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by Chris Hedges
June 11,
2021
from
Scheerpost
Website
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who
was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The
New York Times, where he served as the Middle East
Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper.
He
previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News,
The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR.
He
is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show
On Contact. |
Illustration by Mr. Fish
Chris
Hedges gave this talk
at a rally
Thursday night in New York City
in support of
Julian Assange.
John and Gabriel
Shipton, Julian's father and brother,
also spoke at
the event, which was held at The People's Forum.
A society that prohibits
the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in
justice.
This why we are here tonight.
Yes, all of us who
know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the
suffering of his family.
Yes, we demand that
the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him
be ended.
Yes, we honor him up
for his courage and his integrity.
But the battle for
Julian's liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a
publisher.
It is the most important
battle for press freedom of our era. And if we lose this battle, it
will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us.
Tyrannies invert the rule of law.
They turn the law into an
instrument of injustice.
They cloak their crimes in a faux legality.
They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their
criminality.
Those, such as Julian,
who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without
the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has
nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.
The long campaign against Julian and
WikiLeaks is a window into the
collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political
philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls,
our system of inverted
totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the
fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its
institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but
internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global
corporations...
I was in the London courtroom when
Julian was being tried by Judge
Vanessa Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of
Hearts in Alice-in Wonderland demanding the sentence before
pronouncing the verdict.
It was judicial farce.
There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison.
There was no
legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S.
Espionage Act.
The CIA spied on Julian
in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global (Undercover
Global S.L.),
contracted to provide embassy security.
This spying included
recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his
lawyers as they discussed his defense.
This fact alone
invalidated the trial.
Julian is being held in a high security
prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse
and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical
disintegration.
The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently
documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis.
Lewis presented these
directives to Baraitser.
Baraitser adopted
them as her legal decision.
It was judicial
pantomime.
Lewis and the judge
insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and
muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to
criminalize journalists and muzzle the press.
And that is why the
court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public,
limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and
making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial
online.
It was a tawdry show
trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the
Lubyanka...
Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves
as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we
are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative,
it is the restoration
of the rule of law...
It is simple and basic.
It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary.
But living in truth in a
despotic system is the supreme act of defiance.
This truth
terrifies those in power...
The architects of
imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled
legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and
their obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate.
Say this simple truth and
you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the
media landscape.
Prove this truth, as,
...have by allowing us to
peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and
persecuted.
Shortly after WikiLeaks released the
Iraq War Logs
in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes, including,
-
video images of
the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other
unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video
-
the routine
torture of Iraqi prisoners
-
the covering up
of thousands of civilian deaths
-
the killing of
nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to U.S.
checkpoints,
...the towering civil
rights attorneys Len Weinglass and my good friend Michael
Ratner, who I would later accompany to meet Julian in the
Ecuadoran Embassy, met with Julian in a studio apartment in Central
London.
Julian's personal bank
cards had been blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents
detailing US war crimes had disappeared from his luggage in route to
London.
Swedish police were
fabricating a case against him in a move, Ratner warned, that was
about extraditing Julian to the United States.
"WikiLeaks and you
personally are facing a battle that is both legal and
political," Weinglass told Assange.
"As we learned in the
Pentagon Papers case, the US government doesn't like the truth
coming out. And it doesn't like to be humiliated. No matter if
it's Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White
House.
The US government
will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if
they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights
of publishers with you, they are willing to do it.
We believe they are
going to come after WikiLeaks and you, Julian, as the
publisher."
"Come after me for what?" asked Julian.
"Espionage," Weinglass continued.
"They're going to
charge Bradley Manning with treason under the Espionage Act of
1917. We don't think it applies to him because he's a
whistleblower, not a spy.
And we don't think it
applies to you either because you are a publisher. But they are
going to try to force Manning into implicating you as his
collaborator."
"Come after me for what?"
That is the question...
They came after
Julian not for his vices, but his virtues...
They came after Julian,
-
because he
exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi
civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some
800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo
-
because he
exposed that
Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US
diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon
and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia,
and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans,
fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long
pattern of illegal surveillance that included the
eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in
the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003
-
because he
exposed that
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA
orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that
overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya,
replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime
-
because he
exposed that
George W. Bush, Barack Obama and General
David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg
laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war
crime, that they authorized hundreds of targeted
assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen,
and that they secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone
attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians
-
because he
exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to
give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a
bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she
would do their bidding while promising the public financial
regulation and reform
-
because he
exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his
own party
-
because he
exposed how the hacking tools used by
the CIA and
the NSA (National Security Agency) permits the wholesale government
surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones and
anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and
store our conversations, images and private text messages,
even from encrypted apps...
Julian exposed the truth...
He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of
the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the
global ruling elite.
And for these truths they
came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back
the veil on power.
"Red Rosa now has
vanished too..." Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist
Rosa Luxemburg was murdered.
"She told the poor
what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out."
We have undergone a
corporate coup,
-
where the poor and working men and women are reduced
to joblessness and hunger
-
where war, financial speculation and
internal surveillance are the only real business of the state
-
where
even habeas corpus no longer exists
-
where we, as citizens, are
nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to
be used, fleeced and discarded...
To refuse to fight back,
to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to
save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and
international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live
in truth, is to bear the mark of Cain.
Those in power must feel
our wrath, and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience,
it means constant acts of social and political disruption, for this
organized power from below is the only power that will save us and
the only power that will free Julian.
Politics is a game of
fear.
It is our moral and
civic duty to make those in power very, very afraid.
The criminal
ruling class has all of us locked in its death
grip.
It cannot be
reformed.
It has abolished the rule of law.
It obscures and
falsifies the truth.
It seeks the consolidation of its obscene
wealth and power.
And so, to quote the
Queen of Hearts, metaphorically of course, I say,
"Off with their
heads"...
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