Enough of lies about Julian Assange!

 
Enough of lies about Julian Assange!

x John Pilger: The bourgeois press is concerned about the "Assange effect": the thugs who took Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy may one day come for them

Newspapers and other media in the US and Britain have recently declared their passion for freedom of expression, especially for their right to publish freely. It is because they are worried about the "Assange effect."

It is as if the struggle of those who speak the truth, such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, now represents a warning to them: that the thugs who took Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy in April may one day come for them.

The Guardian echoed a common refrain last week. The extradition of Assange, the newspaper said, “is not a question about how intelligent Assange can be, let alone about how pleasant it can be. It is not about his character, or his opinions. It has to do with freedom of the press and with the public's right to know. ”
 
Assange out of the Ecuadorian embassy may one day come for them

What The Guardian is trying to do is separate Assange from its fundamental achievements, achievements of which The Guardian has benefited while exposing its own vulnerability, along with its tendency to flatter predatory power and defame those who reveal its double standards.

The poison that has been fueling the persecution of Julian Assange is not as obvious in that editorial as it usually is; there is no fiction in which Assange does not stain the walls of the embassy or behaves horribly with his cat.

Instead, the misleading references to "character", "judgment" and "sympathy" perpetuate an epic stain that is almost a decade old. Nils Melzer, United Nations Rapporteur on Torture, used a more adequate description. “There has been,” he wrote, “a relentless and unrestricted campaign of public harassment.” He explains harassment as “an endless stream of humiliating, degrading and threatening statements in the press.” This “collective scorn” amounts to torture and could lead to at the death of Assange.

Having witnessed much of what Melzer describes, I can attest to the truth of his words. If Julian Assange succumbs to the cruelties accumulated on him, week after week, month after month, year after year, as doctors warn, newspapers like The Guardian would have to share that responsibility.

A few days ago, a guy from the Sydney Morning Herald in London, Nick Miller, wrote a careless and misleading article entitled: "Assange has not been acquitted, he has simply mocked justice." He was referring to Sweden's abandonment of the alleged investigation into Assange.

Miller's report is not atypical because of his omissions and distortions, although he pretends to be a platform for women's rights. There is no original work, there is no real investigation: only slander.

There is nothing about the documented behavior of a group of Swedish fans who kidnapped the “accusations” of inappropriate sexual behavior against Assange and made fun of Swedish law and the much vaunted decency of that society.

He does not mention that, in 2013, the Swedish prosecutor tried to abandon the case and sent an email to the Crown Prosecutor's Service (SFC) in London to tell him that he was no longer going to try to get a European arrest warrant. who received the answer: "Don't you dare!" [My thanks to Stefania Maurizi de La Repubblica.]

Other emails show that the SFC discouraged Swedes from going to London to interview Assange, something that was common practice, thereby blocking the progress that could have freed him in 2011.

There was never accusation. There were never charges. There was never a serious attempt to impute “accusations” to Assange or to question him, behavior that the Swedish Court of Appeals ruled negligent and that the Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association has since been condemning.

The two women involved later said there was no violation. There is important written evidence that their text messages were intentionally stolen from Assange's lawyers because they clearly undermined the "accusations" (https://lahaine.org/cO1z).

One of the women was so surprised that Assange was arrested, that she accused the police of having pressured her and of changing her statement as a witness. The chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed any "suspected crime."

The Sydney Morning Herald man omits that an ambitious and committed politician, Claes Borgström, appeared behind the liberal facade of Swedish politics and seized and revived the case.

 Borgström recruited a former political collaborator, Marianne Ny, as the new prosecutor. Ny refused to guarantee that Assange would not end up being sent to the US in case he was extradited to Sweden, though, as The Independent reported: “Informal talks have already been held between US and Swedish officials about the possibility of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is placed in US custody, according to diplomatic sources. ” This was an open secret in Stockholm. That egalitarian Sweden has a dark and documented past of leaving people in the hands of the CIA was not news.

The silence was broken in 2016 when the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, an agency that decides whether governments meet their human rights obligations, ruled that Julian Assange had been illegally detained by Britain and asked the Government British to let him free.



1995-2019: Julian Assange, And The Way He Looked - The ...

 Both the Governments of Great Britain and Sweden had participated in the UN investigation and agreed to respect their ruling, which had the weight of international law. But British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond stood in Parliament and insulted the UN panel.

The Swedish case was a fraud from the moment the police secretly and illegally contacted a sensationalist newspaper in Stockholm and unleashed the hysteria that was going to devour Assange. WikiLeaks' revelations of US war crimes had shamed those servants of power, with their vested interests, who called themselves journalists; and for this, the unsociable Assange was never going to be forgiven.

The ban was open. Assange's media torturers cut and beat each other's lies and insulting abuse. "He is really one of the most massive shits," wrote The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore. The common trial reached was that he had been charged, which was never true. In my career, in which I have reported from places that recorded extreme agitation, suffering and criminality, I have never seen anything like that.

In the homeland of Assange, Australia, it was where this "harassment" reached its peak. The Australian Government was so anxious to deliver its citizen to the US that in 2013 the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, wanted to take away her passport and charge her with a crime, until she was told that Assange had not committed any crime and that she had no right to take away his citizenship.

According to the Honest History website, Julia Gillard holds the record of the most flattering speech ever made before the US Congress. Australia, she said to the applause, was the "great companion" of the United States. The great companion colluded with the US in her persecution of an Australian whose crime was journalism, denying her right to adequate protection and assistance

When Assange's lawyer, Gareth Peirce, and I met two Australian consular officials in London, we were surprised that everything they knew about the case "is what we read in the newspapers."

This abandonment by Australia was one of the main reasons for Ecuador to grant him political asylum. As an Australian, I found this situation especially shameful.

When asked recently about Assange, current Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said: "He should face the consequences." This type of thugs, devoid of any respect for truth and rights, principles and the law, is the reason why the press mostly controlled by Murdoch in Australia is now worried about their own future, since The Guardian He is worried and The New York Times is worried. All this concern has a name: "Assange's precedent."

They know that what happens to Assange can happen to them. The basic rights and justice that are denied to him can also be denied to them. They have been warned. All of us have been warned.

Every time I see Julian in the gloomy and surreal world of Belmarsh prison, I remember the responsibility of all those who defend him. There are universal principles at play in this case. He usually says: “It's not about me. It's something much broader. ”

But at the heart of this remarkable struggle - because it is, above all, a struggle - is a human being whose character, I repeat, character, has shown the most amazing courage. I greeted him.

(Edited version of a speech that John Pilger offered at the London launch of the book "In Defense of Julian Assange," an anthology published by Or Books, New York.)

Brief history of the western strategy of mass bombardment of civilian populations and lies to justify it

 
Black rain

x Higinio Polo: Brief history of the western strategy of mass bombardment of civilian populations and lies to justify it

At the end of 2003, European newspapers brought small information about Milan. Fifty-five thousand people had been evacuated from their homes, as a result of the discovery of a World War II bomb. Nothing, apparently, linked that news to the bombings in Iraq, which had begun on March 20 of the same year, but had one point in common: sixty years away, both episodes had starred in US planes and they had targeted cities, regardless of the consequences for the civilian population.

In Iraq, an infernal rain of Tomahawks missiles, first, and airfighter attacks later, designed in the Shock & Awe operation, threw thousands of bombs on the cities in Baghdad, Kirkut, Basra, Tikrit, Mosul . The North American pilots made more than a thousand daily flights to bomb, during five days in a row, official buildings, barracks, infrastructure, power plants, water treatment centers, neighborhoods. Afterwards, the bombings continued: it was the new tactic that the American occupation troops developed against the Iraqi resistance after the defeat of Saddam Hussein.

* * *

The Italian general Giulio Douhet published in 1921 a book, The domain of the air, where he developed the utility of aviation and bombing to break the enemy's resistance, using fear, destruction, disorganization of the economic structure and the sinking of the production. A few years earlier, involved in the great war, Douhet had participated in Libya in the fighting against the Turk: there was the first aerial bombardment in history. Shortly thereafter, the bombing of civilians would arrive, swelling the infamy of war crimes. In 1925, in that North Africa, Spanish planes bombed crowded souks, as in Beni Ider, and American pilots enlisted in French forces did the same by dropping their bombs on the civilian population of Xauen: there were no men of military age , only women and children, and caused a killing, according to Sven Lindqvist.

Since then, the possibility of crushing with enemies and adversaries, in wars or revolts and protests, has been a constant, and the United States became an applied and fierce follower of General Douhet's thesis. With the complicity, lies or silence of the media, the US has continued to bomb countries, devastating territories, sowing death on the planet. Because the US is not only the only country in history that has used nuclear bombs against the civilian population, it is also the only one that has bombarded dozens of countries on all continents of the earth, except in the uninhabited Antarctica and its allied Australia ( Oceania). And the only country that has used the three types of weapons of mass destruction against the civilian population: nuclear, chemical and bacteriological. The US is a criminal power, and much of its strength lies in the constant use of its devastating ability to raze cities or countries from the air.

The US had an advanced instructor: in the first decades of the 20th century, Britain bombed Yemen, Kenya, Malaysia and other countries to crush revolts, guerrillas and revolutions. In Kenya, between 1952 and 1960, the British convinced the world that during the "mau mau rebellion" they fought "fierce black murderers" and not peasants who had stolen their land: the RAF launched tens of thousands of tons of bombs, and the bombings and killings ended with almost one hundred thousand Kenyans, and tens of thousands of others were locked in concentration camps. Britain bombed civilian populations in the interwar years, in its colonies in Africa, and in Iraq.

W. G. Sebald speaks, in his book On the Natural History of Destruction, of the terrible British and American bombings on Germany during World War II. The Nazis bombed, in 1940, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Coventry, and the British responded with bombings over Cologne, Hamburg, Lübeck, Kiel, Stuttgart, Essen, Berlin and so many others: Arthur Harris and the RAF. Since 1942, Americans were bombing Europe, causing heavy civilian casualties. Hitler had bombed London, but afterwards the flood of bombs on Germany would be devastating, until the final moment of the capitulation, as Jörg Friedrich thoroughly documented: British and North Americans bombed more than a thousand cities, causing more than one million dead, with thirty million of people suffering the bombs.

It was war, but the objectives were not always military, but the civilian population, because it is not my thing

It was war, but the objectives were not always military, but the civilian population, because it is not the same to bomb a city that is at the front of the battle than to destroy populations from the rear of the rear. Dresden was jointly bombed by British and North Americans: they killed eighty thousand people, which other sources raise to 135,000. In the east, it was the American general Curtis Le May who organized the bombings: his plan was to bomb the civilian population to break Japan, although, due to propaganda considerations, he spoke of "bombing against strategic objectives."

It was a lie, and the American bombings killed more than a million Japanese, in a cold accounting of the death that the Pentagon generals knew beforehand: the horror, which Akiyuki Nosaka showed in his bleak The fireflies' grave. Fascist Japan was not far behind, although it did not bomb the US, where its airplanes could not reach, but China: in fact, it had begun to bomb Chinese cities already in the thirties: Nanjing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chongqing.

The US dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo, with the deliberate purpose of killing tens of thousands of people. Curtis Le May, having ordered the launch of thousands of tons of incendiary and napalm bombs over Tokyo that caused more than one hundred thousand deaths, commented: “When we burned the city, we knew that women and children would die. But you had to do it. ” The bombing campaign led by Le May sought to terrorize the civilian population, and after the war, always opted for the bombings, even atomic ones, against the Soviet Union, China or Cuba. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, were not exceptions, but the norm. His country rewarded Le May's extreme cruelty by granting him honors and distinctions: for the US, Curtis Le May was not a war criminal, but a hero, and he still is.

After the landing in Normandy, the American troops advanced fighting the Germans, but also bombing the civilian population, which they were going to liberate. French historiography speaks of thousands of victims caused by the bombings; the figure of twenty thousand dead is accepted by all, and some venture higher figures: Jean-Pierre Azéma, for example, estimates in almost fifty thousand civilian deaths, only in Normandy, during the advance of American and British troops.

They attacked destroying entire towns, bombing cities. In a small town in that Normandy, Saint-Lô, 352 people died, on June 6 and 7, 1944, not in combat but under American and British bombs: the town was virtually destroyed. The same thing had happened in Italy, when the American troops advanced: the San Lorenzo neighborhood of Rome was completely destroyed by the American bombings.

The evolution of the Second World War demonstrated to the US military command the lethal efficacy of the bombings, and, since then, they have not stopped destroying the earth. In March 1946 (when the Soviet Union still lacked several years to also get the atomic bomb and be on equal terms), the US decided that the Strategic Air Command (SAC) would be an independent army agency and, two months later, he was ordered to prepare a plan to launch nuclear bombs anywhere on the planet: the main objectives were Soviet cities and industrial centers. The SAC controlled the strategic bombers and intercontinental missiles, and in 1992 it was converted into the US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), based at the same Offutt air base in Omaha, Nebraska.

In November 1947, the US finalized its Broiler nuclear war plan: twenty-four Soviet cities would be destroyed with atomic bombs, a program that was subsequently developed with the Half Moon plan of 1948 and the Off Tackle plan of 1949, where destruction was already planned of one hundred and four Soviet cities. The USSR did not yet have nuclear weapons, and when it did, as of 1949, it always lagged behind US atomic bombing projects. The fear of the consequences of a nuclear war stopped the most aggressive plans, although generals like MacArthur demanded the launch of atomic bombs on China.

A good part of the planet was one step away from the destruction: since 1961, the North American Strategic Air Command, SAC, kept bombers with nuclear bombs flying twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, prepared to launch their cargo against the Soviet Union, Socialist Europe and China. The Pentagon's plan was to launch one hundred and seventy nuclear bombs on Moscow, and Washington strategists had calculated that their bombs would kill more than four hundred million people.

 

 
After the horror in the Pacific, the war came from Korea, and Vietnam. In June 1950, the North American Strategic Air Command set out to bomb North Korea. It was a flood of bombs: in three months, the bombers destroyed all the northern cities. As Kim Il Sung's soldiers had advanced south to unify the country, the US also began bombing it, destroying many cities: they dropped more than a million bombs. To reconquer Seoul, the US bombed it mercilessly: when its troops entered, more than fifty thousand bodies were piled up among the ruins of the city.

Two years later, William O. Douglas, president of the US Supreme Court, visited South Korea. Faced with the infernal destruction, he said: “I have seen European cities devastated by war, but I had never witnessed a devastation like the one I found in Korea. Cities like Seoul are severely damaged, but many others, such as Chorwon, at the base of the Iron Triangle, have been completely razed. Bridges, railways, dikes ... have been reduced to rubble. Misery, disease, pain, suffering, hunger… everything mixes beyond comprehension. ”In the Korean war, five million people died; The vast majority, civilians.

In Vietnam, the Pentagon approved the Thunder operation in 1965: waves of bombings to systematically destroy the country. But they could not bend the Vietnamese. It seemed impossible to go any further, but they did, and hell came: more bombs, and napalm, which they had already used in Japan and Korea. The explosive charge launched by the US in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the war was eight million tons of bombs, which amounted to seven bombs for each man, woman or child, or six hundred and forty atomic bombs like Hiroshima's.
 

The American writer Stan Sesser wrote about the bombings in Vietnam: they sent "a bomber loaded with bombs every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for nine years incessantly." During the Vietnam War, the Washington government and the Pentagon generals did not retreat from the evidence of their inhumanity, and received the help and understanding of many of their intellectuals: Samuel Huntington, for example, considered that the shelling of the population Vietnamese civilians were the most appropriate way to defend Western civilization.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union and Russian paralysis during the fateful Yeltsin decade stimulated American aggression and its bombings, which reached Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and many other countries, from Yemen to Sudan, from Libya to Somalia. Only under the presidency of Clinton, the US intervened in Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Congo, Iraq, Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999, NATO bombed the television offices in Belgrade: sixteen journalists and workers were killed. They also bombed the Chinese embassy, ​​killing three diplomats and injuring another twenty people.

The bombings on the small Yugoslavia lasted seventy-eight days, during which their bombs killed several thousand people and caused the destruction of the country: losses were estimated at one hundred billion dollars; destroyed bridges, water treatment plants, factories, power plants. His cruelty and contempt for the civilian population is marked by massacres such as the bombing of a passenger train at the Grdelica Gorge, or the Korisa massacre, where a convoy of Albanian Kosovo refugees was bombed by NATO, dying more than a hundred people. But the bombs often have the company of lies: despite the evidence of their authorship, Washington refused to acknowledge their responsibility in the Korisa massacre and tried to blame Belgrade for the bombing. When he had no choice but to recognize the bombing, NATO spoke of "error," of "legitimate military objective," and continued to accept the high death toll.

 

 In Iraq, after the great lie of the “weapons of mass destruction” that were supposedly held by the Baghdad government, the bombings were apocalyptic: the 2003 US invasion and the subsequent military war and occupation led to the death of more than one million Iraqis Iraq Body Count (IBC), based on news from the media, talked about 100,000 civilians killed as of July 2010. For its part, in October 2006, The Lancet estimated that the war in Iraq had already caused 655,000 dead; In shelling alone, he considered 137,000 Iraqis dead. In September 2007, a British organization, ORB International, estimated 1,200,000 deaths caused in Iraq by the US invasion.

Since then, more than fifteen years ago, the US continues to bomb the martyred Iraq: in the first three months of 2017 alone, the US bombed Iraq and Syria and killed almost two thousand civilians. An Amnesty International investigation revealed that during the offensive against the Syrian city of Raqqa, the US bombings dropped more bombs than anywhere else since the days of the Vietnam War: they killed more than one thousand six hundred people, all civilians. The Pentagon spokesmen declared that they were bombing the Islamist army of Daesh, and that it was "the most accurate air campaign in history", although sometimes they had to recognize some "error." Because the defense to justify bombing and massacres is always prepared, and is always the same: when a massacre occurs, and if the news reaches the international media causing a great commotion, the US declares that it will open a “commission of inquiry” To clarify the facts. He knows that he will stop the first blow like that; afterwards, the news disappears from the press and television, and the world forgets.

On other occasions he resorts directly to lies: on March 17, 2017, the US bombed a building where dozens of families had taken refuge, in Mosul, Iraq, in a fierce massacre where more than one hundred people died. Washington had to acknowledge that it was their planes that were responsible, but they managed to avoid their responsibility: he claimed that the bombs dropped were not enough to destroy the building or cause so many victims, but that inadvertently caused the explosive blast left there. by Daesh It was a crude lie, but nobody remembers Mosul's killing anymore.

Now, in addition to continuing to use conventional bomber planes, the US sweeps countries from the peace of the offices of its military bases. When NATO started the war against Libya, along with France and Britain, the Pentagon decided to bomb the country with its new unmanned aircraft, the Predators. In 2015, the German magazine Der Spiegel revealed that since 2013 the US has also led drone attacks in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and in Africa from the base of Ramstein, headquarters of US air forces in Europe.

Those drones, which have become habitual in the wars of our day, were led by the US military from the military offices of Nevada. The Pentagon also uses Global Hawks surveillance devices, drones almost fourteen meters long; and the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper that are directed from the Creech base in Nevada Air Force, located in Indian Springs, about fifty miles north of Las Vegas. They could not have baptized that base better: it is named after General Wilbur L. Creech, a man who bombarded the civilian population in Korea and later in Vietnam.

Until today: on November 3, 2010, American remote-controlled planes killed fifteen people in the north of the Waziristan region of Pakistan. The US command did not bother to offer explanations: the Pakistani government was unaware of the attack, and the Pentagon did not believe it necessary to justify its action: it regularly bombs wherever it considers. In 2011, Predator remote-controlled airplanes, controlled from Nevada with equipment composed for each one by almost two hundred people, were bombing Libya, in an operation that had all the characteristics of a video game: the US military who control those drones do so from their offices, with tranquility, without stress, and then return home; they have played one more game, although in it they have really killed human beings: it is the dehumanization of the enemy. There are no war crimes or cruelty: it is only a distance game. The Pentagon has also used these drone planes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and in African countries such as Somalia and Sudan.

 

 Although the legitimacy of those cold executions was accepted for being carried out in the course of a war (that is the American justification: they are immersed in a “global war on terrorism”), very often, American bombing kills civilians, innocent In that constant accounting of death, the United States has always resorted to lies. Francis Patrick Matthews, whom Truman appointed Secretary of the Navy, said his country should be willing to do everything to keep the peace, even to start a war. Matthews believed that the duty of the United States was to be "aggressors for peace."

When Truman ordered the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans believed that the nuclear mushroom was the new statue of liberty, and his government defended the atomic holocaust to "achieve peace," because the Pentagon generals have not been shaken never hands while designing horror scenarios, and for many decades lies accompany bombs.

Seita, the boy who dies like an abandoned dog at Kobe's Sannomiya station, in the terrified post-war Japan that Akiyuki Nosaka described, hears the thunderous buzz of the American squads and sees the black spots that fall on them: it is the rain that the planes launch, he thinks, gripped by panic. It was the black rain of the bombings, the shroud that the US continues to throw on the world.

The old mole