Assange matters to Journalism

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
17
1

Trying to charge Assange under the Espionage Act is the materialisation of every worst fear for free speech and journalism.

No one else managed to expose state secrets like he did, their wrath will be unforgiving.

 

Cheering the demise of Assange for his alleged crimes in Sweden is the cacophony of the woke hecklers veto, little different to the jagged shriek of the lynch mob or stomp of the book burning storm trooper.

Assange matters. Liking him or his behaviour doesn’t. He represents a bigger value that goes beyond his interpersonal failures. The inability of some to see this or understand it are limitations we shouldn’t allow to eclipse the issues of holding powerful states to account.

If Assange is taken and the precedence set, we are all lost. This is the battlefront that must be won.

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17 COMMENTS

  1. Let’s establish his personal failures first eh! All the indications are that the girls were put up to the accusations in the first place; all for the same reasons as everything else that has followed on from them being made.
    D J S

    • Absolutely @DJS. It was a well organized smear from the get go and the young woman who merely wanted an AIDS test has always denied she was raped.The ABC has done an excellent job uncovering and recording everything that occurred in Sweden in the Assange case. Sweden’s propensity to comply with any Fascist /Imperialist government of the day in order to maintain their facade of neutrality is a well documented historical fact.

    • They are women, not girls, and they went forward to police (to demand he be STD tested) after they compared accounts of their encounters.

      There has been no evidence that there was any external influience on their decision to do so.

      • The young woman was taken to the police by the older woman who owned the apartment where Assange and the young woman were billeted. The apartment owner had slept with Assange on previous visits to Sweden. The young woman did not ask to be taken to the police she asked to be taken to a medical service. The young woman was used as a honeytrap by the Swedes. The apartment owner was paid for her collusion and this is all a matter of public record. Assange answered all questions of the authorities in Sweden . The Swedes let him go.Ther was nothing to charge him with. He had not broken any law. There was nothing to prevent Swedish authorities from interviewing Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy . Sweden chose not to.The Swedish prosecutor Marian Nye is on record in colluding with the CIA in the illegal rendition of suspects to Guantanamo Bay. This is part of a larger CIA and USA DOJ psy-ops operation to dirty Assange ‘s image before extraditing him . the Australian Public Broadcasting unit 4 Corners has exposed all of this.Also available t read up on @ New Matilda.
        https://newmatilda.com/2019/03/25/the-psychology-of-getting-julian-assange-part-5-war-propaganda-101/

  2. Yes it is important, certainly chilling on the free speech and journalism. In that sense Assange is very important. In the sense of his role or not as the great revealer of secrets could be inflated though, if you didn’t realize there were horrific problems before Assange and Snowden then you just weren’t paying attention. We already knew for instance about the depleted uranium fallout mutant baby situation in Iraq.

    And one could say this sort of quasi martyrdom could have been expected as par for the course in terms of becoming a high profile dissident, but the cause lives on. It’s bigger. Maybe, an eternal war? So we continue the fight, sing battle songs again, it’s never over. You win some and you lose some in this universe

  3. In the society context there is a need for international media platforms, such as WikiLeaks to succeed, because media within nations is so easily suppressed in the modern Deep State Panopticon Society age.

    There is also a need for women to be safe in that society.

    But I am becoming wary of a certain cynical duality, whereby attacks on women are being made by insecure men on both sides of the political spectrum.

    1. those who pose feminists as a cultural Marxist threat to the historic white race male Christian patriarchy order
    2. those who pose feminists, and woke men on their side, as part of some liberalism ininimcal to the class unity of the left.

  4. I am totally in the dark as to Assange’s personal failures. Unless you are referring to the human fact that we are all flawed.
    All I know of Assange’s personal failures are what I’m be told to believe from clearly partisan sources. There has been a concerted campaign to blacken the Wikileaks and Assangename to sever any public sympathy for his plight, and to discredit his work
    “A leaked Pentagon document prepared by the Cyber Counterintelligence Assessments Branch dated March 8, 2008, exposed a black propaganda campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and Assange. The document said the smear campaign should seek to destroy the “feeling of trust” that is WikiLeaks’ “center of gravity” and blacken Assange’s reputation. It largely has worked. ”

    https://www.truthdig.com/articles/crucifying-julian-assange/
    I know its fashionable to preface any remarks about Assange with “I’m no fan of Assange ..but..”
    So I have no confidence in any of the various character assassinations, and actually I don’t even care, its all beside the point

    • We are in an age that requires a certain sophistication, rather than a dumbed down population – divided (and thus controlled more easily) by rival partisanships.

      We need a vital democracy, to preserve national sovereignty and yet to co-operate internationally. Yet what is emerging is a global regime (capitalist market) and ethnic fascism (strongman leadership) of popular nationalism (with diminished civil liberties) where the strong bully the weak internationally and domestically.

      In the instance of Assange – the he is the good guy who can do no wrong (only be wronged) line is no different to all the way with the USA patriotism, or allegiance to the strongman order of rule. It lacks perspective. His behaviour in Sweden and betrayal of those who put up the bail money is what it is. I remind you of “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and …”

      The existence of international media platforms to hold to account local national tyranny and imperialism is important and this cause is what needs to be fought for.

    • That’s the power of the propaganda that even the Daily Blog feels the need to qualify their statements – in fairness, Martyn is probably hoping to reach journalists from the MSM and get them to focus on the real issue here which is journalistic freedom.

      For someone who is totally fearless check our John Pilger’s reporting

  6. Some points about the rape allegations from this article by Jonathon Cook http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51675.htm

    * In late summer 2010, neither of the two Swedish women alleged Assange had raped them when they made police statements. They went together to the police station after finding out that Assange had slept with them both only a matter of days apart and wanted him to be forced to take an HIV test. One of the women, SW, refused to sign the police statement when she understood the police were seeking an indictment for rape. The investigation relating to the second woman, AA, was for a sexual assault specific to Sweden. A condom produced by AA that she says Assange tore during sex was found to have neither her nor Assange’s DNA on it, undermining her credibility.

    * Sweden’s strict laws protecting suspects during preliminary investigations were violated by the Swedish media to smear Assange as a rapist. In response, the Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, took charge and quickly cancelled the investigation: “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape.” She later concluded: “There is no suspicion of any crime whatsoever.”

    * The case was revived by another prosecutor, Marianne Ny, during which time Assange was questioned and spent more than a month in Sweden waiting for developments in the case. He was then told by prosecutors that he was free to leave for the UK, suggesting that any offence they believed he had committed was not considered serious enough to detain him in Sweden. Nonetheless, shortly afterwards, Interpol issued a Red Notice for Assange, usually reserved for terrorists and dangerous criminals.

    * The UK supreme court approved an extradition to Sweden based on a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) in 2010, despite the fact that it was not signed by a “judicial authority”, only by the Swedish prosecutor. The terms of the EAW agreement were amended by the UK government shortly after the Assange ruling to make sure such an abuse of legal procedure never occurred again.

    * The UK supreme court also approved Assange’s extradition even though Swedish authorities refused to offer an assurance that he would not be extradited onwards to the US, where a grand jury was already formulating draconian charges in secret against him under the Espionage Act. The US similarly refused to give an assurance they would not seek his extradition.

    * In these circumstances, Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London in summer 2012, seeking political asylum. That was after the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, blocked Assange’s chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

    * Australia not only refused Assange, a citizen, any help during his long ordeal, but prime minister Julia Gillard even threatened to strip Assange of his citizenship, until it was pointed out that it would be illegal for Australia to do so.

    * Britain, meanwhile, not only surrounded the embassy with a large police force at great public expense, but William Hague, the foreign secretary, threatened to tear up the Vienna Convention, violating Ecuador’s diplomatic territory by sending UK police into the embassy to arrest Assange.

    • Thanks@AARON. I have lost count of the number of arguments I have had with old friends about Assange being a rapist over the last 9 years. It is comforting to know that others understand the concerted propaganda campaign against Assange.The USA is Fascist Imperialist global power and needs to exposed for what it is. The USA military industrial complex is out of control and murders at will anywhere it chooses. Assange is a very brave man for exposing this fact.Yes he is a sexist male. So what ? Powerful men have always used their power to seduce gullible women. Ce’s t la vie.

  10. ‘Going Underground’…not the mainstream media:

    ‘Julian Assange’s Indictment threatens all mainstream outlets!’

    https://soundcloud.com/rttv/alan-dershowitz-julian-assanges-indictment-threatens-all-mainstream-outlets-going-underground

    “On this episode of Going Underground, we speak to Alan Dershowitz (Harvard Law professor and former legal adviser to Julian Assange) about the latest indictment against the WikiLeaks founder, the danger it poses to mainstream outlets such as CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post, the silence of most Democrats and Republicans on Assange’s persecution, Donald Trump’s state visit, and more…

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