June 25 2024 Victory For Journalism As A Sacred Calling In Pursuit of Truth: Julian Assange Free

In a time of darkness and great peril for democracy, when America’s colony and proxy Israel assassinates journalists first in any act of war to erase evidence of crimes against humanity in Palestine, when Biden has fist bumped the apex predator of a savage monarchy who ordered or later granted immunity to the perpetrators of the brutal and nightmarish assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Julian Assange walks free as a triumph of the will to resist tyranny and state terror.

With him go our hopes for a better future than we have made of the past.

Assange remains a figure of the second of the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.

As V.S. Naipaul coined the phrase in his novel India: A Million Mutinies Now, so now I paraphrase it; let us unleash a million Wikileaks now, and let no darkness remain in the Pandora’s Box of our histories.

As I wrote in my post of December 4 2021, Victory for a Free Press in the Trial of Julian Assange; America’s persecution of Julian Assange for exposing our government’s war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and throughout the world has seen a stunning reversal today in a British court’s refusal of extradition for trial, on the grounds that the American prison system is unsafe and amounts to a death sentence, but which left the greater question of the possibility of a fair trial for political prisoners in the American justice system, and its role in the repression of dissent, unresolved. This judgement of our judicial system and our carceral state by our closest ally illuminates fatal flaws for which a reckoning is long overdue, for ours is not a free nation.

Julian Assange and Jamal Khashoggi are parallel cases which test and interrogate the liberty or tyranny of governments and of societies; canaries in the coal mine of totalitarian darkness.

Shall we cherish or silence and punish those who call out the villainies of secret power and the atrocities our governments perpetrate in our name? This is a key question in our choice of who we want to become, peoples imprisoned and enslaved in submission to authority which subjugates others, or a free humankind which questions and resists those who would enslave us.

Britain has today given us an answer, one which defies the imperialism of America and the fascism of Trump’s regime, and recalls Churchill’s reply to the Nazi invasion of France in his three major speeches of 1940. Today as then, we celebrate the restoration of humankind’s moral compass as a tidal change in our history, one which dawns with America’s repudiation of Trump and the start of the Biden Presidency and which I hope will ripple throughout the world as a force of liberation. To tyranny and to fascism there can be but one reply; Never Again.

Yet while we celebrate this victory for a free press and the global resistance to state tyranny and terror, and the assault on truth and on journalism as a sacred calling in its pursuit, we must recognize that the equivocal nature of the ruling on this test case in Britain has exposed the flaws of our current system of justice in regard to the defense of truth and of truthtellers.

As written by Jonathan Cook in Counterpunch;” Journalism as espionage:

Significantly, Judge Baraitser backed all the Trump administration’s main legal arguments for extradition, even though they were comprehensively demolished by Assange’s lawyers.

Baraitser accepted the US government’s dangerous new definition of investigative journalism as “espionage”, and implied that Assange had also broken Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act in exposing government war crimes.

She agreed that the 2007 Extradition Treaty applies in Assange’s case, ignoring the treaty’s actual words that exempt political cases like his. She thereby opened the door for other journalists to be seized in their home countries and renditioned to the US.

Baraitser accepted that protecting sources in the digital age – as Assange did for whistleblower Chelsea Manning, an essential obligation on journalists in a free society – now amounts to criminal “hacking”. She trashed free speech and press freedom rights, saying they did not provide “unfettered discretion by Mr Assange to decide what he’s going to publish”.

She appeared to approve of the ample evidence showing that the US spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy, both in violation of international law and his client-lawyer privilege – a breach of his most fundamental legal rights that alone should have halted proceedings.

Baraitser argued that Assange would receive a fair trial in the US, even though it was almost certain to take place in the eastern district of Virginia, where the major US security and intelligence services are headquartered. Any jury there would be dominated by US security personnel and their families, who would have no sympathy for Assange.

So as we celebrate this ruling for Assange, we must also loudly denounce it as an attack on press freedom, as an attack on our hard-won collective freedoms, and as an attack on our efforts to hold the US and UK establishments accountable for riding roughshod over the values, principles and laws they themselves profess to uphold.

Even as we are offered with one hand a small prize in Assange’s current legal victory, the establishment’s other hand seizes much more from us.

Vilification continues

There is a final lesson from the Assange ruling. The last decade has been about discrediting, disgracing and demonising Assange. This ruling should very much be seen as a continuation of that process.

Baraitser has denied extradition only on the grounds of Assange’s mental health and his autism, and the fact that he is a suicide risk. In other words, the principled arguments for freeing Assange have been decisively rejected.

If he regains his freedom, it will be solely because he has been characterised as mentally unsound. That will be used to discredit not just Assange, but the cause for which he fought, the Wikileaks organisation he helped to found, and all wider dissidence from establishment narratives. This idea will settle into popular public discourse unless we challenge such a presentation at every turn.

Assange’s battle to defend our freedoms, to defend those in far-off lands whom we bomb at will in the promotion of the selfish interests of a western elite, was not autistic or evidence of mental illness. His struggle to make our societies fairer, to hold the powerful to account for their actions, was not evidence of dysfunction. It is a duty we all share to make our politics less corrupt, our legal systems more transparent, our media less dishonest.

Unless far more of us fight for these values – for real sanity, not the perverse, unsustainable, suicidal interests of our leaders – we are doomed. Assange showed us how we can free ourselves and our societies. It is incumbent on the rest of us to continue his fight.”

As I wrote in my post of May 3 2024, A Sacred Calling to Pursue the Truth: On World Press Freedom Day; On this thirty first World Press Freedom Day I call for the universal recognition of journalism as a sacred calling to pursue the truth which supercedes the rights of any state to authorize and enforce versions of it in service to power and identitarian politics, and for a United Humankind in solidarity as guarantors of each other’s universal rights, which include the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; to Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to preserve the independence of the press and the transparency of all governments as institutions which must answer ultimately to their people.

Freedom of the press and of information, the right to speak, write, teach, organize, research and publish in an environment of transparency of the state, along with rights of protest and strike, are instrumental to the agency of citizens and to the idea and meaningfulness of democracy.

Any power or authority held by a government of any form is granted by its citizens or has been appropriated from them unjustly, and it is the highest principle of natural law as articulated in our Declaration of Independence that we may seize and reclaim it at any time it is held without our participation and co-ownership, or used against our general interests.

True democracy as a free society of equals requires the four ideals of liberty, equality, truth, and justice, and one thing more; an engaged electorate of truth tellers who will hold our representatives and the institutions of our government responsible for enacting our values

Like the role of a free press in the sacred calling to pursue the truth, the role of a citizen is to be a truth teller. Both serve Truth, and truth is necessary to the just balance of power between individuals which is the purpose of the state.

I explored the implications of parrhesia and Foucault’s extension of this classical principle as truth telling in my post of May 27 2020, On Speaking Truth to Power as a Sacred Calling; I found myself responding with candor to a conversation today in which a friend, a fearless champion of the marginalized and the wretched of the earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, expressed fear of retribution in calling out the police as an institution of racist state force and control, thereby illustrating the mechanism of silencing on which unjust authority depends.

Of course this was a preface for an act of Breaking the Silence; I did say they are my friend.

Here is the beginning of that conversation; “Today I’m going to do something stupid.

On my Facebook and Twitter feeds I am going to express a viewpoint that I have long held to myself. A viewpoint I believed, if ever made public, would kneecap my dreams of a political career and public service.

Today I realized my silence was just a vestige of my own internalized oppression and respectability politics, and f*** respectability. It has never, and will never, save us. So here goes: here’s why I am a #PoliceAbolitionist”

What followed was a brilliant and multivoiced discussion of the role of police violence in white supremacist terror, as an army of occupation whose purpose is to enforce inequality and elite hierarchies of exclusionary otherness and to subvert the institutions and values of democracy, and of the use of social force in a free society of equals. This is among the most important issues we face today and questions some of the inherent contradictions of our form of government, of which George Washington said, “Government is about force; only force.”

But this is only indirectly the subject on which I write today; far more primary and fundamental to the institution of a free press is the function of other people’s ideas of ourselves, of normality and respectability, in the silencing of dissent.

To our subjugation by authorized identities, I reply with the Wicked Witch; I will fuck respectability with you, and their little dog normality too.

Authorized identities and boundaries of the Forbidden are about power, and we must call out the instruments of unequal power as we see them. Foucault called this truthtelling, and it is a crucial part of seizure of power and ownership of identity; always there remains the struggle between the masks others make for us and those we make for ourselves.

Against state tyranny and terror, force and control, let us deploy parrhesia and the performance of our best selves as guerilla theatre. Go ahead; frighten the horses.

Often have I referred to this key performative role in democracy as the Jester of King Lear, whose enactments of mockery and satire, the exposure and deflation of the mighty as revolutionary seizures of power which reclaim that which we the people have lent them when it is used unjustly, are necessary to maintain the balance of interests in a society in which government is co-owned equally by its citizens and has as its overriding purpose the securement of the freedom and autonomy of individuals and of their universal human rights.

Without citizens who refuse to be silenced and controlled by authority, democracy becomes meaningless.

So with my arts of rhetoric and poetry as truthtelling, and with my praxis of democracy in my daily journal here at Torch of Liberty; to incite, provoke, and disturb.

For democracy requires a participatory electorate willing to speak truth to power.

To all those who defy and challenge unjust authority; I will stand with you, and I ask that all of us do the same.

As written in his newsletter by Michael Moore, in an essay entitled Why I Posted the Bail Money for Julian Assange 14 Years Ago; “For over 14 years, I have fought for his freedom and his rights as a journalist to share the truth as he uncovers it to the public. On Monday night, we learned that he would be set free and be allowed to return home. He would face no further harassment or threats from the American government. Although 14 years of his life were stolen from him by a government of, yes, war criminals, they were never able to lay a hand on him.

On the day I posted $20,000 in bail money in 2010 to help get him released, I wrote the following statement about why I did so and why I believe he is owed our eternal thanks for exposing the truth about the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Hopefully, someday, this country of ours will apologize to him for this torture. In the meantime, let us all draw from him the kind of courage that is needed during our darkest times of aggression and the funding of foreign slaughter with our tax dollars. It is also my hope that we will sometime soon return to having a vital and vibrant press that exists to uncover the lies and protect us, the citizens, from those who would seek to end our democracy.

For now, this is, indeed, a happy day. Be well, Julian. And know that the good people of this world will never forget your sacrifice.

Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.

Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.

We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.

So why is WikiLeaks, after performing such an important public service, under such vicious attack? Because they have outed and embarrassed those who have covered up the truth. The assault on WikiLeaks and Assange has been over the top:

Sen. Joe Lieberman (Gore’s Democratic running mate in the 2000 election) says WikiLeaks “has violated the Espionage Act.”

The New Yorker’s George Packer calls Assange “super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal.”

Sarah Palin claims he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” whom we should pursue “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.”

Democrat Bob Beckel (Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign manager) said about Assange on Fox: “A dead man can’t leak stuff … there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”

Republican Mary Matalin says “he’s a psychopath, a sociopath … He’s a terrorist.”

Rep. Peter A. King (R-NY) calls WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization.”

And indeed they are! They exist to terrorize the liars and warmongers who have brought ruin to our nation and to others. Perhaps the next war won’t be so easy because the tables have been turned — and now it’s Big Brother who’s being watched … by us!

WikiLeaks deserves our thanks for shining a huge spotlight on all this. But some in the corporate-owned press have dismissed the importance of WikiLeaks (“they’ve released little that’s new!”) or have painted them as simple anarchists (“WikiLeaks just releases everything without any editorial control!”). WikiLeaks exists, in part, because the mainstream media has failed to live up to its responsibility. The corporate owners have decimated newsrooms, making it impossible for good journalists to do their job. There’s no time or money anymore for investigative journalism. Simply put, investors don’t want those stories exposed. They like their secrets kept … as secrets.

I ask you to imagine how much different our world would be if WikiLeaks had existed 10 years ago. Take a look at this photo:

That’s President George W. Bush about to be handed a “secret” document on August 6th, 2001 — just one month before 9/11. Its heading read: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” And on those pages it said the FBI had discovered “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.” Mr. Bush decided to ignore it and went fishing for the next four weeks.

But if that document had been leaked, how would you or I have reacted? What would Congress or the FAA have done? Was there not a greater chance that someone, somewhere would have done something if all of us knew about bin Laden’s impending attack using hijacked planes?

But back then only a few people had access to that document. Because the secret was kept, a flight school instructor in San Diego, who noticed that two Saudi students took no interest in learning how to perform takeoffs or landings, saw nothing strange about that and did nothing to inform any authorities. Had he heard about the bin Laden threat through the media, might he have called the FBI? (Please read this essay by former FBI Agent Coleen Rowley, Time’s 2002 co-Person of the Year, about her belief that, had WikiLeaks been around in 2001, 9/11 might have been prevented.)

Or what if the public in 2003 had been able to read “secret” memos from Dick Cheney as he pressured the CIA to make up “facts” that he wanted in order to build his false case for war? If a WikiLeaks had revealed at that time that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, do you think that the war would have been launched — or rather, wouldn’t there have been calls later on for Cheney’s arrest?

Openness, transparency — these are among the few weapons the citizenry has to protect itself from the powerful and the corrupt. What if within days of August 4th, 1964 — after the Pentagon had made up the lie that one of our ships was attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin — there had been a WikiLeaks to tell the American people that the whole thing was made up? I guess 58,000 of our soldiers (and 2 million Vietnamese) might be alive today.

Instead, secrets killed them.

I have joined with filmmakers Ken Loach and John Pilger and writer Jemima Khan in putting up the bail money for Julian Assange — and we hope the judge will accept this and grant his release today.

Might WikiLeaks cause some unintended harm to diplomatic negotiations and U.S. interests around the world? Perhaps. But that’s the price you pay when you and your government take us to war based on a lie. Your punishment for misbehaving is that someone has to turn on all the lights in the room so that we can see what you’re up to. You simply can’t be trusted. So every cable, every email you write is now fair game. Sorry, but you brought this upon yourself. No one can hide from the truth now. No one can plot the next Big Lie if they know that they might be exposed.

And that is the best thing that WikiLeaks has done. WikiLeaks, God bless them, will save lives as a result of their actions. And any of you who join me in supporting them are committing a true act of patriotism. Period.

I stand today in absentia with Julian Assange in London and I ask the judge to grant him his release. We are willing to guarantee his return to court with the bail money we have wired to said court. I will not allow this injustice to continue unchallenged.

— Michael Moore

(P.S. You can read the statement I filed yesterday [ December 13, 2010 ] in the London court here.)

Back in December of 2010, three days after I wrote that statement and provided the court with my portion of Julian’s bail, the court granted Julian Assange his freedom based on our bail money. He then continued his appeals through the British Courts. After 18 months, facing certain extradition, he entered the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking asylum. In April of 2019, upon leaving the Ecuadorian embassy after confining himself there for nearly 7 years, he was immediately arrested by British authorities and held at the request of the United States for possible extradition and trial in the US. He was incarcerated in Britain’s maximum security prison, Belmarsh, for over 5 years fighting his removal to the United States. The British courts, though, refused to turn Assange over to the Americans — in part because British law, as in most western democracies, refuses to extradite prisoners to any country that has the death penalty. His case dragged on through both the Trump and Biden administrations until finally, yesterday, the U.S. government gave in and agreed to a plea deal that would immediately grant Assange his freedom and allow him to return home to Australia.

So far, neither the U.S. Justice Department nor the British government has sought the arrest of those who fraudulently led both countries into invading Iraq under the lie that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attacks.

In addition, the British court informed me when Assange skipped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy that they would not be returning my $20,000 in bail money. I have been assured, though, that the British government has used my contribution to finally help put into writing a first-ever written Constitution for the United Kingdom — something they have been promising to do since June of 1215.”

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