Presstitutes
black out judge’s ruling in favor of Julian Assange
Presstitutes black out judge’s ruling
in favor of Julian Assange
Media silent on dismissal of DNC suit
against Julian Assange
August 2, 2019
Please make sure these dispatches
reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and
ask them to do likewise.
Oscar
Grenfell
The American media has been
abominable in the matter of Assange, but the British media’s scurrilous attacks
and rejoicing upon his incarceration have been even more vile and open in their
contempt for real press freedoms.
A federal court ruling last Tuesday dismissing a
Democratic National Committee (DNC) civil suit against Julian Assange “with
prejudice” was a devastating indictment of the US ruling elite’s campaign to
destroy the WikiLeaks founder. It exposed as a fraud the entire “Russiagate”
conspiracy theory peddled by the Democratic Party, the corporate media and the
intelligence agencies for the past three years.
The decision, by Judge John Koeltl of
the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, rejected the
smears that Assange “colluded” with Russia. It upheld his status as a
journalist and publisher and dismissed claims that WikiLeaks’ 2016 publication
of leaked emails from the DNC was “illegal.”
Despite the significance of the
ruling, and its clear newsworthiness, it has been subjected to an almost
complete blackout by the entire media in the US and internationally.
The universal silence on the court
decision—extending from the New York Times (which buried a
six-paragraph report on the ruling on page 25) and the Washington Post,
to “alternative” outlets such as the Intercept, the television
evening news programs and the publications of the pseudo-left—can be described
only as a coordinated political conspiracy.
The New York Times, the Washington
Post and other corporate outlets have relentlessly smeared Assange as a
“Russian agent” and depicted him as the linchpin of a conspiracy hatched in
Moscow to deprive Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton of the presidency
in the 2016 US elections.
Its aim is to suppress any discussion
of the court’s exposure of the slanders used to malign and isolate Assange, and
to justify the unprecedented international pursuit of him over WikiLeaks’
exposure of US war crimes, surveillance operations and diplomatic conspiracies.
The New York Times,
the Washington Post and other corporate outlets have
relentlessly smeared Assange as a “Russian agent” and depicted him as the
linchpin of a conspiracy hatched in Moscow to deprive Democratic Party
candidate Hillary Clinton of the presidency in the 2016 US elections.
Now that their claims have been
subjected to judicial review and exposed as a tissue of lies and fabrications,
they have adopted a policy of radio silence. There is no question that if the
court ruling had been in favour of the DNC, it would have been greeted with
banner headlines and wall-to-wall coverage.
The response exposes these
publications as state propagandists and active participants in the campaign by
the Democratic Party, the Trump administration and the entire ruling elite to
condemn Assange for the rest of his life to an American prison for the “crime”
of publishing the truth.
The editors and senior writers at
these outlets, such as New York Timeseditorial page editor James
Bennet, are in constant contact with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Behind the scenes, they work out an editorial line that will advance the
interests of the Wall Street banks and the military-intelligence apparatus. At
the same time, they decide what news and information they will hide from the
American and world population.
The efforts by the mainstream news
outlets to bury the ruling presents a clear example of the type of media
manipulation that has led millions of people to seek alternative sources of
news on the internet, of which WikiLeaks is itself an example.
Judge Koeltl’s decision made plain
the anti-democratic and dictatorial logic of the DNC case against Assange. He
warned: “If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning
the DNC’s political, financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because
the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or
other media outlet.” This, he stated, would “override the First Amendment”
protection to freedom of the press mandated by the US Constitution.
Koeltl’s finding was an absolute
vindication of Assange and WikiLeaks’ 2016 publications exposing the attempts
by the DNC to rig the Democratic Party primaries against self-declared
“democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.
The judge found these releases, together
with the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in
which she pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest
public concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the
curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a
presidential election.”
Koeltl, moreover, found there was no
evidence to justify the DNC’s assertion that WikiLeaks had colluded with the
Russian state to obtain the material. Assange and WikiLeaks have always
maintained that the documents were not provided to them by the Putin regime.
The ruling demonstrated the flagrant
illegality of the US vendetta against Assange. The slander that he was
operating as a “Russian agent” to “interfere” in US politics was used by the
American government and its intelligence agencies to pressure the Ecuadorian
regime to sever Assange’s internet access in 2016, and again in 2018. It served
as a central pretext for its illegal termination in April of his political
asylum in the embassy building.
The judgment was also an implicit
exposure of the lawlessness of the attempts by the Trump administration, with
the full support of the Democrats, to extradite Assange from Britain, so that
he can be prosecuted on 18 US charges, including 17 espionage counts, carrying
a maximum sentence of 175 years’ imprisonment.
The Trump administration and the
Justice Department are claiming that it was illegal for WikiLeaks and Assange
to publish US army war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of
diplomatic cables and other documents exposing US war crimes and intrigues,
provided by the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
Koeltl’s ruling, however, reasserted
the fundamental democratic principle that WikiLeaks had a right to publish the
2016 DNC documents, even if they had been obtained by the Russian government,
or any other entity, illegally.
The clear implication is that even if
Manning’s decision to leak US military and diplomatic documents was a violation
of the law, WikiLeaks’ publication of them was not. The publication of both the
2010 and the 2016 leaks was constitutionally protected journalistic activity.
Koeltl further undermined the claims
of the Trump administration, the Democrats and the media that Assange is a “hacker,”
undeserving of First Amendment protections. The judge repeatedly referred to
Assange as a “journalist” and WikiLeaks as a “publisher.”
In other words, the attempt to
extradite Assange to the US and prosecute him is a frontal assault on the US
Constitution and press freedom. In its disregard for domestic and international
law, it can be described only as an extraordinary rendition operation, similar
to the kidnappings and torture operations conducted by the CIA.
The hostile response to Koeltl’s ruling
on the part of the entire political and media establishment, in the US and
internationally, demonstrates that this conspiracy will not be defeated by
plaintive appeals to the governments, political parties and media corporations
that have spearheaded the assault on Assange’s legal and democratic rights.
All of them are using the persecution
of Assange as a test case for the imposition of ever-more authoritarian
measures, aimed at suppressing mounting popular hostility to war, social
inequality and an assault on democratic rights.
What is required is the development
of a mass movement from below, to mobilise the immense social and political
power of the working class internationally to secure Assange’s liberty and to
defend all democratic rights.
To take forward this critical
struggle, the WSWS and the International Committee of the Fourth International
last month called for the formation of a Global Defence Committee to free
Assange and the courageous whistleblower Chelsea Manning. All workers, young
people and supporters of democratic rights should contact the WSWS today to take up the fight to free
Assange and Manning!
—Oscar
Grenfell
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Oscar Grenfell writes for wsws.org, a Marxian publication.
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
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