John
Pilger, o.a. Journalist, documentaire/film maker en schrijver, gaat regelmatig op
bezoek bij Julian Assange in de Ecuadoraanse ambassade in Londen. Hij
beschrijft hoe Assange in feite als een gevangene wordt behandeld,
terwijl er nergens ter wereld aanklachten tegen hem zijn ingediend…….
In het hieronder opgenomen artikel haalt Pilger voorts een aantal zaken aan die zijn onthuld in WikiLeaks,
zoals de geheime besprekingen van Hillary Clinton met de Wall Street bankenmaffia, waar ze deze georganiseerde misdadigers beloofde voor hen te werken, mocht ze tot
president worden verkozen……. Voorts werpt hij licht op de enorme
bedragen die Clinton ontving van terreurstaten Saoedi-Arabië en Qatar, die tegelijk IS van financiën (en militair materieel, Ap) hebben voorzien,
een zaak waarvan Clinton op de hoogte was………
Ook GB
krijgt onder uit de kan, dit i.v.m. de Chagos Eilanden, waar GB de
bevolking evacueerde o.a. van het eiland Diego Garcia, waar de
militaire basis van de VS is gestationeerd….. 50 jaar lang heeft GB
geweigerd de bewoners terug te laten keren naar hun huis….. Verder valt in het artikel van Pilger te
lezen dat de Britse regering de bewoners van deze archipel eigenlijk de toegang
niet meer kon ontzeggen en daarom besloot de Chagos Archipel tot een zeereservaat uit te roepen…… Daarmee kunnen de bewoners bijvoorbeeld niet meer als
vissers voorzien in hun onderhoud…… De Britten verzekerden de VS
in een geheim bericht dat dit voldoende was om de wil tot terugkeer
van de bewoners te breken, een bericht dat ook al terug is te vinden in WikiLeaks……
Gelukkig
heeft het Internationaal Gerechtshof beslist dat GB geen zeggenschap
heeft over de Chagos archipel……
Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van Pilger, gepubliceerd op Information Clearing House:
The
Prisoner Says No To Big Brother
By
John Pilger
March
04, 2019 “Information
Clearing House” – Whenever I visit Julian
Assange, we meet in a room he knows too well. There is a bare table
and pictures of Ecuador on the walls. There is a bookcase where the
books never change. The curtains are always drawn and there is no
natural light. The air is still and fetid.
This is Room
101.
Before I enter Room 101, I must surrender my passport and
phone. My pockets and possessions are examined. The food I bring is
inspected.
The man who guards Room 101 sits in what looks like
an old-fashioned telephone box. He watches a screen, watching Julian.
There are others unseen, agents of the state, watching and
listening.
Cameras are everywhere in Room 101. To avoid them,
Julian manoeuvres us both into a corner, side by side, flat up
against the wall. This is how we catch up: whispering and writing to
each other on a notepad, which he shields from the cameras. Sometimes
we laugh.
I have my designated time slot. When that expires,
the door in Room 101 bursts open and the guard says, “Time is
up!” On New Year’s Eve, I was allowed an extra 30 minutes and
the man in the phone box wished me a happy new year, but not
Julian.
Of course, Room 101 is the room in George Orwell’s
prophetic novel, 1984, where the thought police watched and tormented
their prisoners, and worse, until people surrendered their humanity
and principles and obeyed Big Brother.
Julian
Assange will never obey Big Brother. His resilience and courage are
astonishing, even though his physical health struggles to keep
up.
Julian
is a distinguished Australian, who has changed the way many people
think about duplicitous governments. For this, he is a political
refugee subjected to what the United Nations calls “arbitrary
detention”.
The
UN says he has the right of free passage to freedom, but this is
denied. He has the right to medical treatment without fear of arrest,
but this is denied. He has the right to compensation, but this is
denied.
As
founder and editor of WikiLeaks, his crime has been to make sense of
dark times. WikiLeaks has an impeccable record of accuracy and
authenticity which no newspaper, no TV channel, no radio station, no
BBC, no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Guardian can equal.
Indeed, it shames them.
That
explains why he is being punished.
For
example:
Last
week, the International Court of Justice ruled that the British
Government had no legal powers over the Chagos Islanders, who in the
1960s and 70s, were expelled in secret from their homeland on Diego
Garcia in the Indian Ocean and sent into exile and poverty. Countless
children died, many of them, from sadness. It was an epic crime few
knew about.
For
almost 50 years, the British have denied the islanders’ the right to
return to their homeland, which they had given to the Americans for a
major military base.
In
2009, the British Foreign Office concocted a “marine reserve”
around the Chagos archipelago.
This
touching concern for the environment was exposed as a fraud when
WikiLeaks published a secret cable from the British Government
reassuring the Americans that “the former inhabitants would find
it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for
resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a
marine reserve.”
The
truth of the conspiracy clearly influenced the momentous decision of
the International Court of Justice.
WikiLeaks
has also revealed how the United States spies on its allies; how the
CIA can watch you through your I-phone; how Presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton took vast sums of money from Wall Street for secret
speeches that reassured the bankers that if she was elected, she
would be their friend.
In
2016, WikiLeaks revealed a direct connection between Clinton and
organised jihadism in the Middle East: terrorists, in other words.
One email disclosed that when Clinton was US Secretary of State, she
knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were funding Islamic State, yet she
accepted huge donations for her foundation from both
governments.
She
then approved the world’s biggest ever arms sale to her Saudi
benefactors: arms that are currently being used against the stricken
people of Yemen.
That
explains why he is being punished.
WikiLeaks
has also published more than 800,000 secret files from Russia,
including the Kremlin, telling us more about the machinations of
power in that country than the specious hysterics of the Russiagate
pantomime in Washington.
This
is real journalism — journalism of a kind now considered exotic: the
antithesis of Vichy journalism, which speaks for the enemy of the
people and takes its sobriquet from the Vichy government that
occupied France on behalf of the Nazis.
Vichy
journalism is censorship by omission, such as the untold scandal of
the collusion between Australian governments and the United States to
deny Julian Assange his rights as an Australian citizen and to
silence him.
In
2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard went as far as ordering the
Australian Federal Police to investigate and hopefully prosecute
Assange and WikiLeaks — until she was informed by the AFP that no
crime had been committed.
Last
weekend, the Sydney Morning Herald published a lavish supplement
promoting a celebration of “Me Too” at the Sydney Opera
House on 10 March. Among the leading participants is the recently
retired Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop.
Bishop
has been on show in the local media lately, lauded as a loss to
politics: an “icon”, someone called her, to be
admired.
The
elevation to celebrity feminism of one so politically primitive as
Bishop tells us how much so-called identity politics have subverted
an essential, objective truth: that what matters, above all, is not
your gender but the class you serve.
Before
she entered politics, Julie Bishop was a lawyer who served the
notorious asbestos miner James Hardie which fought claims by men and
their families dying horribly with asbestosis.
Lawyer
Peter Gordon recalls Bishop “rhetorically asking the court why
workers should be entitled to jump court queues just because they
were dying.”
Bishop
says she “acted on instructions … professionally and
ethically”.
Perhaps
she was merely “acting on instructions” when she flew to
London and Washington last year with her ministerial chief of staff,
who had indicated that the Australian Foreign Minister would raise
Julian’s case and hopefully begin the diplomatic process of bringing
him home.
Julian’s
father had written a moving letter to the then Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull, asking the government to intervene diplomatically to free
his son. He told Turnbull that he was worried Julian might not leave
the embassy alive.
Julie
Bishop had every opportunity in the UK and the US to present a
diplomatic solution that would bring Julian home. But this required
the courage of one proud to represent a sovereign, independent state,
not a vassal.
Instead,
she made no attempt to contradict the British Foreign Secretary,
Jeremy Hunt, when he said outrageously that Julian “faced
serious charges”. What charges? There were no
charges.
Australia’s
Foreign Minister abandoned her duty to speak up for an Australian
citizen, prosecuted with nothing, charged with nothing, guilty of
nothing.
Will
those feminists who fawn over this false icon at the Opera House next
Sunday be reminded of her role in colluding with foreign forces to
punish an Australian journalist, one whose work has revealed that
rapacious militarism has smashed the lives of millions of ordinary
women in many countries: in Iraq alone, the US-led invasion of that
country, in which Australia participated, left 700,000 widows.
So
what can be done? An Australian government that was prepared to act
in response to a public campaign to rescue the refugee football
player, Hakeem al-Araibi, from torture and persecution in Bahrain, is
capable of bringing Julian Assange home.
Yet
the refusal by the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra to
honour the United Nations’ declaration that Julian is the victim of
“arbitrary detention” and has a fundamental right to his
freedom is a shameful breach of the spirit of international law.
Why
has the Australian government made no serious attempt to free
Assange? Why did Julie Bishop bow to the wishes of two foreign
powers? Why is this democracy traduced by its servile relationships,
and integrated with lawless foreign power?
The
persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our
independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our
politics, our culture.
So
stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take
direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police.
War
is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If
Julian can stand up to Big Brother, so can you: so can all of
us.
John
Pilger gave this speech at a rally in Sydney for Julian Assange,
organised by the Socialist Equality Party.
===================================
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‘VN heeft eerder de ‘detentie’ van Assange al als onwettig verklaard‘
‘Julian Assange gearresteerd, een flagrante schending van de persvrijheid!‘
‘Russiagate en Assange: The Guardian wordt nu zelfs door collega’s voor zot uitgemaakt‘
‘De prijs op het hoofd van Julian Assange: 1 miljard dollar…..‘
‘Media tonen ware gezicht door weigering Julian Assange te verdedigen‘
‘WhiteHouse: US, Ecuador Coordinating About Future Of Assange Asylum‘
‘Stop de isolatie van Julian Assange!’
‘Volkskrant en Nieuwsuur Fake News over ‘Russische hacks…..’‘