The media’s villainy will quickly be erased as a result of it writes the script telling us what’s occurring on the earth
It is just proper that all of us take a second to rejoice the victory of Julian Assange’s launch from 14 years of detention, in various kinds, to be united, lastly, along with his spouse and youngsters – two boys who’ve been denied the possibility to ever correctly know their father.
His final 5 years have been spent in Belmarsh high-security jail as america sought to extradite him to face a 175-year jail sentence for publishing particulars of its state crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
For seven years earlier than that he was confined to a small room within the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after Quito awarded him political asylum to evade the clutches of a law-breaking US empire decided to make an instance of him.
His seizure by UK police from the embassy on Washington’s behalf in 2019, after a extra US-aligned authorities got here to energy in Ecuador, proved how clearly misguided, or malicious, had been those that accused him of “evading justice”.
The whole lot Assange had warned the US wished to do to him was proved appropriate over the following 5 years, as he languished in Belmarsh solely reduce off from the skin world.
Nobody in our political or media class appeared to note, or might afford to confess, that occasions have been enjoying out precisely because the founding father of Wikileaks had for thus a few years predicted they’d – and for which he was, on the time, so roundly ridiculed.
Nor was that very same political-media class ready to think about different important context displaying that the US was not attempting to implement some sort of authorized course of, however that the extradition case in opposition to Assange was solely about wreaking vengeance – and making an instance of the Wikileaks founder to discourage others from following him in shedding gentle on US state crimes.
That included revelations that, true to type, the CIA, which was uncovered as a rogue international intelligence company in 250,000 embassy cables printed by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him and kidnap him off the streets of London.
Different proof got here to gentle that the CIA had been finishing up in depth spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s each transfer, together with his conferences along with his medical doctors and legal professionals.
That reality alone ought to have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. However the UK judiciary was trying over its shoulder, in the direction of Washington, way over it was abiding by its personal statute books.
Media no watchdog
Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or reasonably, they did what they’re really there to do: hold the rabble – that’s, you and me – from realizing what they’re actually as much as.
Their job is to construct narratives suggesting that they know finest, that we should belief them, that their crimes, similar to these they’re supporting proper now in Gaza, are literally not what they seem like, however are, actually, efforts in very tough circumstances to uphold the ethical order, to guard civilisation.
Because of this, there’s a particular have to establish the essential function performed by the media in retaining Assange locked up for thus lengthy.
The reality is, with a correctly adversarial media enjoying the function it declares for itself, as a watchdog on energy, Assange might by no means have been disappeared for thus lengthy. He would have been freed years in the past. It was the media that stored him behind bars.
The institution media acted as a prepared device within the demonising narrative the US and British governments rigorously crafted in opposition to Assange.
Even now, as he’s reunited along with his household, the BBC and others are peddling the identical long-discredited lies.
These embrace the continually repeated declare by journalists that he confronted “rape costs” in Sweden that have been lastly withdrawn. Right here is the BBC making this error as soon as once more in its reporting this week.
In reality, Assange by no means confronted greater than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of proof. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for thus lengthy not due to Sweden however mainly as a result of the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the chief of the Labour get together), insisted on it dragging on.
Starmer made repeated journeys to Washington throughout this era, when the US was looking for a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. However as occurred so typically within the Assange case, all of the information of these conferences have been destroyed by the British authorities.
The media’s different favorite deception – nonetheless being promoted – is the declare that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants at risk.
That’s utter nonsense, as any journalist who has even cursorily studied the background to the case is aware of.
Greater than a decade in the past, the Pentagon arrange a overview to establish any US brokers killed or harmed because of the leaks. They did so exactly to assist soften up public opinion in opposition to Assange.
And but a crew of 120 counter-intelligence officers couldn’t discover a single such case, as the top of the crew, Brigadier-Basic Robert Carr, conceded in court docket in 2013.
Regardless of having a newsroom full of a whole lot of correspondents, together with these claiming to specialize in defence, safety and disinformation, the BBC nonetheless can’t get this fundamental reality concerning the case proper.
That’s not an accident. It’s what occurs when journalists permit themselves to be spoon-fed data from these they’re supposedly watching over. That’s what occurs when journalists and intelligence officers stay in a everlasting, incestuous relationship.
Character assassination
However it’s not simply these obvious reporting failures that stored Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the complete media acted in live performance in his character assassination, making it not solely acceptable however respectable to hate him.
It was not possible to publish on social media concerning the Assange case with out dozens of interlocutors popping as much as let you know how deeply disagreeable he was, how a lot of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his partitions within the embassy with faeces. None of those people, in fact, had ever met him.
It additionally by no means occurred to such folks that, even have been all of this true, it will nonetheless not have excused stripping Assange of his fundamental authorized rights, as all too clearly occurred. And much more so, it couldn’t presumably justify eroding the public-interest obligation of journalists to show state crimes.
What was in the end at stake within the protracted extradition hearings was the US authorities’s willpower to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether or not Assange was a narcissist had exactly no bearing on that matter.
Why have been so many individuals persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws have been crucially necessary to the case? As a result of the institution media – our supposed arbiters of reality – have been agreed on the matter.
The smears won’t have caught so properly had they been thrown solely by the rightwing tabloids. However life was breathed into these claims from their countless repetition by journalists supposedly on the opposite aspect of the aisle, significantly on the Guardian.
Liberals and left-wingers have been uncovered to a gradual movement of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his determined, lonely battle in opposition to the world’s sole superpower to cease him being locked away for the remainder of his life for doing journalism.
The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – confirmed him exactly zero solidarity when the US institution got here knocking, decided to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making these revelations attainable.
For the document, so we don’t overlook, these are just a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and never the law-breaking US safety state – the villain.
Marina Hyde within the Guardian in February 2016 – 4 years into his captivity within the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the considerations of a United Nations panel of world-renowned authorized specialists that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” as a result of Washington had refused to problem ensures that it will not search his extradition for political crimes:
Lengthy-time BBC authorized affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given area within the Guardian on the identical day to get it so fallacious in claiming Assange was merely “hiding away” within the embassy, beneath no menace of extradition (Be aware: Although his analytic grasp of the case has confirmed feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine additional this week on the Assange case):
Two years later, the Guardian was nonetheless peddling the identical line that, regardless of the UK spending many thousands and thousands ringing the embassy with law enforcement officials to stop Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was solely “satisfaction” that stored him detained within the embassy:
Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, printed by the Guardian in 2019, simply as Assange was being disappeared for the following 5 years into the closest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleansing employees have to be feeling:
Anybody who didn’t perceive fairly how personally hostile so many Guardian writers have been to Assange wants to look at their tweets, the place they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “presumably even the most important arsehole in Knightsbridge”, whereas Suzanne Moore mentioned he was “essentially the most large turd.”
The fixed demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably provided by the intelligence providers, however simply disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians.
This infamous information hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the handfuls of CCTV cameras surveilling ever strategy to the embassy – remains to be on the Guardian’s web site:
This marketing campaign of demonisation smoothed the trail to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.
It additionally, helpfully, stored the Guardian out of the highlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” on the coronary heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly launched a cache of unredacted information – as I’ve defined intimately earlier than.
Too little too late
The institution media that collaborated with Assange 14 years in the past in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes solely started to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – greater than a decade too late.
That was when 5 of his former media companions issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it ought to “finish its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets and techniques”.
However at the same time as he was launched this week, the BBC was nonetheless persevering with the drip-drip of character assassination:
A correct BBC headline, have been it not merely a stenographer for the British authorities, would possibly learn: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or conflict prison?”
For whereas the institution media has busily fastened our gaze on the supposed character flaws of Assange, it has stored our consideration away from the true villains, those that dedicated the crimes he uncovered: Blair, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and plenty of extra.
We have to recognise a sample right here. When the info can’t be disputed, the institution has to shoot the messenger.
On this case, it was Assange. However the identical media machine was rolled out in opposition to former Labour chief Jeremy Corbyn, one other thorn within the institution’s aspect. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC have been the 2 retailers that have been most helpful in making the smears stick.
Sadly, to safe his freedom, Assange was compelled to make a deal pleading responsible to one of many costs levelled in opposition to him beneath the Espionage Act.
Highlighting the enduring unhealthy religion of the Guardian, the identical paper that so readily ridiculed Assange’s years of detention and the menace he confronted of being locked away in a US super-max jail for all times, ran an article this week, as Assange was launched, stressing the “harmful precedent” for journalism set by his plea deal.
Washington’s remedy of Assange was all the time designed to ship a chilling message to investigative journalists that, whereas it’s effective to show the crimes of Official Enemies, the identical requirements mustn’t ever be utilized to the US empire itself.
How is it attainable that the Guardian is studying that solely now, after failing to know the lesson earlier, when it mattered, throughout Assange’s lengthy years of political persecution?
The even sadder reality is that the media’s villainous function in retaining Assange locked up will quickly be erased from the document. That’s as a result of the media are those writing the script about what’s going on on the earth.
They may shortly paint themselves as saints, not sinners, on this episode. And, with out extra Assanges to open our eyes, we are going to most probably imagine them.
