Delegitimising Journalism: The Effort to Relabel Julian Assange
“Your honour, I represent the United States government”. The Westminster Magistrates Court had been left with little doubt by the opening words of the legal team marshalled against the face of WikiLeaks. Julian Assange was being targeted by the Imperium itself, an effort now only garnished by the issue of skipping bail in 2012. Would the case on his extradition to the US centre on the matter of free speech and the vital scrutinising role of the press?
Thomas Jefferson, who had his moments of venomous tetchiness against the press outlets of his day, was clear about the role of the fourth estate. A government with newspapers rather than without, he argued to Edward Carrington in 1787, was fundamental so long as “every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” To Thomas Cooper, he would write in November 1802 reflecting that the press was “the only tocsin of a nation. [When it] is completely silenced… all means of a general effort [are] taken away.” The press provided the greatest of counterweights against oppressive tendencies, being the “only security” available.
Not so, now. The fourth estate has been subjected to a withering. The State has become canny about the nature of the hack profession, providing incentives, attempting to obtain favourable coverage, and, above all, avoiding dramatic reforms where necessary. An outfit like WikiLeaks is a rebuke to such efforts, to the hypocrisy of decent appearances, as it is to those in a profession long in the tooth and, often, short in substance.
It has logically followed that WikiLeaks, the enemy of the closed press corps and an entity keen to remove the high priests of censorship, must be devalued and re-labelled. This has entailed efforts to delegitimise Assange and WikiLeaks as those of a rogue enterprise somehow detached from the broader issue of political reportage. In this, traditional media outlets and the security establishment have accommodated each other; the State needs secrets, even if they rot the institutional apparatus; exposing abuses of power should be delicate, measured and calm. Scandals and embarrassments can be kept to a minimum, and the political system can continue in habitual, barely accountable darkness.
The indictment against Assange is the clearest statement of this strategy. It insists on shifting the focus from publication and press freedoms, which would pit the legal wits of the prosecution against the First Amendment, to the means information is obtained. Unscrupulous method, not damning substance, counts. In this case, it is computer intrusion laced with the noxious addition of conspiracy, a criminal concept vague, flexible and advantageous to the prosecution. The other side of the bargain was, the document alleges, Chelsea Manning, who thereby gathered the “classified information related to the national defence of the United States” pursuant to a password cracking pact, relaying it to WikiLeaks to “publicly disseminate the information on its website.”
A delighted Hillary Clinton, as she has always done with Assange, revelled in the prosecutorial brief, approving of an approach she could scant improve upon. At a New York speaking event, with husband Bill also in attendance, she suggested that journalism and Assange were matters to disentangle, if not divorce altogether. “It is clear from the indictment that came out that it’s not about punishing journalism, it’s about assisting the hacking of the military computer to steal information from the US government”. Call it something else, and the problem goes away. “The bottom line is that he has to answer for what he has done, at least as it’s been charged.”
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin went one better than Clinton on John Berman’s New Day on CNN, doing away with any niceties, or impediments, British justice might pose to extradition efforts. “We’re going to extradite him. It will be really good to get him back on United States soil. So now he’s our property and we can get the facts and truth from him.” The Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner has similarly given the hurry on to British courts to “quickly transfer” Assange in an effort to finally give him “the justice he deserves”. New York Senator Charles Schumer, who obviously thinks the Constitution is irrelevant in this whole affair, simply wants red tooth in claw revenge for Assange’s “meddling in our elections on behalf of Putin and the Russian government”. To Schumer, the issue of a security breach seems less important than avenging the lost Democratic cause against Donald Trump.
Media coverage of Assange’s efforts over the years have often centred on the tension between the mind-blowing “scoop” and the pilfering “hack”. Scoop Assange is to be praised; Hack Assange is to be feared and reviled. The paper aristocrats such as The Washington Post and The New York Times have blown hot and cold on the subject. One study from 2014 in the Newspaper Research Journal, in assessing publications run in the two over the course of the Cablegate affair, showed a rejection on the part of The Grey Lady of WikiLeaks as a journalistic outfit, with the Post taking a different view.
The fault lines are now sharper than ever. Assange’s arrest has done much to out the security establishment gloaters. Their tactic is one of personalising character and defects, as if that ever made a difference to the relevance of an idea. Michael Weiss, writing for The Atlantic, is characteristically obscene, and does everything to live up to the national security establishment he praises. Assange was a man who “reportedly smeared faeces on the walls of his lodgings, mistreated his kitten, and variously blamed the ills of the world on feminists and bespectacled Jewish writers”. As he was pulled out of the Ecuadorean embassy he looked “very inch like a powdered-sugar Saddam Hussein plucked straight from his spider hole.”
This grotesque exercise of equivalence – Assange the cartoonish beardo on par with a murderous dictator – has been supplemented by a general air of mockery, some of it more venal than others. Such behaviour has always been music to those who believe in the sanctity of the state. Guy Rundle of Crikey noted the same tendency of many a hack who had gathered outside the court to cover Assange’s trial. Their behaviour, in mocking Assange the man rather than Assange the publisher, “essentially validated every critique of mainstream media that WikiLeaks has ever made: that the profession is full of natural psychopaths, who spruik cynicism and call it even-handedness, who speak power to truth, who wilfully mistake the adrenaline rush of the micro-scoop and the petty scandal for genuine contestation.”
In this war of language, the treatment of Assange can only be seen as one thing: an act of muzzling a publisher framed as a computer security breach. In so doing, it criminalises the very act of investigative journalism, the sort that actually exposes abuses of power rather than meekly accommodating them.
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Return to home pageFREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW!!
Chelsea Manning, Wikileaks and Assange should be applauded for exposing the war crimes committed at the direction of US Presidents George W Bush and Barak Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember the USA (United States of Apartheid) is not a member of the International Criminal Court and so the US military and politicians working in Iraq, and Afghanistan for the benefit of US Big Oil are protected and cannot be held accountable for their actions after the Desertstorm II invasion to take over Iraqi oil reserves.
Remember also that Saddam Hussein was a protege of the CIA which protected, fed and housed him until Saddam was instructed to take over the Bar’th Party and make Iraq a vassal state of the USA.
To argue ad hominem is a procedure as vile as it is irrelevant. Assange could resemble an anti GetUp buffoon for all I care. What matters is US killers gloating as they strafe ordinary people, children and ambulance workers included. What matters is torturing non- proven guilty people in Guantanamo Bay, tho’ to torture even guilty people is hardly the mark of a decent society.
Agree totally. The 21st century MSM is quite obviously in cahoots with the powers that be, and social media isn’t much better. IMO, the time is ripe for dark web journalism to counter the creeping cancer of protection applying to official criminals.
The British government will do as they’re told by their cousins/ masters in Washington.
That Assange is probably innocent, matters not a jot to these government and judicial toe rags.
At the end of the day I for one have no doubt Blair has his fingers in the pie of corruption and wants Assange to disappear forever.
For mine, someone has ratted out Assange probably telling the said toe rags of officialdom, he has no further incriminating evidence on them and they can go on about their business of killing Arabs and starving their own people to death as per usual and as planned in the Tory secret manifesto. .
That most of the public believes anything the British establishment is telling them, apart from being obscene, is actually quite entertaining. I only ever thought the average shmuck in the street was gullible as the day is long, now I know I was right. The Brits who do have a little grey matter keeping their ears apart, should be storming the prison for his release. Let them call out the police or the troops, it is time to make a stand. They get away with this no one is safe, not even old worn out bloggers or floggers, take your pick.
Yes, it has been infuriating. It’s supposedly about “stealing” “state secrets” rather than reporting a war crime (can you see the flaw in THAT logic??), but even though Assange may not be a “nice person” (who says he is not…I find him wholeheartedly acceptable) we must still tolerate him, as if he were a leper.
Hillary Clinton finally shows her darkest, most disgusting self, but so have many others, including the judge presiding over Assange’s case, who smeared Assange with vile insults of the sort you may have expected from Roland Freisler from the Reich.
As for Morales etc, how do we know Assange behaved badly at the embassy, but for their say-so? I don’t think Corea has said any such thing. If you were locked unjustly in virtual solitary for seven years, how good would your temper be, especially after they put surveillance cameras in your closet excuse for a room?
And msm is legendary for its own ravenous opportunistim when offered the opportunity to uncover a story real or fake,, on thousands of occasions Millie Dowler comes to mind for just one example, far, far crueler for far, far less reason… Channel 9 “Sixty Adverts”, channel 7’s early evening rubbish?
Utter hypocrites, just catch up on yet another episode of Media Watch and decide for yourselves, as to THEIR ethics.
TV and radio are no better than the press for the weasel-worded agitprop reports they present. But back to print, my guess is Michael Weiss belongs to the single set of people who seem most hostile toward (frightened of?) Wikileaks and I wonder why given historical events over a couple of generations. Shame on supposedly reputable journals running murk like that.
It is well known that even reputable outlets have been leaned on by intelligence services to blacken the Wiki name. My guess is, there must some foul and numerous skeletons in some closets.
Apart from that, you have to wonder at the Chicken Little gullibility of sections of the public also, as evidenced by more than a few comments from various oiks about Wikileaks.
An Honest Government Ad – Julian Assange & American Empire Juicemedia, Published on Apr 15, 2019 (Youtube 2m 11s)
Phillip Adams, Brisbane, Australia :
https://www.change.org/p/free-julian-assange-before-it-s-too-late-stop-usa-extradition/sign?
PS We are not sovereign
Al, you are my friend… soothing balm on a raw wound.
I do hope others who watch this will understand the true meaning of the term employed.
Peace. Salaam. Shalom.
(1) Julian Assange is an Australian Citizen, a multi-award winning journalist, including being honoured by his country’s highest award for journalism, The Walkley Award & the rare Gold Peace Medal by the Sydney Peace Foundation, that has published documented proof of high level crimes & corruption.
(2) He has now been arbitrarily detained WITHOUT charge by the UK Govt. for 8 years.
(3) In 2012 Ecuador granted Julian political asylum protection from US threats against his life & liberty. US politicians had publicly called for his assassination.
(4) After a 16 month investigation, to which lawyers representing Julian, the UK & Sweden, gave written submissions to a UN expert panel of lawyers where it was determined by the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner on Feb 5 2016, that Julian Assange’s “Arbitrary Detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation”.
(5) The UK had prevented Julian taking up his asylum by detaining him in the Ecuador Embassy for the past 7 years. The UK stated they would arrest him if he left the Embassy & refuse to guarantee he will not be extradited to the USA. The UK has forcibly removed Julian Assange from his political asylum.
(6) The Wikileaks USA Grand Jury has been sitting since 2010. As Julian is protected under the US #1st Amendment, the US is seeking to prosecute him under the 1917 Espionage Act. He could face 45yrs in prison, or the death penalty, for publishing news as a Journalist.
(7) There has been no fair & proper legal process to date for Julian Assange, who is the victim of a political persecution.
(8) Top secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden indicate that Julian had been placed on a US manhunting time line in 2010. Further revealing, that on Aug 10 2010, the US National Security Agency(NSA) secretly asked its allies to charge Assange with something.
(9) On Aug 20 2010, Swedish police made totally unfounded public rape allegations. These were used to detain Julian without charge for 6 years in the UK before being dropped. There is much evidence of police, prosecutorial & judicial perversion of justice.
(10) The Wikileaks Grand Jury is conducted in secret, has 4 prosecutors, no defence and no judge.
(11) The UK/US Bilateral Treaty does not require a prima facie case to extradite a citizen to the US.
(12) Under the US National Defence Authorization Act, a person can be held indefinitely without trial.
Edward Snowden Classified Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, February 18 2014.
The Five-Eyes ‘Supra-National’ Intelligence Agency Alliance that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries[1], AUSCANUKUSNZ, comprise the Australian Signals Directorate(ASD), Canadian Communications Security Establishment(CSE), GCHQ, NSA & NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), as well as associated peer level national Intelligence agencies.
On Aug 20 2010, Swedish police made totally unfounded public rape allegations. These were used to detain Julian without charge for 6 years in the UK before being dropped. There is much evidence of police, prosecutorial & judicial perversion of justice.
Nine Eyes:
The Nine Eyes is a different arrangement that consists of the same members of Five Eyes working with Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway.[2],[3]
Fourteen Eyes:
According to a document leaked by Edward Snowden, there is another working agreement amongst 14 nations officially known as SIGINT Seniors Europe, or “SSEUR“.[4] These “14 Eyes” consist of the same members of Nine Eyes plus Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.[2][3]
[1] Snowden-Interview: Transcript pg2, 26.01.2014 23:00, Norddeutscher Rundfunk,via the Wayback Machine.
[2] Kelion, Leo (27 January 2014). “NSA-GCHQ Snowden leaks: A glossary of the key terms”. BBC. Retrieved 27 January 2014
[3] Cremer, Justin. “Denmark is one of the NSA’s ‘9-Eyes'”. The Copenhagen Post. Retrieved 27 January 2014.
[4] Rensfeldt, Gunnar (11 December 2013). “Read the Snowden Documents From the NSA”. Sveriges Television. Retrieved 14 February 2014.
[Mission: Investigation] the documents leaked by Edwards Snowden and retrieved from Glenn Greenwald that are the basis for the report about Sweden’s collaboration with the NSA and the GCHQ Rensfeldt, Gunnar (11 December 2013) Sveriges Television, Sweden
Sweden(SE) status in the intelligence community
NSA internal PM on FRA and Sweden relations(TS/SI/NF)
As a friend of mine put it today,
“Are you saying war crimes are ok and citizens don’t have a duty to report them?
Do you think we should ignore international law?
Is your definition of a journalist someone who only reports the official view (reading this, ABC?) even when they know the law has been broken? “
NSA-GCHQ Snowden leaks: A glossary of the key terms Kelion, Leo (27 January 2014). BBC.
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Probably the wrong thing to do but I must add some more Binoy Kampmark, but from a different source.
I am moved to this because it deals with a despicable low in jurisprudence I discovered over the weekend, involving a cretin called John Snow, the judge at Assange’s most recent hearing.
Assange had a fair hearing, did he?
https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/assange-and-the-criminalisation-of-investigative-journalism,12578
By the way, it does not help the cause of democracy when someone like John Passant describes Assange supporters, “blinded..hero worshippers”, while grumbling about the left press displaying lack of interest in his emotionally crippled rubbish.
Put him at the same level as that disgusting creature Judge Snow?
Analysis: Snowden document reveals Swedish prosecution of Assange was requested by the U.S. The Professors Blog – Science, Culture & Human Rights for All, October 7, 2014
Note: Coincidentally, 10 days later, in Sweden, a legally declared under International Law NEUTRAL Sovereign State, yet exposed by subsequently published NSA documents as a highly valued covert member of the Fourteen-Eyes, a GCHQ-NSA direct partner, regardless of the government of the day, since 1954 :
On Aug 20 2010, Swedish police made totally unfounded public rape allegations. These were used to detain Julian without charge for 6 years in the UK before being dropped. There is much evidence of police, prosecutorial & judicial perversion of justice.
Sweden – Swedish Armed Forces – International deployments
Declared Neutral Nation Sweden, since 1954 ? Au contraire …
Cui Bono ?
Paul Walter,
The key paragraph, the ‘money quote’, from your link, Binoy’s IA article:
Yet, Tory Peer Lord James Arbuthnot, was much more than some junior Defence Minister, & served as Chairman of the influential Defence Select Committee, which oversees the operations of the entire Ministry of Defence and its associated public bodies, including the armed forces, from 2005 to 2014, before being nominated as a Life Peer. As well as Chair of the Special Select Committee set up to scrutinise the Bill that became the Armed Forces Act 2011.
He is a Senior Associate Fellow of the The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), a British defence and security think tank. With a remit to include all issues of international foreign policy & affairs, defence and security, including economic & financial, and organised crime, terrorism and the ideologies which foster it.
RUSI has a membership consisting of military officers, diplomats and the wider policy community, numbering 1,668 individuals and 129 corporate members.
Hm ? Not even the merest possibility of the perception of a conflict of interest or bias, what ?
Sigh
Believe it or not, there are a few on the left who wouldn’t want to consider this and much else at the AIM thread and censor you if you pointed it out. Two “public” so-called lefties have done this to me in the past for trying to point out what has been accepted as fair and informed comment at AIM.
It grows late and I must be up for some activities elsewhere on the morrow, but as I prepared to shut down I found myself in recall of a fairly good brit courtroom drama featuring Martin Shaw called “Judge John Deed” and would be laughing at the stark contrast with Snow except for the tragedy of the thing.
How different in the make-believe world of 2019?
Paul Walter,
The overlooked/omitted evidence/indicators, key relationships & linkages are documented by verified records in the public domain since 2013, as provided in the primary & secondary source references.
Their problem. It’s a red Red pill or blue pill scenario, which some cannot adjust to re real world perception of ‘reality’. (The Matrix)
“I know you won’t believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.”- Socrates
The The Birmingham Six, Guildford Four & Maguire Seven are directly relevant, though on a lighter note, am a longtime fan of The First Great Train Robbery (1978), the final act in particular, before the Bench. 🙂
Cheers M8Y
Socrates…just gets it so right, so often.
I guess that is why they lost patience and killed him.
Correct me if I am wrong. Assange began his career during the Obama Presidency. A time before BREXIT, a time before the rise of the Alt Right, a moment when the world seemed a little more optimistic. But so much changed during the years of his sojourn in the Ecuadorian embassy, which if he is extradited to the USA, will be far more comfortable than an anonymous black site. Frankly, his fate lies with Corbyn, who if elected in the UK, will not allow his extradition. I genuinely believe much of the redacted material in the Mueller Report deals with Assange and Roger Stone. Love him or not, his fate is the balance.