracy arrived at an historic crossroads. Moving forward from this day, citizens of Western nations will head down one of two paths.

The first path leads towards genuine democracies, wherein governments are accountable to the publics they govern, and publics have a right to know what leaders do in their name. It is a path along which a free press fosters an informed electorate, capable of making informed decisions at election time. Such principles are not only fundamental prerequisites for democracy, but essential protections against government abuses of all kinds.

The second path heads down totalitarian terrain, currently being blazed by the Trump administration, wherein governments decide who is free to speak and who is not, including who is a ‘journalist’ and who is not, by granting themselves the power to silence those who make them look bad. This pathway not only spells death to democracy and the public’s right to know, it is a recipe for state-sanctioned abuse.

As the Science of Human Rights Coalition warns in a document titled Human Rights 101, “Unless citizens want their governments to support human rights, government leaders rarely will do so… [Human rights principles] carry no weight unless the people know them, unless the people understand them, unless the people demand that they be lived.”

People kept in the dark about their government’s activities, however, are in no position to demand anything of their governments at all, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us. Down the pathway of governmental secrecy, citizens can kiss goodbye not only to respect for human rights, but to holding their leaders accountable over any issue in which the interests of the elites and the majority clash, whether fossil fuels, climate emergency, racial and economic inequality and injustice, endless wars, mass surveillance or any other public interest matter one might care to name.

Judicial Harassment, Public Mobbing and Holding Governments to Account

But getting back to Sunday, June 28th 2019; what happened that placed Western societies at such a crossroads, faced with a choice between democracy and autocracy, freedom and tyranny, knowing and not knowing, light and dark?

On that day, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, published letters to four ostensibly democratic states, detailing the ways in which those states have joined forces to mob, persecute, silence, harass, defame and psychologically torture a publisher of journalism.

Importantly, the states concerned have targeted the publisher in question not for causing any harm nor publishing misleading content. Quite the reverse. The publisher under attack stands out amongst his peers for his unblemished record of 100 per cent accuracy. Which makes that publisher Julian Assange.

WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange is being mobbed not for perpetrating harm or deception, but for making powerful leaders look bad. By publishing the truth about them.

Professor Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. (IMAGE: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

In democracies founded on informed electorates, such journalistic activity is a welcome development. In totalitarian states, however, where powerbrokers’ interests reign supreme, it is not.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines totalitarianism as “a political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them”. A political system in which a publisher languishes in Belmarsh Supermax for journalism would be an example.

In fact, Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges has long argued that Western societies are undergoing a gradual transformation from democracies to corporate totalitarian states, through a slow motion corporate coup d’etat, in which power is seized not by a demagogue but by “the faceless anonymity of the corporate state.” A Princeton study in 2014 lent empirical weight to that view.

The violently oppressive reaction of powerful state-corporate interests to the publishing activities of Julian Assange appears to illustrate Hedges’ point even more powerfully still.

As punishment for keeping the world’s population so accurately informed about the inner workings of power, Nils Melzer reports that Julian Assange is not only incarcerated in Belmarsh prison, but has suffered nearly a decade of “prolonged, involuntary and arbitrary detention… [along with]sustained and unrestrained public mobbing, intimidation and defamation… [ranging from]judicial harassment… [to]open threats and instigation of violence, [including]repeated calls for his assassination or murder.”

Professor of international law Nils Melzer has succinctly pointed out that none of this has anything to do with facing ‘Swedish Justice’. Melzer explains that the Swedish investigation surrounding Julian Assange has been, from the start, “a relentless campaign of judicial persecution… [involving]abuse of the judicial system in order to try to extradite [Julian Assange] to the US”.

Most recently, that judicial persecution has entailed locking Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison for 50 weeks over the pseudo-legal concoction of defunct bail infringement. Even the Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association has called the Swedish investigation “deplorable”, fearing that it has “damaged the reputation of the Swedish judicial system”.

Altogether, Professor Melzer’s letters, which constitute his final report, lay the responsibility for the near decade-long campaign of persecution and psychological torture of Julian Assange squarely at the feet of the UK, the US, Sweden and Ecuador. In his letters to those four states, Melzer notified each government of their culpability via “direct perpetration or, as the case may be, through instigation, consent, or acquiescence, as well as through failure to prevent” the various forms of persecution described.

In addition to detailing the states’ culpability, Professor Melzer requested a response from each state outlining their plans to investigate the allegations in his final report, and to protect Julian Assange from further harm, as well as ensuring redress for harms caused to date. In the event that no such measures were forthcoming, Professor Melzer asked the states to “explain how this is compatible with [their]human rights obligations”.

Posted on the website of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, alongside Nils Melzer’s letters, are the states’ replies. Before examining those replies and their implications for Western democracies, it is worth briefly revisiting how and why the persecution of Julian Assange began.

A Tender Eye That Brought Humanity to a Vicious War

In 2007, two Reuters employees set out on assignment in Baghdad. They were Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old photo-journalist and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, a father of four.

Although only 22, Namir was regarded as among “the pre-eminent war photographers in Iraq” with “a natural sense of colour” and “a tender eye that brought humanity via quiet moments to a vicious war”.

He was “one of the most beloved members of the Reuters staff, a cheerful, funny, smart young man who loved motorcycles” a colleague recalled. A former Reuters Chief Photographer in Iraq described Namir as an “editor’s dream… [whose]quick smile and energy never faded…it’s very, very sad to know I’ll never get one of his bear-hug greetings again.”

A screencap from the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ video, which sparked the global hunt for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.

While on assignment in Baghdad, after walking calmly across an open square, the two unarmed men found themselves showered with gunfire, raining down from a US Apache helicopter above. Namir’s body was “riddled with bullet holes”, killing him instantly. His wounded colleague, Saeed, attempted to drag himself on his stomach to safety, out of the helicopter’s sights.

As Saeed crawled away, two young children, aged five and ten, arrived on the scene in a van. Their father and his friends, all unarmed, stopped to rescue Saeed from the carnage, dragging him into their vehicle. The man’s children sat and watched as their father was ripped apart by gunfire, unleashed from the helicopter above, while being strafed by bullets themselves. As they cried and bled, surrounded by death, the children had no-one to cradle them through their pain, their father lying lifeless on the ground.

“Look at those dead bastards,” one of the soldiers gloated. “Nice.”

Another US soldier described the killings as typical of “daily routine in Iraq for seven years”.

Three years later, in 2010, for posting a leaked video of the massacre, offering the world a human glimpse of the war on Iraq, as well as exposing tens of thousands of other civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, Julian Assange was placed on an FBI manhunting target list.

A whole-of-government operation was launched against him, replete with a ‘war room’ under the direction of a Brigadier General, involving a “suite of government offices not far from the Pentagon”, where “120 intelligence analysts, FBI agents, and others” worked “24 hours a day, seven days a week”, targeting WikiLeaks.

https://youtu.be/HfvFpT-iypw

In 2010 Barack Obama even urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Julian Assange, just weeks before the legally “deplorable” Swedish investigation was instigated.  As if that weren’t enough effort to silence a journalist, a grand jury was also convened, where Julian Assange now faces 17 counts under the Espionage Act and 175 years in US prison, for reporting on Namir and Saeed’s deaths, the deaths of their rescuers, and the trauma of the children who watched from a van.

For turning these carefully dehumanised foreigners into living breathing human beings, bringing humanity to a vicious war just as Namir had done, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning have been made to pay. As punishment, both have suffered years of detention and both have suffered torture, while those responsible for the killings have walked free.

Nils Melzer warns, “When you prosecute a whistleblower and a journalist for exposing war crimes and corruption, you have to be very careful, because if you don’t prosecute the war crimes, then clearly you don’t have equality before the law… then prosecution becomes persecution.”

A Line in the Sand

The murderous acts that WikiLeaks exposed in 2010 are the very kind of acts that the US-led persecution of Julian Assange has served to bolster and protect, along with a raft of other state-corporate crime and abuse such as torture, exploitation of vulnerable populations, for instance in Haiti and the Chagos Islands, CIA domestic spying tools, predatory pro-corporate deals such as the TPP, environmental abuses by oil and mining companies, and on and on and on.

Not only has the near-decade long campaign of mobbing, judicial harassment and vilification of Julian Assange served to distract from these state-corporate abuses and crimes, creating a climate of impunity for the perpetrators, it is now poised to create a precedent of legal impunity, via the Espionage Act charges.

As numerous leading legal minds and even establishment media have warned, the Espionage Act prosecution awaiting Julian Assange in the United States stands to criminalise journalism worldwide, green-lighting cross-border pursuit of publishers around the globe. The legal upshot will be that states can get away with murder simply by slapping Espionage charges on those who expose their crimes. Or, alternatively, by torturing them to death, whichever comes first in the Assange precedent.

Either way, Nils Melzer has expressed his grave concern that “US authorities intend to make an ‘example’ of [Julian Assange], in order to punish him personally, but also to deter others who may be tempted to engage in similar activities.” Similar activities being holding power to account by publishing truthful material in the public interest, a cherished bedrock of democracy and human rights.

WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, being dragged from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in April 2019.

Chris Hedges writes that the persecution of Julian Assange represents not only a sharp downhill turn on the corporate totalitarian slide, but “the destruction of all protection of the rule of law”.

Speaking at a rally for Julian Assange in Sydney, Mike Head, of the World Socialist Website, adds that it is “not just about the past crimes [that Julian Assange]has exposed. It’s also a warning of the future crimes being prepared”.

In short, the implications of Nils Melzer’s letters to the US, the UK, Sweden and Ecuador could not be more serious nor more dire.

WikiLeaks’ editor Kristinn Hrafnsson says, “A line has been drawn in the sand and either you are going to support Julian and fight this retribution and those indictments, or you basically step back and the lights will go out. That’s how serious it is.”

The UN Rapporteur on Torture’s letters stand on that line in the sand, by demanding that the states involved publicly confirm where they intend to head from here: down the path of lights-out for rule of law and democratic freedoms, or down the path of democracy and human rights?

Note from KMM: In the next post, Dr. Johnson demonstrates the role of moral disengagement in the torture of Julian Assange, and the role of the corporate media in the process. Article originally published by Transcend Media Services, September 16, 2019.

Can you watch this trailer and do nothing?

by Kathie MM

Here’s the facts, ma’am.  Just the facts, sir. The crushingly vivid facts are available, but you don’t see them on the corporate media. Those  media serve the military-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex benefits from death and destruction.  You don’t.  Nobody does in the long run.

Please watch the trailer again and again and ask yourself, “Can I really do nothing?  Can I turn a blind eye on the carnage my government is perpetrating in my name, in the phony names of peace and democracy? Can America be great while allowing a few powerful interests to profit from the murder of innocent men, women, and children elsewhere?” There is absolutely no moral justification for what is being done.

Watch the trailer.  Find and watch the whole film. Forward the links.  Search for the voices of peace.  Fight despair.  Identify and support the voices of peace.  Vote for the advocates of peace, the opponents of war.  You can do it and sleep better at night.

And if you need more facts, read Andrew Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East.  Facing the facts is a bitter pill to swallow but if we don’t all take our medicine, the murderous epidemic being spread by the people in power who control our country and its resources will envelop everyone.

Antidotes to bombardment

 

Playing with hands. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Ibex73.

by Kathie MM

The corporate media assaults us with one awful story after another.

Hate crimes, racist incidents, violence against women, attacks on immigrants, loss of health care, chaotic governments, threats of fascism and terrorism.

Sometimes it’s hard not to feel frightened, stressed out, depressed.

But there are other messages in the media, perhaps more worthy of your attention.

Here’s one from Steven Singer.

He tells us that as a critic of charter and voucher schools, he is often asked, ‘Why should I care about other people’s children?’”

In his thoughtful essay, he explains:

“Children…. haven’t done anything to earn the hate or enmity of the world.… Many of them haven’t even learned the prejudices and ignorance of their parents. And even where they have, it is so new it can be changed.

“[Helping someone else’s child] wouldn’t hurt my child. In fact, it would show her how a decent person acts towards others. It would teach her empathy, kindness, caring. It would demonstrate the values I try to instill in her – that we’re all in this together and we owe certain things to the other beings with which we share this world.”

“I proudly send my daughter to public school…I want her to experience a wide variety of humanity. I want her to know people unlike her, and to realize that they aren’t as different as they might first appear. I want her to know the full range of what it means to be human. I want her to be exposed to different cultures, religions, nationalities, world views, thoughts and ideas….

I want us both to live in a society that treats people fairly, and where people of all types can come together and talk and reason and enjoy each other’s company.”

For me, this essay reverberates far beyond the issue of charter schools. It represents a set of goals for humanity sought by millions of people around the world for hundreds of years.  Let their voices, our voices, be heard.

Beware the spin!

                                                                                                                                                            By Kathie MM
In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation about the threat of the military-industrial complex (MIC) to national security, social justice, and peace. Not only has the MIC become gargantuan since his warning, it has also swallowed up institutions that should be alerting citizens to the persisting dangers identified by Eisenhower.

In 2005, Norman Solomon* warned the nation about the entanglement of the corporate media in an expanded military-industrial-media complex. He provided frightening examples of members of the media cozying up to the military and assuring the public that each new war is good, valiant, necessary, and desirable when pursued by the U.S. government (which, after all, must struggle to line all those pockets that bring it to power).

To Norman Solomon, I sing, in the music and words (with a little editing), of Don McLean:

“Now, I understand, what you tried to say to me

How you suffered world insanity

And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how

Perhaps they’ll listen now.”

Sadly, war drums are once again drowning out voices of reason and ethical reflection. The enthusiastic rush of the corporate media to anoint Donald Trump as miraculously “presidential” because he ordered the launching of those “beautiful” missiles towards a site in Syria is a scene right out of 1984.

The day after the first strikes, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) revealed that the corporate media were singing the same old song: Rah, rah for the red, white, and blue.

If you must read the establishment newspapers and watch hyped-up television programs glorifying Trump’s attacks, at least balance out your exposure to the military-industrial-media complex by diving into alternative media:

Read War is the ultimate distraction by Mark Summer.

See what Former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, tells Paul Jay on Real News  .

Learn more about #HandsoffSyria demonstrations .

Listen to the first song (Nasty Man )  Joan Baez has written and recorded in 25 years:

And see what the Friend’s Committee on National Legislation recommends .

*Solomon’s War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). The first chapter of the book can be found at WarMadeEasy.com.