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The silence of journalists in Britain and the US over the extradition proceedings against 维基解密 创办人 朱利安·阿桑格 is making them complicit in the criminalisation of newsgathering by the American government.
In an Old Bailey courtroom in London over the past four weeks, lawyers for the US government have sought the extradition of Assange to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of computer misuse. At the heart of their case is the accusation that in leaking a trove of classified US diplomatic and military cables in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks endanger the lives of US agents and informants.
One of the many peculiarities in this strange case is that the evidence for any such thing is non-existent. 五角大楼 has admitted that it failed to find a single person covertly working for the US who had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. This failure was not for lack of trying: The Pentagon had set up a special military task force, deploying 120 counter-intelligence officers, to find at least one death that could be blamed on Assange and his colleagues but had found nothing.
Other allegations against Assange put forward by the lawyers for the US government are similarly flimsy or demonstrably false, yet he is still in real danger of being sent to a maximum security prison in the US after the court makes its ruling on 4 January. Once there he faces a sentence of up to 175 years and, whatever the length of his incarceration, he is likely to spend it in solitary confinement in a tiny cell.
The Assange case creates a precedent that mortally threatens freedom of the press in Britain. If Assange is extradited then any journalist who publishes information that the American authorities deem to be classified, however well-known or harmless it may be, will risk being extradited to face trial in America. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, says that non-Americans like Assange do not enjoy First Amendment rights to free expression.
The outcome of the Assange extradition hearing is a crucial tipping point which will tell if Britain and the US go further down the same path towards “illiberal democracy” as Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, India and the Philippines. What Assange and WikiLeaks did – obtaining important information about the deeds and misdeeds of the US government and giving that information to the public – is exactly what all journalists ought to do.
Journalism is all about disclosing important news to people so they can judge what is happening in the world – and the actions of their government in particular. The WikiLeaks disclosures in 2010 only differed from other great journalistic scoops in that they were bigger – 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified army reports from the Iraq War and 90,000 from the Afghan War – and they were more important. [Full disclosure: I gave a statement read out in court this week seeking to explain the significance of the Wikileaks revelations.]
Astonishingly, British and American commentators are in a state of denial when it comes to seeing that what happens to Assange could happen to them. They argue bizarrely that he is not a journalist, though the Trump administration implicitly accepts that he is one, since it is pursuing him for journalistic activities. The motive is openly political, one of the absurdities of the hearing being the pretence that Trump-appointed officials provide a reliable and objective guide to the threat to the US posed by the WikiLeaks revelations.
Why has the British media been so mute about the grim precedent being established for themselves, were they to investigate the doings of a US government that makes no secret of its hostility to critical journalism. Ten years ago, 纽约时报, 守护者, 世界, 明镜及 El Pais的 published extracts from the WikiLeak documents on their front pages for days on end, but they long ago distanced themselves from its founder. Yet, however much they may wish the contrary, their future is wrapped up in his fate.
Alan Rusbridger, the former 监护人 editor under whom the cables and war logs were printed, made this clear in an interview, saying that he had no doubt about the damage being done to freedom of the press. “Whatever we think of Assange,” he said, “what he is being targeted for is the same or similar [to what] many journalists have done, then it’s surprising to me that more people can’t see that this case has worrying implications for all journalists.”
The danger to a genuinely free press is, indeed, so glaring that it is a mystery why the media has, by and large, ignored the issue. Coronavirus is a contributory reason, but treating Assange and WikiLeaks as pariahs long predates the epidemic. Pundits wonder if he is a journalist at all, though he is clearly a journalist of the electronic age, publishing raw information in a different way from traditional newspapers, radio and television. His politics are unashamedly radical, which further alienates many commentators.
Far more important, however, in converting Assange from being portrayed as a heroic fighter against state secrecy into a figure beyond the pale, were the allegations of rape made against him in Sweden in 2010. This led to a Swedish prosecutorial investigation that continued for nine years, was dropped three times and three times restarted, before being finally abandoned last year as the statute of limitations approached. Assange was never charged with anything and none of this has anything to do with the extradition hearings, but it helps explain why so much of the media has ignored or downplayed the Old Bailey hearings. Many on the political right always believed that Assange belonged in jail and many progressives felt that the rape allegations alone made him anathema.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers to the media in 1971, gave evidence to the court that he had leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War to show the public that the war was continuing though its perpetrators knew it could not be won. He said that Assange had done much the same, this time in relation to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Pentagon Papers and the WikiLeaks disclosures were similar in every way.
The saga of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is now so long and complicated that it is worth reminding oneself of the piercing light they cast on the US government’s activities in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. I myself first used the material from the disclosures in the summer of 2010 to explain why the Afghan government, supported by 90,000 US troops, was not winning a war that Washington claimed was in defence of democracy.
I quoted a report from an American civil affairs official in Gardez, Afghanistan, in 2007, who said that he had been bluntly informed by a member of the Afghan provincial council in the town that “the general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worse than the Taliban”. The US official lamented that this was all too true. Why this was so was explained by another US report dated 22 October 2009, this time from Balkh in northern Afghanistan, which described how Afghan soldiers and police were mistreating local civilians who refused to cooperate in a search. I wrote how the official US report said that “a district police chief raped a 16-year-old girl and when a civilian protested the police chief ordered his bodyguard to shoot him. The bodyguard refused and was himself killed by the police chief.”
Such revelations explain why the Afghan war is still going on and tens of thousands more people have died – and why the US government is so keen to put Assange in jail for the rest of his life.
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首先，美国当局表示，他将被判处四到六年监禁，考虑到曼宁的刑期，这是相当现实的。像大卫·利（David Leigh）（英国秘密国家的朋友）这样的专业记者据说是根据阿桑奇在私人谈话中的各种言论编造了这些故事？阿桑奇还表示，讽刺杂志编辑伊恩·希斯洛普对阿桑奇在电话中所说的话撒了谎。阿桑奇多次声称要就有关他和维基解密的李的书起诉《卫报》。阿桑奇的维基解密同事谈到，女性在与他相处 10 分钟后愿意与他发生性关系，以及他如何抓住这些机会。他去瑞典参加了一个反战研讨会。阿桑奇在瑞典逗留的十天内，与左翼人道主义女性发生了一系列迅速的性接触，之后他申请了在瑞典生活和工作的居留许可。
当有关自愿性行为演变成袭击的指控出现时，他并没有离开英国。如果他想避免入狱，他应该前往厄瓜多尔或返回澳大利亚，这是他的国家。但他在自己的土地上并没有与多名女性获得同样的机会。他决定推迟不可避免的事情，并且在大使馆的避难所里也不孤单
阿桑奇表示，他将克林顿视为敌人，而维基解密在总统竞选关键阶段发布的民主党全国委员会电子邮件的一个特点是，这似乎是为了抑制她在民调中的飙升。普瓦特拉斯和格林沃尔德在爱德华·斯诺登泄密事件中发挥了重要作用，她冒了很大的风险。她拍了一部关于阿桑奇的电影，发现阿桑奇想要审查这部电影。当你看到阿桑奇说话时，他似乎没有自己的想法（除了澳大利亚男性沙文主义之外）。在 2012 年《今日俄罗斯》节目中，他在第一集中就以色列的未来采访了真主党领导人。
阿桑奇不像加里·麦金农那样是英国人，英国政府直截了当地拒绝将麦金农移交给美国。也没有像倒霉的麦金农那样侵入美国政府最秘密的计算机来寻找有关不明飞行物的信息。不，阿桑奇与一个愿意访问秘密数据库的受骗者合谋窃取信息并发布。现在，他突然希望英国在一系列危机中能够针对世界上最强大的国家维护其国家主权，这样他就不必像曼宁那样在美联储俱乐部呆上几十个月。
No, he’s facing 175 years.
Or are you saying that they’ve already tried him in the US, without him or the evidence? Good to know. And if not, of course we can take a not-in-writing promise from an enraged government that blows away people with abandon all across the world.
阿桑奇是他自己不幸的根源。
The USA wants to deter whistleblowers – putting Assange inside for just a few years does not do that. Confidently stating even before any trial in the US what a US court would sentence him to suggests they have already found him guilty, and proceedings are as hollow as those experienced here:
Except that the WikiLeaks disclosures were labeled “secret – classified” and the pentagon papers were labeled “Top secret – classified”
Patrick Cockburn, have you noticed that of the two main Julian Assange judges, the Chief Judge Arbuthnot still supervising the Assange court trial, has a son Alex selling millions of pounds of ‘anti-Assange cyber security’, with the whole trial being a kind of advert for the judge’s son’s business at Darktrace?
Mr Cockburn, have you noticed that Julian Assange always declared himself a loyal ally of Israel, anti-Palestinian just like he is anti-9-11-truth, and that Julian Assange has multiple links to the Rothschild family, with Assange’s early ‘Wiki-leaking’ decimating a Rothschild bank rival, his bail in the UK posted by a Rothschild family relation, one of Assange’s lawyers also a lawyer for a Rothschild Trust? And that Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu himself told Israeli media that Assange is a Mossad asset?
Mr Cockburn, have you noticed that one of Julian Assange’s defence lawyers at Doughty Chambers, was thrown under a train and killed, possibly when he found out that Julian is a fraud who was never really ‘living’ at the London Ecuador Embassy, but moved in & out by UK MI5 for photo ops & meetings?
Mr Cockburn, have you noticed that several people trusting Julian Assange have turned up dead, such as Peter W Smith, of whom Wikileaks claims that they ‘never received his files’ before he was killed?
Mr Cockburn, did you see when 82-year-old Zbig Brzezinski blurted out US television, the PBS News Hour on their 29 Nov 2010 broadcast, that the ‘Wikileaks’ came from the intel agencies themselves?
Mr Cockburn, is it not strange that Wikileaks and Assange are not de-platformed and blocked from fundraising around the world despite ‘serious criminal charges’, when the tech companies and banks are de-platorming genuine dissidents all over the place?
Mr Cockburn, did you know that Assange, Wikileaks and their ‘defence lawyers’ – apparently receiving laundered US-govt-tied-funds via ‘legal defence fundraising’ – have all agreed to hide the USA Dept of Justice files on Virginia federal judge bribery, which they all know would make Assange’s extradition impossible, given these are the same judges who would put Julian Assange ‘on trial’?
You are despicable if you think Chelsea Manning did a couple of dozen months at Club Fed? And why should Assange do even a day in a prison? Is he an american?
He is not British, autistic, or a journalist. He wanted to be James Bond, but you cannot live like that. He is not going to serve 84 months like Manning.
84 years, then?
The Press alas “press”, paid, for media corporations working journalists, scribes, bread-writers, video bloggers, Joey Rogans´, Youtubers, alternative “news” sites, are way satisfied that the Assange competition/disturbance was lifted. You could not trust this Assange persona to content himself with wages, salaries, and knitting on the feeds of “infotainment’ handed down from the powers that be.
Journalists do just that, they elaborate in word-counts what is obvious and handed to them. Assange was not a team player. Knowing how to write, pose, soundbite, attract advertising, does not mean having something to say. In our society the middle class media labourers are whores by definition. “Do not bite the hand that feeds you” is the credo. Two emotions prime with regard to Assange, deep envy and revenge.
In the end, Assange has little to do, the model of how to do real journalism is there in the open, any-one with balls and a sponsor can adopt the methods of Assange. Somebody as Stallman, of FSF and gnu is a slightly less attractive example of flushing real opposition down the toilet. FSF and Wikileaks are genuinely attractive ideas out in the open. Github sold out a while ago, that is how it is supposed to be. Bourgeois comfort, not ambition beyond convention. Remember the engine of our “sophisticated” Western society is greed for the few, and prostration for all others.
Federal sentences are in months and the prosecutors have publicly announced they are not going to ask the judge to give him more than 72. Manning’s sentence was 420 months and he was released by Obama after serving 84. Manning refused to testify about Assange to a Federal Grand jury and was put in prison for 11 months and only released after a suicide attempt. Manning has to pay court fines fines of $250,000. An English court gave Assange a 50 weeks term in prison for jumping bail, which is just him being caught for him breaking his word: very different to doing time for refusing to snitch. Assange’s refusal to say where he got the DNC emails from is more a case of him refusing to expose himself as a willing tool of the GRU. So Manning has sh0wn more balls after a sex change that Assange seems to be able to muster.
In the the style of Lauri Love and Gary MacKinnon’s legal representatives, Assange’s defence are asserting that he is autistic, which is laughable. The Swedish women said Assange obsessively checked social media for any mention of him. He is more narcissist than Rain Man believe me. Manning said Assange explained Wikileaks as an intelligence service; risible counter surveillance measures he was seen taking in 风险 suggests he saw himself as a unaligned James Bond. Yet 007 operates as a detective trying to catch wrongdoers rather than a low profile covert operative. This was the flaw in Assange’s business model, he could not be a 名人 secret agent or peacemaking supercop because no country’s laws (with an ultimate resort to armed force) stood behind him.
Why does the Judge needs three months to do what she has already decided she is going to do?
肖恩，你刚刚重复了 MSM 的观点。你什么7岁了？因为如果你不这样做，那么你在认知上就脑死亡了。
Cockburn的有用文章。
皮尔格（Pilger）在这里还讨论了阿桑奇（zangazi）对犹太复国主义同性恋媒体的对待。
约翰·皮尔格（John Pilger）告诉RT，阿桑奇“强迫”那些战争罪行背后的人“照镜子”，现在正面临报仇
https://www.rt.com/uk/502443-assange-trial-pilger-interview/
“Assange’s demise came because he provided “too much truth” and exposed Western hypocrisy, Pilger believes.
他让那些犯下了战争罪行的人，强迫他们照镜子……那是他不可原谅的罪行。
西方人的自我认知是，它通常不会做糟糕的事情，并且其政治人物大多是真实的，并受到独立媒体的控制。 维基解密说，所有这些都不是真的。
结果，阿桑奇在XNUMX月份在伦敦老贝利（Old Bailey）的审判期间及之前，都受到英国司法系统的公然虐待。 他因逃避保释而受到前所未有的严厉刑罚，被关押在恐怖分子和暴力罪犯最高安全的监狱中，无法以合理的方式与他的辩护队沟通，并面临许多其他不公正现象。
该法院尚未进行正当程序； 已经进行了报复。
皮尔格警告说，如果将阿桑奇引渡到美国，并尝试与许多其他调查性记者几十年来所做的事情没有什么不同，那将是一个危险的先例。 这将发出一个信号，即美国可以接触到任何国家中任何敢于公开不符合华盛顿意愿的东西的人。
尽管存在风险，西方主流媒体对审判视而不见，包括那些乐于根据WikiLeaks披露进行报道的人。
“由于他不属于他们的合谋俱乐部，他们打开自己的消息来源的方式是可耻的。 他们知道这是一种耻辱，”皮尔格说。“
哦，看看这里又是多产的“肖恩”，第一个评论者，吐出他总是吐出的同样的帝国垃圾，主要是嘲笑这样一个事实：阿桑奇不仅是一个世界英雄，也是一个正常的异性恋男人，对其他人有吸引力。女性。作为英雄，就应该生活在一个理智的世界里。
There are too many things about Assange that just don’t add up. The latest one is as you say:
Mr Cockburn, is it not strange that Wikileaks and Assange are not de-platformed and blocked from fundraising around the world despite ‘serious criminal charges’, when the tech companies and banks are de-platorming genuine dissidents all over the place?
“由于他不属于他们的合谋俱乐部，他们打开自己的消息来源的方式是可耻的。 他们知道这是一种耻辱，”皮尔格说。“
羡慕又憎恨，因为没有勇气去面对阿桑奇敢于做的力量！ 对他们的警告以及对当权者的警告已被完全理解，但与皮尔杰所建议的略有不同！ 阿桑奇是竞争者，他们通过电力系统刺穿了他们的同谋和便利，现在，同谋是有目共睹的，这使他们的纺纱变得复杂，他们的净资产和自我受到了打击。 嫉妒，然后憎恨，仅此而已。
肖恩是一个心烦意乱的人。他所写的东西的价值趋于零。
Brabantian (see his post above) may write some interesting things about other themes, but he is also completely mistaken about J.A. Contrary to what he says, WL also made public diplomatic documents concerning The Country which are critical about it. Lately I read twice articles mentioning those documents and even quoting from them (it’s easy to google the theme and find results which confirm what I said). I think a large part of the information which he provides is false, invented or irrelevant. Brabantian should simply stop writing about this subject because he cannot say anything meaningful about it.
这篇文章讲述的是西方媒体可耻的漠不关心。首先。然后是关于这次审判是如何进行的，几乎是闭门进行的。这是对英国“正义”的嘲讽。这是一座Ksngeroo法庭，让人想起纳粹德国和斯大林时代的表演起诉。第三，没有人因维基解密的披露而死亡。反过来说，维基解密发布后，人们的生命可能会得到拯救，因为政府被追究责任，美国军方也受到关注。这才是媒体应该做的。这些都是值得注意的地方，而媒体却惨遭失败。公众有权利知道，这就是重点。
“Press freedom” is a meaningless empty term. Never existed, and can’t exist. Assange is a Deepstate foil.
他的祖国会给他更多的考虑。英国对像麦金农这样的英国臣民的司法不同于对被授予在英国的特权的澳大利亚人的司法。他所要做的就是一听到瑞典的指控就立即乘飞机返回自己的国家（或俄罗斯！），但他想留在伦敦，这样他就可以在那里继续他的享乐主义生活方式。阿桑奇认为自己高于对英国或任何其他国家的任何国家效忠。他故意违反了遵守保释协议的承诺，这消除了英国必须保护他免受因窃取美国政府信息而受到惩罚的任何可能的义务。他在瑞典度过了非常愉快的十天，顺便申请了在瑞典生活和工作。
阿桑奇没有面临死刑。
Nonsense. De-platforming doesn’t mean that. Wikileaks has its own “platform”, 维基解密网站. It’s not part of that advertising scam called social media, Faecebook, Goo and the rest. There’s something called the Internet that you should try to learn about.
How come the “tech companies and banks” have not de-platformed Ron Unz? How come the those fakes are allowing unz.com to exist?
Neither was Epstein.
All right, what have we learned from this? Since publishers are spies, spies are publishers too. If you’re going to publish, or disclose, or denounce, get yourself all the advantages spies enjoy. When you need to defend some human rights, Article 19 or 5 or 3 or whatever, here’s how you do it now.
Send it off to Wikileaks with instructions to dump it in six months unless they hear from you. Then you get in touch with a country with competent spies. Why? Because they have the resources to draw attention away from you. Remember that poor horny hick Clayton Lonetree? Russia honeytrapped him to keep the heat off their real spy Aldritch Ames. Wikileaks does not have OPSEC resources of that sort, sad to say.
Pick a country that respects rights and rule of law, like Russia or Cuba. The enemy spies will naturally use your info in their national interest, but if their state is committed to rule of law, whatever they do with it is in your best interest too.
Request that the enemy spies leak highlights, obfuscating the source. Let them exploit what they want, with Wiklileaks standing by as a backup or insurance dump.
With CIA clearly willing to conceal their crimes by shitting on your rights of trial, freedom from torture, or any non-derogable right, don’t do the right thing with one hand tied behind your back. Enemy spies are enemies because they expose and denounce US state crimes. That’s a service to the world, and you should help them if you can. They can help you.
Extradition, even with a treaty, depends on both countries agreeing that the behaviour is a crime in both their countries. This is the reality of the USA and UK.
US censorship is based on the 1917 Espionage Act. UK censorship is based on the D-notice system, also based on a First World War law. Both ban a free Press. Neither has ever been successfully defeated in court.
Yanks can bleat about their constitutional rights as much as they like. Laws supported by both Trump and Obama can be obviously unconstitutional but the US Supreme Court isn’t a law court but a club for politicians. It’d be nice if that changed after the politician Ginsberg died but I’ll believe that only if I see it.
The publisher Assange will serve time in the USA for exposing US Government crimes. I expect no US support for him whether by a Justice, a media owner or a politician. That’s the reality of US values.
Some Yanks will say “but, but, but the constitution”. [电子邮件保护]