I woke up this morning and opened my laptop to check the time (it was the nearest thing to hand). Next thing I did was take a quick look at Substack Notes to see what was happening. The first post in my timeline was something from Caitlin Johnstone casually announcing Assange is free.
I read it back disbelievingly through blurry eyes and then I checked the news to ensure the story was definitely true. Not that I was doubting the source. It’s just that the moment did not feel real. I could not believe the man was finally going to walk free after everything they’d put him through.
At the same time, I would have been equally stunned if they’d announced his extradition. This was one of those cases where I would have been stunned no matter the outcome.
My first thoughts were for Assange and his family.
As a father of young children myself, I found it unbearable to think what they were putting his family through. As any psychologist will tell you, separating a child from their parents is one of the cruellest things you can do.
The parents and children will both have suffered terrible psychological trauma and might never be the same again. They therefore deserve all the time in the world to heal and live as a family.
If Assange hides away from the public and never shows his face again, he has more than earned the right to do so, but if ever he needs our help, we should be there for him. He has sacrificed so much to get the truth out and we should forever be grateful to the man.
The next thoughts I had about Assange’s release were a tad more selfish.
I realised that I, and my family, could potentially suffer like Assange and his family have suffered. All it takes is for me to write the wrong thing or upset the wrong person and they could find an excuse to put me behind bars. Not that I’m suggesting I’ve ever had more than 0.001% the impact Assange has had, it’s just any writer, blogger or journalist is at risk now. No one is safe from the establishment and you just have to look at how the likes of Craig Murray have been targeted to see this.
You are particularly at risk if you publish anything relating to foreign policy because the establishment has decided that counts as espionage now. You are not allowed to write the truth about foreign policy, you are only allowed to repeat their lies. If you do anything else, you are taking a great risk because they will find a way to come after you.
The UK is even making it so that any writing that could be seen as beneficial to a foreign power could land you in prison. Does this mean I could be jailed if my criticisms of attempts to start a proxy war in Taiwan are seen as beneficial to China? I’ve no idea, and that’s the way they want it. They want you to be afraid to write about anything they don’t like. The thing is, we can’t accept this.
We can’t refuse to tell the truth when our government is endangering us because then we are complicit. We are playing our role in endangering the public.
This means we have a moral obligation to defy these bastards. We need to send the message loud and clear that we will not accept journalism, truth telling and whistleblowing are crimes. If we do, we accept we do not live in a free society.
While today could seem like a huge victory for Assange, and on one level it is, really it’s a tainted victory, and if we let them get away with what they’ve done, it will be no victory at all. We need a huge push to get every war criminal Assange exposed imprisoned and we must demand much stronger speech protections because this can never be allowed to happen again.
Let’s not forget this all started with a trumped up rape story in Sweden which was an excuse to get Assange out of the UK, so he could then be extradited to the US. Assange had not even been charged with a crime in the US because they knew it would be difficult to extradite him from the UK and this was the workaround.
Assange was forced to seek asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy, and this meant he had skipped bail. This was the only crime he was ever guilty of, but honestly, who can blame him? If he’d never skipped bail, I have no doubt he would now be rotting in a supermax prison in the US where existence is basically like being placed inside a coffin but being kept alive.
The US conveniently decided Assange had broken some archaic law that was rarely if ever used, even though he had never stepped on US soil. This meant the US decided they had jurisdiction over the entire planet. Surely, only laws of the country you’re in should apply, and if you break them, you should face prosecution in that country.
The problem for the US is that everyone knew Assange had not broken any British law, other than skipping bail, so they had to give themselves new powers. Even this was fraught with problems, because if you are to say that US laws extend across the world, you at least have to say US human rights do too. That would have meant Assange could have claimed protection under the first amendment right to free speech. If he did this, the case against him would have been dead in the water, so the US would not guarantee Assange could rely on the first amendment. This meant they were discriminating against Assange based on his nationality and therefore the UK could not legally extradite him. It strongly looks like this plea deal was a way to save face because Assange was about to walk free regardless. In other words, rather than Assange’s release being a merciful decision, they handled it in the most callous way they could. I’m even hearing that he has to pay $500,000 for his flight home.
Every single step of the way, the establishment has gone out of the way to be as cruel as possible to Julian Assange. The UN ruled many years ago he was being arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorian embassy for political purposes and should be allowed to go free. Instead, we kidnapped him from the embassy and kept him in solitary confinement in a tiny cell for five years. Even if there was justification to imprison him for this long (there wasn’t), why was there a need to keep him in max security in the cruellest possible conditions? Assange was hardly going to mount a prison escape.
This was cruelty for cruelty’s sake and the sickening thing is that everyone who cried over the death of Navalny in Russia, would not have blinked if Assange had died in our custody. Indeed, this might have been the goal, given the very obvious ways in which his health was deteriorating.
The Assange case has been as significant as the Gaza genocide for exposing the west’s claims of freedom and democracy as a sham. By suffering in the way he has, Assange has shown us what our establishment really is, and for that we should be as grateful as we are afraid. The bastards in charge are the enemy of the people, but now that we understand that, we can figure out a way to fight back.
Thank you for your courage and sacrifice, Julian, you will forever be appreciated.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Caitlin J: 'Assange Is Free, But Justice Has Not Been Done'
Assange Is Free, But Justice Has Not Been Done Caitlin Johnstone Jun 25, 2024
Julian Assange is free. As of this writing he is en route to the Northern Mariana Islands, a remote US territory in the western Pacific, to finalize a plea deal with the US government which will see him sentenced to time served in Belmarsh Prison. Barring any shady shenanigans from the empire in the process, he will then return to his home country of Australia a free man.
Importantly, according to experts I’ve seen commenting on this astonishing new development it doesn’t appear that his plea deal will set any new legal precedents that will be harmful to journalists going forward. Joe Lauria reports the following for Consortium News:
“Bruce Afran, a U.S. constitutional lawyer, told Consortium News that a plea deal does not create a legal precedent. Therefore Assange’s deal would not jeopardize journalists in the future of being prosecuted for accepting and publishing classified information from a source because of Assange’s agreeing to such a charge.”
I’ve obviously got a lot of big feels about all this, having followed this important case so closely for so long and having put so much work into writing about it. There’s so very, very much work to be done in our collective struggle to liberate the world from the talons of the imperial murder machine, but I am overjoyed for Assange and his family, and it feels good to mark a solid win in this fight.
None of this undoes the unforgivable evils the empire inflicted in its persecution of Julian Assange however, or reverses the worldwide damage that has been done by making a public example of him to show what happens to a journalist who tells inconvenient truths about the world’s most powerful government.
So while Assange may be free, we cannot rightly say that justice has been done.
Justice would look like Assange being granted a full and unconditional pardon and receiving millions of dollars in compensation from the US government for the torment they put him through by his imprisonment in Belmarsh beginning in 2019, his de facto imprisonment in the Ecuadorian embassy beginning in 2012, and his jailing and house arrest beginning in 2010.
Justice would look like the US making concrete legal and policy changes guaranteeing that Washington could never again use its globe-spanning power and influence to destroy the life of a foreign journalist for reporting inconvenient facts about it, and issuing a formal apology to Julian Assange and his family.
Justice would look like the arrest and prosecution of the people whose war crimes Assange exposed, and the arrest and prosecution of everyone who helped ruin his life for exposing those crimes. This would include a whole host of government operatives and officials across numerous countries, and multiple US presidents. https://x.com/wikileaks/status/1805523516130722200
Justice would look like a hero’s welcome and a hero’s honors from Australia upon his arrival, and a serious revision of Canberra’s obsequious relationship with Washington.
Justice would look like formal apologies to Assange and his family from the editorial boards of all the mainstream press outlets which manufactured consent for his vicious persecution — including and especially The Guardian — and the complete destruction of the reputations of every unscrupulous presstitute who helped smear him over the years.
If these things happened, then we could perhaps argue that justice has been served to some extent. As it stands all we have is the cessation of one single act of depravity by an empire who’s only backing off to make room for newer, more important depravities. We all still live under a globe-spanning power structure which has shown the entire world that it will destroy your life if you expose its criminality, and then stand back and proudly call this justice.
So I personally think I’m just going to take this one small victory in stride with a quick “thank you” to the heavens and get back to work. There is still so much to do, and vanishingly little time to do it.
on June 25, 2024, 12:44 pm