Flashback Friday: The Case of Julian Assange

Miscellaneous quotes pertaining to Wikileaks and the Assange Case

Dark Shadows Over the Heartland

“It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on.”
—Julian Assange

"That's what a journalists job is, to hold those in power, elected politicians and everyone else to account, we have got to protect journalists"  
--Jeremy Corbyn speaking to Sky News on Assange

"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”  

--Julian Assange speaking in 2011

"He should be given a medal - he is contributing to democracy.”

--Noam Chomsky on Julian Assange

"To every political leader and journalist making and writing speeches: You can't save Navalny. You *can* still save Assange. If you're silent here, when and where you can actually influence the outcome, you were never standing up for principles—you were just hoping for applause."

--Edward Snowden,  Feb 20, 2024

"Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression." 

--James Madison, letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788

“Their fear of Assange and malice toward him tells us that the WikiLeaks documents were real. Anyone who read them had their world view changed forever. Guessing and knowing are two different things.”

--Attribution uncertain

"As they lecture us endlessly about human rights in other countries, the Biden administration is trying to kill journalist Julian Assange for the crime of embarrassing the CIA. His wife Stella joins us from his extradition hearing", sad but very true!”

--Tucker Carlson

“It's crucial to untangle facts from politics in the Assange case. Yes, there were allegations that the CIA discussed actions against him, but that shouldn't overshadow the debate on press freedom. Assange's actions have raised complex questions about journalism and national security. While he may have broken the law by aiding hackers, the severity of his penalty should be assessed fairly. We need to consider the impact on freedom of expression and media accountability.”

--Quantica

"The contradiction of people screaming of the  treatment of Alexei Navalny say nothing over the treatment of Julian Assange. Wonder why that is?"

--Eric Pistey

"Why punish julian assange who is only the messenger of truth, he is not the perpetrator of the crimes committed by the USA who is trying to cover up their crimes by attempting to shoot down the messenger to sweep their crimes under the carpet and out of view."

--Sweet Jennet, x.com

“This is not justice; never could this be justice, the verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.”

—Julian Assange

“A Society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.”

—Chris Hedges

“The New York Times reported that Assange’s lawyers contend that the U.S. is prosecuting him for political reasons. That is correct. Assange very publicly shamed the U.S. government. And the U.S. government does not stand for humiliation. (Just witness its treatment of Iran for over 40 years because of the hostage crisis.) For that, Assange has been hounded, falsely accused, tortured, prosecuted and threatened with 175 years in prison. The same fate awaited whistleblower Edward Snowden, had he not had the sense to flee to a place the U.S. could not follow, namely Russia.... Had Assange died in Belmarsh prison, or should he, that would be fine with the United States, because there’s one thing the U.S. miitary and national security state will not tolerate and that is publication of their crimes abroad, in other words, the truth."

--Eve Ottenberg, CounterPunch, 19 February 2021  

"Wikileaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections...And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow..."

—Chris Hedges

Notes from the Julian Assange Saga

Does the American public have a right to know what its own government is up to and has been up to these past many decades? Apparently not, when you look at how the government stomps down any reporter who strives to shine a light on what our veiled government entities--FBI, CIA, NSC, Homeland Security--are doing under cover of darkness. 

This week, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was put on trial in England after having taken refuge for a number of years in the Ecuadorian embassy. What follows here are some quotes that I extracted from Wikiquotes and Twitter yesterday.

“It is impossible to correct abuses unless we know that they’re going on.”
—Julian Assange

"That's what a journalists job is, to hold those in power, elected politicians and everyone else to account, we have got to protect journalists"  
--Jeremy Corbyn speaks to @SkyNews On Assange

"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”  
--Julian Assange speaking in 2011

"He should be given a medal -- he is contributing to democracy.”
--Noam Chomsky on Julian Assange

"To every political leader and journalist making and writing speeches: You can't save Navalny. You *can* still save Assange. If you're silent here, when and where you can actually influence the outcome, you were never standing up for principles—you were just hoping for applause. x.com/Snowden/status…"
--Edward Snowden

“Their fear of Assange and malice toward him tells us that the WikiLeaks documents were real. Anyone who read them had their world view changed forever. Guessing and knowing are two different things.”

"As they lecture us endlessly about human rights in other countries, the Biden administration is trying to kill journalist Julian Assange for the crime of embarrassing the CIA. His wife Stella joins us from his extradition hearing", sad but very true!”

“It's crucial to untangle facts from politics in the Assange case. Yes, there were allegations that the CIA discussed actions against him, but that shouldn't overshadow the debate on press freedom. Assange's actions have raised complex questions about journalism and national security. While he may have broken the law by aiding hackers, the severity of his penalty should be assessed fairly. We need to consider the impact on freedom of expression and media accountability.”
--Quantica

The contradiction of people screaming of the  treatment of Alexei Navalny say nothing over the treatment of Julian Assange. Wonder why that is?

--Eric Pistey

Why punish julian assange who is only the messenger of truth, he is not the perpetrator of the crimes committed by the USA who is trying to cover up their crimes by attempting to shoot down the messenger to sweep their crimes under the carpet and out of view.

--Sweet Jennet

“This is not justice; never could this be justice, the verdict was ordained long ago. Its function is not to determine questions such as guilt or innocence, or truth or falsehood. It is a public relations exercise, designed to provide the government with an alibi for posterity. It is a show of wasteful vengeance; a theatrical warning to people of conscience.”

—J. Assange

“A Society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.”

—Chris Hedges

“The New York Times reported that Assange’s lawyers contend that the U.S. is prosecuting him for political reasons. That is correct. Assange very publicly shamed the U.S. government. And the U.S. government does not stand for humiliation. (Just witness its treatment of Iran for over 40 years because of the hostage crisis.) For that, Assange has been hounded, falsely accused, tortured, prosecuted and threatened with 175 years in prison. The same fate awaited whistleblower Edward Snowden, had he not had the sense to flee to a place the U.S. could not follow, namely Russia.... Had Assange died in Belmarsh prison, or should he, that would be fine with the United States, because there’s one thing the U.S. military and national security state will not tolerate and that is publication of their crimes abroad, in other words, the truth.“
—The Atrocious Prosecution of Julian Assange, by Eve Ottenberg, CounterPunch, (19 February 2021)

WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency. their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections... And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow...

—Chris Hedges

Related Links

How Much Did WikiLeaks Damage U.S. National Security?

The Beginning of America's Imperialist Ambitions

The Most Dangerous Man In The World

Back in the nineties, when the Internet was young, I came across a magazine called 2600, a quarterly publication for hackers. The whole idea of it was foreign to me and like everything Internet it made me curious. We've all heard stories of kids who by means of their net connections broke into places they shouldn't have been to produce unanticipated effects. On one occasion a satellite was re-directed which resulted in 90% of all U.S. pages becoming inoperable for a time.

According to Wikipedia the name of the zine "comes from the phreaker discovery in the 1960s that the transmission of a 2600 hertz tone (which could be produced perfectly with a plastic toy whistle given away free with Cap'n Crunch cereal—discovered by friends of John Draper) over a long-distance trunk connection gained access to 'operator mode' and allowed the user to explore aspects of the telephone system that were not otherwise accessible."

There's plenty about the modern world that is unusual. And considering how many varieties of experience and cultures we come from, it's not surprising how many varieties of people there are in the world. Julian Assange is one of these, labeled by some as The Most Dangerous Man In The World.

Earlier this years I finished Andrew Fowler's biography of Assange. Well-researched, well-told, the book gives you insights about the founder of WikiLeaks, his roots, his life lessons and who he really is. The book is available on Amazon.com and a Kindle version can be had for just 99 cents.

The story begins in 1971. His mother Christine was a hippie artist who escaped from a cult and for a time lived in a cottage on an island off the coast of Australia. She and inifant Julian bounced around in various places trying to avoid the son of a cult leader who may have been Julian's father. "The Family" was an isolated group that included LSD as a centerpiece of some of its rituals.

Julian was a smart kid who took an early interest in computers. His mother would paint and he would head to his room. At age eleven he was writing software for the Commodore 64 his mom bought him. As a teen he came involved with a group of non-conformist geeks who called themselves The International Subversives. Utilizing the early backbone of the Internet (pre-WWW) they became hackers, going so far as to interfere with a NASA rocket launch.

There are a number of rather critical reviews of Fowler's version of the Julian Assange story, one of many bios that have emerged since Assange became a high-profile newsmaker a couple years back. Even if The Most Dangerous Man is thin on details, as one reviewer wrote, I still found it an interesting read simply because I really knew nothing about this man other than he posted secret military documents that purportedly put lives in danger.

Remember, what the media says and what really happened is also fraught with a measure of unreliability.

There were many insights I gained from this volume, foremost being his relationship with Daniel Ellsberg, who to some extent served as a mentor with regard to Assange's activities. Ellsberg, you may recall, outraged President Nixon and the Pentagon by releasing what became known as "the Pentagon Papers" to the New York Times. At the time, Henry Kissinger called Ellsberg "the world's most dangerous man."

Ellsberg, a military analyst with the RAND Corporation, explained his behavior this way. "There were 7,000 pages of top secret documents that demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates..."* His aim was to create open public debate about the Viet Nam War to which he had become opposed.

According to the book Ellsberg both supported and chastized Assange for some of his WikiLeaks activity. Ellsberg was extremely critical of Assange after the latter dumped a large volume of U.S. State Department  communications into the public realm without first reading them. This would set a very bad precedent, as there really are some things that should not be revealed, like names of embedded servicemen and agents. According to the book there were no lives lost from this incident and Assange agreed that he could never do something like that again.

For what it's worth, I found the book to the a helpful read that gave insights I would not otherwise have had about the man. Ellsberg himself endorsed the book with these words: "A gripping thriller. By far the best account of Julian Assange's motives and the talents that make him so dangerous."

The Internet as an agent of creating transparency is also capable of toppling governments, as we have seen in Tunisia and Egypt. There's something to be said for people with courage enough to stand up to the State with a flashlight to shine on what power brokers prefer to keep hidden. When Ellsberg was labelled dangerous, one must ask, "To whom?" Same with Assange I suspect.

Something to think about.

* http://www.democracynow.org/2007/7/2/how_the_pentagon_papers_came_to

WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Irving Wallace's The Man

One of the most powerful and compelling books that I remember having to read in high school was The Man by Irving Wallace. The dramatic novel gives an inside look at the high stakes political action inside the Beltway. It is the story of Douglas Dilman, the first black man to become president, in this case through fluke in that the president is killed in a freak accident overseas while the vice presidency is vacant. Through the laws of succession Senator Dilman rises to the Oval Office.

Being president is challenge enough, but being a black president in a highly bigoted culture is an even greater burden. And it isn't long before those who are out to get him set him up.

SPOILER ALERT

Much of the tension revolves around an incident in which Dilman is accused of assaulting a white woman. It's a setup job, but it shows the extremes to which the bad guys will go to get him out of office, to muffle his voice, to trash his character.

The media, too, get on board, relishing the opportunity to have a story. There are smears and sneers and jeers, and (I don't remember them but undoubtedly) a few tears.

Fast forward, 2010.

If WikiLeaks is not the biggest story of 2010, it certainly has to rank high on the list of big stories. I do not know enough about Julian Assange to call him good or evil and have not done my due diligence in dissecting the ethics of what he's been doing. I only know that when the latest charges were brought up, the allegations of rape, Irving Wallace's novel came to mind.

The irony is that as Assange brings to light documents that put our government officials in a bad light, journalists are shining a light on Assange that puts his own character in a bad light. At the end of the day one wonders, where are the heroes here? But then, as with President Dilman, what if there were no sex crimes committed at all?

These are high stakes games being played and who among us even knows what the truth is. Except that we know there's a lot of fog and obfuscation out there right now. White noise and a ball of confusion.

Just thinking out loud. What a long strange trip it's been.