WikiLeaks
is a rare truth-teller. Smearing Julian Assange is shameful
Last
December, I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in
the bitter cold outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Candles
were lit; the faces were young and old and from all over the world.
They were there to demonstrate their human solidarity with someone
whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about the importance
of what Assange had revealed and achieved, and the grave dangers he
now faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy,
opportunism and pathetic animus of a few who claim the right to guard
the limits of informed public debate.
These
public displays of warmth for Assange are common and seldom reported.
Several thousand people packed Sydney Town Hall, with hundreds
spilling into the street. In New York recently, Assange was given the
Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award. In the audience was Daniel Ellsberg,
who risked all to leak the truth about the barbarism of the Vietnam
war.
Like
Jemima Khan, the investigative journalist Phillip Knightley, the
acclaimed film director Ken Loach and others lost bail money in
standing up for Assange. “The US is out to crush someone who has
revealed its dirty secrets,” Loach wrote to me. “Extradition via
Sweden is more than likely . . . is it difficult to choose whom to
support?”
No,
it is not difficult.
In
the NS last week, Jemima Khan ended her support for
an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with an article on
WikiLeaks’s founder. To Khan, the Ellsbergs and Yoko Onos, the
Loaches and Knightleys, and the countless people they represent, have
all been duped. We are all “blinkered”. We are all mindlessly
“devoted”. We are all “cultists”. In the final words of
her j’accuse, she describes Assange as “an Australian
L Ron Hubbard”. She must have known this would make a gratuitous
headline, as indeed it did across the press in Australia.
I
respect Jemima Khan for backing humanitarian causes, such as the
Palestinians. She supports the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism,
of which I am a judge, and my own film-making. But her attack on
Assange is specious and plays to a familiar gallery whose courage is
tweeted from a smartphone.
Khan
complains that Assange refused to appear in the film about WikiLeaks
by the American director Alex Gibney, which she “executive
produced”. Assange knew the film would be neither “nuanced” nor
“fair” and “represent the truth”, as Khan wrote, and that its
very title, We
Steal Secrets:
The Story of Wikileaks,
was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that
could doom him to one of America’s hellholes. Having interviewed
axe-grinders and turncoats, Gibney abuses Assange as paranoid.
DreamWorks is also making a film about the “paranoid” Assange.
Oscars all round.
The
sum of Khan’s and Gibney’s attacks is that Ecuador granted him
asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous. Assange has been
declared an official “enemy” of a torturing, assassinating,
rapacious state. This is clear in official files, obtained under
Freedom of Information, that betray Washington’s “unprecedented”
pursuit of him, together with the Australian government’s
abandonment of its citizen: a legal basis for granting asylum.
Khan
refers to a “long list” of Assange’s “alienated and
disaffected allies”. Almost none was ever an ally. What is striking
about most of these “allies” and Assange’s haters is that they
exhibit the very symptoms of arrested development they attribute to a
man whose resilience and good humour under extreme pressure are
evident to those he trusts.
Another
on the “long list” is the lawyer Mark Stephens, who charged him
almost half a million pounds in fees and costs. This bill was paid
from an advance on a book whose unauthorised manuscript was published
by another “ally” without Assange’s knowledge or permission.
When Assange moved his legal defence to Gareth Peirce, Britain’s
leading human rights lawyer, he found a true ally. Khan makes no
mention of the damning, irrefutable evidence that Peirce presented to
the Australian government, warning how the US deliberately
“synchronised” its extradition demands with pending cases and
that her client faced a grave miscarriage of justice and personal
danger. Peirce told the Australian consul in London in person that
she had known few cases as shocking as this.
It
is a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest danger
of delivering Assange to the US. The Swedes have refused all requests
for guarantees that he will not be despatched under a secret
arrangement with Washington; and it is the political executive in
Stockholm, with its close ties to the extreme right in America, not
the courts, that will make this decision.
Khan is rightly concerned about a “resolution” of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods demonstrated in the evidence in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and the Stockholm prosecutor Eva Finne all but dismissed the case.
As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote in the Guardianin August 2012, “. . . the allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction . . .
“The authorities care so little about violence against women that
they
manipulate rape allegations at will . . . [Assange] has made it clear
he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in
Britain or via Skype. Why are they refusing this essential step to
their investigation? What are they afraid of?”
NAME: ILENNA D MIRAWAN
CLASS: 1EA08
NPM:13212596
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