WikiLeaks is a rare truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is shameful
Last December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the world. They were there to demonstrate their human solidarity with someone whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about the importance of what Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right to guard the limits of informed public debate.
These public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom reported. Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall, with hundreds spilling into the street. In New York recently, Assange was given the Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg, who risked all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam war.
Like Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist Phillip Knightley, the acclaimed film director Ken Loach and others lost bail money in standing up for Assange. “The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty secrets,” Loach wrote to me. “Extradition via Sweden is more than likely . . . is it difficult to choose whom to support?”
No, it is not difficult.
In the NS last week, Jemima Khan ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with an article on WikiLeaks’s founder. To Khan, the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the Loaches and Knightleys, and the countless people they represent, have all been duped. We are all “blinkered”. We are all mindlessly “devoted”. We are all “cultists”. In the final words of her j’accuse, she describes Assange as “an Australian L Ron Hubbard”. She must have known this would make a gratuitous headline, as indeed it did across the press in Australia.
I respect Jemima Khan for backing humanitarian causes, such as the Palestinians. She supports the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, of which I am a judge, and my own film-making. But her attack on Assange is specious and plays to a familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a smartphone.
Khan complains that Assange refused to appear in the film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she “executive produced”. Assange knew the film would be neither “nuanced” nor “fair” and “represent the truth”, as Khan wrote, and that its very title, We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America’s hellholes. Having interviewed axe-grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid. DreamWorks is also making a film about the “paranoid” Assange. Oscars all round.
The sum of Khan’s and Gibney’s attacks is that Ecuador granted him asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous. Assange has been declared an official “enemy” of a torturing, assassinating, rapacious state. This is clear in official files, obtained under Freedom of Information, that betray Washington’s “unprecedented” pursuit of him, together with the Australian government’s abandonment of its citizen: a legal basis for granting asylum.
Khan refers to a “long list” of Assange’s “alienated and disaffected allies”. Almost none was ever an ally. What is striking about most of these “allies” and Assange’s haters is that they exhibit the very symptoms of arrested development they attribute to a man whose resilience and good humour under extreme pressure are evident to those he trusts.
Another on the “long list” is the lawyer Mark Stephens, who charged him almost half a million pounds in fees and costs. This bill was paid from an advance on a book whose unauthorised manuscript was published by another “ally” without Assange’s knowledge or permission. When Assange moved his legal defence to Gareth Peirce, Britain’s leading human rights lawyer, he found a true ally. Khan makes no mention of the damning, irrefutable evidence that Peirce presented to the Australian government, warning how the US deliberately “synchronised” its extradition demands with pending cases and that her client faced a grave miscarriage of justice and personal danger. Peirce told the Australian consul in London in person that she had known few cases as shocking as this.
It is a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest danger of delivering Assange to the US. The Swedes have refused all requests for guarantees that he will not be despatched under a secret arrangement with Washington; and it is the political executive in Stockholm, with its close ties to the extreme right in America, not the courts, that will make this decision.
Khan is rightly concerned about a “resolution” of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne all but dismissed the case.
As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardian in August 2012, “. . . the allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . .
“The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will . . . [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step to their investigation? What are they afraid of?”
Read more by John Pilger
- The Real Invasion of Africa Is Not News, and a License To Lie Is Hollywood’s Gift – January 31st, 2013
- As Sanctions Hit Iran’s Most Vulnerable, the Man Who Dared to Feed Sanction-Starved Iraq Remains in Prison – November 9th, 2012
- The Life and Death of an Australian Hero, Whose Skin Was the Wrong Colour – October 4th, 2012
- Apartheid Never Died In South Africa. It Inspired a World Order Upheld by Force and Illusion. – September 20th, 2012
- The Liberal Way to Run the World – September 6th, 2012
WikiLeaks is a rare truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is shameful - Unofficial Network
February 17th, 2013 at 10:04 pm
[...] View original article. [...]
Rich
February 18th, 2013 at 1:04 am
Smearing anyone is shameful. But isn't that what this article does? Rather than rebut the accusations of Khan and Gibney they are "specious", playing to "a familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a smartphone", "gratuitous", "Assange haters". Why not just address charges directly with simple evidence? Former lawyers are linked with astronomical fees which presumably were pre-agreed. Hardly the stuff of dispassionate evidence based journalism.
The article reads as though written in anger in response to an allegation of gullibility addressed at the author…which of course it is, as John Pilger himself contributed to Assange's bail security alongside Jemima Khan (even though this fact which is relevant to the reading of the article is omitted). It must be hard for an award winning journalist to read such allegations.
The problem with Julian is that he has undoubtedly shone a bright light in the darkness of government secrets, revealing truths for which we should all be grateful…but when presented with a scandal of his own his most fervent supporters never seem to quite get to publishing the facts of the matter, always relying on circumstance and in some cases on hearsay and smear.
Stealing and adapting John Pilger's own words on journalism: "It is not enough for activists to see themselves as mere campaigners without understanding the hidden agendas of the cause and the myths that surround it".
mickperry
February 18th, 2013 at 3:17 am
It was a heartening experience to listen to the panel convened to discuss the latest developments in the case bought by those brave souls fighting against certain NDAA provisions passing into US law. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g36A0QVy2s
Michael Moore, one of those who also put up bail for Julian Assange alongside Jemima Khan, makes clear his continuing support for the head of the publishing organisation, but he can expect this fact to go unnoticed by all but the most diligent news watchers, and Pilger's work has made clear why this is the case.
Alex Gibney's case against Assange on the other hand, rests entirely on 'lack of evidence' that there is any plan to extradite Assange to the US once in Swedish custody. Not acknowledged by Gibney is the complete lack of evidence that Assange will be tried by a jury either in the US or Sweden before being cast into indefinite detention. The Swedish authorities have been repeatedly asked to provide an assurance that Assange will not be handed over to the US justice system, and they have failed to do so.
Articles for Monday » Scott Lazarowitz's Blog
February 18th, 2013 at 5:12 am
[...] John Pilger: WikiLeaks Is a Rare Truth-Teller. Smearing Julian Assange Is Shameful [...]
Drake
February 18th, 2013 at 7:26 am
Sweden's persecution of Assange is no surprise to anyone who has spent time in that country. Despite Swedens veneer of being a socially progressive nation, the truth is quite the opposite. Of late,the fascist right wing Conservative party has taken virtual control of the country. In schools they teach the "virtues" of Nordic racial purity and hatred of all non Christian people, especially Muslims.
These are the same fascists who aided the Nazis while pretending to be neutral. I have, no doubt, that those fascists are playing ball with their brethren in the US government.
Brian
February 18th, 2013 at 10:39 am
He has omitted nothing. The word "I" is missing from the paragraph referring to his and Khan's lost bail money.
Why are Assange's supporters responsible for publishing the facts: what facts? That he had consensual sex with two women while in Sweden? That the case was dropped because it was unlikely to result in a conviction (or even a trial) until it was suddenly picked up by a government minister? That is what happened. Those are the facts.
Tom Mauel
February 18th, 2013 at 5:24 pm
Well Rich "what are the facts of the matter"? Are you implying that Assange is guilty of some crime after the women in question have each already denied there was sexual misconduct?
tinkersailor
February 18th, 2013 at 8:17 pm
"Rather than rebut the accusations of Khan and Gibney they are "specious", playing to "a familiar gallery whose courage is tweeted from a smartphone", "gratuitous"
Charges……. "she describes Assange as “an Australian L Ron Hubbard”……. How does one refute such mawkish babble….. "No Jemima!!! Julian isn't planing to start any toll gate religion or cult of the "duped and “blinkered” and travel around the planet on a yacht collecting royalties on the leaks."
"Stealing and adapting John Pilger's own words on journalism: "It is not enough for activists to see themselves as mere campaigners without understanding the hidden agendas of the cause and the myths that surround it".
It seems to me the predominate "hidden agenda" in play here is getting Mr. Assange in front of a U.S. Federal Court and holding him in prison on espionage charges….
It's quite "rich" so to speak that Rich doesn't " share with US…. the dear readers… the "hidden agendas" to which he alludes. Come on Rich… Come Clean..!! What are the "hidden" agendas that Assange is pushing or working to materialize….. Your hints don't do it… We give up… Tell us what these Assange agendas are to which you allude….. or forfeit any credibility… of your argument.
Rich
February 19th, 2013 at 1:41 am
Failing to disclose personal financial interest is quite an omission in any opinion piece!
To be fair I'd be angry too if I read an article I thought implied I was gullible. The problem is that this is a partisan piece which actually doesn't even address the themes that Goldsmith brought up: an apparent unwillingness to engage with anybody not 100% on side and a track record of falling out with previously strong supporters.
This piece really doesn't help bring people on-side: quite the opposite it preaches to the converted just entrenches a them and us position. The world is never so black and white.
Sorry – I just happen to agree with Khan "It would be a tragedy if a man who has done so much good were to end up tolerating only disciples and unwavering devotion, more like an Australian L Ron Hubbard. "