Stephen Sefton, Tortilla con Sal, May 25th 2020
Until Julian Assange was over a year into his effective incarceration in Ecuador's London Embassy, I just assumed his network of relatively wealthy and influential contacts would ensure he got passage out. Back then, it seemed probable he would be able to leave the embassy under diplomatic immunity and make a safe and a secure life beyond the reach of the sadistic, vindictive, cynical NATO country and allied governments that wanted to humiliate and destroy him. Back then, for people like me who distrust Wikileaks, the controversy over Assange looked like an internal squabble between different factions of the criminal Western elites, those who wanted to preserve some vestige of apparent freedom of speech and those who could hardly care less.
Specifically, it seemed to me earlier on, and still does now, a huge mistake on the part of Assange and Wikileaks to have partnered with imperialist propaganda outlets like the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian and their continental European NATO country counterparts. In my opinion, that mistake wiped out any credibility the Wikileaks project might have had. More broadly, I have never trusted Wikileaks because it has always seemed to me, and still does, to be a perfect disinformation vehicle, practically tailor made for the abundantly resourced NATO intelligence services to mould and exploit. So I tended to view Assange as just another pseudo-progressive operator carving out a comfortable, nonconformist niche within the imperialist media ecosystem.
I thought then and still do that the Wikileaks project embodies very much the same failure of logic as that identified by William Binney, a great US patriot, with regard to US government mass surveillance. The vast flood of information and data is simply overwhelming. For genuine intelligence purposes, data gathering processes based on well-targeted, well-informed selection are far more efficient and helpful. Rather than democratizing news, Wikileaks' vast troves of information will always need the mediation of a class of people willing and able to process them. That class cannot avoid being subject to the same pressures, manipulations and infiltration as conventional news media. It brings to mind the fiasco of the Tor project being funded by the US authorities, so reminiscent of Chesterton's “The Man who Was Thursday”.
However, while I mistrust Wikileaks, it's been clear ever since the second year of his imprisonment in Ecuador's embassy that I was very wrong to misjudge Assange as a person. He has proven himself to be really exceptionally brave and principled, behaving with tremendous personal dignity despite the endless, evil smear campaign against him. The grotesque injustice of his show trial is obviously deliberately designed to compound the cruel psychological torture he has suffered for many years and continues to suffer. But Assange, as this interminable ordeal has progressed, has shown quite exceptional emotional, intellectual and moral courage and integrity.
He deserves the support of anyone who claims to be concerned about the defence of basic human rights, the right to life above all, the right to freedom from torture, but also the right to due process, which Assange has been consistently denied by the corrupt Swedish and British legal systems. While freedom of expression may be the overwhelming motif dominating the context of Julian Assange's ordeal, the underlying reason for his relentless persecution is perhaps even more fundamental. The challenge the NATO country elites intend to crush has been Assange's uncompromising, essentially anti-imperialist demand, however forlorn, to the US and its imperialist accomplice nations to respect the UN's founding principle of non-aggression.
The Western elites hate Assange because he has exposed them as the imperialist war criminals they have always been. They will never abandon their campaigns of unlawful aggression against independent nations that defy their will. NATO propaganda outlets like the Guardian hate Assange because he forced their hand over the odious NATO war crimes he exposed. The Guardian and its Western media cronies will never forgive Assange because they are accustomed to protect NATO country governments, managing discreetly unpalatable revelations of the kind Assange made impossible for them to cover up. He did it again in 2016 with the scandalous revelations about the corrupt, repressive US Democrat party machine. No wonder the profoundly anti-democratic Western elites hate him so.
Writers and activists of proven moral authority like Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Binoy Kampmark, and Roger Waters and over a thousand other activists and writers are striving to ensure Julian Assange is set free from the scandalously unjust legal process he faces. Whatever our politics, everyone who detests injustice should join them. We should all speak up for Julian Assange.