We should never forget who forced Assange to carry the cross for the sins of Western imperialism

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As I type, Julian Assange is finally on his way to freedom after exactly twelve years of confinement in Belmarsh Prison and the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

What was the ‘crime’ committed by Julian Assange? Journalism. He dared to do journalism, to tell the truth, to hold the powerful to account for their sins.

Julian Assange dared to stand on dangerous ground, a moral high ground. One doesn’t have to ascend very far morally to rise above the agglomerations of power that run the contemporary world and no powerful telescope is needed to see what they do. As Noam chomsky observed:

“we live entangled in webs of endless deceit, often self-deceit but with a little honest effort, it is possible to extricate ourselves from them. If we do, we will see a world that is rather different from the one presented to us by a remarkably efficient ideological system, a world that is much uglier, often horrifying.”

Assange saw the horror clearly, he didn’t flinch and indulge in self-deceit. He resolved to tell the truth effectively and to shine a light into dark places. Julian of all people knew that the deep state of the U.S. with its secret torture bases and its extraordinary rendition flights would come after him but chose to walk on that dangerous ground anyway. As the portrayed Valeri Legasov said in the Chernobyl mini-series:

“I’ve already trod on dangerous ground. We’re on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”

Let us remember the Wikileaks exposures that really rattled the establishment.

During the Iraq War, members of the U.S Army and the CIA committed savage war crimes in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape. This included the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. These were not isolated incidents as the U.S. claimed but part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

Despite the repeated assurances of U.S. presidential candidates, the torture base at Guantanamo remains open and U.S. abuses inside their military / prison complex have expanded. For all of the Western finger wagging at other ‘regimes’, one should never forget that the U.S. tortures its prisoners and has the largest prison population in the world.

Much was exposed about U.S. detention centres on home soil during the years that the U.S. pursued the extradition of Assange. As Azeezah Kanji enquired sharply in  2021; why should anyone believe that the U.S. are civilised torturers?  The “assurances” of humane treatment issued by the U.S. merely underlined the horrors of America’s mass incarceration state including:

• ADX Florence: where prisoners are kept in almost total isolation for years on end, in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture
• Communications Management Units – in some ways even more restrictive than a supermax prisons
• Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) which  “seal off the prisoner from the outside world and shield his treatment from public scrutiny (PDF)”

Assange knew well what potentially awaited him in the U.S. prison-medical industrial complex:

• Isolated segregation in “psychiatric services units”
• Naked confinement under constant surveillance in “suicide watch” cells
• “therapy” delivered to patients locked in phone booth-sized “treatment cages”.

At the Sheridan Federal Correctional Institution in Oregon, prevailing conditions reportedly include maggot-infested meal trays, denial of treatment for serious medical conditions, deprivation of basic sanitation materials such as toilet paper, and lockdown for up to 24 hours a day. The more the U.S. assured the world that they wouldn’t treat Assange as they treat other political prisoners, the more was revealed and the less anyone believed them.

If Assange truly does make it back to Australia, we shouldn’t forget the role of all branches of the British establishment in railroading Assange.

The Guardian, the alleged flagship of the left liberal media (long since exposed as a tool of military intelligence, the 1% and the Israeli lobby), conducted an egregious smear campaign against Assange for years: happy to collude with the false allegations of rape that were obviously a ruse to discredit him, silence him and facilitate his onwards transportation to a U.S. torture cell. The Guardian’s treatment of Assange has been little short of a feud and it’s easy to see why, for he exposed them for the stenographers of power that they have become under Kath Viner.

All CPS records of Keir Starmer’s four trips to Washington in 2011 while in charge of Assange’s extradition case were helpfully expunged, but U.S. records show he met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials. I doubt that meeting ended well for Assange who was to remain in confinement for another 13 years.

Keir Starmer is but part of the shameful persecution of Assange that the British judiciary colluded with: a process that saw him imprisoned and effectively tortured for 12 years. He was imprisoned not by any conviction but by a deliberately dragged out process. Meanwhile Tony Blair, a real war criminal, resided in luxury in Belgravia: his sins washed away by the establishment and his career rehabilitated by (naturally) The Guardian et al.

The Guardian will seek to cover its tracks now of course, but will still parrot the lie that Assange endangered members of the security services. And as Media Lens reminded us this morning:

Make no mistake, Assange is free only because the U.S. wants him to be free. It buys Biden some much needed political capital with his jaded democratic base in the run up to the U.S. election.

Assange has been forced to carry the cross for western sins but in doing so he has blazed a trail for many others. His release is a joyous moment but we must never forget the price he has had to pay and who forced him to pay it – nor be deterred by it.

As Gaza has shown us all too clearly, the Western empire is replete with depths of cynicism and horrors almost beyond imagining. As Assange is finally released we must resist the conflation that the empire wants to make between journalism and espionage.

Let Assange’s release spawn thousands more individuals like him and organisations like Wikileaks. We so desperately need a renaissance in journalism, so that it once again holds power to account rather than hiding its crimes and agendas.

His suffering should illuminate the difference also between freedom and licence. While Assange was imprisoned for 12 years he never lost his true freedom to speak the truth, while those who retained the licence to parrot western propaganda in exchange for money and status claimed no freedom to do otherwise.

That we have any chance at all of such a renaissance in journalism we owe in large part to Assange and I raise a glass to him for that forever, may his reunion with his family be full of all the joy he richly deserves.