The public outcry over the Assange case is reaching a new pitch, writes John Rees.

‘Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping floundering condition which is this High Court of Chancery’, wrote Charles Dickens in Bleak House.

Famously he used the smog of London as a metaphor for the all-enveloping bureaucracy and obfuscation which engulfed the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce that lies at the heart of the novel.

Such was the outrage at Dickens’s depiction of the courts that Bleak House played its role in the reform of the legal system in the 19th century.

And yet here we are. In the 21st century with an innocent journalist currently enduring his fourth year in Belmarsh High-Security prison. The Victorian smog has gone, but the stench of justice delayed still hangs heavy in the air.

Julian Assange’s prospects would be grim indeed if he were reliant only on the painfully slow processes of the High Court, currently months into its deliberation about whether it will even hear his latest appeal against extradition to the US where he would be tried under Espionage Act charges and possibly face a 175-year prison sentence. 

But fortunately, he is not. His case relies not just on the High Court, but on the Court of Public Opinion, as all high-profile political cases do. And in this court, opinion is swinging ever more powerfully in Assange’s direction. 

In the last six months, there have been some dramatic developments. Last October the Human Chain for Assange that surrounded Parliament was the largest demonstration so far in the UK against his extradition.

Then all the newspaper titles that printed the stories for which he is being extradited, The Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, issued a joint declaration calling for Assange’s release.

Then the Australian prime minister ended his low-key approach to lobbying on Assange’s behalf and made a public call for him to be released.

Most recently a tour of South America by WikiLeaks editor in chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson, and WikiLeaks ambassador, Joseph Farrell, was greeted by 5 Presidents from Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina, all of whom made statements calling for Assange’s release.

All this comes on top of the now widely accepted fact that many journalists’ unions, press freedom organisations, and human rights groups across the globe have adopted Assange’s case as a litmus test of the state of the freedom of the press.

This is rapidly turning into, and being seen to turn into, a battle of the 99 percent against the 1 percent. The rest of us versus a tiny, entrenched, political-security-legal elite bent on the public punishment of a journalist who did what all journalists should aspire to do: let the public know vital information that governments and corporations are hiding from them.

The latest expression of support for Assange is the Night Carnival protest in London this Saturday, assembling at 4 pm in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the very spot where Dickens pictured the poisonous fog to be thickest. Its slogan is ‘Light into Darkness’, using the age-old subversive nature of carnival to shine a light on this very dark corner of the political and legal system. 

 It’s time to stop persecuting Julian Assange

As Americans, we should be angry and disgusted that our government, and now the Biden administration, has been engaged in the persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange is a political prisoner. He has never endangered the lives of Americans, and there is no evidence otherwise.

“He went to extraordinary lengths to anonymize the sources and protect the sources at the same time. He was extremely responsible in his journalistic approach to this,” says Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the U.K.’s Labour Party. When Wikileaks source Chelsey Manning was tried, she was acquitted of “aiding the enemy.” If she’s not guilty of it, how can Assange be?

Yet, the U.S. security-state crowd vengefully wants him punished — silenced. His “crime” has been to embarrass the powers that be by publishing accounts — confessions, really — voluntarily given to him by former U.S. military personnel (whistleblowers), who have committed war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. You don’t promote democracy, human rights and U.S. national security by using Black Ops death squads against innocent civilians.

You don’t protect America by recklessly killing dozens of civilians in mistargeted and then covered-up drone strikes that make the locals hate us.We, the people, in whose name and with whose tax dollars these wars are waged, have the right to know, the need to know. Through Wikileaks, Assange has helped the public learn about the dirty secrets, the crimes, of the powerful. His work has been heroic, as is the work of all responsible journalists who do the same things when they are truly doing their difficult job.

That is why major newspapers around the world — the New York Times (U.S.), El País (Spain), The Guardian (U.K.), Le Monde (France) and Der Spiegel (Germany) — along with International PEN and the presidents of several nations, have asked that these spurious charges against Assange be dropped. 

A free and independent press is supposed to act as a Fourth Estate in a democracy, a watchdog of the three branches of government. For there to be real democracy, with real freedom of speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment, the press must be allowed to do its job. If that means embarrassing the powerful by exposing the truth about them and their policies, so be it. Democracy requires that.

This agenda of suppressing free speech, of harassing and persecuting journalists, is a shameless catering to those whose real agenda is a national-security state, a place where democracy, dissent and a free press have been replaced by Orwellian repression, where people like Assange can be convicted in secret National Security courts.

American presidents, including Obama, seem to feel the need to let dictators control their policies — afraid that if they don’t, they’ll be called weaklings and traitors, that perhaps, like JFK, they’ll end up dead. But the national-security-state mentality that’s behind the Assange prosecution isn’t about protecting the nation, it’s about crushing dissent and crippling democracy.

We can’t let ourselves be intimidated by bullies. Around the world, the free press is under siege. News reporters are being jailed and murdered. Moving in the opposite direction is the right thing to do, the American thing to do. That means ending the persecution of Julian Assange and the war on journalism in general. Email the White House and your Congress people today. 

Wikileaks / Counterfire

yoojin@wikileaks-kr.org

Yoo Jin, Reporter 다른기사 보기

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