The Political Persecution of Julian Assange
In October 2006, a media outlet called Wikileaks was founded and launched in Sweden by Julian Assange. According to the BBC, the Wikileaks site has been run by the Swedish ISP PeRiQuito (PRQ), which had previously hosted the controversial file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.
Assange was noted for his expertise with computers. He became a formidable hacker, using the name ‘Mendax’ in 1987. According to his bio:
During this time, he hacked into several U.S. Department of Defense facilities, the U.S. Navy, ‘NASA,’ and Australia's ‘Overseas Telecommunications Commission.’ He also hacked the websites of several prominent corporations and institutions like ‘Citibank,’ ‘Lockheed Martin,’ ‘Motorola,’ ‘Panasonic,’ ‘Xerox,’ ‘Australian National University,’ ‘La Trobe University,’ and ‘Stanford University.’
His hacking activities came to light in the early 1990s and he was eventually charged with 31 counts of hacking-related crimes in 1994. He pleaded guilty to 24 charges in 1996 and got away with a fine.
W
ikileaks has received a spate of journalism awards, as noted on its website. However the fortunes of the outlet and its founder would soon change dramatically.
It all started in 2010, when Wikileaks released thousands of classified documents from the United States, which included the infamous ‘Collateral Murder’ video, the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs to “Cablegate”, the State Department diplomatic cables. This was followed in 2011 by the “Gitmo Files” – documents on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. The timeline of events and relevant facts are documented by The WikiLeaks Defence Fund.
Assange’s persecution effectively began in December 2010, when Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant seeking his extradition. He had been in Sweden in August of that year. By that time the US had described WikiLeaks as a “very real and potential threat”. He had been involved with two women. This resulted in charges of rape being recorded by Swedish police. However there had never been any allegations of rape. As Wikileaks defence reports:
Text messages between the two women, which were later revealed, do not complain of rape. Rather, they show that the women “did not want to put any charges on JA but that the police were keen on getting a grip on him” and that they “only wanted him to take a [HIV] test”. One wrote that “it was the police who made up the charges” and told a friend that she felt that she had been “railroaded by police and others around her”.
Emails released under a tribunal challenge following a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the Swedish authorities wanted to drop the arrest warrant for Julian in 2013 – it was the British government that insisted it continue. UK prosecutors admitted to deleting key emails and engaged in elaborate attempts to keep correspondence from the public record.
It was clear by this time that the US wanted to extradite Assange and negotiations had begun with the Swedish authorities. With this threat looming, Assange entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in order to seek asylum on 19 June 2012. He was granted political asylum on 16 August 2012. The Ecuadorian government at the time stated:
“There is a certainty of the Ecuadorian authorities that an extradition to a third country outside the European Union is feasible without the proper guarantees for his safety and personal integrity. The judicial evidence shows clearly that, given an extradition to the United States, Mr. Assange would not have a fair trial, he could be judged by a special or military court, and it is not unlikely that he would receive cruel and demeaning treatment and he would be condemned to a life sentence or the death penalty, which would not respect his human rights… If Mr. Assange is reduced to preventive prison in Sweden (as it is usual in that country), it would initiate a chain of events that will prevent the adoption of preventive measures to avoid his extradition to a third country”.
One of the first moves by the US to curtail Wikileaks activities was to cut off its sources of finance, one of several acts with no legal foundation that would follow. Institutions such as Paypal, visa and Mastercard, cut off payments to Wikileaks. There has been strong condemnation of the move:
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has openly criticized the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, as have the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. ...The US Treasury has publicly acknowledged that the US has no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks.
In November 2010, the US Grand Jury began its investigation into Wikileaks, following an announcement by the US Attorney General that an unprecedented “active, ongoing criminal investigation” had begun.
In 2018, the political situation in Ecuador changed dramatically. This would change the plight of Assange and Wikileaks, with a series of unprecedented incidents that would make a mockery of International law.
With the election of Lenin Moreno, Assanges' fate was sealed. Moreno’s rise to power was no accident though. The US had been seeking regime change in Ecuador since Rafael Correa came to power in 2007. According to an article in WL Central, based on an interview with Chilean journalist Patricio Mery:
the CIA has been actively plotting to destabilise or even assassinate Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, after US anger over decisions such as the granting of political asylum to Julian Assange and the termination of the US lease on a military base.
It is also alleged that the CIA has been involved in ‘an Iran-Contra style drug operation in Chile’, linked to the regime change operations. An article from infowars reported on the allegations of CIA drug involvement. It states that ‘intelligence sources have revealed’ that the CIA is ‘using drug money to fund Rafael Correa’s opposition in the coming 2013 Ecuadorian elections’.
One of the sources was a former Chilean police officer, Fernando Ulloa, who said that:
300 kilograms of cocaine were entering Chile monthly under the escort of members of his own institution, the Carabineros, and the Chilean Army.
Former UK diplomat Craig Murray had warned about CIA involvement in Ecuador. He stated in his blog in 2012 that he had:
two excellent sources for the news that the US/UK strategy against Julian Assange was to ensure the defeat of President Correa in Presidential elections next spring, and then have him expelled from the Ecuadorean Embassy. One source was within the UK civil service and one in Washington. Both had direct, personal access to the information I described. Both told me in the knowledge I would publish it.
Moreno’s political colours were apparent before he came to power, despite serving as vice-president under Correa. In an interview with telesur:
Correa said that the current President had deceived him for ten years as a close political ally, who served in his government only to turn on him as a “wolf in sheep's clothing” once assuming power himself. “Moreno cheated me for ten years. He is a person that was with the opposition,” Correa said.
In the 2010 ‘Cablegate’ release, WikiLeaks published a 2007 report on Moreno by U.S. Ambassador to Ecuador Linda Jewell. The cable noted Moreno’s ‘openness to the U.S.’ In summing up the meeting, Jewell notes:
Moreno conveys a mature, serene demeanor and a genuine commitment to making a positive difference for his country. While not one of Correa's top political advisors, he seems to enjoy good access and to have developed the President's respect. We expect him to be a moderating influence on the administration. He will be a useful partner and advocate for many of our development assistance programs, and he will likely also be a useful and strategic conduit for political messages that may be difficult to deliver directly to Correa (emphasis added).
Moreno came to power on 2 April 2017. It didn’t take him long to put Ecuador on the path to neoliberalism and in the process become Washington’s friend. However Moreno’s shift to the right was related to sustained pressure from the US. An article from Truthdig outlines how, following the decision by Ecuador to grant Assange Ecuadorian citizenship, the Trump administration turned up the heat on Assange and the Moreno Government. This followed the decision by the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office, working in cahoots with the US, to refuse to recognise Assange’s newly conferred status. On December 29, 2017, the Ecuadorian government withdrew Assange’s citizenship.
Ecuador’s declining economic situation, linked to collapsing oil prices, gave the US the opportunity to wave an economic carrot. Following a visit by the IMF to the country in June 2018, Ecuador had in principle agreed to take a loan from the IMF. On March 11, 2019, the deal was secured, four weeks before Assange was ejected from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
But there was a catch. The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) unpacked the ‘devil in the detail’. According to CEPR, the projected benefits made by the IMF don’t stand up to scrutiny, that the package is ‘heavily biased in favor of the financial sector.’ In response to the package:
Civil society organizations, and, notably, Ecuador’s ombudsman, have filed lawsuits alleging that the agreement itself is in violation of Ecuador’s constitution.
The package will instead drive down living standards, increase unemployment and generate increased poverty. Another component in the equation is Ecuador's high economic dependency on oil exports, linked to the US dollar. As a result, Ecuador’s de-facto currency is the dollar.
What is emerging here is a pattern of ‘neoliberal entrapment’. In other words, the US in conjunction with the IMF has effectively held Ecuador to ransom – all because a journalist and a media outlet exposed the crimes of the US and its allies. But then this is nothing new. This is the way the IMF works. Ironically it even admitted this itself in an article entitled Neoliberalism: Oversold?
The introduction notes:
Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, in turn jeopardizing durable expansion. (Emphasis added)
Not surprisingly there is a degree of self-contradiction within the article. It sums up thus:
there are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected. Our assessment of the agenda is confined to the effects of two policies: removing restrictions on the movement of capital across a country’s borders (so-called capital account liberalization); and fiscal consolidation, sometimes called “austerity,” which is shorthand for policies to reduce fiscal deficits and debt levels. An assessment of these specific policies (rather than the broad neoliberal agenda) reaches three disquieting conclusions:
•The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries.
•The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomize the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda.
•Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects.
The aims though justified the means and on April 11, 2019 Assange was arrested after UK police were ‘invited’ to enter the Ecuadorian embassy in order to arrest him.
T
he Assange case was well summed up by Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, in an interview with the Swiss magazine Republik.
Prior to Melzer’s involvement in the case, The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ruled that Assange was being held in Arbitrary Detention:
On 4 December 2015, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted Opinion No. 54/2015, in which it considered that Mr. Julian Assange was arbitrarily detained by the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In that opinion, the Working Group recognized that Mr. Assange is entitled to his freedom of movement and to compensation. The application was filed with the Working Group in September 2014. The Opinion 54/2015 was sent to the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on 22 January 2016 in accordance with the Working Group’s Methods of Work.
Melzer became involved with the case only weeks before Assange’s arrest. Initially he had been skeptical. But after reviewing documents presented to him by Assange’s legal team, it immediately became apparent that this was no ordinary case. His investigations revealed the full extent of the conspiracy against Assange.
Commenting on the Swedish rape allegations, he said that the Swedish authorities:
were never interested in testimony from Assange. They intentionally left him in limbo. Assange reported to the Swedish authorities on several occasions because he wanted to respond to the accusations. But the authorities stonewalled.
Melzer had the original documents pertaining to the case at his disposal and it was clear there was never any rape accusation:
The woman’s testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape.
The woman in question had wanted Assange to get an HIV test, but when the police shifted the charge to rape, she refused to cooperate with the police because ‘the police were apparently interested in “getting their hands on him.”’ After that, a rape allegation was bizarrely leaked to the Swedish press:
The willful malevolence of the authorities only became apparent when they immediately disseminated the suspicion of rape via the tabloid press, ...It also violated a clear ban in Swedish law against releasing the names of alleged victims or perpetrators in sexual offense cases.
It transpired that the original statement that had been made by the woman was altered electronically:
The statement was edited without the involvement of the woman in question and it wasn’t signed by her. It is a manipulated piece of evidence out of which the Swedish authorities then constructed a story of rape.
All of this coincided with the release of incriminating material from Wikileaks. There can be little doubt that the outcome of the rape allegation had the US seal of approval. As Melzer noted:
The U.S. immediately demanded that its allies inundate Assange with criminal cases. We aren’t familiar with all of the correspondence, but Stratfor, a security consultancy that works for the U.S. government, advised American officials apparently to deluge Assange with all kinds of criminal cases for the next 25 years.
Stratfor was exposed by Wikileaks in the The Global Intelligence Files:
On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.
According to Stratfor’s website:
As the world’s leading geopolitical intelligence platform, Stratfor brings global events into valuable perspective, empowering businesses, governments and individuals to more confidently navigate their way through an increasingly complex international environment.
The company started out as The Center for Geopolitical Studies, based at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. In 1996 they moved to their location in Texas, forming Stratfor. AKA the ‘shadow CIA’, due to its links with the US intelligence agency. The company has – according to Channel 4 News:
made vast sums of cash – the details of which are difficult to ascertain – from trading non-classified information about individuals, groups or regions considered by their clients to be a potential security risk.
Prior to the email dump by hacker group Anonymous, little was known about Stratfor. But that has evidently now changed. What is clear is that Stratfor was active against Wikileaks and Assange prior to the email leaks.
Curiously, there is an unlisted entity called The Center for Geopolitical Studies that was apparently founded in 2010 in Baton Rouge. It’s unknown whether there are any links to Stratfor.
Ultimately as far as the rape fiasco was concerned, the case went all the way to the Swedish supreme court. It ruled that prosecutors had to either charge Assange with an offence or drop the case altogether. The UK’s response to this development via the Crown Prosecution Service was to tell the Swedish authorities, “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!”.
Melzer was frank about his interpretation of the case:
the man who informed the public is locked away in pre-extradition detention in London and is facing a possible sentence in the U.S. of up to 175 years in prison. That is a completely absurd sentence. By comparison: The main war criminals in the Yugoslavia tribunal received sentences of 45 years. One-hundred-seventy-five years in prison in conditions that have been found to be inhumane by the UN Special Rapporteur and by Amnesty International. But the really horrifying thing about this case is the lawlessness that has developed: The powerful can kill without fear of punishment and journalism is transformed into espionage. It is becoming a crime to tell the truth.
Melzer also made it clear that if Assange was extradited to the US, he would not receive a fair trial. He would be tried at the ‘Espionage Court’ in Alexandria, Virginia, which is the main hub in the US for the intelligence community. Most of the population work for the likes of the CIA and the NSA.
Melzer made a pertinent observation from history:
In the 1930s, Germany and Japan left the League of Nations. Fifteen years later, the world lay in ruins. Today, the U.S. has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council, and neither the ‘Collateral Murder’ massacre nor the CIA torture following 9/11 nor the war of aggression against Iraq have led to criminal investigations.
He made the point that the Assange trial was just a show case:
A show trial is to be used to make an example of Julian Assange. The point is to intimidate other journalists. Intimidation, by the way, is one of the primary purposes for the use of torture around the world. The message to all of us is: This is what will happen to you if you emulate the Wikileaks model. It is a model that is so dangerous because it is so simple: People who obtain sensitive information from their governments or companies transfer that information to Wikileaks, but the whistleblower remains anonymous. ...The case is a huge scandal and represents the failure of Western rule of law.
And summed up the case with a warning to us all:
I have seen lots of horrors and violence and have seen how quickly peaceful countries like Yugoslavia or Rwanda can transform into infernos. At the roots of such developments are always a lack of transparency and unbridled political or economic power combined with the naivete, indifference and malleability of the population. Suddenly, that which always happened to the other – unpunished torture, rape, expulsion and murder – can just as easily happen to us or our children. And nobody will care. I can promise you that.
I
n another slant on the case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation analysed the technical aspects of the case.
The article points out how the US Government has targeted Assange over his alleged relationship with Chelsea Manning and the use of a password to access information. EFF notes:
While breaking into computers and cracking passwords in many contexts is illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, few prosecutors would ever bother to bring a case for such an inconsequential activity as a failed attempt to reverse a hash. But the government has doggedly pursued charges against Assange for 10 years, perhaps because they fear that prosecuting Assange for publishing leaked documents is protected by the First Amendment and is a case they are likely to lose.
In other words, the US is attempting to circumvent the First Amendment by accusing him of being a malicious hacker under computer crime law. According to EFF there has been other cases of cybercrime being used to incriminate anyone who challenges authority. Interestingly such a case has arisen in Ecuador, which just happens to be linked to the Assange case (see below):
in Ecuador, Amnesty International has joined EFF in raising awareness about the case of Ola Bini, a Swedish open source software developer who garnered government ire and is now facing a politically-motivated prosecution for supposed computer crime violations.
Middle Eastern regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Tunisia have a similar history. As for Assange:
The conspiracy charge is rooted in a chat conversation in which Manning and Assange discussed the possibility of cracking a password. Forensic evidence and expert testimony make it clear that not only did Assange not crack this password, but that Manning only ever provided Assange with a piece of a password hash – from which it would have been impossible to derive the original password.
An earlier article from the EFF delves into the ramifications of the case. With regard to the indictment against Assange:
As the Supreme Court has explained, every person has the right to disseminate truthful information pertaining to matters of public interest, even if that information was obtained by someone else illegally. The indictment purports to evade this protection by repeatedly alleging that Assange simply “encouraged” his sources to provide information to him. This places a fundamental free speech right on uncertain and ambiguous footing.
EFF goes on to state:
Most dangerously, the indictment contends that anyone who “counsels, commands, induces” (under 18 USC §2, for aiding and abetting) a source to obtain or attempt to obtain classified information violates the Espionage Act, 18 USC § 793(b). Under the language of the statute, this includes literally “anything connected with the national defense,” so long as there is an “intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” The indictment relies heavily and repeatedly on allegations that Assange “encouraged” his sources to leak documents to Wikileaks, even though he knew that the documents contained national security information.
One of the elements underpinning the case is the US claim that Assange isn’t a journalist. But as EFF points out, the US Department of Justice doesn’t define what a journalist is or who fits that description. In short, the US is obfuscating the whole narrative and taking it out of context to suit its own agenda. In a supreme court judgement on the case of the Pentagon Papers, it was explained:
In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
It would apparently follow from this that the US Government itself is in breach of the First Amendment and is therefore unconstitutional. Other rulings by the supreme court cited in the article have held up the integrity of the First Amendment. But all this could be under threat.
B
rett Kavanaugh has been a contentious recent appointee to the supreme court. Kavanaugh was found to have committed perjury on several occasions during confirmation hearings throughout his career, not to mention accusations of sexual assault and abuse.
President Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett, a woman with little experience and seven children, was formally confirmed to the Supreme Court on October 26. How did she manage to make the grade? As Mother Jones points out, she ticked the right ideological boxes that enabled her to fit into a sexist anti-abortion culture. She was also associated with a particular religious conservative organisation:
When President Trump took office, he immediately prioritized the federal judiciary in a way no other president has. To help him fill the bench with religious conservatives, he turned to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization established in 1982 that over the years has been funded with millions of dollars in dark money donations in an effort to stack the federal courts with conservative and libertarian judges for decades to come.
By July 2020, the group had helped the GOP-controlled Senate ram through a record 218 Trump judicial nominees—85 percent of them white, and 76 percent male. Its singular focus on youth and ideological purity among the nominees has been instrumental in lowering the standards for judicial office.
In describing itself, the Federalist Society reads like a neoliberal scripture:
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.
The Washington Post digs into the Federalist Society’s activities, in particular its executive vice president Leonard Leo, a man who has friends in high places, and who has considerable influence in the capacity of ‘Trump’s unofficial judicial adviser’. He is involved in a network of non-profits, which attracts dark money funding to the tune of more than $250 million, with the aim of supporting conservative policies and judges. Emerging from this with an increasing profile is the Independent Women’s Voice. More about them later.
Leo’s career took off when he became an adviser for the White House, connected to judicial nominations, during the George W. Bush administration. It was during this period that he became closely connected to Brett Kavanaugh. Even during Obama’s term in office, he continued to be influential. Influence is important, so is media PR:
Leo, then a commissioner, said the Federalist Society had learned to sidestep pointed questions about judicial nominees… “We get around these inquiries quite well.”
Leo continued to make important connections. In 2013:
Leo joined forces with wealthy conservative donor Rebekah Mercer and Stephen K. Bannon, then the chairman of Breitbart News, on the board of a small charity known as Reclaim New York. Mercer and Bannon would go on to play central roles in Trump’s insurgent campaign, Mercer as a leading financial backer and Bannon as campaign chief.
As a result of the ties with Mercer, the Mecer Group became one of the Federalist Society’s funders.
When Donald Trump came on the scene in 2016 as presidential candidate, Leo began advising him of potential Supreme Court nominees. This would dictate the Presidents direction in this area over the next few years.
Also coming out in support of Trump during his campaign, was the Independent Women’s Voice, which continued to receive funding from the Federalist Society. Heather Higgins, the group’s president and chief executive, was critical of the accusations of sexual abuse against Kavanaugh, defending Kavanaugh against the allegations.
As it happens, supreme court appointee Amy Coney Barrett is also a member of the IWV. On 22 October 2020, she came under fire from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law after succeeding the nomination to the full Senate from the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Lawyer's Committee was formed in 1963 ‘at the request of President John F. Kennedy to involve the private bar in providing legal services to address racial discrimination.’ It states its mission is:
to secure, through the rule of law, equal justice for all, particularly in the areas of voting rights, criminal justice, fair housing and community development, economic justice, educational opportunities, and hate crimes.
The Committee stated:
“Chairman Graham’s decision to race forward with the Judiciary Committee vote on the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett is especially problematic given that her nomination and potential confirmation are taking place in the final days of an election where the President who nominated her is running for reelection. ...Given that Judge Barrett has refused to say that she would recuse herself from any election cases that may arise in this year’s ongoing election, moving forward with her confirmation now compromises the integrity of our democratic process.”
The statement continued:
“During the course of the Committee’s hearings, Barrett appallingly dodged fundamental questions about our democracy and civil rights—including a refusal to acknowledge voter intimidation was prohibited under federal law.”
The Committee has left no stone unturned regarding Barret. They sent an opposition letter to the United States Senate, produced a report on her record and put out an article on the threat she poses to civil rights. Following her final appointment to the Supreme Court, the Committee stated:
Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation dramatically alters the balance of the Supreme Court in ways that will prove devastating for Black Americans and other communities of color for generations to come. Judge Barrett has refused to acknowledge the fact that voter discrimination is still ongoing, and could not concede that voter intimidation is illegal. These are issues playing out in this election at this very moment and may also come before the Court in the weeks and months ahead. Barrett’s record makes clear that she will turn the clock back when it comes to access to democracy.
Meanwhile the Intercept unearthed some intriguing revelations about the IWV and the Federalist Society. The main body behind the IWV’s political persona is the Independent Women’s Forum. At the helm is Higgins. She was instrumental in assisting Kavanaugh’s ascendancy to the supreme court. The IWF and the IWV then focused their energies on pushing Barret. The two groups like to project themselves as neutral. But it’s the dark money ultraconservative groups led by Leo that keeps them funded.
But sitting quietly behind the Federalist Society is a much higher profile entity – namely the Koch brothers. They are notorious climate denialists, who have spent millions on political funds and on derailing climate initiatives. The Koch’s generate a wide web of influence that directly links into the US establishment.
The article explains how the IWF and their backers influence the courts:
Another key strategy to influence the courts by IWF and the broader network of Leo-tied nonprofits has been filing amicus briefs, which can make it appear like there is a wider-ranging support or opposition for an issue than in reality. “A small number of donors are trying to orchestrate this legal revolution, but it looks broader than it is because they are throwing their voices through a flotilla of groups, and IWF is one of them,” said [researcher Lisa] Graves.
But its not just a clandestine network of non-profits that are throwing money into this system. In addition to the Koch’s is a who’s who of corporate backers that includes:
Facebook, Juul, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, the American Beverage Association, the Walton Family Foundation (Walmart), Karen Wright (the CEO of the Ariel Corporation, the largest global manufacturer of gas compressors), Amway, and Dick DeVos (former Amway CEO and the husband of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education).
The Nation put it succinctly, describing the IWF as ‘‘Feminists’ Doing the Koch Brothers’ Dirty Work’.
So, what happens next? Is America heading towards a constitutional crisis? One thing’s for sure, Wikileaks has unearthed a Pandora's box. It should be no surprise that the US establishment would do everything in its power to conceal this. A vital component of the establishment is the fourth estate – the corporate media. It’s the shield that the establishment hides behind and it played a key role in manufacturing Assange as a bogeyman. It engaged in what Media Lens describes as a Propaganda Blitz.
The Propaganda Blitz book outlines several examples of how the media branded Assange, with the so-called ‘liberal’ Guardian taking the proverbial biscuit for petty insults, like Suzanne Moore’s comments on Twitter:
Seems like Assange’s supporters did not expect him to skip bail? Really? Who has this guy not let down? She added: ‘I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd.’
The nonsense continued with other ‘journalists’ comparing him to a character out of Monty Python. Others commented on the fact that Harrods was next to the Ecuadorian Embassy and that was why Assange had chosen to go there. Another Guardian jester Tim Dowling ‘offered ‘five escape routes from the Ecuadorean embassy’’. He commented:
Ascend to embassy roof. Fire cable-loaded crossbow (all embassies have these; ask at reception) across the street to Harrod’s [sic] roof. Secure and tighten the cable, then slide across, flying-fox style, using your belt as a handle. Make your way to the Harrod’s helipad.
BBC World Affairs correspondent, Caroline Hawley, enjoyed Dowling’s piece, sending the link to her followers on Twitter: Advice for #Assange escape: order a pizza and escape as delivery boy.
And so on...
Fortunately there were sober reflectors. But their voices would be drowned out by the white noise. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern commented:
Not only is Julian Assange within his rights to seek asylum, he is also in his right mind. Consider this: he was about to be sent to faux-neutral Sweden, which has a recent history of bowing to U.S. demands in dealing with those that Washington says are some kind of threat to U.S. security.
John Pilger summed up Assange’s predicament:
Julian Assange has been vindicated because the Swedish case against him was corrupt. The prosecutor, Marianne Ny, obstructed justice and should be prosecuted. Her obsession with Assange not only embarrassed her colleagues and the judiciary but exposed the Swedish state’s collusion with the United States in its crimes of war and ‘rendition’.
Pilger added on the media campaign:
For almost seven years, this epic miscarriage of justice has been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. There are few precedents. Deeply personal, petty, vicious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet subjected to treatment not even meted out to a defendant facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. That the US threat to Assange was a threat to all journalists, and to the principle of free speech, was lost in the sordid and the ambitious. I would call it anti-journalism.
The authors compare the media’s treatment of Assange with George W Bush, a war criminal by all accounts, who illegally invaded Iraq on false pretences, resulting in the deaths of a million Iraqis and the destruction of an entire country, not to mention the rise of Islamic State. The Guardian commented after Trumps election:
Mr Bush can be seen now as a paragon of virtue. He sounds a lot better out of office than in it. And so the 43rd US president should be applauded.
‘Grandpa’ could do no wrong:
In an article titled, ‘How George W Bush went from “war criminal” to the internet’s favourite grandpa’, the New Statesman opined:
It sounds flippant to say that compared to Trump, Bush is starting to look good, and this sentiment has become a popular online joke within itself. Nonetheless, the claim is grounded in some reality.
Then along came Obama:
The rehabilitation of Bush and Blair followed the deeper rehabilitation of the US brand under Obama. After the Iraq disaster – drenched in too much blood and too many lies for even the propaganda system to whitewash – Obama’s task was to reassert the myth of US benevolence. Corporate media adulation duly followed. Two Guardian headlines from 2016 give an idea:
Listening to Obama makes me want to be American for a day
And:
Barack Obama: He has such power … yet such humility
This moral makeover played a vital role in reassuring the public that, with Obama at the helm, the US was under new, compassionate management.
The book makes this observation:
We have provided many examples (and there are many more!) to emphasise just how intense corporate media opposition was right across the media ‘spectrum’. In a world being observably trashed by unconstrained corporate greed, the ‘free press’ directed a tsunami of scorn at a rational, clearly well-intentioned and completely nonviolent voice trying to draw attention to the facts. This indicates the staggering toxicity and irrationality of the ‘mainstream’ press.
The book outlines how the Guardian made a killing out of Wikileaks’ revelations, but then turned round and stabbed Assange in the back:
The Guardian’s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing. Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to the Guardian, was abandoned when he was no longer useful, then subjected to a vituperative onslaught. With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a ‘damaged personality’ and ‘callous’. They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables.
What all this illustrates is a disturbing and morbid pathological mindset. The book sums it up:
Propaganda blitzes never make moral sense. The reason is that they are a form of ethical posturing generated by a structurally violent, greed-driven system for immoral ends. The Italian humanist Machiavelli, who would have greatly appreciated the Western enthusiasm for ‘humanitarian intervention’, commented:
The experience of our times shows those princes to have done great things who have had little regard for good faith, and have been able by astuteness to confuse men’s brains.
A vital aspect of the effort to ‘confuse men’s brains’ involved the use and abuse of five ‘good qualities’. Machiavelli summarised:
It is not essential, then, that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated above, but it is most essential that he should seem to have them ... Thus, it is well to seem merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright, and also to be so; but the mind should remain so balanced that were it needful to be so, you should be able and know how to change to the contrary.
What Machiavelli actually meant was that leaders should appear merciful and compassionate, but should be merciless, inhuman and cruel, as required, because, after all:
Everyone sees what you seem, but few know what you are.
And this is precisely the philosophy of the propaganda blitz. The truth about any given person or event is often deeply hidden from public view – the important thing is to seem to have dramatic new evidence that seems to be affirmed by all who are ‘merciful, faithful, humane, religious and upright’, corporate dissidents included. With the public pacified, the powerful can then do as they please
But we now know why the Guardian turned volte-face away from its liberal roots. This in depth report from Declassified details the story.
In June 2013, the Guardian started publishing the revelations from Edward Snowden concerning mass surveillance conducted by the UK and US national security agencies. Following this, the paper was targeted by the UK security services. The paper was effectively coerced and seduced into changing direction. As the report notes:
On 20 July 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian’s offices at King’s Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been published.
At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent three hours destroying the laptops containing the Snowden documents.
Following this the Guardian turned round and began to cooperate with the security services. This led to a closer relationship between them. Doors opened for the paper and ‘exclusives’ began to follow.
The paper itself changed and began to fracture from its liberal and investigative past. Experienced reporters left the paper, sealing its decline into ‘mainstream’ mediocrity.
Running parallel with this change was the Guardians’ relationship with Assange, which had collaborated with Wikileaks during the initial leaks. But as the paper changed direction, it turned against Assange and began a focused smear campaign against him. The report sums up:
The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped create the conditions for a deal between Ecuador, the UK and the US to expel Assange from the embassy in April.
As the Assange trial drew to a close, Media Lens reported how the corporate media has ignored the trial, effectively keeping it out of the public gaze. Included in that list is the BBC, the voice of the UK establishment, or as Media Lens put it, ‘UK state-affiliated media’.
The final word though on the actual trial should go to Kevin Gosztola, who has diligently and professionally reported on the trial from day one.
For one witness in particular, there was a feeling of Déjà vous. That witness was Daniel Ellsberg, who published the famous Pentagon Papers, which led to the Watergate scandal. Both cases have close parallels.
Ellsberg worked for the Pentagon. That gave him access to classified information. He circulated documents he had obtained with trusted contacts. In June 1971, the documents were initially released by the New York Times, then following a court embargo, some of the documents were sent to the Washington Post for publication. The cat was out the bag. Shockwaves reverberated through the incumbent Richard Nixon administration, as well as previous administrations, particularly Lynden Johnson’s administration.
Ultimately the publication of the papers were upheld under First Amendment rights (see above). They revealed that the Vietnam war was a lost cause before it even started. But that didn’t stop the US from deliberately starting the war. Sound familiar?
In an attempt to discredit Ellsberg, a team of ex-FBI and CIA operatives broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, in an unsuccessful attempt to steal psychiatric records on him. Members of the team then subsequently became involved in a covert break in into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex. The complex was bugged and monitored over a period of time. Nixon tried to cover up what was going on, but was eventually exposed.
The scandal surrounding Assange’s period in the Ecuadorian Embassy is just as damning as Watergate. An investigation by the Grayzone reveals how a security firm called UC Global, founded by former Spanish special forces officer, David Morales, set up a spying chain in the Embassy at the behest of the CIA:
the UC Global files detail an elaborate and apparently illegal US surveillance operation in which the security firm spied on Assange, his legal team, his American friends, US journalists, and an American member of Congress who had been allegedly dispatched to the Ecuadorian embassy by President Donald Trump. Even the Ecuadorian diplomats whom UC Global was hired to protect were targeted by the spy ring.
Linked into this spy ring was ultraconservative billionaire and long-time Republican donor Sheldon Adelson. But Morales was exposed by former employers, which led to a major trial in Spain, where he was charged with ‘violating the privacy of Assange and abusing the publisher’s attorney-client privileges, as well as money laundering and bribery.’
The base of the operation was Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands:
The operations formally began once Adelson’s hand-picked presidential candidate, Donald Trump, entered the White House in January 2017.
...the CIA came under the control of Mike Pompeo, another Adelson ally who seemed to relish the opportunity to carry out illegal acts, including spying on American citizens, in the name of national security.
At a speech for Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo left no doubts as to his intentions:
“We have to recognize that we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. To give them the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.”
In the Embassy, Morales’ team altered the CCTV system so that it could be accessed by US intelligence based at Las Vegas Sands. It also transpired that the security guards took visitors mobile phones and opened them up to note specific details that would enable their phones to be hacked. Assange had strong suspicions that security was being compromised during this period that followed the election of Moreno.
Another visitor to the Embassy had been Ola Bini (noted above). He was surveilled at Morales insistence. On the same day police raided the embassy to arrest Assange:
Ola Bini – the Swedish computer programmer branded as a “hacker” by Morales and placed under apparent US surveillance – was arrested in Ecuador and detained for months without charges. Accused of collaborating with Assange and various cyber-crimes, Bini has been held in Ecuador’s El Inca prison, where US authorities have reportedly requested to interrogate him.
The Assange case has revealed astounding levels of corruption and criminality – not just in the US – but in other countries, a global neoliberal web that resembles organised crime. This isn’t a trivial observation. A Newsweek headline posed the question, ‘Donald Trump's Mafia Connections: Decades Later, Is He Still Linked to the Mob?’
The piece looks at the early day’s of the Trump empire, before it became an empire. Back in the seventies, the Mob had their fingers in the real estate pie. Trump was on the FBI’s books, although there wasn’t anything they could pin on him regarding associations to the Mob. Nevertheless, the people who Trump did associate with apparently had connections with certain people and given the Mobs' business interests in real estate, it appears that Trump knew who to deal with if he wanted to grow his empire. According to the article:
early on, Trump relied on his associations with underworld characters to open his grandiose (and ultimately bankrupt) gambling dens on the boardwalk.
Trump himself made an interesting comment back in his ‘The Apprentice’ days:
Trump claimed that "every network" tried to get him to do a reality show, but he refused.
"I don't want to have cameras all over my office, dealing with contractors, politicians, mobsters and everyone else I have to deal with in my business," he told a 2004 panel at the Museum of Television and Radio in L.A. "You know, mobsters don't like, as they are talking to me, having cameras all over the room. It would play well on television, but it doesn't play well with them."
Then there is the CIA’s links with the Mafia. But the CIA has its own version of organised crime. This is revealed in an interview reported in Counterpunch with author and journalist Douglas Valentine, who has wrote extensively about the CIA from research through interviews with former agents. He wrote the book The CIA as Organized Crime.
Explaining why he refers to the CIA as ‘the organized crime branch of the U.S. government,’ Valentine states that “Everything the CIA does is illegal, which is why the government provides it with an impenetrable cloak of secrecy.” He goes on to discuss how back in the ‘60’s, the CIA hired a Mafia operative involved in the drug trade to assassinate Fidel Castro. This gave the Mafia carte blanch to freely operate their trade in the US market.
“Everything the CIA does is deniable,” he says:
“If they can’t find a way to structure the program or operation so they can deny it, they won’t do it. Plausible denial can be as simple as providing an officer or asset with military cover. Then the CIA can say, “The army did it.”
“It’s part of its Congressional mandate. Congress doesn’t want to be held accountable for the criminal things the CIA does.”
The CIA attracts a particular type of person:
“The CIA officer who created the Phoenix program, Nelson Brickham, told me this about his colleagues: “I have described the intelligence service as a socially acceptable way of expressing criminal tendencies. A guy who has strong criminal tendencies but is too much of a coward to be one, would wind up in a place like the CIA if he had the education.””
The Phoenix Program was instigated by the CIA during the Vietnam War. It was a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to undermine the “Viet Cong.” Most of the victims were innocent civilians suspected of harbouring information about the enemy.
To be a successful agent all you have to do is “lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.”
Right from day one, the CIA has been involved with the drug trade. In Vietnam in particular, the CIA exploited lucrative drug connections. They even established a dedicated department as well as infiltrating Government agencies involved in drug law enforcement. By 1973:
“with the establishment of the DEA, the CIA was in total control of all foreign drug law enforcement operations and was able to protect traffickers in the US as well. In 1990 the CIA created its own counter-narcotics center, despite being prohibited from exercising any domestic law enforcement function.”
The fact that certain drugs are illegal allows whoever controls the drug trade considerable power and leverage. Valentine sums up exactly how this works within the US establishment:
Briefly stated, they profit from it just like the Mafia profits from it. Suffice it to say that Wall Street investors in the drug industries have used the government to unleash and transform their economic power into political and global military might; never forget, America is not an opium or cocaine producing nation, and narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, upon which all of the above industries – including the military – depend. Controlling the world’s drug supply, both legal and illegal, is a matter of national security.
He goes on to explain how capitalism grows out of control causing massive inequality, resource depletion and the climate crisis. In response:
“America police forces adopt Phoenix-style “anti-terror” strategies and tactics to use against the civilian population.”
And this involves the complicity of the corporate media:
What FOX and MSNBC have in common is that, in a free-wheeling capitalist society, news is a commodity. News outlets target demographic audience to sell a product. It’s all fake news, in so far as each media outlet skews its presentation of the news to satisfy its customers. But when it comes to the CIA, it’s not just fake, it’s poison. It subverts democratic institutions.
In March 2017, Wikileaks itself had released files on the CIA; Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed. The documents show a sophisticated arsenal of ‘malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation,’ that can target domestic technologies such as ‘Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.’
There is no accountability over these activities. As Wikileaks notes:
Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech at the Texas A&M University, he joked about his time at the CIA and stated:
I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s —it was like —we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.
It was of course no joke. For once, Pompeo was telling the truth.
What all this appears to indicate is that US global hegemony has been built on the global drug trade, amongst other things.
This then is the backdrop to the Assange case. Wikileaks has arguably just scratched the surface. Its no surprise then that the US has been desperate to stop Wikileaks and its founder in its tracks to prevent further revelations that would expose the sordid underbelly of the ‘Deep State’. The Washington Consensus is all about maintaining the status quo – at any cost.
Finally, on January 10, 2021, Nils Melzer participated in a comprehensive interview with the Grayzone that compliments and expands on the interview reported on above.
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