Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: The ‘getting’ of Assange and the smearing of a revolution

Guarda un po' cosa va a finire sulla stampa iraniana...
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The ‘getting’ of Assange and the smearing of a revolution 	
 
John Pilger
On Line: 09 October 2011 16:27
In Print: Monday 10 October 2011
The High Court in London will soon to decide whether Julian Assange is 
to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At 
the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defense, 
described the whole saga as "crazy". Sweden's chief prosecutor had 
dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for 
Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to 
have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in 
Britain.
However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave 
danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a 
Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the 
United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, 
who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, 
providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by 
governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to 
the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged 
whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 
21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive 
"He broke the law".
This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to 
prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the U.S. 
and Sweden had already started talks on Assange's extradition. At the 
same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long 
abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from 
Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of 
America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a 
leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the 
South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to 
exist.
Under the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange 
should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, 
Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, said, "Whistleblowers are part 
of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal". His embrace 
of George W. Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has 
pursued more whistleblowers than any U.S. president. The problem for his 
administration in "getting" Assange and crushing WikiLeaks is that 
military investigators have found no collusion or contact between him 
and Manning, reports NBC. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, 
probably in line with Vice President Joe Biden's absurd description of 
Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist".
Should Assange win his High Court appeal in London, he could face 
extradition direct to the United States. In the past, U.S. officials 
have synchronized extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending 
case. Like its predatory military, American jurisdiction recognizes few 
boundaries. As the suffering of Bradley Manning demonstrates, together 
with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of 
Guantanamo, much of the U.S. criminal justice system is corrupt if not 
lawless.
In a letter addressed to the Australian government, Britain's most 
distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who now acts for 
Assange, wrote, "Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently 
on the basis of entirely false assumptions... it is very hard to attempt 
to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now 
hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential 
extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different 
alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that 
his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly 
politically charged."
These facts, and the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, 
have been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks 
founder. Deeply personal, petty, perfidious and inhuman attacks have 
been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet held isolated, tagged 
and under house arrest - conditions not even meted out to a defendant 
presently facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife.
Books have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched 
or kick-started on the assumption that he is fair game and too poor to 
sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has 
struggled to survive. On 16 June, the publisher of Canongate Books, 
Jamie Byng, when asked by Assange for an assurance that the rumored 
unauthorized publication of his autobiography was not true, said, "No, 
absolutely not. That is not the position ... Julian, do not worry. My 
absolute number one desire is to publish a great book which you are 
happy with." On 22 September, Canongate released what it called 
Assange's "unauthorized autobiography" without the author's permission 
or knowledge. It was a first draft of an incomplete, uncorrected 
manuscript. "They thought I was going to prison and that would have 
inconvenienced them," he told me. "It's as if I am now a commodity that 
presents an incentive to any opportunist."
The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has called the WikiLeaks 
disclosures "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 
years". Indeed, this is part of his current marketing promotion to 
justify raising the Guardian's cover price. But the scoop belongs to 
Assange not the Guardian. Compare the paper's attitude towards Assange 
with its bold support for the reporter threatened with prosecution under 
the Official Secrets Act for revealing the iniquities of Hackgate. 
Editorials and front pages have carried stirring messages of solidarity 
from even Murdoch's Sunday Times. On 29 September, Carl Bernstein was 
flown to London to compare all this with his Watergate triumph. Alas, 
the iconic fellow was not entirely on message. "It's important not to be 
unfair to Murdoch," he said, because "he's the most far seeing media 
entrepreneur of our time" who "put The Simpsons on air" and thereby 
"showed he could understand the information consumer".
The contrast with the treatment of a genuine pioneer of a revolution in 
journalism, who dared take on rampant America, providing truth about how 
great power works, is telling. A drip-feed of hostility runs through the 
Guardian, making it difficult for readers to interpret the WikiLeaks 
phenomenon and to assume other than the worst about its founder. David 
Leigh, the Guardian's "investigations editor", told journalism students 
at City University that Assange was a "Frankenstein monster" who "didn't 
use to wash very often" and was "quite deranged". When a puzzled student 
asked why he said that, Leigh replied, "Because he doesn't understand 
the parameters of conventional journalism. He and his circle have a 
profound contempt for what they call the mainstream media". According to 
Leigh, these "parameters" were exemplified by Bill Keller when, as 
editor of the New York Times, he co-published the WikiLeaks disclosures 
with the Guardian. Keller, said Leigh, was "a seriously thoughtful 
person in journalism" who had to deal with "some sort of dirty, flaky 
hacker from Melbourne".
Last November, the "seriously thoughtful" Keller boasted to the BBC that 
he had taken all WikiLeaks' war logs to the White House so the 
government could approve and edit them. In the run-up to the Iraq war, 
the New York Times published a series of now notorious CIA-inspired 
claims claiming weapons of mass destruction existed. Such are the 
"parameters" that have made so many people cynical about the so-called 
mainstream media.
Leigh went as far as to mock the danger that, once extradited to 
America, Assange would end up wearing "an orange jump suit". These were 
things "he and his lawyer are saying in order to feed his paranoia". The 
"paranoia" is shared by the European Court of Human Rights which has 
frozen "national security" extraditions from the UK to the U.S. because 
the extreme isolation and long sentences defendants can expect amounts 
to torture and inhuman treatment.
I asked Leigh why he and the Guardian had adopted a consistently hostile 
towards Assange since they had parted company. He replied, "Where you, 
tendentiously, claim to detect a 'hostile toe', others might merely see 
well-informed objectivity."
It is difficult to find well-informed objectivity in the Guardian's book 
on Assange, sold lucratively to Hollywood, in which Assange is described 
gratuitously as a "damaged personality" and "callous". In the book, 
Leigh revealed the secret password Assange had given the paper. Designed 
to protect a digital file containing the U.S. embassy cables, its 
disclosure set off a chain of events that led to the release of all the 
files. The Guardian denies "utterly" it was responsible for the release. 
What, then, was the point of publishing the password?
The Guardian's Hackgate exposures were a journalistic tour de force; the 
Murdoch empire may disintegrate as a result. But, with or without 
Murdoch, a media consensus that echoes, from the BBC to the Sun, a 
corrupt political, war-mongering establishment. Assange's crime has been 
to threaten this consensus: those who fix the "parameters" of news and 
political ideas and whose authority as media commissars is challenged by 
the revolution of the internet.
The prize-winning former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook has 
experience in both worlds. "The media, at least the supposedly left-wing 
component of it," he writes, "should be cheering on this revolution... 
And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it [even] to 
discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age... Some of 
[campaign against Assange] clearly reflects a clash of personalities and 
egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more 
profound ideological struggle [about] how information should be 
controlled a generation hence [and] the gatekeepers maintaining their 
control."
(Johnpilger.com)
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index.php/opinion/3368-the-getting-of-assange-and-the-smearing-of-a-revolution
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html

 John Pilger
si'. gli articoli di uno che, mentre la gente scappava dal Vietnam del
Nord, ne lodava gli illuminati progressi in campo economico
http://www.brookesnews.com/061704pilger.html

Il 09/10/11 22:29, נחום ha scritto:

Poi ci lamentiamo della stampa italiana...
-- 
Dead men may not talk, but they also don't lie.  [Chuck Hawks]